"I don't think we don't need to also veer into correcting bad grammar and spelling mistakes."

Do you realize that this sentence most likely does not convey your intended meaning?

This is the main problem I have with bad spelling and grammar. When reading anything on the internet, I am forced to waste a lot of attention on sorting out all the mistakes in order to get at the most likely intended meaning. As others have said, errors in english are almost as grave as errors in Perl. Programming is also a linguistic venture, and we all should strive to be as precise in our expression of thoughts as possible.

If we allow users of higher standing to correct a newbie's ramblings, there will be less questions and posts ignored due to the pain of reading them.

Edit: I would like to also point out that the question-and-answer site Stackoverflow.com allows and encourages the improvement of content. Even though it attracts the usual numbers of rather clueless people, who seem to have only passing acquaintance with both the english language and the subject they are asking about, all lasting contributions uphold at least an acceptable standard. The average standard is finally what the whole site, not just the individual poster, is judged for by the casual reader.

Interesting comment. I liken the debate that happens around a question that's been raised (perhaps poorly, by a newbie) to be similar to the Socratic method -- questions are answered by more questions in order to distill the matter at hand.

And if substantive questions are preceded by the meta-question "What do you mean?", that's OK -- I'd rather see how the discussion evolved (and what interesting side-arguments popped up) rather than have the heavily edited, almost unrecognizable question as the top post, because then then it suggests we have to go back and edit all of the replies as well.

And that's why it's my firmly held belief that when someone asks a question, they *shouldn't* be able to go back and edit their original question, because then the replies don't make any sense. It's important to leave history the way it was -- that way you can see what the question really was about. The asker has learned how to propose a question to the community (a meta-answer), and also something about Perl (an answer, or more likely, several answers, since TIMTOWTDI).

Regarding StackOverflow's ability to go back and edit stuff -- I guess that's a slightly different model, where it's a Q&A site that's also a wiki. Frankly, I like the way Perlmonks works the way it is.

Alex / talexb / Toronto

Team website: Forex Chart Monkey, Forex Technical Analysis and Pickpocket Prevention

"Groklaw is the open-source mentality applied to legal research" ~ Linus Torvalds

I see your point. I agree that in a chronological thread model, heavy editing is not warranted.

That raises two follow-up questions:

1. How should light editing be handled?
2. If a question would require heavy editing, is it appropriate to repeat the entire question in heavily edited form?

I would propose the following answers:

1. The original poster should be contacted by private message, pointing out the errors and how to correct them. The original poster should not take offense.
2. Yes.

The question that remains is how to distinguish these cases.

> As others have said, errors in english are almost as grave as errors in Perl.

Perl is definitely much easier to parse than English. Compared to most languages I know English is by orthography, phonology and vocabulary a mess.

> When reading anything on the internet, I am forced to waste a lot of attention on sorting out all the mistakes in order to get at the most likely intended meaning.

I have much more problems to understand native English speakers than "foreigners".

Non-natives use a limited set of patterns and vocabulary, you can figure out what they meant.

But natives often either start to use their local slang or try their (local) style of "sophisticated" speech.

<update>(to continue this perl analogy, native speakers know the language good enough to use magic, to golf and to obfuscate, while the code of non-natives will mostly look like BASIC! ;-)</update>

Anyway, IMHO people writing non-comprehensible stuff should be politely asked what they meant or should be ignored, but not corrected...

(So if you don't know what I mean, ignore me ;-)

Cheers Rolf