Community's view on old question grammar edits

Question

As you may have noticed, there have been multiple old questions popping up due to edits. I feel like such amount of edits hurts the community.

First reason is that they don't really bring anything useful to the questions being edited. It isn't essential to question if "im" or "Im" has been used instead of "I'm". I find such edits fine if this is a fresh question, but I don't see how this would make old questions better. What would be useful here is to provide a better answer and then maybe do a few grammar fixes (and certainly don't bring anything new to question OP didn't consider in his question) as you review the question itself. But don't just do grammar alone.

Second reason is that the real (new) questions tend to disappear quickly. They are being moved by all the edits to old questions and may be unnoticed, thus unanswered. I've been quite active here for past couple of months, yet still I tend to miss one or another new question purely because of the high amount of edits to old questions.

Third reason - some edits change the question too much (or even add new (mis)information) that it alters authors idea about the question he was asking about. This may discourage new members of Bricks.SE community from posting new questions. It also looks like members of this community are more focused on typos than the quality of the content.

Overall, I find it good to review and fix some errors, but going full "grammar nazi" mode isn't that great.

What's the stand of the community on this issue?

Edit. I just noticed there's an Archaeologist badge you can achieve editing posts older than 6 months.

PS. If you find a typo, it could be this was placed intentionally or was a pure mistake. However this doesn't change the idea. I will rollback whichever edit will be made to this post except tags.

Answer 1

Proper grammar and spelling means a lot to people who learned English as a second (or third) language. Many, I dare say most of us, have learned it not by speaking naturally at early age, but by learning grammar and spelling rules in theory and then applying them.

Worse yet, grammar errors tends to correspond to the native language of the writer, making it even harder to read for people from other countries, speaking languages from other language groups as their first.

What to you may be a small typo or minor grammar issue, for other non-natives may be the difference between illegible and legible writing.

Answer 2

We've had some similar excitement previously around the capitalisation of the word LEGO and also the legos purges - in general, we prefer edits that are substantial and leave the post better than you found it.

That said, if we didn't think there was value in these minor edits (and to be clear, I like a grammatically correct, properly capitalised, properly punctuated post as much as the next pedant), we would be rejecting them from the review queues - the editor in question at the time of writing doesn't meet the reputation cap to make edits directly, nor to stop earning reputation from edits.

Whilst maybe not ideal, you can always use the Questions view, which can sort them by created date rather than just latest activity.