Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors

Nominations for candidates in the Guild's mid-year Election of Coordinators closes on June 15 at 23:59 UTC. We welcome self-nominations. The week-long June blitz begins on Sunday, 16 June, at 00:01 UTC. Sign up now!

WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors was featured in WikiProject Reports in the Signpost on 22 October 2007, 14 June 2010 and 26 April 2020.

This WikiProject has been mentioned by a media organization: Britt Peterson (20 February 2015). "Wikipedia's copy editor army". The Boston Globe. Retrieved 20 December 2018. more passionate about the perfection of language than many professionals [...] the copy editor army clearly feels a sense of pride and responsibility

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As some of you may know, I generally clear out the 150-200 shortest articles on every drive. I don't list them on the drive page, because it becomes too bloated. That number approximately matches the backlog reduction for each drive. I will not be doing that for the May drive. I encourage any/all of you to take on that task. (I hate it when a drive doesn't provide a net backlog reduction.) Thanks and good editing! Lfstevens (talk) 19:08, 4 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the heads-up, and for your hard work. Do you have a way of finding the shorter articles, eg a petscan query? Wracking ^talk! 19:22, 4 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I'm aware of some of your efforts being only nominally recorded on the drive pages. When you say "bloated", would it be discouraging for others to be aware of your productivity, or could it be an example for the rest of us to do more? I'd be sorry to see your efforts diminished due to discouragement. Dhtwiki (talk) 08:25, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Lfstevens, I didn't mention your name directly above, because I don't like to put people on blast, but I just want to say that I have appreciated your copy-editing work for many years now. Thank you for (tens of?) thousands of copy-edited articles. I will try to pick up some of the slack for the May drive.

Wracking and others: Here's a petscan link to all articles under 8,000 bytes, sorted by size (currently 195 articles). Picking off sentences and paragraphs tagged with Template:copy edit inline is also a quick way to shrink the backlog. Have fun! – Jonesey95 (talk) 16:53, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I"m not leaving, just need a change of pace (so many villages!) You guys are awesome. Thank you so much for all your efforts. If we hang together, we can make a huge impact on the pedia. Go for it! Lfstevens (talk) 02:13, 6 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I noticed that the article William I, Count of Nassau-Siegen has been edited. Phrases that were split with references were combined with the references. They were split because the references to the phrases were different, the reference books did not give the same information for both parts. This is no longer clear now. Furthermore, texts have been modified in such a way that they no longer correspond to what is written in the reference books. Please remove my name from the article history, so that I cannot be associated any longer with this article. Regards, Roelof Hendrickx (talk) 17:37, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Roelof Hendrickx. You do not own any article on Wikipedia, and you cannot stop other editors from editing content which you have written. If you have specific concerns about an edit, please bring them up at Talk:William I, Count of Nassau-Siegen, or fix it yourself.

The Guild of Copy Editors has no control over the history of any article, and this is the wrong place to bring about any request in that regard. If you would like to change your username, see WP:RENAME. If you would like to leave Wikipedia forever and change your username, see WP:VANISH. Wracking ^talk! 17:52, 6 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I never said that I owned that article, nor that I didn't want others to edit the article.

Bringing my concerns up on the talk page will have no effect, as the changes will never be made. I found out that it is common practise on Wikipedia to change correct into incorrect. Therefore it will useless to fix it myself, it would only lead to edit wars. That's the reason why I have no intention to contribute to Wikipedia any longer.

I don't want to change my username or vanish, as I still use Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons. I'll try to find out how to get removed from the history of this article. Roelof Hendrickx (talk) 17:41, 10 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I took a look at the article's history. I note that you added a lot of text here, for which you might have been accorded more appreciation. However, you did seem to edit war over the fact that on Wikipedia, curly quotes and apostrophes are deprecated; and it's not unusual for editors to find fault with such enormous contributions, unless their content and style are cleared beforehand on the talk page. During their recent copy edit, User:ZyphorianNexus removed much material; apparently that led to the citations being now more vague as to what they support. I can appreciate the problem there, but haven't studied the article closely enough to determine where the fault lies. You should not worry about being held responsible for additions that are not yours; and as Wracking has indicated, it would be nigh impossible to remove your account from the edit history. Dhtwiki (talk) 06:07, 11 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, if I'm not mistaken, there are no more articles from Jan 2023 needing copy editing. Since I'm not sure how (or if I can/am supposed to), can someone change "Help improve our oldest backlogged articles (January 2023)" in the "How you can help" section to the link to the Feb 2023 articles? Thanks. GoldRomean (talk) 01:04, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Yes. Thank you for noticing. I've made a change to Wikipedia:WikiProject Guild of Copy Editors/Left panel, a more-or-less "hidden" page where such a change is made, being then transcluded to the page above. That's the tricky part. Any alert editor who knows how to do that can make the change. Dhtwiki (talk) 06:06, 31 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, thanks! GoldRomean (talk) 15:05, 2 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

I have recently replaced, using AWB, hundreds of tautological instances of "due to health reasons" with "for heath reasons", and similarly for uses of "due to medical reasons" and "due to legal reasons". Naturally, I have excluded cases in quotations or the titles of sources.

Please consider this in your work.

Are there other, similar, phrases that need attention? Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:00, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, Andy. I can't think of anything else offhand, but will let you know if I do. All the best, Miniapolis 12:22, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Andy, thank you for your work. A few misused phrases and words I often find are:

• "Due to the fact (that)" --> "Because / Because of / Due to";
• unnecessary uses of "that"... "Dave Brown told reporters that the fire was deliberately lit";
• "Impact" and "impacted (by)" where the meaning is "effect" or "affected (by)"; "The train strike has impacted thousands of travellers today".

There's probably loads more but those may keep you busy for a while. :) Cheers, Baffle☿gab 21:07, 11 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the suggestions, Unfortunately, most of them cannot be handled as simple find/ replace operations in AWB. I will add those that can to my to-do list. Andy Mabbett (Pigsonthewing); Talk to Andy; Andy's edits 09:10, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. Although my availability is limited, I'm keen to get into GOCE again. I enjoyed it last year when I had plenty of spare time. I've selected three articles from the list and two look as if they'll be easy enough to improve. Jonny Bairstow, however, could be a nightmare. It is BLP and seriously unsourced. I suspect it contains original research.

I need advice about how much I can do under the GOCE banner. I think large amounts of unsourced content should be removed, assuming I won't be able to find sources, but that would probably halve the size of the article. What do you think? Thanks. PearlyGigs (talk) 00:06, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your help. I see that there are many "citation needed" templates at the Bairstow article, but, with 73 citations, I wouldn't call it "unsourced". It is a BLP, which requires strict adherence to being properly sourced, but I'm looking at things such as:

Bairstow played in all six England matches at the 2021 ICC Men's T20 World Cup, though he finished with just 47 runs and a top score of 16.[citation needed][58] (while his involvement in the tournament is supported, his personal score isn't).

From 2016 to 2018, he played for Peshawar Zalmi in the Pakistan Super League.[citation needed] (his playing for the league is mentioned online, but I couldn't find the particular date range; however, this is likely to be something for which sources could be found).

You would be within your right to remove unsourced text, but I myself would rather leave in such text, as long as concerned simple scoring and didn't involve extraordinary claims, such as of scandalous behavior or being the greatest player ever. Dhtwiki (talk) 04:00, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Dhtwiki. Thanks for your advice. I'll work my way through it and see what I can do. The main problem is the 2013 to 2014 section which has no citations at all. I've been looking at a couple of sites, mainly ESPNcricinfo, which might provide some of the missing references. PearlyGigs (talk) 04:15, 12 June 2024 (UTC)[reply]