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Sometimes when browsing questions I see one with an edit request. It looks a bit like this:

share edit(1) close flag

Clicking on that edit(1) takes me to a preview where I can see the edit, and possibly approve it. If I approve it, I'm greeted by a window saying:

This suggestion still needs 1 approve vote from other reviewers.

Why? With a rep of 2000+ I can edit the question myself without having anyones approval, if I want. I don't see the point of having to wait for a second review here. Any approved edits will still show up at the top of the queue, for community review, so I don't see what type of abuse it can prevent.

I assume this is a site-wide feature, but just in case it is not, I'm posting it here in EE.SE, because I'm not sure how much every sub-site can be customized.

I captured a screenshot of the window, but it looks a little bit confusing here since it has the same style as the actual text, so I've tried to move it away from the question.

enter image description here

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  • \$\begingroup\$ It is the original editor making things go into vote mode, and in the vote, all users are equal (once they have enough rep to vote). \$\endgroup\$
    – PlasmaHH
    Mar 31, 2017 at 10:48

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System wide. It's stupid, and really meant for high traffic sites like SO, but everyone is stuck with it. Why does approving an edit require more than one vote?

Multiple approvers are required on Stack Overflow because when only a single person did it, we had a lot of junk edits go by really quickly. Things which contributed little, things which skipped a whole lot of errors, or things that didn't even really revise the post properly. This was bad.

Multiple approvers thus allows some level of check-and-balance, a second pair of eyes can notice errors that were overlooked. It's certainly not a guaranteed success, but since its instantiation there have been fewer reports on Meta Stack Overflow of such problem edits getting approved.

Of course you can force it with an Approve and Edit, or Reject and Edit.

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  • \$\begingroup\$ +1 for explaining the reason, but -1 for the unnecessary opinionated whining that went with it, for a total of 0. \$\endgroup\$
    – Olin Lathrop
    Apr 3, 2017 at 14:09
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    \$\begingroup\$ Oh Olin how could I ever function here without your unneceassry opinionated whiny hypocrisy. 😐 \$\endgroup\$
    – Passerby
    Apr 3, 2017 at 15:50

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