Does a single typo warrant an edit?

Question

If I see one typo in something, should I edit it? Or does this behavior border on pedantry?

An example: "clohes" instead of "clothes."

I ask because sometimes I see a typo in a post, but I hesitate to correct it because of the following alert:

We welcome all constructive edits, but please make them substantial. Avoid trivial edits unless absolutely necessary.

I would feel less inclined to correct minor spelling errors if this wasn't an English Language site specifically. I'd imagine some people who are not fluent in English may be set off by even the slightest typo.

Answer 1

I come from a background in copy editing, so (not surprisingly) I think that a post with the word clothes in it is significantly better than a post with the word clohes in it. And as several experienced and well-informed editors point out in comments above, once you're in for the typo, you might as well clean up some of the other shortcomings of the post as well.

I didn't start editing other people's posts on this site until I had reached the rep level at which my changes skipped the review queue and took immediate effect, so I missed out on useful feedback I would have gotten from other users' vetting my suggested changes. But even so, I can't recall having received more than a couple of negative reactions from posters about the changes I've made to their posts. (Those arose in instances where I thought I understood what the poster was trying to say on an ambiguously expressed point and tried to make that meaning explicit, but I got the intended meaning wrong. In those instances I would have done better to query the poster about the intended meaning than to introduce changes based on guesswork.)

Because spelling, formatting, and grammatical corrections make the poster's question or answer look and sound better, a poster usually has no reason to react badly to such improvements. After all, no one wants to have a serious question or answer dismissed because it contains typos or inadequate formatting. On the other hand, altering the poster's voice or changing the poster's argument to reach a different conclusion—even when you think the change is for the better—is inappropriate at this site, just as it is in the world of professional publishing.

The only time I feel uneasy about correcting typos and doing other cleanup chores on a post is when the post has no substantive merit and/or has already drawn close votes. Occasionally, a post's faulty spelling and bad formatting obscure an interesting question or answer, and clearing away the rubbish makes the hidden issue or insight visible. But far more often, the post's shortcomings in spelling and presentation are entirely consistent with its low overall quality. In those cases, it doesn't make sense to try to improve the post on a formal level, since its substance will remain weak and close-worthy despite the upgrades.

You never know how a particular poster will react to editorial changes or suggestions until you interact with that person. But if your suggestions are usually sound (which you can tell by the proportion of them that are accepted in the review queue) and if the poster isn't unusually prickly about changes, the process is painless for you and beneficial for the poster and for the site.

Answer 2

So far as I know, there are only two reasons why TPTB on SO discourage trivial (one-word) edits.

1: There's a throughput overhead when people without the necessary rep to unilaterally apply an edit "propose" one, because it has to go through the review queue. In such cases, not only does the SO platform itself have to support that computational/storage overhead - we the users also have to spend time processing that review queue (which can get quite large sometimes).

2: Even in the case of edits made by mods and higher-rep users (which are instantly applied, and don't go through the review queue), there's still an overhead in storage/processing terms because the system maintains a history of past edits to each post.

A third possible factor is that if a post has had many trivial edits (rather than a single edit fixing many problems at once), the display can become rather cluttered for higher-rep users who want to look at the edit history. But as one of those users, I can't say this is a significant issue for me.

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As OP suggests, there are stronger reasons for a language site to more assiduously correct typos. We probably have a higher proportion of users who might not recognize a typo for what it is. Hence they may fail to understand the text at all - or even worse, mistakenly believe that what they're looking at is in fact "valid".

Because of this, I sometimes make even a single character edit (for example, if someone mistakenly writes it's where it should be its). But in such cases I normally check the rest of the text fairly carefully, to make sure there's nothing else that needs to be corrected. But I think the system prevents lower rep users from proposing edits involving six characters or less, and I'm perfectly happy with that.