Croftmire

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Happy editing! ChromeGames923 (talk · contribs) 00:03, 14 February 2021 (UTC)

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Dates

As explained at Template:Death date and age#Background, please do not use the template for dates before 1582, or 1752 for British topics. Celia Homeford (talk) 09:34, 5 May 2021 (UTC)

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Recent edits

Hello Croftmire,

Welcome to Wikipedia. Nice work on things like catching grammar errors (e.g. "the the") or adjusting capitalization or the like. However, some of the changes in your recent edits don't seem to be actually adding value. Notably, I see you're also removing double spaces (a style that is harmless and allowed) and "fixing" redirects. Please read WP:NOTBROKEN: there's no need to change links to from a redirect to the target directly, barring certain rare cases (e.g. a misleading or misspelled redirect, or article moves that have left the redirect ambiguous). Not sure if you're using a script to do this or just doing it manually, but it's usually just churn that doesn't add value and can obscure the relevant changes to an article. SnowFire (talk) 17:57, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Hi SnowFire,

Regarding your stance on the fixing redirect, I understand the guidelines on WP:NOTBROKEN state that redirects should not need to be fixed (because it will link to the right article, anyway), but there’s no stipulation that the existing piped redirect must be kept in place (if there are more than one extant); e.g. why should [[King Henry VIII of England|King Henry VIII]] not be changed to [[King Henry VIII]]? Either way, both direct to Henry XIII, yes, but at least the latter example provides less "link clutter".

And I don’t know what your specific idea of "value" is, but I remove unnecessary links and characters (as long as it’s not against the guidelines) not only to de-clutter, but also, amongst other reasons, for clarity and consistency. That, to me, begets value. (If you want to call it “churn”, that’s fine—it’s your opinion.) Also, I’d like to point out that none of my edits are obscuring any relevant changes; any relevant changes I make I try to point out in the edit summary for transparency’s sake. Some editors don’t even do this. Thanks. Croftmire (talk) 23:23, 8 June 2021 (UTC)

Well, it's good you're using expressive edit summaries. What I'm saying is: if you happen to be making a significant edit (i.e. one that the end user will eventually see) and you want to also adjust where exactly a redirect points, go ahead. Please don't just adjust the redirect barring the rare cases of an actually misleading redirect. And to be clear, yes, this is actual Wikipedia policy made for good and proper reasons, not my opinion. I'm also skeptical of your spacing changes. What you see as "removing clutter" is actually not non-controversial; there's no benefit to the end user, readers, based off the spacing used in the wikitext in references, templates, sentence ends, and so on. There isn't any standard to keep, so this kind of change doesn't matter. Again, if you happen to be rewriting a paragraph or the like, feel free to use whatever style you like, but it's not worth going through random other articles to "fix" this - these are merely editor styles.

I hope I don't come across too negative here - some of your changes are clearly good. And hey, it'll be less work for you! I'm just saying that you can probably skip the spacing & redirect updating. It's even less work. SnowFire (talk) 01:34, 9 June 2021 (UTC)

Nonbreaking spaces

Hi Croftmire,

I notice that in several of your edits, for example on today's featured article, you removed nonbreaking space code ({{nbsp}}, {{nowrap}}, {{nobreak}}, or  , to name a few examples of what you might find on Wikipedia) in the name of "removing nonessential characters". Nonbreaking spaces are quite essential; they serve an important purpose in that they prevent a phrase from being separated into two pieces from a line break. Common items that need a nonbreaking space are the units following a number (e.g. 40 USD), AM and PM after times, the days of dates (e.g. 7 August 2021) and names that include small suffixes (e.g. Henry IV, Martin Luther King Jr.).

I manually reverted your changes to the Henry IV article with respect to nonbreaking space code. Please refer to MOS:NBSP, and in the future, I suggest to leave the nonbreaking space code you encounter alone. Thanks. Thrakkx (talk) 03:25, 7 August 2021 (UTC)

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