In a message dated 5/24/2008 2:00:31 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
refero.relata(a)gmail.com writes:
Absolutely not. It is shared - and WP:CITE and WP:V are policy, not
WP:MEWRITEPRETTY.>>
------------------------------------------
Not... relevant.
Copyeditors are not citing nor verifying. They are re-writing *previously
cited and verified* details for consistency, flow, grammar and style.
IF the original writers couldn't be bothered to do it properly, that is not
the burden of the copyeditors to fix. It's the burden of the writers to come
back, and *properly* present the source material so it doesn't need to be
fixed any more.
**************Get trade secrets for amazing burgers. Watch "Cooking with
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2008/5/25 Abd ul-Rahman Lomax <abd(a)lomaxdesign.com>:
> I've seen
> articles where text is added, sources are added, then someone takes
> it out because, perhaps, they say it is unbalanced,
I essentially always revert those kinds of edits.
As a rule, adding material is the way to create balance; I'm not sure
I've ever seen an example where removal of sourced material for
balance is correct, but it could theoretically happen. There probably
should be a bot that reverts all edits that remove material with
references, with the subject line 'pov' (I'm not kidding).
--
-Ian Woollard
We live in an imperfectly imperfect world. If we lived in a perfectly
imperfect world things would be a lot better.
>
> John wrote:
> > I'm kinda tired of having this spam my inbox every day. Could we please
> > move this on wiki?
> >
> ...and earlier regarding the school shooting threats
>
> > Shouldn't this be taking place on Wikipedia and not on the Mailing List?
> > It would allow more to comment.
> There are people who are interested in both of these subjects, and who
> consider them important. Nobody's obliging you to contribute. The
> message at the bottom of each page shows you how to unsubscribe. That
> would insure that you do not receive so much "spam" from the mailing lists.
>
> Ec
Okay, that was really not necessary. John, if you haven't already you might
want to try changing to digest mode. You'll get fewer messages that way, at
least. Cheers.
[[w:User:Lifebaka]]
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
> There is somewhere a recommendation that Talk be refactored. Right
> now, what I see, everywhere I've looked, is that Talk pages are
> simply archived. And then the same debates occur over and over, with
> new participants who have not read the old debate, so more time is
> wasted explaining everything over and over. It is *incredibly*
> inefficient, and inefficiency is not fatal when new editors keep
> pouring in. But it burns editors out, in the end, and that stream of
> new users will dry up. I've called it a pyramid scheme. It works as
> long as new blood keeps appearing.
Refactoring talk pages is an old notion that was already there when I
became involved in early 2002. I tried it then on a couple of
occasions, and found it to be an incredibly difficult task. Not
everybody can do it. It is even more difficult than good copyediting in
article space. It could also lead to complaints from purveyors of
nonsense that their nonsense is being censored.
Archiving doesn't help, especially when those archive pages are
accompanied by a warning that they are not to have further comments
added. Some of the shorter threads on a talk page might do well to be
revived, especially when they deal with an easily refuted but popular
misconception. If a topic is subject to constant dispute the talk page
and its related archives become an unmanageable multitude that would
deter anyone from looking to them for answers. An improvement might be
to archive by topic or question instead of by date as is currently done,
but that would involve more work than simply using cut and past for
everything added before a given date.
New editors that raise questions are more plentiful than new editors
that answer them. The answering editors can soon develop a siege
mentality when they need to keep answering what they perceive to be the
same questions. The result may very well be an inability to recognize
changes in the question.
Ec
G'day Steve,
> One huge thing to watch out for is when our policies end up
> hurting our responsible contributors more than the vandals
> and trolls they're supposed to protect us from. If every new
> contributor is guilty until proven innocent of being a vandal,
> POV warrior, linkspammer, copyright violator, or non-notable
> vanity article pusher, we're going to turn off and drive away a
> lot of new contributors. (The only way to make it worse would be
> if the process for proving yourself innocent involved following
> -- to an absolute T -- a bunch of elaborate policies which new
> contributors aren't likely to be aware of.)
You speak as if we don't already do this ...
--
Mark Gallagher
"Even potatoes have their bad days, Igor." --- Count Duckula
G'day Ray,
> David Gerard wrote:
[SV complains that new-comers to an article rarely pay enough attention to the flow of its text]
> > Actually, I disagree: content accuracy is more important than
> writing
> > flow, and reverting or even discouraging the addition of new
> > information for the sake of writing flow is very bad practice.
> This seems like the opposite of Slim's complaint. She's not
> suggesting
> that new information be reverted or discouraged for the sake of
> writing
> flow. It's about those people who make later changes without paying
> attention to text flow. A careful writer can pay attention to text
> flow
> when adding new facts.
It's the difference, I should think, between *adding* information and *including* it. Suppose we said this about Isaac Newton:
Isaac Newton was an English physicist best known for his definition of gravity, which
was widely-accepted until the discovery of general relativity two hundred years later.
If I were to come across that article and say:
Isaac Newton was an English physicist best known for his definition of gravity, which
was widely-accepted until the discovery of general relativity two hundred years later.
Also, he was an alchemist.
That would Suck. But it shouldn't be reverted --- after all, alchemy *was* a fairly significant part of Newton's life. The article *is* improved by the information (at this point it would be improved by *any* information!), it just reads worse. Suppose a better writer were to come along --- SlimVirgin, say, or David Gerard ... or even this Ray chap --- with the same intentions. She or he might change it to read:
Isaac Newton was an English physicist and alchemist. He is best known today for his
definition of gravity, which was widely-accepted until the discovery of general relativity
two hundred years later.
Much better, and with only a little more effort. We will always have drive-by additions, especially from non-registered users --- this is a Good Thing, even if it makes our articles a little messy. But those of us who know better haven't really any excuse for not taking the time to ensure our additions don't disrupt the flow of the existing text.
Cheers,
--
Mark Gallagher
0439 704 975
http://formonelane.net/
"Even potatoes have their bad days, Igor." --- Count Duckula
>> Do you, since you are solely and only fixing "badly writen English"
>> have to be yourself familiar with the underlying source from which
>> it supposedly comes.
>
> My opinion is that you need to be sure you understand it before you
> change a paraphrase.
I don't want to seem to argue against paraphrasing or
copyediting, since they're both clearly vital. But yes, if
you're going to copyedit, you do have to be pretty scrupulously
careful that you don't change the meaning! Just now I came
across a fine (counter) example. Read <http://en.wikipedia.org/
w/index.php?title=Ian_Michael_Smith&oldid=213296701>. Ask
yourself: in which movie, Simon Birch or The Mighty, is the hero
afflicted with Morquio Syndrome? About which movie's audition
were Ian Smith's parents initially wary? Now read the preceding
(prior to someone's copyedit) revision <http://en.wikipedia.org/
w/index.php?title=Ian_Michael_Smith&oldid=210232536>, and answer
the same questions.
In a message dated 5/25/2008 6:49:25 P.M. Pacific Daylight Time,
scs(a)eskimo.com writes:
Isn't there a Wikiproject or something where people who like to
copyedit can hook up with articles which have been requested for
copyediting? If not, perhaps there should be.>>
--------------
Yes. I believe on my user page I have a userbox that connects to it.
And we do have a tag called something like "cleanup" so anyone can follow
those links to a list if they choose.
Will Johnson
**************Get trade secrets for amazing burgers. Watch "Cooking with
Tyler Florence" on AOL Food.
(http://food.aol.com/tyler-florence?video=4&?NCID=aolfod00030000000002)