Should <2k rep users avoid making small-character edits?

Question

Yesterday I ran across an answer where the author uploaded an image to Stack Exchange's Imgur, but provided a link to it in their answer instead of embedding it. That's a pretty simple markdown change, so I did that.

Since I'm under 2k rep, I'm limited to making edits that meet the character limit. Accordingly, I worked around the system :) with a little markdown hack.

On other sites where I have more rep, when I see edits like this come through the suggested edit queue, I "improve edit" and remove the hack - the user is doing a useful thing and is just crippled by the system. However, in this case my edit was "reject and edit"ed, and the hack removed.

On Server Fault, then, should I avoid making this sort of edit suggestion until I have 2k rep?

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Related: Any way around this: “Edits must be at least 6 characters; is there something else to improve in this post?”, which encourages the use of hacks to get around the edit character limitation.

Answer 1

My totally subjective opinion on this matter:

If you make a significant improvement like in your example, it's welcome. For small typo-fixes or cosmetic stuff, I personally would think the work you implicitly create for others due to the necessary review isn't worth it.

And yes, using silly hacks to overcome the systems limitation is perfectly acceptable. I've no idea how many useless words I've written to meet minimal post lengths on answers that could just as well be a single word.

Answer 2

I agree that this edit was fine. Further I disagree with the reviewer using "Reject and edit", as if to say you hadn't done anything useful, whereas his edit had pretty much exactly the same end result. He should have used "Improve edit" instead.

Answer 3

In this situation - the edit was sufficient. I do admit to sometimes asking a higher rep user to fix things like this when they bother me.

In practice, you can always find more to edit. In this case, for example "You'd need the application development options under server roles" would add to searchability (and in theory accessibility), probably meet the intent of the OP and get you past that minimum character limit.

Answer 4

I only jump in since no-one else has included a subtlety I find important (if slightly orthogonal): how old is the post you're editing?

For a case like this, where it's a day old, I thought the edit was helpful, and I would've approved it; in-lining an image is a helpful thing to do. For posts that are only a few minutes old, I'm OK with even less-substantial edits: spelling fixups, removal of txtspk, it all seems good to me.

Once a post is more than a few days old, I become very much more resistant to allowing edits, and the practice of edit-farming in five-year-old posts - particularly five-year-old posts that haven't attracted any improvements in the last four years eleven months - I find deeply annoying and unhelpful. Down at this depth, I like the requirement that edits be reasonably substantive; I think it keeps the worst of the farmed fixups at bay.