Who Stuffed Words In My Mouth

The refactorer's proper concern is to ImproveSignalAndReadability of a whole page or a small network of pages. It's very hard to make much progress at all in the face of signed contributions. Often the refactorer is tempted to edit signed contributions to ease the task.

For trivial changes, like spelling, or removing transition language (e.g. Hey, John.), this is acceptable by way of the WikiNewspaperAnalogy. But who decides whether a proposed change to a signed contribution is trivial or not? Only the original author knows what he or she intended to say. A signed contribution is intended to be the writing of the signer.

If you edit someone else's work, you should be 99.9% sure they would approve, otherwise you will immolate both the readers and writers trust in Wiki. Readers assume that a signed contribution is written by the signer. "Refactoring" these, without leaving an explicit indication for other readers that you've changed the words is fundamentally dishonest. Further, writers do not have time to continuously check and revise changes to their statements; they might even leave Wiki permanently. You cannot assume that a "refactoring" is correct until changed by its original author.

A proposed rewording of a signed contribution could be better expressed as a separate, often italicized and parenthesized, entry -- with a request that the original contributor indicate their acceptance of the change by themselves cutting, pasting, and perhaps further rewording, your proposed "enhancement". This approach leaves the signer in charge of words that will be attributed to him or her, allows the refactorer to propose an alternative, and readily distinguishes the two wordings for the rest of the community.

Alternatively, you could weaken the signature. If you're very careful, you can flag the text as paraphrased or edited, although this is very dangerous. It's safer to anonymous the section entirely.

Conversely, one violates of the trust of Wiki by pinning an anonymous statement to a person without consulting the person first. For example, let's say someone wrote:

: I really hate Fred and Wilma. -- Anonymous

which was subsequently edited to

: I really hate Fred and Wilma. -- Barney

by Dino based solely on suppositions and assumptions on who wrote it (say by correlating comments on other pages). However, it was really true that Betty wrote it. Barney is rightly pissed. Even if Barney wrote this, he may for whatever reason have left it unsigned. Unsigned contributions are acceptable and encouraged on Wiki. Signing contributions that aren't your own are deeply discouraged on Wiki.

See RefactoringWithoutBias for an apropos example of what to do.

See ExampleStuffInMouth and FooDash for different approaches to this.

Moved from RefactoringGivingWrongImpression

There was a refactoring in GiveObjectiveCompliments where a book title that I added was inserted into another person's signed text. I don't know if this is the book they were talking about, but now it looks look like that person is recommending the book.

In another page, Ward inserted something I said into text under someone else's signature, making it look like that's what that person said.

This seems wrong to me because the original authors are being attributed with saying something they didn't say, all without their consent. If something is anonymous or is refactored into a document block, this would make sense, but because these people signed their contribution should other people make possibly misleading changes to their text?

Authors should not take themselves too seriously here. This is a collaborative work and we all know it. Those whose words are too important to be refactored should write for the trade journals that serve our same readers. Most journals will even publish a thumbnail photograph along with each column.

A proper refactoring improves the readability of the work without changing its meaning. It is certainly possible that some refactorings here have been poorly executed and for this we collectively apologize.

If you want to fix it, just remove the signature. Voila!