How important is accuracy?

Question

With regard to making small edits would an inaccuracy justify a minor edit?.
The question I refer to is found here and the suggested edit I made can be found Review/Suggested Edits.
A new user who can not edit their own question (apparently) added information that was requested by two other users (to obviate: one of which was myself). This information was added as two answers for the two requests. After adding the information in the answers to the question I noticed another edit had been made that removed a small sentence in bold and on reading the question the "Here is the parted output:" section now covers the relevant information and more.
Which made me suggest adding another edit to change the previously quoted sentence to "Here is some more information as requested:" to show acknowledgement and appreciation of the other edit made by another user and maintaining accuracy.

I appreciate a suggested edit is a suggestion and can easily be refused but the reasons given in Review/Suggested Edits are not quite acknowledging why the edit was suggested. So I took opportunity to try and explain my motives here and open discussion here.

Would it have been acceptable to have voted up the OP's two answers to help boost their rep to remove new user restrictions?

Answer 1

Accuracy is important, my reason to reject your edit was that you only replaced one sentence (which made the question neither better understandable nor more correct) and did nothing else. You could have formatted the "Boot repair" report to make it better readable for instance.

The text from the privileges page talks about editing in general (I admit I sometimes edit a post for only one character) - but it doesn't take into account that you accumulate reputation with every approved edit as long as you are below 2000 rep and not more than 1000 rep come from suggested edits - in this process the community requests a little bit more "substance".

To clarify: you need at least 2000 rep for editing posts without needing peer review. As long as your edits are reviewed each approved edit gains you 2 points - with a limit of 1000 points for "suggested edits".

Answer 2

Taken from the information on privileges - Edit Questions and Answers

When should I edit posts?

Any time you feel you can make the post better, and are inclined to do so. Editing is encouraged!

Some common reasons to edit are:

• to fix grammatical or spelling mistakes

• to clarify the meaning of a post without changing it

• to correct minor mistakes or add addendums / updates as the post ages

• to add related resources or hyperlinks

Try to make the post substantively better when you edit, not just change a single character. Tiny, trivial edits are discouraged.

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For me the change from "Here is the parted output:" to "Here is some more information as requested:" was too minor.

What followed "Here is the parted output:" was the output of sudo parted -l.

Following that there was more information but I don't think any reasonable person would have believed that the entire rest of the post was the output of the parted command.

For me and at least one other reviewer this change did not actually fix any problem with the question as I could see nothing wrong with the question as written. Edits are supposed to make the question (or answer) significantly better and for me at least this change was not significant.

If you look at this question on meta Is it acceptable for users to only gain reputation through a plethora of tiny edits?

You will see that reviewers don't always agree on what are and are not too minor

Answer 3

You're citing my answer on another Meta question in a comment to make a point but that post is in an entirely different context, about circumventing the minor edit threshold when you need to make a technically important edit.

Paraphrasing a single line is not an important edit.

And it has nothing to do with accuracy. Even its base value questionable; was it really better than the original?

If you want to polish up posts, you're welcome to, but please be thorough. As others have said, there was (and still is, to an extent) a lot to be desired about the formatting of that question that you glossed over with your edit.

And that last part applies to 2k+ users too. Minor edits (of the calibre that this post is about) are not desirable.