2008/5/26 Delirium delirium@hackish.org:
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.
God help us if anyone ever attempts complete codification of copyediting for non-crappy writing style. There's a certain hubris that seems to affect Wikipedia editors: that sufficient instruction creep can abstract away the need for any judgement whatsoever.
- d.