Disallow "petty" editing

Question

I feel like the purpose of editing a post should be to correct typos, correct wrong information, add clarification, etc. I don't think you should be allowed to edit a post just to change someone's style of writing (this is clearly different than if it is unreadable or incomprehensible because of poor grammar, lack of continuity, or other).

Case in point is the editing of my post from earlier today. On the internet, I tend to write as I speak. But this edit seemed to exist just to change my writing style. This really bothered me, so I changed it back to the way it was. Yes, there were also two furigana edits with it, but the style part of it I feel was very unnecessary. This heading in the FAQ says, "If you see something that needs improvement, click edit and help us make it so!", but trying to influence one's style of writing seems over-the-line to me.

Answer 1

First off: you're free to roll back an edit you feel harms one of your posts. There's even a "rollback" link right at the bottom of the post when you're viewing it after someone has edited it...

That said, don't take it so personally. You may think starting a question with, "Ok" and ending with a triple-exclamation mark is a fine way to let your personality bleed through into what can often be a bland, sterile wall of text...

...but it's still just text. Folks reading it can't actually hear your chipper "oh kay" as you gather your thoughts in preparation for asking the question, or your plaintive tone as the question itself escapes your lips. They just see the expletive and the superfluous punctuation. Maybe they interpret it the way you meant it, or maybe they don't. And if someone misses the point and has some other reason to edit... well, shucks.

My point is, give 'em the benefit of the doubt. Maybe you're seeing someone hell-bent on smothering your creative spark... or maybe it's an honest attempt to help you out, unaware that the careless slips they're removing are in fact calculated attempts to convey personality via an inherently impersonal medium.

Answer 2

I find nothing wrong with sawa’s edit of your question which you linked. It improved readability of your question by removing superfluous words and punctuation as well as correcting the usage of ruby.

Answer 3

I re-edited your question but it will need to be peer-reviewed.

I agree with Sawa and Shog9 on some major points but I'd like to go a bit into detail:

1. I am not sure about English punctuation but I guess ??? or !!! is technically correct. Still, correct does not mean that you can necessarily use it here.
   This is an informal usage of punctuation and you must remember that this site is not only visited by students but from any kind of person, old, young, students, workers. On the internet there are some standards you must think about and while on a forum it might be ok, here it's not since this is not a forum.

2. the SMACKDOWN!! in your title was unnecessary, you could add "What's the real difference?" which I added, by the way. But that ALL-CAPS word was only distracting, not to mention that writing all caps on the internet means you're SHOUTING. (It's Netiquette.)

Don't take my post personally, I hope I didn't sound harsh because it was not my intention. But there are many ways to express those things you did before. They're not "wrong", I just think they're not fit to this site.

Answer 4

These discussions are getting quite long, so I'm posting this as a fresh answer. As @Troyen mentioned in one of the comments

A lot of the SE traffic comes from search engines,

so the key to all this that I think we all missed at some point or other is that this information is essentially for the whole world. Not just for a certain person. Not even for just the contributing community on SE. But potentially anyone from anywhere could see links to our topics in results from search engines, shared through social networking, etc.

Of course in the back of my mind I know this, but that honestly does not go through my head when creating a post or editing. So after thinking about it for a while, I realized that, yes, my post titles in question may not make sense for someone who stumbles across it from a search engine or wherever. So it is right to change them to something more appropriate that more clearly tells the content (although I don't like the current wording to them and will probably change them to something else -- no offense).

AT THE SAME TIME, we need to take this into account when editing. You're not editing for yourself, not for the poster, and not for the SE community. You're editing for the whole world. So before you change something, you need to be thinking "Is this gonna benefit anyone who reads this or just me?" I think this especially applies to non-native English speakers. If there is a typo or incorrect grammar, that's one thing. But if it's a particular saying or nuance of the English language that you're not familiar with, you probably should avoid editing it. (As an objective example) In this case, @sawa edited out the 'OK' at the beginning of my sentence because he thought it meant I was accepting something and it didn't make sense to him. I don't believe he was thinking, "This doesn't make sense to me, but maybe it's an expression that makes sense to native English speakers. Maybe I should leave it alone." It seems like he edited it to his own understanding and not to the understanding of your average English speaker. Or maybe he honestly did, I don't know.

But the point is, the scope is not just us, but the world, so we need to tune these things for any potential visitor to the site. This discussion has made me think and learn. Thanks to all who participated and I hope there are no hurt feelings anywhere.

Answer 5

https://japanese.stackexchange.com/faq#editing says: