Intro note: the opinions below are just my opinions, not any kind of official decision. Other moderators may well have different opinions. This is simply an explanation of why I personally have decided not to take any moderator action on these two topics at the moment (Haycat2009's sentence-combining edit, and C_R_116's rule-bending creation of a couple of pages).
confocaloid wrote: ↑February 28th, 2024, 2:42 am
Haycat2009 wrote: ↑February 28th, 2024, 2:36 am
The merge of sentences id ok, as each were too short so it did not sound coherent before.
The long sentence "does not sound coherent" after
your edit. Inserting "but" in that place does not make sense.
Do not merge sentences unless you understand and can explain why exactly that is necessary. In most cases, shorter sentences are better.
This is one of those awkward spots where it's a matter of personal preference which of the two options is better.
@confocaloid, this sentence combination in the 'galaxy' article is a tricky case for anyone to do anything about. It seems to me that
- contrary to your assertion, inserting the word "but" in that location does make reasonably good sense -- the sentences are strongly related by the idea of a potential appearance of a natural galaxy,
but that hasn't happened yet;
- so Haycat2009 wasn't necessarily wrong in deciding not to fix that particular item;
- while it's true that in most cases shorter sentences are better, and it's also true that Haycat2009 has had a definite tendency to create accidental run-on sentences in the past ... this case could actually be an exception;
- if you spend time arguing with Haycat2009 about uncertain cases like this one, Haycat2009 will be less likely to listen to you in the 90% of cases when you're pointing out something that really does need to be fixed.
@Haycat2009, your question about the
Caleb R. Hilton article is a good one -- and nobody answered it, so it makes sense that you asked it again. This is also a really tricky question. Here's my take on it at the moment:
- It's generally not a good idea for people to document their own discoveries on the LifeWiki, but
- if a page gets edited multiple times by other LifeWiki editors rather than being immediately removed, then that's a minor sign of approval from those other editors, so
- the
p224 lumps of muck hassler page was created in a way that definitely bent the rules, but nobody made a big deal about it and it sneaked through, and
- now it's a perfectly good LifeWiki article, so
- the simplest thing to do is probably just to leave it the way it is.
- Once the p224 article existed, I would assume that "Caleb R. Hilton" would have been a redlink, and
- we generally don't like redlinks, so
- it makes sense to create a short
Caleb R. Hilton article.
- Again, C_R_116 really technically shouldn't have been the one to create the article, but
- the LifeWiki is in a reasonably good state now, and
- C_R_116 probably won't get in the habit of doing that again (because the article is created now), so
- again it seems reasonable to just leave well enough alone at this point.
Long story short, article creation really shouldn't happen in quite this way, but it's the kind of thing that people get away with sometimes. Don't try this at home. However, if the end effect of some past series of edits is an improved LifeWiki, then don't bother worrying about it. Insisting that all rules must always be followed exactly to the letter can ultimately just make a lot of noise and not actually improve anything.
