Comment by KolmogorovComp

19 days ago

I wish they also spent on the reverse: automatic rephrasing of the (many) obscure and very poorly worded and/or with no neutral tone whatsoever.

And I say that as a general Wikipedia fan.

10 comments

KolmogorovComp

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philipwhiuk  19 days ago

WP:BOLD and start your own project to do it.

  • vintermann  19 days ago

    Or be extra bold, and have an AI bot handle the forum politics associated with being allowed to make nontrivial changes.

    • embedding-shape  19 days ago

      Great way to get banned :)

      I've made a bunch of nontrivial changes (+- 1000s of characters), none of them seems to have been reverted, never asked for permission, I just went ahead and did it. Maybe the topics I care about are so non-controversial no one actually seen it?

tonymet  19 days ago

there are many copy editing projects that do this.

If you mean the left leaning tone / bias, that will be a bit more spicy. But general grammar, tone, ambiguity , superlatives – that’s the goal of copy editing.

I copy edit typesetting , for example.

  • KolmogorovComp  19 days ago

    > If you mean the left leaning tone / bias, that will be a bit more spicy. But general grammar, tone, ambiguity , superlatives – that’s the goal of copy editing

    No, no I mainly mean non-neutral phrasing and/or too personal. Especially for people’s articles. (“And they released that greeeat album! But unfortunately the critics did not understand them… Booh!)

    • tonymet  19 days ago

      I agree. Wikipedia Cleanup is a good starting point. Or look for a Wiki Project to join.

      I've found the best way to learn and contribute is to jump into an existing project. Usually direction is the hardest thing .

      You can of course dive into an article and make changes, but you'll often get pushback (warranted or unwarranted) and that can be discouraging. It's a somewhat natural feedback loop.

      2 replies →

alt227  19 days ago

I would hate it so much if all the articles on Wikipedia were suddenly all rewritten to have a smiliar tone and style. Its beauty is its diversity.