User talk:Axlerate

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Welcome to the wiki, Axlerate!

We hope you will enjoy your stay!

If you need some help in general, do not be afraid to ask your questions at FlightGear wiki:Village pump.

Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically insert your username and the date.

Some links that may be of help (you can find more of them at Help:Contents):

Useful pages to get you started These might be useful too

Again, welcome!

This template was added manually by Johan G.


Welcome to my talk page.

Checking automated grammar and spelling correction with Grammarly

I have looked at some of your initial edits and feel that I need to ask you to not trust Grammarly blindly.

While the very most of the corrections are correct there are some technical terms that Grammarly seems to be unaware of. These are not all that many so far, but they will likely become more.

In Changelog 2.4.0 edit:

  • "Ballistic objects can slave to any AI object" should still be "Ballistic objects can be slaved to any AI object"
  • "Moved to make based build system" should be "Moved to CMake based build system" (See CMake This is a link to a Wikipedia article)

Also typically there would be single whitespace between the equal signs and the title, though that is not visible on the rendered page (it makes the wiki markup slightly easier to read).

Apart from checking what Grammarly suggests or does, feel free to go on. Some of the FlightGear wiki users sometimes use all lowercase, odd punctuation, etc. In addition, the Manual of Style was not around until 2014, and I am certain most users are still oblivious to its existence. Because of these and some other things the wiki is sometimes a bit of a mess.

I have added the above welcome template to all user discussion pages of users having registered after April this year, in the hope that more of the users will understand how a wiki using MediaWiki typically works, and make them aware of the style guide (which I believe might be loosely based on the style guide of the English Wikipedia). Some of us have looked into having it added automatically to discussion pages of new users and adding it to all existing user discussion pages, similar to how they are used on some language editions of Wikipedia. See also FlightGear wiki:Village pump#Welcoming template (permalink).

Johan G (Talk | contribs) 18:05, 6 September 2019 (EDT)

@User talk:Johan G Thank you for the advice! Sorry about removing the white spaces from the equals. Will not do that again, as I now see clealy that it confuses other readers. --Axlerate (talk) 05:10, 7 September 2019 (EDT)

I have also looked at the changes by Grammarly. My opinion is that it could be used to identify issues, and then these issues are manually fixed. The reason is because some articles are maintained by speakers of non-American dialects and, if you don't set the dialect correctly, Grammarly will change text which is perfectly correct (this sentence being such an example).

Another issue I found is with these changes. Most of these changes are not correct. These are lists where the sentence continues across the list. So from the following

Note

By submitting a screenshot the submitter agrees to these terms:

  • The creator of the screenshot retains full ownership and copyright.
  • The creator grants the FlightGear project revocable and non-exclusive copyright, which permits the project
    • to add a copyright notice to the screenshot, which denotes the FlightGear project as a copyright holder[1],
    • to persecute copyright infringement on behalf of the screenshot creator[2].

you can construct one sentence as

Note  By submitting a screenshot the submitter agrees to these terms: The creator grants the FlightGear project revocable and non-exclusive copyright, which permits the project to persecute copyright infringement on behalf of the screenshot creator[2].

After the Grammarly changes, this becomes:

Note  By submitting a screenshot the submitter agrees to these terms: The creator grants the FlightGear project revocable and non-exclusive copyright, which permits the project To persecute copyright infringement on behalf of the screenshot creator[2].

This is a big fail for Grammarly, and why page corrections should not be fully automated.

As for protected pages, if the changes are important, I would suggest describing the changes in the 'Discussion' or 'Talk' pages. Admin privileges are rarely given, and only to those people well known to the project (generally after joining one of the core group video conferences). There are also thousands of non-protected pages that could be improved.

Bugman (talk) 03:14, 2 October 2019 (EDT)