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Comment by jl6 | Hacker News Reader

Wow, there’s a lot of unjustified negativity in this thread. The whole encyclopedia (and a whole bunch of the wider world of computing) is built out of this kind of hyper-focused nerding over details.

These changes don’t make your day worse. He’s not shoving it in our faces or claiming it’s going to save the world. We don’t know what’s going on in this editor’s life or what he “should” be doing with his time instead. Maybe simple routine work is his way of unwinding from the maddening pace and complexity of the rest of life. Good on him for feeling passionate about something and seeing it through.

We should be grateful there are people willing to do this kind of mundane janitorial work.

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I wouldn't call this janitorial work. This seems to me to be less like someone cleaning a building than someone replacing every pencil in the building with a #2 pencil, because they believe that type of pencil is the correct type of pencil to use. They haven't made anything materially better, except by their own rigid definition of what the best pencil is--and maybe there are advantages of using a #2 pencil over a #3 pencil, but if you brought that pencil to work, there's a chance you brought that pencil because you prefer writing with it, and you wouldn't want someone, despite their best intentions, replacing your pencil with a 'better' one. Almost no one is going to look at the graphite and not be able to recognize words because it's a #3 pencil and not a #2 pencil.

In my opinion, this isn't what built Wikipedia, this is what made Wikipedia hostile to new contributors.

The pencil analogy is not particularly compelling.

"Comprise" and "compose" are two different words with different meanings, and people often use the former when they ought to use the latter.

> He’s not shoving it in our faces

But he is?

When someone goes around "correcting" everyone's language and writes a manifesto about it, that sure is shoving to me. It's not working towards a consensus by trying to convince, it's unilaterally imposing, and creating work for others to undo if they disagree. If that's not shoving, I don't know what is.

Since there isn't agreement on this actually being janitorial work (in the sense that they are not simply enforcing the Wikipedia styleguide), this is not some completely innocent activity.

No, this is in its essence very petty vandalism, an attempt to force his notion of grammar on the entirely of Wikipedia despite knowing this is forbidden. That this forcing is the intended goal is clear from their own description of the editing process, where they admit to never permanently recording articles with authors who do object to the edits. Instead they just record objectors for six months and then try sniping in the edit again in the hope that the author is not there to protect it anymore.

In "Reaction to the project" the author links to a "semi-vandalism" charge. You can read the discussion among Wikipedia editors there if you're interested (spoiler alert - most found it valuable and nobody thought it was vandalism).

That's by their own account. Multiple times they mention they don't do the best of caring about our tracking negative comments. They do however do the opposite. It's important to remember this is written by them and is all from their perspective.

This isn't useful nerding over details. It's more like that annoying person who goes around GitHub making pull requests to big projects with just some pointless wording tweaks in the documentation so they can claim to have contributed to the project on their resume.

> The whole encyclopedia is built out of this kind of hyper-focused nerding over details.

Absolutely not. It's built out of people writing useful and information articles, not pedantic editing over personal language bugbears.

> These changes don’t make your day worse.

It shows up in people's watchlists and potentially dozens or hundreds of people will need to verify this change; it introduces edit conflicts, it invalidates drafts people were still working on. It absolutely adds work for other editors, and that's fine even for smaller changes (I have many small changes myself) if it actually improves the article, but all of this amounts to little more than "I don't like it".

It's built of people nerding over articles and topics, and not language fascism. This person just has some kind of personal vendetta against a prepositional phrase that 99% of English speakers have no issue with at all. That's not very healthy for wikipedia or him. The funny thing is I -agree- with his take on usage, I just don't agree with him trying to lording it over all of wikipedia.

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