Why were my edits rejected?

Question

I improved two posts today to fix several capitalization errors and both were rejected with the following message:

I'd prefer to keep barbara's style

The suggested edits:

• is there a "size-independent" method for overlaying two symbols to form a composite?
• how to suppress "Underfull \vbox (badness 10000) ... while \output is active"?

Why would someone reject these clear improvements? Is this user being allowed to write in their own personal style for a reason? I was under the impression that all Stack Exchange sites had the same policy towards editing.

Answer 1

^{My humble attempt. :)}

First of all, I'd like to say that I really admire your work in the main SO site. I learned a lot from your answers. It's an honour to have a SO fellow user here. Make yourself at home, I really hope you enjoy this community.

Please, don't take my next lines personal. It's just some humble thoughts about the way I see this specific situation. And I'd like to share them.

IMHO TeX.sx behaves quite differently from other SO sites. We don't have for example the incoming traffic that StackOverflow has, neither too much offtopic questions. Jeff Attwood once said that no one would come here by accident, since this community is highly specific and technical. Since the traffic is slow, we can better deal with everything, say, a flagged post, a "poor" answer, an offtopic thread, and so on. I think that this community is very friendly, that is, everybody is really eager to help, to make knowledge better.

A quick overview to spot the difference: the first 101k rep user in SO has downvoted 857 posts; our 101k user has downvoted only 13.

Since every site is community-driven, we try to adapt things to our reality and not the other way around. Our methods would probably not work in other sites, say Math.SX or Spanish.SX. Sometimes, when I hear the words "SE policy" said in the wild, the walking hammers from The Wall come to my mind. Don't get this wrong, but I feel it sounds like an imposition: share it fairly but don't take a slice of my pie. I prefer to look at the SE policy as an inspiration for communities to work with a predefined set of suggestions and, as time goes by, work on their own methods, adapted to their own reality.

Now, back to the editing question.

IMHO your suggestions were valid - even Joseph mentioned he edited some questions in the same line in the past. But, at the risk of sounding unfair, I think the ultimate final decision lies with the author. Even though I think posts should be made clear - a nice formatting or proper spelling - I think we need to respect the author's decision on keeping things as they are.

I see the SE network as an awesome Q&A knowledge base, a new tendency. But I fear that people misunderstand the real concept and see threads as collaborative wiki. If it's a wiki, everything is fine, because you are collaboratively editing stuff. The Q&A model is based on people asking and answering questions. The site footer gives us a hint:

user contributions licensed under cc-wiki with attribution required

If we take a closer look on these links, we find the following statement:

Attribution - You must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work).

When we edit things from other users, we are signing a risky contract: we are somehow influencing the author's contribution - for better or for worse. But note that it's up to the author to decide if the modifications to his/her answer should really take place.

Of course, one might say that some modifications are towards improving spelling and grammar. Again, I think they are valid, but we can't impose these changes if the user explicitly rejects it. A silly example: we Brazilians are fond of commas - don't quote me on that. Portuguese usually has way longer sentences than their English counterparts, so we use a lot of commas. Sometimes, when I write in English - my poor English - I tend to add commas as my heart desires. Everybody can go and edit my posts - "The number of commas is too damn high!". Let's say I want to fight for my commas, so I rollback the edits. Am I wrong for rolling back a post to a previous state? I don't think so, even if the reasons for the edit are valid. The rollback feature exists for a reason, and I think the author has the right to take whatever decision on his/her own answers, no matter if there are valid arguments to support the edits.

The same line of thought is for deleted answers. Spoiler alert: 10k+ users can see deleted answers. Let's say I have a very nice answer with 10+ upvotes, and for some reason, I decide to delete it. Someone might say, "the answer is very good, let's undelete it for a greater good". Even if the reason is noble, I still think it's the author decision. It's a pretty "aggressive" way of trying to make things better.

Again, I believe your edits were very good, but it's up to the author to decide if the changes should take effect. I really enjoy reading Barbara's answers, and I always learn from her TeX expertise, besides of course the proper spelling and grammar. People that already know her style rollback edits just to antecipate the inevitable - she'd rollback the question anyway. :) And she has the right to do it, after all, it's her contribution.

When we edit posts, we make sure to leave a note to the author of what we did - we already have a set of predefined text building blocks. It's a way to establish a good relationship with our fellow users.

Don't take the rejected edits too seriously. Barbara is a great person - I really hope to meet her in person someday in a TUG conference and lure her to sign my TeXbook :) - and the lowercases are there for a reason. And I must confess, seeing one of Barbara's answer with the proper capitalization gives me shivers, "Jesus Christ, the AMS has spoken!" :)

Anyway, I hope you consider rejoining this community in the future. :)

Answer 2

In this one case, yes, Barbara Beeton uses an exclusive no-caps style to distinguish her personal posts from anything official representing the American Mathematical Society. See this question for some more discussion.

Respecting poster's style.

Answer 3

This subject was, of course, already discussed thoroughly in the question linked by Alan Munn, to which you (Bill the Lizard) already responded. The other responses were well-considered meditations on policy implications by moderators current and former, and as such I don't think any better opinions can be obtained in response to this new question.

speaking only for myself, though, i think that this question is not written in the same spirit as those answers. [sic] The following comment worries me:

With all due respect, this isn't Barbara Beeton's site. It's run by a community. If perfectly good edits are going to be rejected and rolled back on a whim, then I'm discouraged from contributing any more of my time worrying about the quality of posts on this site.

This ultimatum does not suit you nor us, coming from a moderator of Stack Overflow who may indeed have some say in whether this site gets its share of concern from those who run the larger network (and I don't mean its "community").

In addition, I don't like the idea that a rules dispute can be invented by someone with sufficient pull in the administration (whether through rank or, ironically, mere reputation) and the book thrown at an individual whose contributions are not, in fact, really disorderly. There is a parallel here with a similar episode on math.SX that saw expressed some rather coldblooded sentiments, such as "do we really want this user?". I do not want to see this kind of zero-sum outcome here.

To address your specific question: only in the strictest sense is it true that all stackexchange sites have the same policy towards editing, or anything. Each site is, by intention, self-moderated, and they all have their own minor variations in culture. I always get culture shock going to english.SX or math.SX, and especially stackoverflow, and I personally can't abide scifi.SX despite being a fan of the subject — these are not things subject to uniform rules despite the uniform expectation of good conduct. In this case we have not been coercing one user into line over a matter of personality, and in all cases the network doesn't coerce one site into line over a matter of culture.

Answer 4

This is kind of unfortunate to happen since the whole issue is about the affinity to TeX.SX and our slightly different medium for diversity.

First, I too wrote an edit for barbara's previous answers and it was rolled back a long time ago. I also wondered about this weird rollback and asked it on the chat and it was explained to me quickly. The reason is well-known if you are familiar with the people on TUG and previous interviews about them. Also you can find it in the about box of barbarabeeton

NOTE: answers to questions will be posted in lowercase unless i am answering in an official capacity for my employer. The reasons are given in the last item in an interview on the TeX Users Group web site.

So, the problem is whether barbarabeeton is entitled to impose her own style over the house style of SX. Well, on other sites the answer seems to be a definitive no, however, TeX.SX has a really fun equilibrium point which is the main reason I hang out here. There is a big space for improvisation and other eccentricities unless it clearly goes against the site rules. ( I still think it's a little odd to have a policy too but still no damage is done by doing so. )

We tend to show a lot of respect to other users, this includes Bill the Lizard no matter of rep points level etc., but we have also a great way of negotiating the actions. Any user can come to the chat room and criticize, question or even vent the frustration as happened previously many times.

So, it might seem a little unjust to have one user to get away with their own style but it's really really not the case.

Note that, there is a related but not connected issue which is the correction of LaTeX and friends' names, TikZ etc. capitalization. I do it mostly for the Google search engines but probably our mods can give more info about such consistent correction style.

Answer 5

Please note that writing all lowercase is indeed a dedicated style of writing rooted in bauhaus tradition.

Some references:

Bauhaus Typography Essay

Wikipedia on Herbert Bayer

Wikipedia on "Kleinschreibung"

Dissertation about bauhaus typography

There are several books, for instance on typography and design, published in all lowercase.

"typographie" by Otl Aicher

While this might all be a bit german-centric, I think it could be concluded that writing all lowercase can be a personal typographic style, even with good reasoning behind it and not simple spelling errors.

Mind, I'm not advocating this style, just saying that as long as no real improvement of the content of a post is achieved by "correcting" the "spelling errors" in an all-lowercase text, the edit might be rejected as carrying no improvement at all.

Typography is part of this community's everyday life, after all. Consider whether you would also "correct" any seemingly-misspelled in-words at a computer gaming or role playing community site if inventing "new" words were traditional to that community.

Answer 6