[WikiEN-l] Changing contents by copy editors (was: What to do about our writing quality? (Relata Refero)

[Tony Sidaway]

2008/5/24 Andries Krugers Dagneaux <andrieskd at chello.nl>:
>> [..] What is also  frequently a concern is that material is frequently
>>added to articles based on scholarly resources or books that are not
> online. >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.
>>RR
>
> True, what helps against this is giving quotes of the dead tree sources
> in the footnotes.
>

It's a non-issue, in any case.  If a copy edit obscures or changes the
meaning, a subsequent editor can fix it just as one would fix any
other incorrect edit.  We only cite public sources so all the editor
has to do is check the "dead tree" version as a good library.