Less visible editors?

Question

If I edit a question, my name appears very prominently right below the question, before the name of the original poster. Especially if the editor is a regular, and the OP is a new user who has not yet customised the gravatar or earned many bells and whistles, the editor's badge under the question looks more eye-catching than the OP's badge.

It looks like I was the "first co-author" of the question, not just someone whose editorial help might be acknowledge in a footnote.

As a regular user, I have already learned to ignore the name of the editor and focus more on the name of the OP, but new users seem to get easily confused, let alone those who just find a relevant post by googling. (I guess all of us have seen comments that are accidentally addressed to someone who has recently edited the question.)

To me this seems awkward in many ways, and it makes me much more reluctant to do minor editing regularly:

• If the question is great, I do not want to steal the credit from the OP and spam my own name all around the site.

• On the other hand, if I do not agree with the question, I would not like to associate my name with it – at least not in such a visible and public manner.

While there has been discussion related to minor edits bumping up questions on the front page, and the name of the editor appearing there, I am not so concerned about it this time – after all, what appears on the front page is temporary. However, the questions are more-or-less permanent, and it is likely that the name of the editor stays there for several years.

Doesn't this bother anyone else?

Why is it this way?

Would it be possible to do something with this issue? I would imagine that a lot could be done without changing the engine, by merely editing the style sheets?

Or is it ok to use another (anonymous) account for minor edits?

Answer 1

TL;DR: can we have a minor edit checkbox like wikipedia?

I agree with Jukka. Unlike Suresh, this does bother me. When I only have time to read a few questions, I use the author gravatar as a guide in helping me select which questions to read (maybe I am not suppose to do this, but then why are they so prominently displayed?). It is always a disappointment when I come to the question and realize it is actually a very basic question asked by somebody else and the person I trust just edited the tags. In fact for some frequent editors, I have started effectively ignoring their name when it shows up in the author field. Thus, I contribute to the damage of proactive behavior, by effectively punishing frequent editors (people who contribute to the community greatly) by affording them less of my mind share when selecting questions.

I would really like to see a minor edit checkbox like we have for wikipedia. If I flip the checkbox, then my name does not displace the authors (or last editors) name as the name associated with a question on the front page. This is not only a nice feature for the concern in Jukka's question, it is also simply more honest! If I edited the tags of a question, or went in and changed their math to proper LaTeX, then I haven't actually contributed to the ideas of the question. All I did was better integrate the question into the community, I should not be considered as a co-author or co-editor on the question.

Answer 2

I'm not sure it bothers me that much, to be honest.

Answer 3

This is covered here:

Why are editor names displayed so prominently?

It is unlikely to change because we want a very large emphasis on "co-editing" posts; the ability to edit any and all content is one of the biggest ways we maintain and improve the resources we've created on the Stack Exchange network.