Relata Refero wrote:
My whole point is "re-writing" is quite capable of changing emphasis, wording, tone and context in such a manner that WP:V is relevant. These are familiar issues, for example, to anyone who's ever had to copy-edit translations.
And above all, we do not want to place the burden on writers to come back and check every contribution they've made...
Indeed in my "day job" as a computer science academic, this sort of concern is making copyediting fall out of favor quite rapidly. It's mostly been phased out for unrelated reasons (cutting expenses), but the few journals that still insist on doing extensive editing for style (like anything the IEEE runs) annoy many authors, as we have to keep re-reading our own drafts to figure out what they screwed up this time. It can even end up in comical exchanges of drafts where the author will change something back to what they actually meant to say, the copyeditor will change it back to conform to "house style", the author will revert the change in the next exchange, etc.
Now of course there are some benefits---such journals have more consistent formatting and style, fewer grammatical errors, somewhat more flowing prose, don't infuriatingly use a reference as a noun ("As [1] showed, ..."), and impeccably uniform citation typesetting. But the authorial burden and the chances of a technical error creeping in, or just a statement or implication that the author didn't intend, are also higher than in the becoming-standard "the author just gives us a PDF and we do a quick read-through for obvious problems" approach.
Which doesn't mean we shouldn't edit Wikipedia articles for style, but it is tricky to do well. We at least don't have one of the problems, which is the risk that copyediting can change the original author's voice and end up attributing to them a sentence they would never have written, since our articles aren't bylined. But there can certainly be drift between the text and the references. In general I think there needs to be a more integrated approach than a classical hard distinction between the subject-matter expert and the copyeditor---in many cases there's no hard boundary between improving the treatment of the subject (what to discuss in what order, what to emphasize, what connections to make), which is a subject-matter issue, and improving the overall readability and flow of the article, which is a copyediting issue.
-Mark