@Erik Something that isn't in the guidelines, but I'd be more inclined to make a fairly trivial edit on a thread with high readership. A minor blemish in a post that has only met a couple of hundred eyeballs, or less, after months on CV really isn't doing much harm at all - not even setting a bad example, since almost nobody is looking at it! On a highly visible thread, though, I'd like things shipshape and Bristol fashion - keeping things tight and tidy is at a greater premium.
In case anyone is interested, famous mathematician Terrance Tao has started a blog series for an introductory graduate probability course that he is teaching. The first post can he found here. I'll definitely be following along.
@Erik, let me second & expand on @Silverfish's point. While there is a legal argument to be had regarding the definition of "tiny, trivial edits", I think there is nonetheless some room for applying the standard more strictly or loosely. Namely, when the main page is largely inactive, there is more room for smaller edits. Likewise, smaller edits on (eg, new) threads that are at the top of the main page anyway.
@Silverfish's point that high-visibility threads with typos could be cleaned up nonetheless is of a piece with this line of thinking to my mind.
(Also, this sort of discussion is probably better had on meta.CV than chat, as we could get potentially a wider range of input--chat is little used here--and the resulting understanding would be more permanently accessible.)
@Dawny33, I think I overestimated my mathematical ability before, this series seems to be quite a bit above my head. Though I did spend a lot of last night reading his "career advice" section, which was very well written and useful.
On editing: From a distance virtually all edits can seem tiny, trivial or both. I know, and understand, that people can be irritated to see a post bumped, open it up, and then find that bumping happened only because someone (often me...) made cosmetic changes without affecting the statistical content. But even minor typos can reduce the readability and attraction of a post, so it should be a service to all to make posts cleaner, clearer and more concise.
Conversely, some posts are badly written through and through and it's too much like hard work to edit them consistently. The kind of post that irritates me most is from someone who thinks its cute to ignore just about all punctuation and capitalisation and to use i for the first person i find that really irritating but wont usually work at it in that case its best just to flag firmly but politely that a poster is reducing the impact of their own question
Well it's done via an edit so I think that's the right way to look at it. Adding an appropriate tag, or removing an inappropriate one, is something that's wise to incorporate as part of "In general when you edit, fix everything you can"
Only the latter, though I had some nautical people in my family. I know enough that you have to respect the sea, and you have to respect the ship, but I also know that I didn't want a sailor's life!
I'd be quite interested to know to what extent daily hits are concentrated on a small % of questions. I know with the questions I've asked, some get quite a few hits per day, while others can go a week with hardly any views.
I don't know. Will have to ask someone at some point. If you want to use your editing strategically, I have the feeling that there is a relatively small % of questions that would particularly benefit from being kept tidy but they're not always the obvious ones that pop up on the front page.
Hopefully you're seeing some votes from the popular questions/answers. Not that the points matter much in the grand scheme of things, but it is nice to think the popular ones are appreciated....
That is a good thought. I generally just try to pick out ones on the front page, or ones that grab me from the sidebar of related questions.
@Silverfish, I have even written down your "shipshape and Bristol fashion" in my pocket notebook (earlier today when I first saw it) - never heard this expression before. It's not only statistics that one learns here :)
It's interesting: if the pageviews are fairly low (in the dozens-to-low-hundreds range) then pageviews are an excellent predictor of upvotes. Sadly, more so than quality is!
When pageviews get up into the thousands, then tens of thousands, it's almost all from people arriving via google ... this question of mine about negative skewness has more views than all the other questions I've asked put together, partly because it's now one of the top google hits for "negative skewness".
So the number of upvotes per thousand extra views goes down. But they still accumulate over time.
@Amoeba Glad you enjoyed it. Now you too can confuse Americans!
@Erik When writing a question, I often have no idea how widely-viewed it's going to be in 6 months or a year. Clearly, very specific, esoteric or technical questions are unlikely to garner many views. But some of my "best" questions (in my view, i.e. I find them interesting, or it took considerable research effort, or the answers were particularly valuable) are also among my least-viewed.
@Erik I have come to the conclusion a big part of a thread's visibility is simply the search engine optimisation rather than its inherent quality. Which is one reason I take care to edit question titles, as part of general editing, to make them more distinctive and searchable. (A lot of questions have quite poor titles for search purposes.)
@Silverfish I remember reading that the SE designers wanted to optimize for search engines and speed over most other things, so it makes sense that the titles and the search/discover-ability are key.
