Why are users limited to X-number of edits?

Question

I've been given access to the Late Answers and First Posts review queues, however it appears as though I am only able to submit edits for up to 5 posts at a time and cannot submit further edits until pending edits have been reviewed.

This is by design (and I understand that component), however, what is the thought process behind this? Is it to prevent edit approval queues from blowing out? At the time of writing this question, there is 148 questions in the First Posts queue, waiting to be approved. Now I'm not saying I would review them all (although I could) although there are a fair number I could edit.

Answer 1

If you want an Official Answer, this isn't the right place to ask -- as far as I know, SO devs don't typically hang out here. However, I can give you my perspective as to why I like the limit, as someone who has reviewed a lot of edits.

When you first start out editing, there's a pretty good chance you're going to make mistakes. That's because there's a high "cultural norm" component for what constitutes an acceptable edit. These norms aren't written down, and they (apparently) vary considerably between SE sites. That means that your early edits are likely to have a fairly high reject rate, until you either figure out the norms, or else get discouraged and give up.

Now, if you were able to queue up all your edits at once (let's say one hundred, for the purposes of this example), and you followed the common pattern of 80% or so of them being "culturally inappropriate", that's 80 edits I've got to reject. Painful for me to do, painful for you to receive. On other hand, if you're limited to five at a time, I've only got four to reject, and you'll learn much faster about what constitutes an appropriate edit, so your success rate will improve quickly and you'll be into "mass approve" territory that much quicker.