Editing of old questions

Question

I feel that fixing minor typos, adding bold to relevant parts etc, is a reasonably valuable exercise for questions/answers that have come in recently.

However, I am less convinced that this is a good thing to do for older questions. It causes them to go to the top of the active questions queue and clog up the picture of interesting recent activity. Clearly if there are serious flaws in older questions then they need to be addressed, but for minor typesetting issues I'm not so sure.

Clearly this is a personal opinion, and I don't want to discourage people who are trying to make a contribution to this site. I've been in two minds about whether to accept/reject such edits and I was wondering what other people think.

Answer 1

Thank you for bringing this up. I'm also frequently active in the review queues and have been wondering what to do about such minor edits. I guess the idea is that adding a few old questions to the mix of active questions by edits can be a good thing. It raises awareness of what other questions are out there and does something useful (fixing typos, adding tags etc.) at the same time.

I also don't want to discourage anyone, but I personally would like to encourage the editors out there to make an edit really worth it: fix typos, add relevant tags, fix formatting issues, check links (and replace them with stable ones), and maybe work not just on a single answer, but all answers that need work as well as the question, all at the same time, thereby combining all minor edits into one bump. And if there is really just a single typo or a single quote which does not use the standard > markup, maybe give it a pass and work on questions/answers that need more work instead.

Finally, I think there is an unwritten guideline out there to restrict such minor edits to about three questions per day, in order to give the active questions the visibility they deserve.