User talk:Taba2812
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[edit]Hi Taba2812! I noticed your contributions to Have a Nice Day (Bon Jovi album) and wanted to welcome you to the Wikipedia community. I hope you like it here and decide to stay.
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Happy editing! Muhandes (talk) 09:18, 24 September 2021 (UTC)
"Grammar edits" / "Syntax errors"
[edit]Hi there. I've noticed you've made several edits to articles with the edit summary "grammar edit" or "syntax error". In these edits you remove definite articles "(the)" before nouns. These are known as false titles.
These edits aren't grammar or syntax corrections. The sentences were in perfectly grammatically correct standard English before you adjusted them. Please stop changing this. Popcornfud (talk) 13:21, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
- Thank you for the feedback. Practically every article I've read uses this configuration (both english and american), so I thought I would comply with the majority and change it. In fairness, from what I now understand the use of articles was not incorrect so I should have used another edit label, but I still believe articles should be consistent. If there are Wikipedia guidelines on this topic it would be helpful. Taba2812 (talk) 14:18, 8 May 2023 (UTC)
- This is purely a gut instinct guess based on 10 years of editing, but I think if you were to take hundreds of thousands of samples, you'd end up with a pretty even split between when false titles are used or not.
- Wikipedia is generally OK with inconsistency across articles when it comes to matters of style, barring exceptions listed in the manual of style. For example, Wikipedia articles don't even all use the same dialect of English.
- There's no guideline or policy on this subject. I don't think it's the kind of thing that the manual of style would cover unless it becomes a a persistent dispute across the encylopedia.
- The use of false titles is so widespread across forms of writing now that it does come down to editorial judgment. I personally dislike them as I think it adds a journalistic flavor to articles that is inappropriate. However, there's no doubt many other experienced Wikipedia editors would disagree with me.
- The main thing I want to raise awareness is that adding false titles is not necessarily a win-win or a grammatical correction. (I myself once added them automatically to articles for years, thinking they were a simple way to remove words with no downside.) Popcornfud (talk) 14:31, 8 May 2023 (UTC)