Wikipedia talk:Be bold/Archive 1

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For the most part, the instinctive desire of an author to "own" what he has written is counterproductive here, and it is good to shake up that emotional attachment by making sweeping changes at will when it improves the result. But there's an important exception to keep in mind: Commentary written by and specifically credited to one person should not be edited for content without correctly identifying all the changes. It's OK to fix obvious spelling and grammar bugs, but changing content is tantamount to making a false quotation claim. For example, the Wiki is not paper page contained a quote from Jimbo about something that would "grow gracefully old", and someone changed it into the cliche "grow old gracefully". That's not what Jimbo said, and it has a different meaning. It was also not an improvement on the original; in fact it was much worse. --LDC

Another comment: There are times when I have edited a page originally written in British English. Since my native language is American English, I do not consider myself competent to edit British text without accidentally throwing in a "realize" or "the team is..." or something else I'm not familiar with, so I simply "translated" the page into American English in its entirety so that I can be sure it's correct. This in no way implies that I think one is better than the other; only that I'm more competent to edit one. Of course, if a British person later comes along to edit it and wants to translate it back, that's fine too if he or she feels more competent editing that. --LDC


Perhaps this debate doesn't really belong here, but do you really find British English so different that you feel you can't piecemeal edit it correctly? I certainly feel competent to edit pages obviously written by Americans :) As far as ending up with a mixture of British and American (and, what the hell, let's throw in some Australian, New Zealand, and South African English as well), I can't see it as a huge problem. If somebody finds the spelling and vocabulary inconsistencies too annoying, they'll get cleaned up IMHO. --user:Robert Merkel
I don't need to edit other people's text to get a mishmash of American and British English -- my writing is a mishmash already! I switch willy-nilly from -ise to -ize and back again... :) --user:Simon J Kissane
Or consider Canadian English. Just read anything written in standard Canadian English (whatever that is), or peruse the Canadian Oxford English Dictionary, and you'll find that using a mishmash of British and American English is the norm in Canada. So rewriting an entire article is probably not worth the bother. --AJM

So, this page should link to a new one, called, Wikipedia:Avoid edit wars, maybe? Graft

This seems to be duplicated on meta: m:Be bold in updating pages. Is it better placed here or there?

Isn't the first line "Wikis don't work if people aren't bold." too definitive (and misleading ?) ? It suggests that boldness is the only way to live in wikipedia. Better ways of rephrasing the line can be found at Wikipedia:Editing_policy, section:On editing styles. It talks about different approaches to take while editing, boldness being one of them. Wikis work with other approaches too. Perhaps the line could be "Wikis develop faster when people are bold." as the speed element is the biggest advantage. Jay 22:45, Sep 16, 2003 (UTC)