Is it ethical to edit other people's bot/user pages?

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Is it ethical to edit other people's bot/user pages?

The majority of non-archive pages on this wiki are either bot pages or user pages. Many of these pages contain outdated information, or could be improved.

So, is it ethical to edit these pages, even though they were personally made by another user for their own work?

Sheldor23:14, 7 March 2013

For the most part, I think it's fine to edit almost anything on the wiki, particularly if your goal is to improve the wiki and make it more useful to more people. I've migrated/edited lots of such pages. Cigaret and Ascendant are both pages I migrated where I tried to preserve the author's text while also updating inaccurate info and reformatting for the new wiki.

There are a few things I'd consider rude though:

  • Major changes to something like User:Chase-san/NewTech.
  • On Diamond, editing the ranks in "How competitive" seems fine, but modifying "What's special about it" would seem rude.
  • Any major changes to a bot/user page for a user that's active - I'd just say you should discuss it on the talk page first.
Voidious23:37, 7 March 2013
 

Yeah, my thoughts are if the person is active then ask first, if the person isn't active feel free to add, but think very carefully before modifying.

The only good reasons I can think to modify are:

  • Grammar/spelling (which is fine)
  • Adding links and categories which may not have existed when the author was making the page (also fine)
  • Updating rumble positioning and scores (try to stick a date next to the data that's there, then add a new date with current data).
  • Possibly adding a brief blurb if the bot was particularly influential in Robocode development.
Skilgannon05:51, 8 March 2013
 

Take for instance my recent edit of AWs userpage. I contemplated it for a moment. But I decided he probably made a mistake, and so I felt it was safe to correct it.

But I wouldn't go through and change the structure of his page, or start adding on a new section. It's his page. So in the end I suppose my opinion is to have a light touch.

I don't completely agree with Skilgannon. Large corrections, yes, definitely. But for minor corrections, you shouldn't have to go through the possibly long process of asking. Such as if you can fix their misspelling of "froward" into "forward".

Chase08:44, 8 March 2013
 

Is it ethical to edit other people's posts for minor typos/grammatical errors/inaccuracies?

Sheldor17:04, 19 March 2013
 

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