Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Physics/Archive July 2024

Pleased help me: talk page harassment

Please help me get Jacobolus to stop harassing me on my talk page, who is persists despite repeated warnings to stay away, and direct statements that I regard this as harassment. I am so incensed by this behaviour that I do not even know how to find an admin to help me. —Quondum 00:35, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

@Quondum: This belongs at WP:ANI, not here. –LaundryPizza03 (dc̄) 00:41, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Making comments on other editors talk pages to politely ask them to stop making edits which violate Wikipedia policy and which are disruptive to the encyclopedia project is an ordinary norm in this community and is not "harassment". Indeed, calling this "harassment" is way out of line. Also cf. WP:SOMTP.

You are of course free to remove sections from your own talk page, per WP:OWNTALK. –jacobolus (t) 00:43, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

@Jacobolus Your comments about edits belong on the pages that the edited pages. There you can build consensus for your point of view. I suspect you don't realize that your direct style of expressing yourself may come across as aggressive even when it sounds polite to you.

I'm not sure that which you concerned about is all that important to be honest. So many articles have so many problems. Maybe this one is just below the bar. Johnjbarton (talk) 02:30, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

This is not a matter of building consensus for a point of view. This is a straight-forward violation of Wikipedia policy which can be reverted without prior discussion.

I try to always tell editors to knock it off at the soonest moment I notice them start systematically/mechanistically making edits which arbitrarily swap between equally valid and accepted style variations based on personal preference, because these edits are in my opinion some of the most counterproductive for the encyclopedia project. (Though to be sure not as counterproductive as systematic edits which actively break citations or the like, which I of course also tell people to stop.)

It's relatively common to run across people making edits across many pages like changing all of the BCEs/CEs to BCs/ADs or vice versa, changing one abbreviation of a template name in the source markup for another, swapping between UK and American English, switching spaced en dashes for unspaced em dashes or vice versa, switching citation templates to cite X templates or vice versa, twiddling all of the non-rendering whitespace in the source markup, and so on. Confronting editors about this occasionally leads me to butt heads, especially with folks running bots or doing script-assisted changes, but I still think it's worth doing, to clue editors in about Wikipedia policies and prevailing cultural norms.

This kind of grammar nitpick is a particular pet peeve because I've several times run into copyeditors (off wiki) who change authors' style (my own or friends' or family members') to match dated prescriptivist style guides or their personal preference instead of deferring to authors' own voices and then insist that their preference is inherently better even after it is pointed out that the alternatives are equally common and equally correct. (For authors this kind of thing is very annoying: to all of the professional copyeditors out there, please take it easy.) There's a reason these changes are explicitly called out in Wikipedia:Basic copyediting § Things that do not need fixing: "Some style guides advise against grammatical constructions, such as passive voice, split infinitives, restrictive which, beginning a sentence with a conjunction, and ending clauses in a preposition. These are common in high-quality publications and should not be "fixed" without considering the consequences. For example, changing even one passive sentence to make it active can easily alter the meaning of an entire paragraph. Attempts to improve any passage must be based on tone, clarity, and consistency, rather than blind adherence to a rule." –jacobolus (t) 03:01, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

I sympathise with Jacobolus regarding Users imposing their personal preference when there is nothing substantial to be achieved. At MOS:VAR, Wikipedia’s guidelines state: The Arbitration Committee has expressed the principle that "When either of two styles is acceptable it is inappropriate for a Wikipedia editor to change from one style to another unless there is some substantial reason for the change". Dolphin (t) 03:50, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Policies are fine, but I think adopting an attitude of "always tell editors to knock it off at the soonest moment" is very likely to harden opinions, piss people off, and generate a lot of unnecessary yak.

Everyone agrees these differences are trivial. I don't see any evidence that @Quondum is systematically making such changes or using a bot to do so as implied by @Jacobolus. There is no mountain here that I see.

I appreciate the work @Quondum has been doing. If it costs an occasion pointless that/which is not a big deal. Johnjbarton (talk) 15:19, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

What I mean is, I think it's better to tell people to stop violating Wikipedia policy right away before they keep making hundreds or thousands more policy-violating edits. –jacobolus (t) 17:02, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Thanks for clarifying. What I mean is I think it's better to cut some slack for minor issues between long time editors who are not in fact making "thousands" of such edits. This is a community endeavor by humans. Lighten up! Move on to something substantial. Johnjbarton (talk) 18:14, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

By "thousands" I am speaking in general: I've made the same kind of objection to several editors who were doing larger-scale script-assisted editing with dozens or hundreds of repetitive edits every day, which makes reverting them inordinately difficult. In this particular case we're likely talking about dozens to low hundreds of future edits of the same type. But they should still be asked to stop.

If any wikipedian is reading any article and a sentence stands out as awkward or confusing, by all means rewrite the sentence. If it seems like an improvement, this may even just mean converting a specific instance of "which" to "that"; there are certainly sentences where the word "which" seems a bit awkward. I have no problem at all with deliberately rewriting particular sentences for clarity. What I object to is using the browser's "find" tool (or even efficient visual skimming) to look for the word "which" throughout an article and then changing it to "that" any time the clause is non-defining, and then going to do the same across many articles. (Or likewise with other kinds of prescriptivist choices between equally grammatical and idiomatic constructions, or other formulaic stylistic changes)

I'm not trying to be rude, mean, or personal. I just think these types of edits are harmful to the project. It's precisely because I agree that it's a community endeavor by humans that I think we should respect human authors' style and voice in cases where it was fine and correct, instead of trying to enforce any particular editors' arbitrary personal preferences. –jacobolus (t) 18:53, 1 July 2024 (UTC)

Pro forma cross post on Nonmetal topic

Sandbh has made a suggestion about multiple articles renaming at Nonmetal proposal which connects to previous discussions here. I (Ldm1954) think it has some merit as a start to break an impass about names and content. As a first step I have suggested combining three of the articles proposed by Sandbh on materials, metallurgy and physics into one as they are the same. If interested, please vote either Accept Merge or Reject Merge at Nonmetal proposal. One small step to break the impass. Ldm1954 (talk) 07:34, 4 July 2024 (UTC)