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When I edit a question and change a link from http://www.example.com to [this](http://www.example.com), does it count as 8 characters edited, or as deleting the whole link and retyping (so 30 characters)? When I look at my edit again and see an an edited link I made, all of it is striked through and new text next to it written in green. Does this mean that I edited more characters?

The same with code blocks and blockquotes. How exactly does the character edit counting system work?

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  • Whilst we're here, please don't edit example.com to this as this is worse than leaving the link as it is, as it obfuscates the destination. Either leave the link, formatting it nicely on its own line if it's long, or use appropriate anchor text such as Example.
    – grg Mod
    May 26, 2015 at 14:27
  • Acknowledged. So for example instead of meta.apple.stackexchange.com/questions/2497/… will be Question on Ask Different Meta
    – John K
    May 27, 2015 at 6:43
  • It'd be preferable to use the question's title, however links to other questions on the same site should definitely be left as just a link as the system pulls the question title automatically (except in comments).
    – grg Mod
    May 27, 2015 at 7:00
  • I do appreciate the edits that you make here; don't worry about a few rejects as long as you understand why the edit was rejected or reject-improved. If you have any questions about a specific edit that was rejected, feel free to ask in chat, and ping me if I was the one to review it as I'd appreciate seeing the discussion.
    – grg Mod
    May 27, 2015 at 9:31

1 Answer 1

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The edited characters count for the purposes of the minimum edit count is based on the number of non-whitespace characters that are edited in a post.

This means that:

  • example to **example** is an edit of four characters, not 11 (or 7).
  • Prepending four spaces to a line for a code block is an edit of zero characters, as all the characters are whitespace.
  • Prepending a > for a quote block is an edit of one character, regardless of how many characters are in the quote block itself.

The edited characters count for the automatic edit summary (available >2k) includes whitespace character changes, therefore showing 4 characters when adding a code block.

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