I don’t often edit articles that others have written. But occasionally, I’m called to do this. As a non-professional editor, it’s actually a task I loathe for a variety of reasons: it’s time-consuming, focuses on things wrong, the advice’s easily ignored so it’s often futile. Most of all, it’s not something I actually feel especially competent doing. So I only edit as a reader might read.
As an author, I remember having one of my articles mauled by an editor who called me a ‘buff’… a colloquialism I would never use in speech never mind in writing. I’ve no idea why the editor did that or some of the other questionable edits (s)he made. But it was published, for better or worse.
Now I’ve been challenged by a series of articles. And I’m annoyed. I came across them a few weeks ago: Yes! Why? The articles have HTML errors, punctuation errors, poor expression, redundancy of content/phrase, inaccuracy, bias, and no authorship!
There are factual errors, too. However, quick reading of even Wikipedia articles would be more fruitful for the curious reader. That the articles are published without authorship, credit, editing, or even proper formatting for the web is problematic.
If the readers are supposed to assume they are authoritative just because of where they’re posted, I’d say that is bad form. Worse, they’re not interlinked with other articles on the same site, nor even citations, resources or external links. In other words, they’re a variant of webspam.
I’m not going to provide the link here because it’s disingenuous to link to a series of articles (it’s like voting in Google rankings) that I don’t think are link-worthy (they’re seriously not). Suffice to say, you’re probably already familiar with it! The organisation that is publishing it really, truly, honestly deserves much better.