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No, they don't add value. In some cases, they detract and should be removed. It's a more common problem on SO, but I do occasionally see it on SF: A post will have code or a shell script where the quotes have been replaced with these Unicode characters in the code, causing the code or script to break. These should be edited out and replaced with their ASCII ...

Yes, this sort of edit improves the answer. Ideally, answers (and questions!) should be well-written and not contain notes about the editing process or any other irrelevancies such as signatures. They should be able to stand on their own. Imagine, if you will, reading a history book and suddenly coming across "EDIT: I expanded this paragraph to explain ...

This is precisely the definition of an edit which is too minor. If we accept that this adds value and should be approved, we must accept virtually anything. The edit doesn't materially improve the legibility of the post, much less the correctness, and requires working around the automatic filter to submit in most cases. More importantly, it bumps the post ...

Absolutely. Part of the draw of this site and a big reason for its quality is that you don't have to wade through chat and sequencing stuff and history to get to the solution you want. For much the same reason we don't like taglines and signatures, don't preserve temporal order in answers, and don't allow replies to anything except in comments, we shouldn'...

No, not really. Yes, the Unicode representations of quotes and ellipses are “better” than ASCII in that they're closer to their literary counterparts, but we are not a publication. First and foremost, we are a knowledgebase focused on ease of editing. The ASCII character set has its roots firmly embedded into our keyboard punctuation and isn't going away ...

Cleaning up old content is important for the longevity of the site and for the long-tail questions, but getting new content answered is more important. Which is why we generally suggest doing 4-5 questions at a time and taking a break, as you've stated you've been doing. This gives the chance for new questions to still be seen, and stops the flooding of the ...

This is really three questions: Is it acceptable to edit a question that got closed before any answers were accumulated? Absolutely. To be blunt, if it has no answers the question was probably closed because it was crap. The comments may even be asking you to edit it so it's a good question and we can answer it. Fix it and let us know so we can reopen it ...

I'm going to have to agree with Sven. I have a lot of respect for you ewwhite, particularly since you guided me away from taking the wrong behavior hints from the rest of the community when I was a newbie, but I think this is a good opportunity for me to return the favor. Putting aside my own (less than favorable) opinions of Hans Reiser, I think you're ...

Can you explain to me how posting a mugshot of Reiser contributed in any way to the technical discussion regarding the file system he developed? Regardless of what he did, he is still a human being and has rights and this part of your post was beyond disrespectful. Frankly, I find this appalling and I can't understand why you even object to have this part ...

Use backticks and blockquotes and code blocks however you damn please. I have the following conventions when I'm editing: Executable names, backticks Flows, backticks (e.g. Go to Tools > Options and un-tick the corrupt my data randomly checkbox) Config files, codebox Single-lines from config files, backticks or codebox (depending on my mood) Quoting from ...

Interesting question. I was fairly heavily involved in your original question, both in answering it (to try to demonstrate that the entire question was founded on incorrect data) and I then voted to close it (since it increasingly seemed to be unanswerable once the error was removed). I'm not sure how you could "heavily edit" that question without making ...

Why the system only notifies users when their edits are approved and not when they are rejected is indeed puzzling. The reviewers who reject an edit do have to provide a reason for their rejection, either by choosing among a set of standard reasons or by typing in their own. There is a question on Meta Stack Exchange with some more information. There are ...

The only general comment I have on editing old posts is that if all you're doing is removing "thanks" or capitalizing "I" in one or two spots you should really look at the post critically. Does the edit substantially improve the clarity of the post? Was the signature or the poor grammar/syntax really that terrible to look at? If the answer to either ...

What Mark said. Plus I use backticks anytime I want a snippet of syntactic code (programming code, CLI, file spec, etc) I want to stand out. ">" for quoting someone else, only. Quoting Wikipedia, the OP, another person, etc. The four space thing for longer/multiline chunks of syntactic code (config files, programming, whatever)

Generally, "make your post look like an O'Reilly Book" is good advice, provided you have one on your desk (I think most of us do). When editing, "Make it readable" is pretty much the guiding advice -- If it looks better when you're finished you did it right :) Generally that means backticks for commands, Quote blocks for quotations/citations, and code ...

In general, yes editing is encouraged! When you edit a question or an answer (and you don't have >2k reputation yet) it is entered in a review queue for peer review. Edits remain in a pending state until they get enough votes to either approve them and make the edits take effect or reject them and discard the edit. Two votes in either direction will ...

Pulling up the review, it looks like one community member approved, but two others thought your edit was more appropriate as a comment. They voted "attempt to reply": "This edit was intended to address the author of the post and makes no sense as an edit. It should have been written as a comment or an answer." The review ends when two people have reviewed ...

Edits should strive to be "seamless", and when done right, the entire answer should continue to read as though it was the work of a single author. It was the jarring "key change" (as it were), between the original answer and your edit, that triggered the "attempt to reply" reflex (honestly, I think I probably would have reviewed that edit the same way ...

This seems utterly bizarre: if I have rights to edit posts unilaterally without approval, shouldn't I still have rights to approve low-rep users' edits unilaterally as well? Yes. And you do. Just click "Improve" when reviewing the edit, make some minor change (or lots of major changes, if the edit you're approving didn't go far enough), and click Save ...

I believe this is by design. I have never received notifications of edits to my content, only ever suggested edits. You can see edit list under Responses > Revisions in your profile:

ASCII is more portable than unicode, and for that reason I would consider it to be preferred, whenever it does not break the meaning of the text. Given that ASCII was designed to express English, it is hard to imagine an English sentence, which cannot be expressed in ASCII. Replacing correctly used ASCII characters with unicode in my opinion removes value. ...

What has recently changed is 2012-10-16: The number of reviews required to accept/reject suggested edits has been increased to two Network wide (versus 1 before) and three on Stack Overflow. (versus 2 before) Moderators can still cast final vote like before As I understand it, in particular the edit reviews on SO were appalling with even blatant spam ...

Now that you've posted the Readers Digest version... You edit looks essentially fine to me and I see nothing wrong with the way you've formatted it. The only thing I would suggest is to try and add a blank line between sections when they get so long, as it greatly aids readability. TL;DR, in my opinion the post you're referring to looks better after the ...

I don't see what the conflicting advice is here. It was me that suggested you do 4 or 5 at a time so that you don't flood the front page with edits (as I knew you'd go at it with a certain gusto) @HopelessN00b just be aware that they all go past the front page and that they can drown out new questions so doing them in batches is preferable So if you're ...

I'm one of those that requested you slow down just a little. I only ever see the default first page of questions and perhaps it's a timezone thing but over the last few days or whatever, I'm seeing more edited old crap than new questions. Sure I could change my settings but the reality is that the settings I'm using are those used by the very vast majority ...

Should we do something about these minor edits? Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged and should be rejected when you encounter them in the review queue. Although it is a good thing to edit and improve incorrect and outdated content the main disadvantage is that even a minor edit (on an older Q&A) bumps it to front page. So make your edits count on ...