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I've known about MSE for a while, but I only just recently got involved in MSE properly. One of the daily things I do here on this site is make edits to new posts (often by new users) to add $\LaTeX$ formatting, since its easy and makes posts more intelligible and look better, which helps them get answered or be more useful answers.

The problem I've run into is that I make a suggested edit, and then the author makes a small edit discarding my work e.g. https://math.stackexchange.com/review/suggested-edits/409481 (I hope that is the correct link).

So the question I'm asking is what should I do in this case. Is there a way to integrate the edits and resuggest? (sort of like git's merge tool)

Additionally, since this would seem to be a fairly routine and necessary task on this site, why is the editing rep barrier so high? Although I'm not necessarily suggesting it should be lower, I'm just curious what the reasoning is, since editing to fix formatting would seem to be a very important activity that wouldn't see so much of a parallel on the other SE sites.

Also if I've tagged this post incorrectly, I apologize, this is my first time asking a question on Meta.

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    $\begingroup$ This doesn't answer your question, but I just edited some formatting into that post. $\endgroup$
    – Gerry Myerson
    Commented May 12, 2015 at 0:28

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Is there a way to integrate the edits and resuggest? (sort of like git's merge tool)

No automatic merge tool, but since the content of all your suggested edits remains available to you (via suggestions tab of your profile), you can copy the formatting from there and try to merge manually. This makes sense to do when the rejection was based on edit conflict, rather than on the negative reviews of your suggestion.

You can largely avoid such edit conflicts by not editing a post when it is still hot from the oven. Let it cool for 30-60 minutes; if it still needs fixing then, the chances of conflict are much lower.

wouldn't see so much of a parallel on the other SE sites

No, it is not without a parallel on other SE sites. Plenty of broken markup gets posted on other sites too (Stack Overflow, Ask Ubuntu, TeX, SharePoint...) Perhaps the percentage is higher here because Math is on the lower end of the quality spectrum, but it's not exceptional.

By the way, not every post with broken formulas really needs fixing; for many of them, a downvote is enough.

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    $\begingroup$ Math has "more" markup than other sites. $\endgroup$
    – Asaf Karagila Mod
    Commented May 12, 2015 at 4:12
  • $\begingroup$ Thanks, yeah I only just discovered that when I was asking this question. Is there a feature request for that? Or was it decided that it wasn't really high priority. Also that's good advice, and I suppose if I would downvote it anyway, there's no need to fix the markup. Also to clarify, I meant that writing LaTeX is significantly more work than retabbing, which is all I remember having to do on SO. $\endgroup$
    – jgon
    Commented May 12, 2015 at 5:38

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