I guess the operating word in my reply was "could", in the sense that if
you're unsure, just mark it editorial and we'll look at it during
review. It's harmless to do that, as opposed to NOT doing that, which
could end up confusing the history and making review harder. In general,
default to more, and smaller, editorial commits.
Does that mean they "must" be editorial? No, and that was poor phrasing
on my part. Because nothing is clear cut in literature, there isn't a
clear cut rule for what is or isn't editorial. Would removing quotes
from a non-English word, that in context is being introduced as a term,
in favor of italics, change the meaning of the text? Probably not,
because there's not many other ways to interpret that context, so it
MIGHT NOT have to be editorial. (But it COULD be!) Might removing quotes
in favor of italics possibly change the meaning in OTHER contexts? It's
certainly possible, and in those cases it SHOULD be editorial.
Regardless of editorial, commit hygiene is all about "units of work"
which are easy to review and undo. When a whole bunch of work is
committed in one big commit, it's hard to see what's going on and even
harder to tease it apart if we must.
I think that's the more important point than editorial or not. If one
forgets to mark something as editorial, then it's not the end of the
world if one's commit hygiene was good, and the commits are small,
isolated units of work that can be inspected and reasoned about. In that
case, we can easily go back and add editorial during review.
But when commits become huge swaths of various changes including
pretty-printing and whatever else, then things get really tough.
In this particular case, I haven't looked at the history. Weijia, if it
makes your job easier to let a few less controversial changes squeak
through unmarked, then OK. But in almost all of these cases it's just a
judgment call, with the workload of an interested reviewer 10 years from
now in mind.
On 6/30/22 9:33 PM, Vince wrote:
> Generally, changing content (changing spelling, fixing printing [not
> transcription] errors, changing punctuation, etc.) is editorial,
> changing formatting is not. Thus, adding a language tag is formatting
> and non-editorial, and so (in my productions, anyway) is changing a
> language “marker” from quotes to italics, or a book name from being
> quoted to our italic semantic tags, etc. Neither of those have ever come
> up as a problem in a review, by anyone, including Alex.
>
> However, Alex's reply below was that such a change could be editorial;
> if so, that is news to me. If we’re going to start calling stuff like
> that editorial, then I agree we need some guidelines in the manual for
> what constitutes editorial, because that muddies the waters considerably.
>
> Note that the issue here is not whether to label the commit as editorial
> or not (which is easy to change), the issue is unknowingly mixing
> non-editorial and editorial changes in a single commit (which is /not/
> easy to change). Without a clear explanation and understanding of which
> is which, the odds of them being mixed are greatly increased.
>
>> On Jun 30, 2022, at 8:17 PM, Genevieve Segol <
genevie...@gmail.com
>> <mailto:
genevie...@gmail.com>> wrote:
>>
>> There is no reference list telling us what constitutes an editorial
>> change. Is everything that is not a semantic addition an editorial
>> change? For example, on May 22, I asked
>> "f a foreign word is included in quotation marks, followed by its
>> definition, do I remove the quotation marks when I add the <i
>> xml:lang=. . .tag? The latter will turn the words to italics, and it
>> seems to me that this is redundant emphasis. Or do I omit the lang tag?"
>>
>> I was told to do remove the quotation marks, but there was no
>> mention/warning of this being an editorial change. In fact, I still
>> would not know how to handle that. Two separate commits: one for the
>> tags, and one for removing the quotes?
>>
>> Given the number of such occurrences, one might as well start the
>> project from scratch.
>>
>> On Thursday, June 30, 2022 at 5:52:15 PM UTC-7
weijia...@gmail.com
>> <
http://gmail.com/>wrote:
>
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/899BD283-C1D0-446A-83D0-CC56A031B74C%40letterboxes.org
> <
https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/standardebooks/899BD283-C1D0-446A-83D0-CC56A031B74C%40letterboxes.org?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer>.