Wikipedia talk:Today's featured article/March 21, 2018

Copyedit first sentence

edit

I would recast the first sentence as follows:

Capella is a star system of four stars in the constellation Auriga; it appears to the naked eye to be a single star .

— Hugh (talk) 05:29, 2 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

Hugh, I'll reply here since this is a bit more private than WT:TFA or your talk page (no one reads these pages, generally!) I don't want to cause you any embarrassment. As a group, FAC people, and especially people who hang out at WP:ERRORS, aren't the shy, retiring type ... they'll speak up if they have opinions, and no one spoke up in favor of any of your 55 changes. That doesn't mean you don't know what you're doing ... for all I know, you're right and we're all wrong ... but it does mean that more work is needed if you want to come up with changes that people are going to be on board with. Having said that ... that's them, this is me. I'm all ears when someone takes an interest in copyediting, and I'll be happy to listen to any advice. I've been doing what I do on Wikipedia full time, more or less, for a little over 10 years now, so I've got an idea what kind of prose the FAC people and Main Page people are looking for. For this page: yes, I agree with part of your suggestion, and I moved "is a star system" up to the front. - Dank (push to talk) 23:56, 8 March 2018 (UTC)Reply
@Dank: Thanks for your reply. I'm not interested in contributing any further to FAC, but please feel free to ping me on a talk page like this if you would like suggestions with how to improve prose in specific blurbs. I would be only to happy to help.
As far as stopping a situation such as the one I inadvertently caused from happening again, I would strongly suggest that FAC limit the editing of blurbs for the current month to administrators (as with today's and tomorrow's), and signal that this is a section of Wikipedia to which WP:BOLD does not apply. — Hugh (talk) 03:05, 9 March 2018 (UTC)Reply