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I scoured meta and have not found any discussion on this topic.

I thought about it when I very much appreciated an edit someone made http://askubuntu.com/revisions/146161/2 which greatly clarified my original title http://askubuntu.com/posts/146161/revisions

And then realized I often would have upvoted edits in the past as well, I don't see downvoting as being so useful though because you can really just roll back or re-edit if it is that bad. So, downvoting becomes a little convoluted.

But, I do think, allowing an upvote/downvote next to each edit may:

  1. Encourage good edits

  2. Encourage more incentive to make edits

  3. Discourage bad/careless edits

All in all, I feel it may be useful. Not so much a feature request as wanting to understand why it doesn't exist. Any thoughts ?

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I guess logically, upvote/downvotes would have to only be an option for revision /2 or greater. And would work on a lower points system 2 points for upvote -1 for downvote. –  TryTryAgain Jun 4 '12 at 5:07
It's hard enough getting people to vote on posts that are in their face... –  Lorem Ipsum Jun 4 '12 at 5:13
Very true, but YOU should know: We need to use the force :D –  TryTryAgain Jun 4 '12 at 5:16
Considered indeed: meta.stackexchange.com/questions/36574/… –  Shadow Wizard Jun 4 '12 at 6:31
Nice find! I'm surprised I couldn't find that. Pretty complete. I would not be sad if this was closed as a duplicate; I think it basically is essentially the same, although varies slightly. –  TryTryAgain Jun 4 '12 at 6:41

2 Answers 2

It's really not necessary. Sure, occasionally I run across some edits and I want to throw upvotes at the screen, but that is quite a rare occasion at that. You've already mentioned why we shouldn't have downvoting on them, so I'll skip that.

Why can't we offer reputation?

Editing is meant to improve the post. Edits made on non-community-wiki posts are not meant to actually change the content of the post, but just to make the post more readable and more understandable. Fixing it up to be more useful is the goal here. The vast majority of the time, you're not actually introducing new content to the post, and the vast majority of the time an edit doesn't deserve reputation (those under 2,000 are granted the +2 to help them gain editing privileges). This is a community-driven site; those who care about the content will pitch in because they want to make the site better.

What about comment-style voting?

Adding comment-style upvotes to edits doesn't achieve anything. You can't order edits by popularity of votes because edits need to be sorted chronologically in order for them to make any sense. Each edit is directly correlated to the edit previous to it. This is not always the case with comments, where certain key comments can be upvoted above the rest and still make sense without the previous context behind them. They'd just be random votes on edits.

I'm all for encouraging people to make good edits, but useless votes that they likely won't ever look at doesn't seem like the correct route.

Would it be visible?

Not a lot of people look at the edit history anyways. Unless you have a specific reason to look, chances are you won't. This would likely end up being some hidden feature behind the scenes that a lot of people won't use.

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I didn't think of the difficulty with sorting, good point. To your third point: I don't think driving more people to discover that feature as a bad thing. Still +1 for your thoughts. –  TryTryAgain Jun 4 '12 at 6:09
You're not getting an upvote for that edit ;) meta.stackoverflow.com/revisions/134429/2 –  TryTryAgain Jun 4 '12 at 6:10

It's Community

There are +2 given for people who are suggesting edits and being reviewed. Not necessity to give more incentives to other people having edit permission.


  1. Edit a question (from other user) and get +2 rep?

  2. Not getting edit's +2 rep after reaching 2k rep

  3. Discourage bad/careless edits being feature requested.

share|improve this answer
I think the over 2k cap probably turns some 2k+ users off from contributing as much as they would with the possibility of some recognition gratuity. –  TryTryAgain Jun 4 '12 at 5:53

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