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4:00 AM

Just to clarify, here are some examples of edits which I would consider useful, but not important enough to bump an old post: correcting typos, adding completely missing MathJax, adding DOI link (or other link) to references, TeX improvements (changing $<a,b>$ to $\langle a,b \rangle$, $sin x$ to $\sin x$, $max f(x)$ to $\max f(x)$, $||a||$ to $\|a\|$, etc.)

I should have also mentioned adding reasonable tags or removing wrong ones. (Especially in the case where there is a suitable top-level tag, but the question is not tagged with such.)

Examples where I would consider bumping post: correcting link which is not working, replacing missing picture, fixing picture link to stable (imgur) url, ...

If a post is marked CW, it often means that edits by other users are welcome, so maybe I would be more relaxed in such cases.

And, as you agreed, the situation is different if the question has been bumped anyway for other reason.

I understand that bumping old question is more distracting on a site with less than 50 qpd than on a site with hundreds of questions per day.

When on MO, I'll try to respect the opinions of MO community as expressed in the relevant threads:

Q: Editing titles to include $\mathfrak{LaTeX \; Math}$

Should question titles, which sometimes intentionally avoid LaTeX math for those who choose faster rendering, be edited to insist upon LaTeX math? A recent instance that prompted my question is "two tetrahedra in R^4." The original title used R^4 to mean $\mathbb{R}^4$, and it was edited, bringin...

Q: What's our consensus on people resurrecting old questions just to edit formatting?

I think the title says it all. Personally, as someone who uses the "newest questions" as the front page, I'm not keen on people tweaking questions or answers that seem to have outlived active interest. Added 2013-07-08: I see we are now getting nit-picking corrections of English. Well, more defe...

discussion

Perhaps also this one from tea is relevant: Must we raise the dead for umlaut's sake

2 hours later…

Martin Sleziak

6:42 AM

Since you brought up $\mathbf Z$ and $\mathbb Z$ issue both here and on meta, I will also comment on this: My personal view is that edits should respect the OP intentions. (It is helpful to make an edit for an user who does not know how to do something in MathJax. It is different thing to change completely the notation introduced by the OP.)

But I guess changing $\mathbb Z$ to $\mathbf Z$ (or the other way round) is not that radical change as completely changing the OP's wording or notation.

I suppose things like this were discussed on some metas, too. But I did not find quickly something here at meta.MO. I found a related discussion at meta.MSE:

Q: Arbitrarily editing an asker's notation to fit your own preferences

I've seen several cases of other users editing a question to change all instances of an asker's $\mathbb{Z}_n$ to $\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}$, saying that the former is an incorrect notation. I don't want to call specific people out if they are genuinely trying to improve the site, but it is really...

discussion editing

There was even a discussion specifically about (blackboard) bold:

Q: Blackboard bold

Why do people use blackboard bold here and elsewhere in print? I thought the whole point of the font was as a substitute for bold when one was writing out something by hand. Shouldn't we be using just bold R, Z, N, etc.?