On Sat, May 24, 2008 at 10:23 PM, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Relata Refero wrote:
What is also frequently a concern is that
material
is frequently added to articles based on scholarly resources or books
that
are not online.
Material that is not online is just as valuable and important as
material that is. If you doubt the material look it up.
Umm, yes.
If the original addition is carefully worded to
closely
paraphrase a point in the secondary source, a copyeditor concerned about
style might well - and frequently does - come in and change that such
that
it is no longer sufficiently faithful to the
nuances in the source, since
the copyeditor does not have access to the source.
"Closely paraphrase" and "sufficiently faithful" are points of view
about a particular text. Close paraphrases intended to avoid a copyvio
can change the meaning of a passage entirely. How do you presume that
the copyeditor does not have access to the source? Whose nuance is
correct?
I'm not presuming, I'm basing it on actual incidents. And if you think that
people routinely order $39.95 books or put in an interlibrary loan before
doing a bit of copyediting....
The rest of what you say isn't really an objection, merely a general
statement about Meaning. The bottomline is that a close paraphrase is
sometimes necessary, and when its done, it needs to be done with reference
to the source, and should not be copy-edited without the copy-editor also
reading and assimilating the source. The latter happens all the time.
RR