How to deal with someone that edits their post from time to time just to bump the question to top?

Question

I have noticed that there are members that edit their posts over and over and over again just to add small and petty things for example to italicize a single word or to add a comma or a full stop etc. and it bumps the question to the top again and again which is somewhat annoying.

I really didn't want to mention someone in particular, but just to prove my point, see this question: A better word than 'cathouse' for an outside shelter for 1 cat

If you go to its Edit history, you will see that it has been edited 17 times.

And most of the edits are trivial (probably intended to bump the question), for instance, the recent edit made was just to embolden a single word (I suspect it was done to emphasize the word which was already emphasized/italicized)

I apologize and I should not have brought it up, but it is not a single time. I have noticed this many times...

How do we handle this? Should I just move on?

Answer 1

I probably edit my own old posts more frequently than anyone else at this site does theirs. Before posting a new question or answer, I read it over for obvious mistakes—but in my experience it is almost impossible to perform a high-quality edit of my own writing immediately after having written it. I don't know whether the problem is mental fatigue, overfamiliarity with the material, or the difference between reading something as a writer and reading it as an editor. But in any case, I don't see everything that is wrong with the post when I first put it up. I leave out links; I mess up the punctuation; I say something not just inelegantly but semi-illiterately. And that's quite aside from my often coming across information later that I didn't have when I submitted the original post.

You might not think so from looking at a randomly selected answer of mine, but I'm a pretty good editor. The trouble is that editing and writing require very different approaches to written content. I often tell writers that their great disadvantage as the writer—and my great advantage as the editor—is that they know what they're trying to say, whereas all I've got to work with is what actually appears on the page. (That, of course, is all that every subsequent reader will have to go by, too.) Given enough distance from something I've written, I can read it as an editor and see faults in it that I couldn't see immediately after I first wrote it.

I realize that the fact that an edited post moves to the top of the question or answer queue (unless you filter the queue to show only the most newly submitted questions) invites suspicions about my motives. But my conscience on this point is clear: I would behave in exactly the same way toward my old posts if the Stack Exchange system left those posts right where they were before I edited them. My interest is in making the posts clearer and more accurate, not in gaming the system to score more points.

The upshot is that I'm guilty of the conduct that the poster here complains about, but I'm not remorseful. The best I can do is regret that anyone who doesn't want to see my posts more than once—if that—has to endure repeat engagements of the same old (but marginally improved) content.

Answer 2

I am the author of A better word than 'cathouse' for an outside shelter for 1 cat.

I am a writer, but I have also worked as an editor on a few publications.

As a regular participant here on EL&U, I often need to switch hats to provide good posts. Production is a creative process, while 'Editing' is almost always a post-production effort. Anyone that writes for a living will understand that the creative process is stifled if the writer is editing mid-stream.

In this particular case, I made many edits. Serious comments are always helpful, and on this post there were many. I try to respond to constructive criticism because our purpose here is not to gain reputation; rather it is to prepare an authoritative resource of English Language & Usage.

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Comments:

(I actually do pretty much the same thing on other user's posts that I 'adopt'. In fact, I think I have edited almost as many other user posts as my own posts, please see my actual [edit] history, and stop cherry-picking)

There is nothing wrong with refining a question or old answer. This is actually on-topic on meta at this moment...

I actually cringe when some of my posts get bumped...but as an old guy sometimes my eyesight is not so good, and I make typos, but out of OCD I just can't let them go unfixed...

In fact, if you check the history of this very answer, you might see that I edited like a dozen times.

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*...and KannE is right about the glasses (they only cost 2 dollars), actually, I buy mine at Dollar. I'm kind of stingy that way.

Answer 3

Improving posts by editing is always regarded as desirable on Stack Exchange, regardless of whether the improvements are minor or substantial. A minor improvement is still an improvement.

If one finds it objectionable that every edit bumps the question to the top of the front page, one should criticise the feature of the Stack Exchange format that makes such bumping impossible to avoid; one shouldn't criticise the contributors who are trying to improve their posts.

Many regular contributors to this site, including those who frequently make minor edits to their posts, would probably welcome it if that feature were changed by, for example, giving the users an option to prevent their edits from bumping the question, or by making the automatic bumping take place only after the edits of, say, at least 100 characters.