1. Oldmanofthemountain

    Oldmanofthemountain Active Member

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    I edited out a typo on a wikipedia page, and I received a warning message over it

    Discussion in 'The Lounge' started by Oldmanofthemountain, Dec 10, 2022.

    Here is a vent post over a petty personal spat I had with some random editor on wikipedia:

    While I was doing some personal research on Northeastern Native American tribes, I came across the page for the Massachusett people. In the infobox, there was a typo regarding an extra space between a coma and the word "indigenous" under the religion section. I removed the blank space between them, and continued on surfing.

    About an hour later, I received a warning message on my talk page. The editor wrote "don't make changes without citing reliable sources," despite the fact that I only fixed a grammatical error. They went on and undid my edit with them captioning "changes require verifiable, published citations" in their comment.

    I'm just beyond confused and frustrated on why this person is treating my edit like I vandalized the page with some political rant. Again, all I did was just change some typo. I don't even know how I could even possibly cite sources for such a trivial edit.

    One thing I should note however is that according to the edit history, the person was responsible for crafting much of the page's layout. Perhaps they misinterpreted my edit of their typo as an attack on their work as a whole.
     
    Last edited: Dec 10, 2022
  2. Catriona Grace

    Catriona Grace Mind the thorns Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    Poor editors, condemned to reinstate typos for lack of reliable sources. You could go back and cite Strunk and White's Elements of Style.:read:
     
  3. Xoic

    Xoic Prognosticator of Arcana Ridiculosum Contributor Blogerator

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    Way, way out there
    And the Chicago Manual of Style, and what the heck, throw in the Gregg Reference Manual for good measure. Three citations.
     
    ps102 and Oldmanofthemountain like this.
  4. JLT

    JLT Contributor Contributor

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    And throw in Benjamin Dreyer's Dreyer’s English: An Utterly Correct Guide to Clarity and Style. He's the copy edit0r of Random House, so I think his credentials are pretty well established at this point.
     
  5. Oldmanofthemountain

    Oldmanofthemountain Active Member

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    Set2Stun likes this.
  6. Naomasa298

    Naomasa298 HP: 10/190 Status: Confused Contributor

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    So... will you apologise to him for besmirching his name on an internet forum?
     
  7. Catriona Grace

    Catriona Grace Mind the thorns Contributor Contest Winner 2022

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    Nah, the editor deserved the besmirching. Now, had he or she groveled properly...
     
    Xoic likes this.

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