When editing a post, I got this message:
We welcome all constructive edits, but please make them substantial. Avoid trivial, tiny one-letter edits unless absolutely necessary.
Why? I wanted to do a minor grammar fix, like I often do to just clean up questions and make them more "presentable". Why would we want to discourage people from doing that kind of cleanup?
(I suspect this must have been answered somewhere previously, but I'm not seeing where...)
This has been discussed repeatedly on the main meta site. The official answer is:
As a < 2k rep user, you should make reasonably substantive edits. The approval cost for your edit is not free, as it costs the attention of one or more users who have to look at your edit and think about it. This cost is high for extremely trivial edits.
This will not be changing.
If you want to make single-character trivial edits, earn 2k rep.
(It's 1000 rep, not 2000, as long as we're in beta.)
Generally speaking, you should try to fix everything that's wrong in one go. If it's a single spelling error, just let it go.
This was covered on meta.stackexchange.com, the meta-site for the whole network.
It basically boils down to helping prevent edit flooding from those who don't yet have the privilege.
FWIW, once you hit 2k rep and get the edit privilege (1,000 here because it's a beta), you don't get that.
