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Several posts on meta say that edits should be substantive improvements addressing multiple issues in the post. This makes sense especially if this post is old and will be bumped although there is no real new activity in this question. In addition these edits clutter the review queue.

But what if my edits are applied immediately so my edits don't appear in the review queue ( no one has to bother with my minor edits) and the question / answer is quite new (say, the question with recent activity is one of the ten questions with recent activity)?

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If you have full edit privileges, anything that's a clear improvement is fine, even if it's small. Please feel free to fix small errors, especially in newer posts or prominent old ones.

But one thing to be cautious about: make sure you try to fix everything there is to be fixed. It's unfortunately common to see edits that fix a glaring mistake in the title without fixing several smaller mistakes in the body. Ideally having enough reputation to have full edit privileges means that you can be trusted to do this! (Sure, if you only have 15 seconds and there's a glaring error in the title, it's still good to fix it, but it's far better to look over the whole post.)

That caution applies even more for others who are just suggesting edits. If you suggest one fix and leave several other mistakes, you're basically forcing the reviewers to do the work that you didn't. At that point, reviewers might choose to use the "reject and edit" option, so that they can fix everything and mark the suggestion as not helpful, and probably should do so if it's a consistent pattern.

If you're suggesting edits in good faith, please don't worry, this will never happen to you; it's totally fine to miss things here and there. I mention this only because the main answer here is endorsing minor edits, and I don't want to see it used as a justification for low-quality suggested edits.

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  • Thank you for your answer. I hope that I will fix everything that is to be fixed in an edit. English isn't my native language so there's a somewhat greater possibility that I will overlook something.
    – Ching Chong
    Commented Jul 11, 2015 at 18:49
  • @ChingChong No worries, even we native speakers miss things. It's more about trying to fix everything than perfection; when people don't even try it's painfully obvious.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Commented Jul 11, 2015 at 19:34
  • I will say, the edit review text does imply that edits should only be rejected if they make no improvement at all. That's why the "accept and edit" option exists. If someone does make an improvement but missed adding/removing a tag or didn't improve the title, or fixed 4 out of 5 spelling errors, that's not really reason to reject the edit.
    – Catija
    Commented Jul 11, 2015 at 21:48
  • @Catija If they fixed 4/5 things, absolutely, accept and edit. I'm talking about if someone fixes 1/5, and the other four are all just as obvious. At that point, the suggested edit isn't really helping any more than flagging a post saying "this needs to be edited". The majority of the work has been left for the edit reviewers. Accepting a suggested edit provides a small reputation reward, a thank you for doing some helpful work, and if you left all the work to someone else, I don't think that "thank you" is really deserved.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Commented Jul 11, 2015 at 22:20
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    I've edited to be a bit less harsh; my main goal is really to avoid this answer being misconstrued as support for poor editing.
    – Cascabel Mod
    Commented Jul 11, 2015 at 22:27
  • Rather than start a new (probably duplicate) question, I thought I'd ask for some clarity here. I have full editing privileges on Gardening and Landscaping, so I completely understand your first point. I'm wondering, though, if suggesting a lot of edits, as completely as possible, and not too minor of course, is something you encourage; or is your suggested edit queue already quite long? Thanks!
    – Sue Saddest Farewell TGO GL
    Commented Oct 11, 2015 at 19:29
  • @Sue Edit away; the queue is usually empty or close to it. I was really only trying to discourage incomplete suggested edits, which are pretty much like saying "I found one mistake, can someone else give me a little rep and do the rest of the work?" But please please fix things if you see them!
    – Cascabel Mod
    Commented Oct 11, 2015 at 22:08

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