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After performing some actions on a PSE post, a message pops up suggesting to do something else with the same post. Here are two examples:

  • after downvoting a post the suggestion is to add a comment to explain why you downvoted.
  • after upvoting an answer on your own question the suggestion is to accept one answer.

I don't know if more suggestions/reminders like these two exist.

I suggest to add another popup message that works like this: it will appear after someone edits a new contributor's post, and the suggestion is to explain why the edit was necessary. That would be particularly useful for new users that are not familiar with this site yet as many edits just add formatting or spoiler tags.

Ideally that comment can be added automatically if the post was edited from the review queues. In this case a good pre-filled comment would be:

Hi {username}, welcome to PSE. I edited your post because {reason}. Please take a look at the edited content so that you can do the same next time.

Where the {reason} part is taken from the edit summary.

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Editing a post already sends a notification to the user's inbox (at least for non-trivial edits: changing a single character or two won't activate the notification). The notification comes with a link to the revision history, so the original author of the post can easily see exactly what was changed.

When you edit a post, you can also say what you're doing and why in the edit summary. This is not compulsory, for 2k+ rep users: if you leave the edit summary box blank, it will just be auto-filled with "added 173 characters in body" or suchlike. But if you want to explain to the OP, that's the way to do so.

So a lot of what you propose is already accomplished: when you edit someone's post, they get a notification which directs them to a page where they can see (if you choose to put one) an explanation of the edit.

Adding a comment is also OK, and often done, but I don't think that should be explicitly encouraged by the system in all cases. It will always lead to a double notification for the OP (one for the edit, one for the comment); it's not always necessary, and the system isn't smart enough to figure out when to encourage it and when not; and it would lead to a lot of noisy comments in cases where commenting isn't really needed but people feel obliged to do so anyway.

If you have enough rep to be able to make edits without approval, and enough experience to know what's a suitable edit, then it seems reasonable to assume that you'll also have good enough judgement to know whether a comment is warranted or not with your edit.

(Plus, what you propose about automatic notifications or pre-filled comments isn't a change that can be made per-site. It would need to be proposed on the network-wide meta site, where I'm fairly sure your proposal would be murdered with downvotes. Many sites on the network hate comments a lot more than we do, and already have enough trouble deleting hundreds of comments every day without needing more unnecessary/automatic comments added to their pile.)

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    $\begingroup$ Thank you for the reply. I did not know that editing posts already triggers a notification (or at least I did not notice it when someone edited my posts). In this case I agree with you that the double notification is unnecessary $\endgroup$
    – melfnt
    Commented May 23, 2020 at 16:16
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    $\begingroup$ I just edited your meta question to demonstrate :-) $\endgroup$
    – Rand al'Thor
    Commented May 23, 2020 at 16:25

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