[WikiEN-l] Age fabrication and original research

[FT2]

On Thu, Oct 1, 2009 at 7:24 PM, Ken Arromdee <arromdee at rahul.net> wrote:

> And back to literal words... I'm really tired of the attitude "since the
> rules aren't meant to be taken literally, we won't fix them so that they
>  make more sense if someone does try to read them literally".



Not really so. For example, I spend a huge amount of
time<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:FT2/Project_contributions>trying
to make things make more sense, be more balanced and representative
of "how it really is intended to be taken". Just today and yesterday I spent
reviewing the interface wordings for RevDelete and Flagged Revisions to try
and improve their commonsense-ness -- see my
contribs<http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20091001134721&limit=50&target=FT2>here
and on the flagged
rev's test wiki<http://flaggedrevs.labs.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Contributions&offset=20091001115755&limit=200&target=FT2>for
this weeks work.

The problem is there comes a point where you can't improve them in terms of
definitiveness without them being so long as to defeat easy readability
("tl;dr"). At that point we rely on the reader to figure it out. if you can
spot improvements that others haven't, and they reflect the spirit better
than the present wording, then Be Bold and see if others agree they are an
improvement, and fix them!

FT2