Can we turn on suggest-edit for this meta?

Question

I am apparently not the only one who's ever been confused about this. Meta sites do not have an edit queue, and so the "edit" link is not active for (other users') questions and answers on [meta] for those with less than some threshold rep (1k or 2k depending on the site). The only reason seems to be that it isn't necessary and/or it's harmful to add another queue for mods.

The help section says that any user should be able to suggest edits, which is true on the [main] site. But because there's no suggested-edit queue it seems that the edit ability on [meta] only for higher-rep users (1000+; 2000+ on "mature" sites), which is the trusted-user rep threshold at which point you can make edits directly (without going into a suggestion-queue). I suppose this means that at 1k rep you can also edit meta directly, but it's a little awkward to suggest stuff that ought to be changed "out of band". This discourages editing on [meta], which may be a fine thing, but I think it also reduces participation, which is probably not a good thing.

There's an apparently-stalled (years-old) feature request to expand edit features in [meta]s. Does anyone else want this? Mods / high-rep users, do you not want this? Is this reasonable for beta-sites, like this one (as of this writing)?

I suspect this too much of an uphill battle, with losing cost-benefit, of marginal value.

Answer 1

A compelling reason for doing this is giving people the ability to do other people favors in a very neatly-packaged way, something like this:

I understand what you're saying, but your last two sentences lost me. I suggested an edit that might clarify what you're trying to express without changing the intent of your post

The person can then just review the edit, and apply it or change it slightly if they agree. On meta, where it's much more about voice, that's pretty ideal. Unfortunately the way you've proposed it is just not technically feasible. I'll go into why.

The voices, man, I keep hearing 'em!

Every suggested edit generates an inbox notification. On sites like Ask Ubuntu, Ask Different, Stack Overflow and others where meta sees significantly more participation than other sites, this would create a lot of noise. The alternative is not generating inbox notifications for child meta suggested edits, which (unfortunately, for the most part) means they'd go unseen or approved in a queue by others, and might not be something the author would have approved as suggested. Meta is a town hall; that's why you need privileges to edit directly on the main site to edit here, one of the chief reasons anyway.

Killed by slow, and do you even meta?

On sites that don't have very active child meta sites, participation is much lower. Turning on work queues here would just mean creating a backlog that moderators would feel obliged to clean out from time to time. It just wouldn't work as you intend it to work. Showing them in the main site queue alleviates that to some extent, but that's shown to everyone regardless of meta participation. Queues where you accomplish small units of work are already a big ask on the main site, I really don't want to mix them. As meta sites tend to take on their own culture over time, I don't want non-participants here reviewing suggested edits because the system asked them to.

I am a mean, horrible person.

But with all of that said, turning our engine sort of upside down for discussion here on meta worked well enough. But, it's missing stuff. There aren't any polls, people can get down-voted for asking for support, curating is sort of second class and opportunistic and using it as a bug tracker could be made much more ideal.

I hope to take on a project this year that takes a serious look at child meta sites, and how they could perhaps diverge a bit in terms of features from the main sites. This is something I'd like to see possible, just ... better, not bolted on.

I'm declining it as proposed, but that doesn't make it a bad idea. In fact it's a good one (heck, I up-voted it), but in need of some groundwork that I really want to do.

Answer 2

I want this quite a lot.

Over on RPG.SE I'm a prolific editor. On other sites I visit I also propose a lot of edits. My main mode of interaction with Stack Exchange sites at this point is to edit and improve content already there. I've proposed some edits on here, too. (My accepted:rejected ratio is pretty high in favour of accepted edits at this point.)

But on Meta, I hover over that greyed-out edit link on a post a couple of days old to make an improvement that stands out, and I click it, and then I sigh quietly and move on to continue reading.

If there were a feature that let me actually suggest edits here on meta I'd like that, and I'd use it a lot.