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Latest comment: 3 years ago3 comments2 people in discussion
Most of User:-A-M-B-1996-'s edits seem to be reasonable, but the one thing that really gets on my nerves is the excessive division of existing paragraphs into new paragraphs. Okay, I'll concede the resulting prose is quite concise. It's also halting and/or choppy. The only time I've seen people write consistently like that is when I was looking at fresh articles coming off the AP newswire that were clearly composed by inexperienced stringers. Any objections before I proceed with fixing such visually jarring prose? --Coolcaesar (talk) 17:11, 30 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
@Coolcaesar: I have no objection to this. You're absolutely right that the resultant language is choppy or halting. But I'd recommend that where possible, the existing paragraphs be expanded rather than combined where the sentences are not relevant to each other.
e.g. "He served as the California National Committeeman to the Democratic National Committee and was an early supporter of John F. Kennedy for President. He remained close to the Kennedy family." In addition to needing citation, these two sentences could be easily expanded into several more sentences describing that relationship or his activism in the Democratic Party. That is the more reasonable fix for a biographical article on a major historical figure. The choppy language is a result of incomplete research, not my stylistic choice. —-A-M-B-1996- (talk) 18:45, 30 September 2020 (UTC)Reply
Um, the correct way to edit on Wikipedia is that you take the article as is and improve it so that it's better than what it was before (i.e., an incremental process). The wrong way is to make a colossal mess and assume others will fix it. Because I can assure you from 16 years of editing experience that no one else will.
The number of people who would be that interested in Mosk's career to write about him at that level of detail is very small, namely because he has been overshadowed by his two most important contemporaries on the state supreme court, Roger Traynor and Rose Bird. Unfortunately, all those people interested in Mosk are too busy writing about him for publication (e.g., the Braitman book-length biography) and don't have time to spare for Wikipedia.
For example, on January 4, 2021, I recently fixed an incorrect assertion in the article on UC Berkeley and its related article on the university's history that the university was formed as a merger of the College of California and the state agriculture, mechanic arts, and mining college. That obvious error had been in the article since 5 July 2003, 17 years earlier. I'm far too busy cleaning up glaring errors like that in such prominent articles to deal with expanding this article myself. --Coolcaesar (talk) 19:32, 1 February 2021 (UTC)Reply
