Is there any penalty for a wrong edit or rejected edit? I see that +2 reputation is awarded for an approved edit. But users who have an edit rejected don't get -2 reputation subtracted. There is no information about subtraction in the achievements menu.

  • 3
    It's at least possible to get edit-banned if you make too many bad edit suggestions. – EJoshuaS - Reinstate Monica Aug 23 '17 at 14:52
  • 3
    Good question. Is this actually documented someplace where we all can see? – dfd Aug 24 '17 at 4:21
  • 1
    @dfd All of the ways you can gain or lose reputation are documented in the help center, as well as this FAQ on MSE. – Cody Gray Aug 24 '17 at 9:41
  • Additionally, any user who submits many rejected edits will be banned from suggesting further edits for 7 days. – Paresh Mangukiya Oct 17 '20 at 7:15

No, not directly.

Good edits are incentivized with a reputation gain of +2. This happens at the point where the edit is approved. However, a feature was recently added that lets the owner of the post or a moderator retroactively reject an edit, which will remove the 2 points that you gained at the time of its initial acceptance. Still, this isn't a penalty so much as changing history—it's as if your edit was never accepted, so you don't gain the incentive from that.

It's important to note, though, that if you consistently suggest bad edits, a moderator is eventually going to notice and probably reach out to you with suggestions on how to make better edits. If that doesn't work and you still keep making bad edits, then you will very likely be banned from suggesting any more edits. You might also be automatically banned (i.e., without moderator intervention) if a large percentage of your suggested edits are rejected. So that is a penalty, but it doesn't directly affect your reputation.

You won't ever lose reputation points from suggesting bad edits.

  • why the removal -2 is not reflected in achievements ..it still shows +2 – Hariom Singh Aug 23 '17 at 4:13
  • If an edit approval is later overridden by a post owner or moderator, then it will show up in your history. – Cody Gray Aug 23 '17 at 4:16
  • 1
    @CodyGray When you say "a moderator is eventually going to notice", what do you mean, do you refer to it being pointed out by a moderator flag or do you have other tools at your disposal to find bad edits? – Nick Aug 23 '17 at 9:36
  • 10
    A user's complete edit history is in their profile, @Nick, so it isn't hard to find patterns. But we do have to go looking, and there are various things that can cause us to do that, including flags from other users. – Cody Gray Aug 23 '17 at 9:37
  • Ahh I see; was wondering why people were able to override my decisions. TBH I don't think that was a good idea; I keep seeing people approving rightfully rejected edits (edits which add poor formatting get rejected, then approved by OP). – Justin Aug 24 '17 at 4:59
  • What happens if someone's edit was rejected as spam or deliberate vandalism? Is there a penalty for that? – EJoshuaS - Reinstate Monica Aug 25 '17 at 17:15
  • @EJoshuaS No, not directly. :-) Again, if that happens a lot, a moderator would probably step in. But there's no rep loss penalty, and the system doesn't treat one rejection reason any different from the others. – Cody Gray Aug 25 '17 at 17:17
  • That seems slightly odd to me, given how significant the penalties for having a spam flag on a post upheld are. But, then again, getting a spam flag upheld requires a lot more people (or a moderator) to agree to the flag whereas accepting that as a reject reason only requires two reviewers. – EJoshuaS - Reinstate Monica Aug 25 '17 at 17:19
  • @EJoshuaS That's a fair point. I'm not really sure why it is not. Probably because it wasn't worth writing a bunch of code to special case it, not to mention the problem of people picking that reason for things that are not actually spam and would not deserve the penalty. Tim Post confirms here. – Cody Gray Aug 25 '17 at 17:21
  • Is that the same reponse at this time? – Ahmed C Apr 6 '20 at 15:32

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .