I really appreciate Wikipedia, I love the ideal, and I respect it as a source of knowledge, and I respect the community... but some behaviours are really bizarre.
Editing someone else's comment is vandalism, not contribution.
I didn’t just change his spelling. I edited his spelling, but I left the previous state (in another section), explained what I had done and why, provided sources and citations as to why my transliteration was preferable, and took clear ownership of what I had done and why I had done it.
And what you did was doubly rude because you acknowledge that your version was "preferable"; that is, it is conceivable that the other user prefers their version. They may be wrong to do so, but by editing their words directly you are denying them their right to an opinion. It is not surprising at all that your edit was reverted.
However I have difficulty agreeing with you on your second paragraph, indeed it is the exact opposite of what I deeply believe: I am convinced that there is an objective truth, and that one of the things where there is prevailing conviction as to what is correct spelling wand what is not. Words have meaning by virtue of convention, and if you do not pursue the convention, you are reneging on the certainty of being able to unambiguously and intelligibly commune with others.
Additionally there is spam. Spam need to be detected and removed from the talk space and administrators can't be the only one with permission to do that.
That said, there is no excuse that the UI don't inform you about the current norms that exist.
Would be much better if talk pages acted like actual chat boards.
I didn’t “vandalise” the other contributor’s comment willy-nilly. I corrected the spelling, but I explicitly left a mention of what it had been before I changed the spelling, why my spelling was better, a reference to sources and citations thereof, and so forth.
Btw, I highly doubt it was an admin that gave you that warning. It was probably a regular user.
It's jut one simple link they need to add, I don't understand what stops them, afaik they can even render the talk pages as mobile, they just fail to link to it from the mobile article page.
And while at it, on mobile if you open an image it should load the plain image file, not with all the sticky floating crap around it such that when you zoom in the sticky floating crap goes over the image itself...
Of most websites I assume the sticky floating crap is there to "engage" users to get more ad revenue (to permanently show all the social like buttons and stuff), but I don't understand why wikipedia does similar antipatterns in their image viewer...
- Write a comment on the article's talk page about a spelling mistake in the article itself? If so, why not directly modify the article?
- Modify an existing comment on the talk page to correct a spelling mistake in that comment? If so, I can see why that would be seen as étiquette-breaking.
This is wrong. If you disagree about transliteration, you should have added a comment of your own with the supporting documentation you mention, without removing the other user's transliteration from their comments.
The fact that the software did not automatically prevent this is irrelevant. My bank's software will let me spend money I don't have, and charge me overdraft fees after the fact; that doesn't mean I had the money to spend since the software let me. Here on HN, that seems to be worst possible justification or rationalization for behavior everyone else both there and here is telling you is not okay.