[Theforum] Re: the future of admin

Emily Christensen em at members.evolt.org
Fri Oct 26 19:59:55 CDT 2001


From: Warden, Matt <mwarden at mattwarden.com>

> Elfur wrote:
> >me not being emily,
>
> That's ok. I'm not emily either. ;-)

I know, there's only one of me ... sad, but true. ;)

> >Right, and the "no guidelines" thing is a recurring problem.
>
>
> Really? I guess I'm not seeing the same things you are. Can you give me
> examples? Then maybe I can understand where you're coming from.

First off, editing guidelines only matter if we're interested in having a
professional-looking (and -reading) site. If we're not, editing isn't that
big of a deal. (For the benefit of everyone else who hasn't been on admin
for the past three years: Editing and editing guidelines are kind of my
personal hobby horse, and I've argued about them plenty before.) At this
point, I'm perfectly willing to go with the will of the community vis a vis
how carefully edited we want articles on the site to be. I'm not going to
get all red in the face (again) arguing for the importance of grammar and
style.

Examples off the top of my head of why the lack of editing guidelines is a
problem:

* Poorly-worded passages in some articles (my opinion)
* No consistent style for commonly-used words like web site
* No consistency when it comes to capitalization and headlines
* Acronyms frequently not spelled out (and this is one that's specifically
in the writer's guidelines)

But this is really not an important issue for us to be talking about right
now -- I'd much rather table it for the moment and get to writing a mission
statement and/or the lists I suggested in my email "next steps."

Emily





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