I was recently accosted in our main chat room about my mysterious non-content-changing edits. They were comprised of a single white-space character, or a new-line character which would not be visible as per HTML display conventions.
It had been assumed that some unscrupulous reason had been my motive, and I was told to stop.
At some reputation threshold one may edit posts at whim (within reason).
Now, let's get on the issue of voting. When one votes, after 10 minutes or so, the vote is locked unless the post is edited.
So, now assume that one has decided that their vote was miscast - here are some possible reasons:
- A better post (post B) has come since I voted (on post A) and it makes my vote on post A totally ridiculous and undeserved.
- The context of the question or answer has been made clearer in the meantime (usually via comments).
- On further consideration my vote was wrong - I have voted hastily.
I saw a post on main meta.se where a high-repped user told someone with "voter's remorse" to "just go ahead and edit the post and then recast your vote".
The question I have is actually: Let's make it possible for users (perhaps given some rep conditions - advisably the same as 'edit anything' privilege) to not have a timer on votes? (i.e. votes can be changes/retracted at any time). Otherwise, can I please be left alone regarding my admittedly ridiculous need to give 0 net-sum edits to posts? - I don't really want to be constantly justifying myself when using a normal privilege when doing no harm.
If neither of these is possible, it would nice to have an explanation, within the context of broader SE, as to why it must be. I think something along the lines of "tactical downvoting" will be the reason, but I just want to make sure.
I think this is important because currently, making these empty-edits is causing some issues for the SE system, for example (courtesy of @Emrakul):
- Adding noise to the revision history
- Bumping old posts to the top of the page
- Making progress toward badges you haven't earned