Community approved my suggested Edit

Question

Clicking on Community, you'll find:

Hi, I'm not really a person.

I'm a background process that helps keep this site clean!

I do things like

• Randomly poke old unanswered questions every hour so they get some attention

• Own community questions and answers so nobody gets unnecessary reputation from them

• Own downvotes on spam/evil posts that get permanently deleted

• Own suggested edits from anonymous users

But now he approved one of my edits. How can that be? What else does "he" (or "she"?) do, that is not in the list?

He/she also rejects edits, votes and has Badges in Area51...strange...

Answer 1

It seems that when somebody who reviews the edit presses "Improve" instead of "Accept" or "Reject", the edit gets recorded as being approved by Community instead of the actual reviewer. (This is arguably a bug, I think).

Note that in the edit history, your suggested edit shows up with the same timestamp (down to the second, as can be seen by mousing over the human-friendly "$n$ hours ago") as Arturo's subsequent edit, strongly suggesting that he was the approver.

I think rejects by Community was recently explained as happening when somebody else edits the post before the suggested edit had a chance to be acted on.

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More technically, the explanation as far as I understand is that Community is even more not-really-a-user than its profile text seems to suggest -- it is just the string that the software displays when the "responsible user" column in its database has not been filled in. So it's not a matter of Community deliberately doing this-or-that; it's just that the programmer who coded the feature didn't bother to give credit to someone else.