Guidelines for suggested edits being too minor

Question

I had always thought that the community consensus on very minor suggested edits was that they should be rejected ^[1][2]. Personally, I agree with that (and I believe some reviews by schroeder support this). I don't see any point in rewarding users with +2 rep for taking time from at least two reviewers and bumping a post to the home page, just to change "a" to "an". However, I see that some other reviewers do accept such edits. Hence, why I ask, has the community consensus shifted, or was there no consensus in the first place?

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In case minor edits are not encouraged, I often find myself wondering whether an edit suggestion is too minor. Consider when the editor:

1. Removes salutation. This has already been discussed, and the conclusion was that the edit should be rejected if it only removes salutation and does nothing else. However, I was surprised to see some reviewers accepting such edits.

2. Pedantic or minor grammatical changes. (Ex. "How is X able to do Y?" -> "How can X do Y?"). I don't see the point of accepting these, but I include this since I see some editors do this when they are attempting another minor edit that falls under the six character limit.

3. Spelling and/or grammatical fixes. Obviously, if there are half a dozen spelling errors and three or four grammatical errors, they should all be corrected. However, what should be done if there is one minor typo/grammatical error, that doesn't create any significant confusion while reading the post? What if it does?

4. Add links. I find that some editors add links to Wikipedia articles or such for terms like XSS, CSRF, WordPress etc. These all seem unnecessary since they are terms that people here are generally familiar with.

Answer 1

Minor edits should be accepted when they make a substantive change to the understanding of the post.

Sometimes, a couple of letters difference can make a huge change to the meaning of a sentence.

Sometimes, large edits make no difference at all.

Minor edits can also be ok when the post is very new and already near the top of the Active queue.

The goal of edits is to add value or to clarify. We should not edit out the author's voice, but the voice should be easy to understand.

Since we have people with a wide range of English skills, making clarifying edits can help in general understanding or to aid in a reader using Google Translate.

So, minor edits, like "a" to "an" do not add value or clarity. Especially when the post is years old.

Adding links to common terms or terms that are covered in tags should be rejected as noise.