'We do not enforce style' - how to react to discrepancies between policy and reality?

Question

I've seen it repeatedly Officially Declared that 'we' do not enforce styles, and do not do trivial changes that have zero effect on clarity. And yet in practice, over the course of my stay here, I have repeatedly seen both my and other people's questions edited in exactly this 'not done' manner. (On a related note, sometimes it's not quite the same thing as a style edit, but a 'fixing' of an 'error' without checking whether there is an error in the first place.)

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Examples (details altered to protect the accused while the jury is out):

• 'Fixing' the style from one style guide's to another's, such as with commas, quotes, capitalisation, pronoun usage, spelling choices, etc.
• Making rewrites based on whether one follows a person-first style or don't-hide-the-adjective style ('fixing' the post to differ from the authorial style).
• Changing 'clip' to 'magazine' (or vice versa) while not being an expert on weapons, thus not knowing that the two are different things and that either may or may not be correct depending on intended meaning, and not checking the definitions before doing such a 'fix'.
• Systematically changing others' title styles to that of a Question Title even though officially it is permitted to post any clear titles even if they're not phrased as a question.

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I've been unsure how to react to that.

I think that just ignoring it and saying 'this is no big deal' will mean that the 'policy' has no power at all, as the people who ignore the policy will get the last word. I.e. in practice styles will be softly enforced by the most persistent editors who ignore the policy. It's also easy to get an incorrect impression of what policy is if high-rep and diamond users are consistently spotted performing actions that are the opposite of policy.

When it's my question, obviously I can keep reverting the edit, though it's frustrating that there's no way to revert only parts of an edit and keep the useful changes, or at least to revert a specific edit when several have been made. Though even that has the downsides of (a) needing to constantly watch for Style Warriors and (b) de facto becoming a participant in an Edit War, even if one on home turf.

When it's someone else's question, participating in an edit war on someone else's behalf seems even less appropriate. But doing nothing also means the poor newbie is likely to get an impression of Doing Things Wrong and trying to conform to the style warriors' preferences in the future.

I tried bringing up the edit's necessity or lack thereof in comments, only to have it brushed off, left as-is, and then seeing the same sorts of style edits happen again but with other posts of other people. So in practice it seems commenting does nothing to prevent such edits.

Should personal style preference enforcement be reported somehow? (I don't recall spotting an edit report button.) Or should something else be done?

Answer 1

This policy isn't just lip service and does have power. Our fellow community members should be enforcing it, and the diamond moderators can and will enforce it as well, as we have done in the past. However we all can only act on what we see happening and we can't notice everything.

If you see one-off edits that change style in a way you're not comfortable with, please roll back or revise accordingly to restore your style preferences. If you are seeing repeated patterns—and it sounds like you are—please do raise attention to it: either mention it here on meta or raise a moderator attention flag on the post explaining the situation. In either case, indicate which revisions were of concern to you such as by mentioning either the revision number (“revision 3”) or the nature of the edit (“someome removed all my headings”) or the editor (“doppelgreener's revision”).

If the pattern is about a specific user's behaviour patterns, please err on using a flag. The diamond team will investigate discreetly. You may raise one flag on each post, or less flags than that and include links to posts, whatever you're comfortable with that gets across the necessary information. If there's a lot, raise just one flag and let us know you want to talk with us about this and we can open a private moderator-only communication channel to let you communicate to us what's going on. If the pattern you're noticing is on other peoples' posts as well you may flag and report those just the same.

If you're experiencing a pattern of being brushed off from users (or one particular user) please flag that too—we all should be listening to peoples' concerns and adjusting our behaviour, not brushing them off.

When it's my question, obviously I can keep reverting the edit, though it's frustrating that there's no way to revert only parts of an edit and keep the useful changes, or at least to revert a specific edit when several have been made. Though even that has the downsides of (a) needing to constantly watch for Style Warriors and (b) de facto becoming a participant in an Edit War, even if one on home turf.

If you are experiencing an edit war or continuously having to revert changes, please raise a moderator attention flag. If necessary we'll be telling someone to knock it off. Original authors of a post always win edit wars unless the edit genuinely improves clarity, in which case the improvement of clarity wins. Some things we might call style changes also improve clarity (e.g. we prefer people use headings appropriately) but we keep them because they improve clarity, not because we prefer one style over another.

Answer 2

So on the one hand, we don't enforce style and don't really approve of mass edits making small changes.

On the other hand, you should also ask yourself what this hurts. Sure, sometimes someone does it wrong. But I know that I personally don't bother much with whether I use a header level instead of bold text, or italicize a magic item name even though that's pretty standard. If someone edits my post to do those things, what skin off my nose is it? I get a notification saying "someone edited your stuff", I look at it, if they didn't jack it up I move along. If someone out there really, really cares about my incorrect use of a semicolon, why would I object to the change?

We'll push back against people making chronic and trivial changes (it bumps questions pointlessly, mainly) but I think you need to get more into the spirit of the shared content here. Someone making an edit doesn't mean you were wrong and must always do different in the future. That's an expectation you are putting on it that is harmful.

Now, incorrect edits are a different thing. Those, revert, complain about in comment, bring to us if there's a pattern. I feel like you're conflating two issues though - wrong edits and just plain small grammar edits. The first is bad, the second is just irritating if too numerous, a whole different scope of problem.

Answer 3

Regarding:

'Fixing' the style from one style guide's to another's, such as with commas, quotes, capitalisation, pronoun usage, spelling choices, etc.

It is difficult to take a definitive position on this statement.

Sometimes those things are a matter of style, but sometimes there are clearly correct/incorrect usages. It is never correct to refer to NASA as "Nasa". On the other hand, capitalizing the sentence following a colon is entirely optional.

Sometimes style dovetails into clarity; e.g., some sentences become ambiguous without an Oxford comma. Maine had a lawsuit about overtime pay a few years ago because of this, which made grammar a million-dollar issue.