How does rep gain when "a suggested edit is accepted" work?

Question

I'm a total newbie to this site and still learning the ins-and-outs... I was skimming through the explanations of how reputation works and saw that you can gain reputation when "a suggested edit is accepted."

I asked my first question yesterday and someone came along and edited it (specifically, added a tag). I honestly hadn't put much thought at all into tags and had only come up with the one tag needed to meet the minimum requirement. I agreed with and appreciated the edit, as I felt it was both an improvement to my question and a learning experience for me as a brand new member. When I later saw that accepted edits provided a reputation gain, I looked for a way that I could "accept" the edit to reward the person for being helpful.

Granted, the user who edited my question has over 3,000 rep and I really doubt another +2 would actually matter to them... but I was raised with "good manners" drilled into me, so from my point of view it's more about a way to say "thanks" to the person than the little "pat on the butt" amount of reputation they'd get.

Anyway, I'm wondering whether I overlooked a way to "accept" the edit or if something about the site's mechanics make it so that I'm not supposed to have that option in this particular case.

Answer 1

In addition to Joubarc's answer, and to help with the other point of your question:

If a user actually suggests an edit (rather than as in this case where they have just made an edit) then it goes into what is known as the "Review Queue", where other members of the community can:

1. Vote to accept the edit.
2. Vote to reject the edit.
3. Make further improvements to the edit.

Also, as the owner of the post, you will be notified that there is a suggested edit on your post, and (I think) you can accept it yourself - thus allowing you to thank the editor before the community does.

Alternatively, you could add a comment to your question starting with @Kramii to thank them and that user will get a notification that you've made a comment to them.

Answer 2

Some privileges are awarded to users based on their reputation. In this case, starting from 1000 rep, users get the Edit questions and answers" privilege, which means that their edits don't need to be approved any longer.

Also, they don't get the +2 reputation bonus for an accepted suggested edit - note the "(up to +1000 total per user)" in the bonus for editing. Their edit isn't considered to be suggested anyway, since it's accepted automatically.

So yes, you're correct to say it usually doesn't matter that much for users past a certain reputation point, and that's what's built in the system. You can find more information on this on the main meta stack exchange site. In short, reputation is supposed to cover good answers and questions; editing isn't the focus.

One point to keep in mind is that it prevents reputation farming through editing: since your edits are auto-accepted, you could get reputation with just "editing" posts even if your edits aren't interesting.