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by Pazzaz 1143 days ago
As a non-native English speaker, I appreciate pedantic editors like this one a lot. When I read Wikipedia, I want the text to be easy to understand and consistent with the rest of Wikipedia and when I edit, I want people to improve what I wrote. I wish everything I wrote had a copy-editor as pedantic as Wikipedia power users.

Some people are complaining about overly zealous editors who delete a lot of and as an Inclusionist [1] I understand the sentiment. I think deleting information from Wikipedia is pretty bad. But being pedantic about English is not deleting information, it's improving the transmission of information.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Inclusionism

1 comments

As a native English speaker let me assure you this user has done nothing for the understandability or consistency of the text.
I don't agree with you. Comprise is a directional word, similar in that sense to surjective. If someone were to write injective when they mean surjective, I might be able to correctly interpret the intended meaning based on context, but that doesn't make the language consistent and it serves as a hurdle to understanding the text.