Reconsider "no improvement whatsoever" rejection

Question

One of the canned messages to reject a suggested edit is no improvement whatsoever:

This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.

Quite an unfriendly message, if not rude, as has already been discussed elsewhere. I propose that we, reviewers, refrain from using it whenever there is good faith on the suggested edit, and instead write a more kind message to reject the edit, say

Although your suggestion does not harm the post, I fail to see any substantial improvement.

or maybe, for rewording and reformatting attempts,

It is dubious whether the proposed formatting/rewording substantially improves this post.

I mean, you can compose your own and just copy-paste.

Examples

Good faith edits that at least partially improve the post, yet have "no improvement whatsoever" rejection votes, and whose true rejection reason I am guessing in the labels:

1. Changes "How can I" into "How to".
2. Too minor.
3. Too minor.
4. Also harms.
5. Too minor.

Good faith edit, rejected, but Muru has written the reason why. This is the behavior I'm trying to encourage, namely, to give a proper reason when rejecting.

Definetly bad edits:

1. Bad faith.
2. Inattentive, though probably not ill-intended.

Thus the suggestion

Reserve "no improvement whatsoever" for the bad edits, that really deserve it. Otherwise, do not respond so harshly to a volunteered, good faith attempt of improvement, especially to new users. If in doubt, assume good faith.

Answer 1

You may have a point in general, but I fear your example is a bad one. That edit was absolutely harmful! It changed a correct grammatical question ("How can I?") into something that is grammatically wrong: "How to?".

"How to" is not a question, it is a declaration. So "How to boil pasta" is a fine title for an article explaining how pasta should be boiled. However, "How to boil pasta?" is not a grammatically valid question. So the edit you mention, which only changed the title of the question from this:

How can I use bash's if test and find commands together?

To this:

How to use "if", "test", and "find" commands together in a bash script?

does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.

Answer 2

On the reviewer side, there's a meaningful difference between the current message:

This edit does not make the post even a little bit easier to read, easier to find, more accurate or more accessible. Changes are either completely superfluous or actively harm readability.

And your proposed:

Although your suggestion does not harm the post, I fail to see any substantial improvement.

[or]

It is dubious whether the proposed formatting/rewording substantially improves this post.

(Emphasis mine.)

The current message hints to the reviewer that that flag reason is only appropriate for edits that are truly, completely devoid of benefit. For example, it makes it clear to me that I shouldn't use it to reject an edit that I think is good, but not good enough to be worthwhile. It indicates that even the tiniest improvement is still an improvement worth accepting.

The proposed rewrite, on the other hand, says that the improvement has to be "substantial." That raises the bar for what an edit has to accomplish in order for it to pass review—and that's harmful, I think.

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On the editor side, I agree that the message comes off as rude.

Could the editor side use a different phrasing than the reviewer side?