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I made a post a couple of days ago, and someone wrongfully made changes to it with a comment of "spelling correction". While I did misspell one word, the bulk of the changes were for changing "T-Rex" to "T. rex". The term I used, "T-Rex", is straight out of Michael Crichton's book, as well as the script. So, I went ahead and re-edited my post. Also, "T. rex" wouldn't even BE proper since the full name is Tyrannosaurus Rex with the 'T' and 'R' capitalized. So the edits were made and approved, and incorrect.

T. rex is a band. T-Rex is used by Crichton.

The problem is that this is my post, and I have no ability to reject the edits because I don't have 2000 rep. Shouldn't people have the ability to reject edits for their own posts?

  • T-Rex is what we learned in elementary school as well, although over on Wikipedia it claims "commonly abbreviated to T. rex"... – Izkata Jun 23 '14 at 23:30
  • And while I'm there, their actual spelling fix still wasn't correct (although it was closer) =P – Izkata Jun 23 '14 at 23:33
  • I had a feeling in the back of my head that I was spelling rappelling wrong. – Michael Gaines Jun 24 '14 at 0:21
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    Actually the full name is Tyrannosaurus rex with a capital T and a lowercase r. In binomial nomenclature the second part is never capitalized. – user14111 Jun 24 '14 at 1:32
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    T. rex is actually the most proper name for the species, using standard binomial nomenclature. That said, I don't think it was worth changing, especially if that's the way the author wrote it consistently. – Kevin♦ Jun 24 '14 at 3:19
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    ...and indeed, while Crichton uses the hyphen, he consistently leaves "rex" lowercase (i.e., you're both wrong). – Micah Jun 24 '14 at 18:21
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    ACTUALLY...BINOMIAL NOMENCLATURE /swag – coburne Jun 27 '14 at 17:54
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When there are issues like this, an edit that lowers the quality of the post, the solution is... MAKE MORE EDITS! The Stack Exchange platform allows edits to improve posts, and everyone can suggest them, even you. When you see an edit that introduces issues, you can suggest a new edit that fixes the issues, and/or you can suggest a rollback:

  1. Go to the revisions page of the post (click the 'edit X minutes/hours/days ago' link on the post) to see the history of the edits made to the post.
  2. Find the past revision that had the highest quality.
  3. Click 'rollback' under the revision's header.

If there are ongoing issues with multiple users undoing each others' edits, flag the post so a mod can come in and stop the edit war.

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The problem at play here is probably the 6 character edit minimum. Users whose edits aren't applied directly, but have to go through review, have a 6 character minimum imposed on their edits.

To fix a typo or some other minor error, users below the threshold have to make some additional changes to get by the restriction. That may have triggered the user to change "T-Rex" to "T. rex".

I'm not a big fan of this restriction, as evidenced by my post on meta where I argue it should be abandoned.

Then again, the user may just have wanted to use the correct scientific abbreviation.

Also, I have been given the opportunity to judge an edit to a post I made before I reached the threshold (or on other stacks where my rep is lower), but only as a regular reviewer.

That means that as long as an edit to your post is in the review queue, you get a chance to approve or reject it, just like any other reviewer would. After it has either been approved or been rejected, you no longer have that option.

  • You can't access that review queue until you can edit things on your own without being approved, at 2k rep. – Yamikuronue Jun 25 '14 at 15:18
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    @Yamikuronue It's not done through the queue. I got a message in my Stack inbox that an edit to a post of mine has been suggested. I then could review that single edit. If I was too late, I only got to see who had approved or rejected it. – SQB Jun 25 '14 at 20:56

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