A couple of points:
Edits like these require approval by people that are generally going to be aware of the policy. When they disallow the edit, it goes away. It's one of the few policies that land squarely in the hands of moderators.
Reviewing suggested edits is a privilege available to all users with 1000 reputation on public beta sites. That's far more than just the moderators. Additionally, suggested edits are reviewed by multiple people, so it is not just one person making the decision.
What I do have a problem with is when people that are new to this particular forum see fit to play Mrs Biddle the 4th grade grammar teacher and go correcting posts -- anyones, really, but mine especially (since they're the only edits I tend to see) -- from 2 years ago
How old the post is is completely irrelevant (note that in this case, it was bumped to the front page because a new answer was added to the question). Who originally wrote the post is completely irrelevant (we're not going to have one policy for your posts, and another policy for everyone else's posts). How long the person suggesting the edit has been a member of our community is completely irrelevant.
The only thing that is relevant is: does the edit improve the question?
My personal opinion is that the following should be refused:
- non-owner post-editing for any reason other than clarity (such as helping a non-native speaker)
- non-owner post-edits suggested by anyone with < 500pts or 3 weeks activity
The whole point of grammar and punctuation is to improve clarity. Spelling helps with clarity and search engine optimization. The reputation or duration of activity is irrelevant, so long as they edits the propose are improvements. It is folly to suggest that the user, rather than the edits themselves be considered the metric for whether an edit improves a post or not.
Changing their/they're/there or then/than is clearly clarity. If the only reason you're editing is for changing to a capital "A" at the beginning of the sentence, then it's purely cosmetic and unnecessary.
Agreed. Edits for one or two minor things like capitalization are too trivial, may unnecessarily bump up old content, and should be rejected.
However, the edit you are complaining about is not just changing to a capital "A". That change was one of 8 different improvements made to your answer. While it might be arguable that 8 changes that were just capitalizing words might still be too trivial (I disagree), included in the edits were fixing a non-standard abbreviation ("mo" is not universally recognizable as "month"), and multiple misspellings (regardless of whether it was deliberate or not, "gettin" and "goin" are not the correct spellings, and "Benadryl" is correct, and "benedryl" is not).
As I mentioned above, proper spelling helps search engines properly index our content, and therefore helps our site to grow. It also helps individual users who are searching for particular content.
I know that anyone editing your posts upsets you, but as has been repeatedly mentioned: this is part of the stackexchange model, and it is a fact of life here. It is up to each user with >1000 reputation to decide on their own if they feel an edit improves a post or not, and even if we did agree here on meta that a policy like your suggestions makes sense for our site, there's no practical way for us to enforce it, short of rolling back edits that we felt were in contradiction to this policy (which would cause further disruption to the "active question" feed).
Finally, rolling back valid edits to your posts just because you don't like the idea of other people editing your content is not appropriate. Rolling back style changes is one thing. Rolling back spelling corrections is another, and is not appropriate.
