What to do if an answer was subjected to a minor formatting-only edit?

Question

Recently an answer of mine (https://mathoverflow.net/a/20820/402) was edited (or rather, a suggested edit was approved by two other users). The edit consisted exclusively of minor formatting changes, it mostly inserted dollar signs, e.g., replaced 1 with \$1\$ etc. It also introduced several formatting and typographical mistakes (such as using : instead of \colon, typesetting W*, L, and E in italic instead of roman font, using \Bbb R instead of \bf R, and including an additional sentence in a list item, the latter problem had to be fixed in an independent edit).

Since such edits unnecessarily bump the questions to the top of the front page while adding nothing to the answer, the current policy seems to discourage them, or at least this seems to be the case from reading the highest voted answer at What's our consensus on people resurrecting old questions just to edit formatting?.

What is the appropriate course of action in this case? Should I simply silently rollback to the latest correct version (revision 2 in this case), hoping that the users involved will eventually learn of the above policy?

Or should I also attempt to inform them of this policy? If so, what is the best way to do this? I certainly don't want to leave comments about this below the answer itself, because this would clutter the comment thread with completely irrelevant comments.

Also, would it be possible to codify the somewhat informal policy explained in the answer above? For example, add the relevant clarifications (e.g., specifically discouraging or even disallowing edits that only add \$ signs) to this page: https://mathoverflow.net/help/editing.

Answer 1

Generally, editors should make any corrections that they can (or notice) before saving a post. If you're editing the post to make a minor typographical correction, or a minor formatting fix, it's very much appreciated if you also give the rest of the post a scan to see if anything else should be corrected. This has some advantages:

• If you have the privilege to edit any post, it helps minimize the churn to the front page, as you noted. However, churn is also a very good thing because it gets more eyes on old content that might need some attention; so long as it doesn't knock more urgent questions out of view.

• If you're suggesting an edit, you're optimizing for other people's time. Edits need to be reviewed, and ideally not repetitively. It's simply a matter of not creating unnecessary work for others.

There are some that maintain that any edit resulting in an improvement to the post is a good one, and they're not exactly wrong. Sometimes, the only thing that's wrong with a post is a minor formatting mistake. Most, however, would be rather irritated if I were to fix a minor markdown problem and leave glaring spelling and grammatical mistakes for someone else.

Personally, I won't resist a trivial edit if it's the only thing needed to curate the post, but the vast majority of my edits are substantial. If you come across someone making many of these extremely minor edits, you should definitely alert a moderator. Likewise, if you detect someone rubber-stamping really bad suggested edits, the moderators would probably also like to hear about it.

No edit should leave the post worse than it was, so feel free to reject or roll back anything that weakens voice or grammar, inserts unnecessary formatting making the post harder to read, alters the intent of the person writing it or otherwise brings down the level of quality.

Answer 2

This is why we need to enable users to mark their edits as "minor" (or some other term that implies it is not an occasion to bump the posts to the top). Any who disagrees would then have the ability to bump it to the top if they think that is appropriate.

Few TeX or LaTeX and MathJax users understand that those software packages were deliberately designed to make small aesthetic changes easy, or that a large number of little stylistic things that people usually don't notice are the cause of their thinking one font looks good and another looks terrible (which they do notice).