Talk:Martha S. Jones

Reverted edits

I'm starting a discussion regarding my undoing of this diff. I would ping the editor whose edit I undid but they've turned off pings -- I'm not trying to shirk consensus-building by not notifying them. I subsequently undid that rollback and I wanted to lay out my reasoning here in pursuit of WP:CONSENSUS. The rolled back edits constituted about an hour of copy editing by an IP editor who made some good and sizable contributions. The first ones were a series of style changes that the MOS is indifferent to, like some paragraph breaks, capitalisation, oxford commas and whatnot -- I don't see a clear argument to favour keeping that material, but I also don't see any reason to roll it back, so I strongly prefer keeping it per WP:BITE and WP:HUMAN etc. The next edits are substantial copy editing on the biography section which frankly, to my reading, just lines it up better with the article's sources. I'm grateful for that, I never write those things perfectly the first time and it's a refreshing change to have a second pair of eyes on it. A few of the changes are better writing but are contrary to stylistic quirks of wikipedia, like undoing some of my careful MOS:CURRENTLY wording so that the page doesn't get out of date, but that's certainly not worth a rollback. The edits under question also added links to the official websites for the article subject's books, which is sometimes done and sometimes not done on academic biographies on Wikipedia. I personally have always felt that this risks the appearance of being a bit un-WP:NPOV, which is why I don't personally do it in pages I write, but in my experience it's extremely normal in writers' bios to link to their books (to name a completely random example by coincidence I was just a few minutes ago looking at the page Daniel Pfeiffer which does this), and I don't think it's an obvious violation at all. For example, companies usually get to have links to their official websites, and influencers get to have links to their social media feeds in their standard infoboxes, so why shouldn't authors have links to their books? Even if this was clearly wrong, I still wouldn't roll back those edits, because those diffs also have copy editing in them. I would just manually unlink to the books. Finally, the editor corrected me on something: in a summary of a book I included a detail that it turns out wasn't really a good summary of the sources, and they deleted that detail. That was a good contribution to the encyclopedia. There is just one detail that is a bit borderline, which is the unsourced place of birth, but my understanding is that birth places are not really covered under anything like WP:BLPPRIVACY so a citation needed template (or just finding a source) would be more appropriate than deletion. Anyhow, I really don't like undoing other editors and I really dislike getting mixed up in edit disputes, so I wanted to make sure that I clearly and plainly lay out why I don't think these edits deserve to be Whac-A-Moled. - Astrophobe (talk) 19:14, 18 May 2020 (UTC)