Some guy corrected 99 out of 100 errors in a post. Should I correct the remaining one and steal the credit to that guy?

Question

Editing can often take long. Some users correct posts substantially and a percent from them might want their edit to be visible as edited by them (well, it depends on the guy, I wouldn't care, but it's better to ask). For instance the first edit in this question.

In this case I also forgot an n at the end of the adjective in italics:

überwiegend die aus dem Latein abgeleitete Wörter

That's a minor error and I can easily correct it, but then I'd take the credit of the one who really took time to correct 90% of the errors.

So what should I do?

Answer 1

There is no such thing as a credit to a post's edit. Everybody, even unregistered users are able to suggest an edit but only high rep uses will be able to edit without review or accept a suggested edit.

For new users edit efforts are rewarded with a small reputation gain of 2 points. This was mainly introduced to encourage editing more. I believe this was a good decision. Later you will not gain any reputation by editing. We do hope however that users will still feel responsible for the site and continue editing (eventually they will be awarded with a badge through that).

Usually editing is more of a janitorial work we do here to make the site better. To make this even easier we removed the automatic conversion to "Community Wiki". Therefore even minor edits can be done without any harm. Only subsequent and continuous minor editing with the obvious intent to harvest reputation is frowned upon and may lead to a review ban.

To answer you direct concern: yes, please do go ahead and edit any error you see in your or any other post. It makes the site better!