Someone is stealing my edits

Question

When submitting an edit, a person is rejecting it in the review queue, but then submits their own edit where many things from my edit are copied.

Answer 1

I don't think this is only about me, but I have rejected and improved at least one of your edits before. I don't remember which one it was, but it had some bad elements and minor good elements (which I took over, I think it was stuff like capitalizing i in "i am").

I generally accept and edit:

• If I would also approve the edit by itself, that is, without wanting to undo some of the changes in a subsequent edit.
• If there are multiple good changes, or a change that clearly took time (e.g., I recently saw someone transcribing a screenshot of code, perhaps for vision-impaired users or indexableness), then I will simply fix any accidentally introduced mistakes instead of rejecting. In this case, the edit has merit even if it introduces an issue.
• To be more welcoming to a new user who is still learning and being onboarded. They could see what I added on top and learn from that, or even if not, they're not immediately discouraged so hopefully they'll later take rejections in stride and notice what works and what doesn't.

Given your constant stream of edits, you clearly know how the system works already, so then I choose to reject and edit insubstantial edits with regressions.

I try to review quite carefully, to see if really no meaning is lost in rephrasings, so it's a bit irksome to get a stream of insubstantial edits. Things like searching the site for "thank you"s and removing those (1, 2), or removing an unnecessary comma somewhere, feels like karma farming and wasting review time.

(Note that you get 5× as much karma from a single upvote. Posting answers is much more effective if that's what you're going for.)

I don't think you get a notification upon rejection so you might not have seen those, but whenever I think it's not absolutely obvious why something was rejected, I leave a comment with my reasoning. Unfortunately the field has space for only a handful of words so it's not always complete. Examples:

• https://security.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/180468 Reject reason that I wrote:

  monospace isn't for quotes; quotes are for quotes. The original was correct.Stop submitting style changes + breaking things alongside negligible fixes

  The changes you made:

  • "To search the internet" is something I've heard commonly enough, I am no English native speaker but this phrasing is either correct or, at least, not misunderstandable and common enough that it doesn't trip me up when reading. You inserted an "on" ("to search on the internet") which is an improvement because this sounds more correct, but it seems frivolous.
  • You replaced quoted words with monospace. Quotations are literally what quote symbols are for. Monospace can be (1) a stylistic choice (such as to make something look like it was written on a typewriter), (2) makes individual characters more clear when that is important (such as when programming, e.g.: print("'o clock") vs. print("'o clock")), or (3) makes it easier to align things like numbers in a ledger or in ASCII art (Wikipedia; Imaginated). Quoting words is none of those purposes, and this isn't the only edit where you've put random things in monospace. It seems you like this style, and you should feel free to use it in your own questions, answers, or comments even if it seems incorrect to me, but don't force it into other people's texts. (This is not the only style choice you introduce in other people's posts.)
  • "[search] to find more resources" was replaced with "[search] for more resources". To me this carries 100% the same meaning, there is no point to this change.
  • There are no other changes.
  • Conclusion: the edit introduces a (imo incorrect) stylistic change of your preference and has no other benefits. Reject.

• https://security.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/180363 You described the edit as "Fixed grammar". Reject reason:

  stylistic choices and oxford commas are not grammar mistakes...

  The changes made include

  • changing a semicolon to a full stop (stylistic choice mainly, or so it seems to me)
  • changing a "[I heard this and that], so I figured [xyz]" to "[I heard this and that]. So I figured [xyz]". The original sounds better to me.
  • removing an oxford comma, again just a stylistic choice

• In this suggestion I just chose the "insubstantial" template as reject reason because that ought to be obvious to anyone. Replacing the word "ONLY" with a boldface "only" is no substantial improvement to the post: it does not make it even slightly easier to read, it carries the same meaning and stands out just as much. There is also a comma inserted in a place where there was no possible confusion of meaning (perhaps technically an improvement, but not substantial).

• Similar with this one: capitalizing a product name in the title, when the product name cannot be confused with another word -- moreover, the word is commonly written all-lowercase! -- edit: and that you also wrote lowercase in your own question title!

• The original author chose to reject this suggestion as insubstantial as well. Here, too, you introduce a stylistic choice: Capitalizing words after a colon. (There are rules regarding this, but it's partially also just a style people prefer.) If you have an important edit (such as fixing a syntax error in meant-to-be-copied code), which this is not, and need to get over the character threshold to be allowed to submit it, then you could add <!-- a comment tag --> instead instead of introducing random changes elsewhere.

With "reject and edit", there is no input field for the reject reason, unfortunately. No custom reason can be given, but also no template reason can be selected. This might also lead to the idea that people are rejecting and then 'stealing' (taking credit for) your edit.

I'm also not sure if you saw this comment from @nobody which might also be (part of) the cause of the confusion: "When someone rejects and edits, they don't get any rep for it. So no one is stealing your edits for the reps, they probably just think your edit is not good enough/complete."

I hope this helps to understand reasons that people might have for rejecting edits.

Answer 2

This occurs when edits are reviewed and someone chooses "reject and edit". It's one of the options when you review the edit queue.

Also, I'm not sure what you are asking or what you are hoping to be done.