@Glen_b "This data is super clean; it's been carefully checked" - that's one I've heard before!!

So some companies appeared six different ways (some of them typos). They were shocked by that. How did they not already know? You just sort a list of uniques and you can spot them in a few moments. 600 companies takes only a few minutes to look through for near duplicates.

They had no clue about any of the information in it.

Some of the assertions I could see were false by looking at the spreadsheet of the raw data before I even read it into R. "This column is only 0 and 1" "Then why is there something that's neither 0 nor 1 in the second row?"

@Glen_b, I'm at "visited 1420 days, 654 consecutive"

It would be 1420 consecutive, if it weren't for my accident a couple years ago.

A little obsessive, I guess...

I guess that's two of us.

I'm still here, but I think I'm less active overall. It's mostly reviewing & editing these days.

I don't really have enough time to get into things deeply.

Yeah, I know the feeling. I'm answering less than half what I was a year ago.

Yeah, "people reached" is fairly unbelievable (in both senses)

Clearly one must discount the numbers down a fair way, but it's still a heck of a lot of hits

The algorithm already discounts in a couple of ways itself.

I have a suspicion it's probably nearer to 10% of the figures on the page.

Yeah, it's got to be much less, but even 10% is a heck of a lot

If we count actual people really paying attention to what's there/

Makes doing the edits and other tidying worthwhile.

There's a real need for editing.

I edit without thinking twice.

I thought one of your best comments to Eric in the meta.CV question was to edit.

I seem to edit 2x as much as the #2 person

Usually you're way out in front, yes.

About 120 more edits and I'll be on the top row of all time editors

unless chl gets busy, or Nick Cox overtakes me again, I guess

You do seem to be making a lot of progress.

Not as much lately as a few months ago. Busy teaching.

The Pareto chart for edits drops off a lot faster than with reputation or voting

the 40th person is about 9% of the first person on both rep and votes. For edits its about 3%

Not sure why

People just don't edit as much, I suppose. You'd probably have a more robust measure by skipping the first 2 people. I have voted ~2x for each edit. That might be a ratio to explore.

@gung I'm often a bit nervous while I'm editing because I realize how little I know. I try to stick to grammar, spelling, and formatting, but even then I worry. One question I almost changed logit to logic. I ended up looking up the term because it was used too many times to be a casual spelling error.

Spelling, grammar, punctuation, formatting, etc., is a huge help. If you accidentally change "logit" to "logic" someone will change it back. Go ahead and edit.

ok thanks

My assumption is statements like "Please help" at the end of a post should be removed aggressively like "Thanks" and signatures aka "John Doe" Is that accurate?

@Erik What I do is by no means definitive, but my habit is to always remove things like that if a post has recent activity, or if I am editing an old post (e.g. to add a tag or correct a typo)

but when you do, it's worth tidying up anything else (tags, spelling, grammar) that you can spot

I have to admit that if I see an old post with low views, and nothing that needs doing except removing a brief "thanks" at the end, I'll leave it there

But that's because I'm a bit paranoid about clogging up the "active questions" list with trivial edits, and probably needlessly so

If it's a recent question, so I know the author is reasonably likely to see my message, then after editing I'll leave a brief comment explaining why I removed the "thanks" - it seems a bit rude and impersonal, but we like to get to the point on this site because it helps the people who come to read this question later

Have a look at this meta discussion about using the Review Queue, there are some copy-and-pastable comments to that effect

@Glen_b Thanks for sharing your story about the not-so-clean data. I quite often find myself telling people that allowing custom text entry on questionnaires and surveys is a recipe for trouble. Also, it's surprising how often people select contradictory responses at different stages in a survey...

Probably the best thing to do in an ideal world would be to ask questions which don't give someone the chance to disagree with themselves later! But some sort of validation that points out to someone filling in their survey that the response they just selected disagrees with an earlier answer, and giving the opportunity to amend either or both, might not be a bad idea (dunno if this is actually implemented on any major survey software).

@Silverfish That list of comments is a gold mine!

Heh, there are 510 "Late Answer" questions on the review queue!

Years old by the looks of it

Have they fiddled with the algorithms to decide what goes on the queue?

??? eh

What's going on w/ the review queue?

No clue but it would have made things so much easier to get that late answer badge ;D

Did they increase the reputation threshold for users to be counted as new? So strange

@Andy Apparently so! Actually I think it was a good exercise. A lot of those needed a looking-over.

Query for general advice. Perhaps I should really ask it on Meta. An old thread I've tidied up a little seems very close to this earlier thread and I'm not sure whether to vote to close as duplicate.

In situations like that, should I just try starting a close vote and see if other people agree? Flag it? (I've generally avoided flagging duplicates since I got over the rep threshold to let me click on "close" instead?)

It's a curious situation where if they were regarded as duplicates I think the threads should probably be merged. Perhaps onto the newer question of the two, if only because that one is the slightly more general of the two. But I'm not even 100% sure whether they are dupes.

I have opted for the neutral approach of mentioning it on chat and seeing what other people think!