Question: I sometimes look at the edit history of a question, mostly when something smells "off" in the way it is written. I took a look at the history of [this question](https://meta.stackoverflow.com/posts/141507/revisions) and it seems like the editor has "writer's envy": the edits do little more than rephrase (poorly in my opinion: how do you "hover a user's question"?) what has already been clearly asked. 

Is this a misunderstanding of the purpose of editing on the editor's part? Hubris? Rep whoring? Something else? 

Am I just being picky here? It bugs me because I respect an individual's writing "voice" and edits merely for style seem a violation of that. SO/SE isn't about literature per se and so long as the writing is clear, without any glaring grammatical errors, what is the point of making these kind of edits?

In my arbitrary sampling of edits I've seen many instances of this – even one edit which replaced all the contractions (e.g. "I am" for "I'm") – because I guess the editor didn't like contractions. Don't like my use of an "em dash" in the last sentence? Fine, but don't you have better things to do?

Answer: 
Personally, I do a lot of editing for style, but IMO it's always sorely needed. There's a lot of barely comprehensible English on SE, and I think an easily readable question attracts more/better answers.

Looking at the example you gave, the editor makes one enormous improvement: s/he replaces "put the mouse over" with "hover", the standard term for what the author was getting at. I think this is a really good example of where a little editing greatly enhances a question. I am pretty sure some folks would read the original and not be quite sure what the author was getting at, and then move on. Same with "It's a small and basic box" being changed to "It's a small box and the text is unformatted" -- I think that's subtly clearer, and makes the question easier to understand and hence to answer.
I agree that many of the changes seem to be gratuitous - it is possible that the editor initially only wanted to improve the formatting of the list, but the system wouldn't let them make such a small change, so further "improvements" were needed in order to get the edit through.

Having said that, the editor has 10k+ reputation on the site and I believe that with such reputation there is no such limitation, so must conclude that the editor was trying to improve the style of the post - the problem here is that whether the style is better or not is a judgement call and entirely subjective.