Peer review rejects bugfix edit on ground of it being aimed at the author

Question

I proposed an edit to this answer to one of my questions.

The edit consisted of replacing two single quotes with two double quotes. The sample code in the original answer failed to compile; the edited version compiled and ran as advertised.

Peer review of the edit rejected the edit with the apparent stock-phrase:

This edit was intended to address the author of the post and makes no sense as an edit. It should have been written as a comment or an answer

Subsequently I pointed out the bug in a comment, whereupon the code's author promptly performed exactly the same edit that had I proposed.

Surely a simple bugfix to posted code is aimed at everyone reading the code, not just the author. Rejecting the edit merely delayed a necessary bugfix and increased the amount of effort required to get it done and the number of people involved.

Was this a reasonable rejection of the edit?

Answer 1

The correction of the compilation alone, without the junk comment would have been a great edit, appropriate and encouraged. The rejection message is a stock message, and doesn't reflect the real reason your edit was rejected.

As @Vogel612 already said, the rejection is reasonable and correct, simply because the commentary is practically just junk. We understand your good intentions and that you simply didn't know a better way, but that doesn't make it a good edit, so rejection is appropriate.

That being said, a better way to handle the suggested edit would have been the Improve Edit option, and either remove the junk, or if that's not possible due to the 6 character limit (for users without the powa), then replace the junk with something meaningful (which of course can be very hard).

Answer 2

Leaving the reasonability of rejection as a "reply-to-author edit" aside, I noticed something in your edit:

-- SE disallows edits shorter than 6 chars! Grr!

This is unnecessary meta-commentary, if not borderline "vandalism" (note the quotation marks). As such it's not helpful to be in a post (and by extension in an edit).

The Character-Restriction does not apply to instant edits, such as people with edit privileges, the post owner and moderators. The edit should've been rejected, because that doesn't belong into an SE post.
For future reference: if you need to make an edit that has too little characters, you can always add syntax-highlighting to a codeblock like so:

<!-- language: lang-[languagecode] -->

This is enough to top the character limit.

So much and happy editing :)