User talk:SharonBennett

Hello, SharonBennett, and welcome to Wikipedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages you might find helpful:

I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Please sign your name on talk pages using four tildes (~~~~); this will automatically produce your name and the date. If you need help, please see our help pages, and if you can't find what you are looking for there, please feel free to ask me on my talk page or place {{Help me}} on this page and someone will drop by to help. Red Director (talk) 02:26, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Incremental changes, elegant variation, English variety

Hi, Sharon, and welcome. I ran across your change to Date rape, with the edit summary Prepositions, misplaced commas/periods with quotation marks, run-off sentence that needed to be shortened. Unfortunately, there were some improvements, mixed in with some problems, which I explained in the edit summary there where I reverted it. In that edit, you made numerous, small changes of wording for no apparent reason, just alterations of one word, for another that you might think is similar, but sometimes they're not supported by sources in the article, and sometimes there are legal distinctions (e.g., offense for crime) and in other cases, it just seemed like change, for the sake of change. In other cases, you seemed to make chnages from American spelling to British spelling, but please read our policies about that at WP:ENGVAR, including MOS:TIES, and MOS:RETAIN.

I noticed a similar sort of pattern at Video games as an art form, with a mix of some word changes which might be defensible, mixed in with others that are not an improvement to the article. I haven't reverted it, and might just edit it to fix a couple of issues.

You might want to consider making incremental changes in a string of small, consecutive edits, rather than ranging all over the article in one, comprehensive edit that contains a whole bunch of unrelated changes. That way, if another editor disagrees with some part of your change, they don't have to revert the whole thing. One other thing: please read about elegant variation; it's not necessary, for example, to change subsequenbt occurrence of crime to assault to offense to whatever else, just to avoid repeating the word crime. It's more important to use the word that best summarizes what the reliable source underlying that portion of article content is saying; and in changing from one word to another, you might not be representing the source in the best possible way.

Once again, welcome to Wikipedia, and I hope you like it around here, and decide to stay! Mathglot (talk) 09:35, 12 February 2019 (UTC)[reply]