Why does editing a question or an answer resurrect it?

Question

I can understand why if an owner of a question updates it, it should give the question more attention, and if a question has no answer and someone edits it making it more clear, it would make sense to display it on the main page again.

But in most cases, edits are rather trivial; fixing typos, grammar, phrasing, etc. Sometimes people edit old, answered questions and they get front page attention in place of new ones. Should it be this way?

I think edited questions should be bumped to first page only if they hadn't been answered yet or had been edited by the original poster.

Answer 1

Yes, it should.

We need a way to make sure that all edits from all users, even moderators, get reviewed. The simplest and surest way to do so is to bump the question.

You might've added new detail that makes a closed question acceptable or an unanswered question answerable. You might've just made your not-so-great answer awesome or replaced a tzenes wall-o-text™ with the single word 'penis'.

All of these action require reevalutation of your post - from voting to answering to rollbacks, bringing many eyeballs to your new content. This is all by design.

There is a catch however. If you edit your own post too much (I think the bar is currently set at 10 distinct revisions), it'll go in community wiki mode, or, in other words, you'll stop gaining reputation from it.

Additionally, if you don't have 2k reputation, your edit will be automatically rejected if it doesn't change the post enough (currently the bar is six characters.)

Finally, there is an upper limit on how many of your old posts you could edit in the course of a day: five.