User:Dablaze

I'm an editor, researcher, and an accomplished kvetch, considering my tender age.

Now that I've been on here a little while, I've noticed a few things that cause heated debate, if not outright conflict. If you care, here's what I think of some of them, in no particular order:

Consistency. A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but a prudent consistency isn't so bad for article writing, IMHO. How many innocent brain cells must die in senseless edit wars over variants in punctuation, spelling, or various standards of notation? I'm always tempted to put commas and periods inside quotation marks, and change -ise to -ize, but as jarring as some foreign spellings are, they're still no less correct within their own speech communities, so I made a little rule for myself: I don't make wholesale changes in an article unless I'm doing a wholesale edit, in which case I feel justified in putting in my preferred style. Keeps me out of trouble. :-)

Besides, I'm a big fan of internal consistency within articles. It's a good system that makes sense for an undertaking like Wikipedia. And there's no way on earth that site-wide standards for every little thing could ever be enforced. Nor should they, IMO. Enforcing standards for the big things is hard enough...

British vs. American English: Doesn't really make a difference to me, unless a certain usage could cause confusion, like the differing meanings of "private school" and "public school." If something's obscure or "inside baseball," then I think it's ripe for editing. If, on the other hand, a usage is common to one variant but not to the other, I don't usually get my knickers in a twist. This is an encyclopedia, after all, and if something is unfamiliar, it's easy enough to look up. As long as one or the other is consistently used thoughout an article, then I don't really have a problem. Even if the Brits totally spell things wrong. :-)

"Is Wikipedia America-centric?" Probably. There's just so many more Americans than British, Australians, etc., and with a greater degree of internet access, I believe. I see people complain about this, but what are we supposed to do? I wonder if the Quebecois and the mainland French have a similar conflict on the French Wikipedia.

Misunderstanding of the concept of copyediting: I can't count how many times I've clicked on an Open Task for copyediting, only to realize that the article is barely written or poorly written, and needs more work before copyediting. Copyediting is what happens to a writer's final draft. A copyeditor does not (or at least should not) have to bother much with the meaning of the article's content. He or she is more concerned with introducing consistency of writing and format. A copyeditor will obsess about whether "million-dollar movie" should have a hyphen instead of what the movie is, or what the million dollars actually refer to. The writer and editor(s) will have already resolved that by the time it gets to the copyeditor. So if I click on something for copyediting that has text like, "Need to add XYZ to this section," or is written in barely literate English, then you'd be amazed at how quickly it turns into a stub or candidate for "needs more attention."

"Objectivity" — Ugh. Big subject. Will write later. Till then, enjoy!