Why must an edit be at least 6 characters?

Question

All I needed to do was to fix spelling from Mechanic to Machanic in the following post:

SQL Server 2008 T-SQL select hanging, but not dead locked

Unfortunately I could not save my edit, and had to come up with more changes.

I am sure this rule makes sense, but could someone please explain it to me.

Thanks a lot.

Answer 1

So, to get an idea of the breadth of discussion already on the network for this, I suggest this search on Meta.StackExchange.

Here's the more succint version and more proof that people are against it

But here's the deal: Once upon a time you had to earn reputation privileges to edit ANYTHING. They decided to make the stack more open, and allow anyone to edit. But if you haven't earned a reputation for understanding the community (so your rep score is below 2k), then the community can't yet "trust" you to know what's right. So there are two restrictions in place:

• Edits must be 6 characters
• Your edits must be approved by a moderator or two other users

Because an accepted is an increase in the amount of trust in you by the community, you can earn up to 1000 rep from just edit approvals alone, 2 per approval (not 2 per edit vote from two other users since you have to have two users vote your edit as valid, 2 per edit getting approved and being shown as the canonical version of the post).

We moderators keep a pretty close eye on things, so we'll usually approve your edits within several hours. If you need something done sooner, you can always visit chat where there should be someone there with the rep to approve your changes.

Please bear in mind, once you cross the 2k threshold, you can make all the one character edits you want.