[WikiEN-l] What to do about our writing quality?

[David Gerard]

2008/5/26 Delirium <delirium at 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.