up vote 13 down vote favorite

I was looking at my old questions and noticed that some TeX in one of my titles was not entered correctly. I fixed it... and to my dismay the question is now on the front page. I'm concerned that this will seem like attention-getting "bumping" -- which might be OK for a post with no responses... but, really was not needed in this case.

Can we have it so edits marked as "minor" (in some way... maybe a check box) do not result in bumps?

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2 Answers

up vote 10 down vote

This is better suited for meta.stackoverflow.

In fact, I believe this has been asked multiple times before and declined.

Here is one thread: http://meta.stackoverflow.com/questions/26483/could-we-have-the-ability-to-mark-a-change-as-minor-in-questions-or-answers

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up vote 5 down vote

This is not a but : The system can't know that you're a "good user" who just wants to fix a typo or something similar. The rationale is that you might as well be a "bad user" who wants to cripple the titles of his questions for whatever reasons. Yes, this rarely happens, but if it does, then it's really bad. And in this case it's an advantage that the question is bumped: Other will see what happened and can revert a bad edit.

EDIT: Asaf made a point in his comment about a rep threshold: That might be an option, but in my opinion only under heavy restrictions. Just an idea (not sure if I like it myself): If a user with more than 5000 rep edits their own post, and it's a minor edit with, say, at most 5 characters difference, then the edit appears in the revision history as "minor edit" without bumping, but the next minor edit will still bump the post.

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The solution for that, like anything else in this system, is to set a reputation threshold (suppose 1,500 points) for allowing minor edits. – Asaf Karagila Apr 7 '11 at 8:55
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@Asaf: If the powers that be would be willing to have extra rules for the smaller sites like math.sx and tex.sx (where I'm active), then this might be an option. (I'm pretty sure it wouldn't work on SO.) However, even on tex.sx I wouldn't be too happy with such a solution, even though I find that bumping by trivial edits annoying myself. But see my edit. – Hendrik Vogt Apr 7 '11 at 10:45
One solution is to have a "don't bump" option that requires approval by mods or 10k+ users, just like the current "suggested edits" by low rep users. The extra work approving it is small price to pay versus the time lost exposing the trivial edit to the entire community. – Gone Apr 7 '11 at 18:51
@Bill: I was going to suggest the very same thing. To allow users with enough reputation to approve minor edits, or something similar. However this would require a system to notify the high rep. users of pending edit requests. Something I wish I would have for someone with my current level of reputation. – Asaf Karagila Apr 7 '11 at 19:10

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