Thread:LadyAlys/@comment-24992699-20140926230724/@comment-24150802-20140929031303

Hi Rbrinkley. Be a bit careful with making minor text changes to pages. I've noticed you have a tendency to make things more wordy, which is not always a good idea. The wiki is used by people for whom English is not their first language and so clear, simple writing is best. As an example, a few days ago on one page, you changed "that person" to "the person in question". "That person" was grammatically correct and is preferred because "in question" is an English idiom and is less easily understood than the common word "that".

There are also some things that don't need to be stated because they are obvious. For example, on the Community page a few minutes ago, you changed "Fall Festival" to "HabitRPG Fall Festival". Adding HabitRPG isn't necessary since that's the topic of the whole wiki. :) You also used "Fall spirit" instead of "Halloween" which again is a bit of an idiom - "spirit" has several meanings and so is less clear than "Halloween". The phrase "this 2014 year" isn't actually good English grammar and the other words you added don't really add any meaning to the page. I'm going to revert your Community page change because I think the original version is clearer. Short and simple is often best.

Please keep this in mind when making changes to text. It might help if you ask yourself before changing something if the words you are adding really do add meaning or significantly improve the clarity of the wiki. In general, if you're changing words just to improve the way they sound to you, then it might be best to not make that change. Small changes to a wiki are often more trouble than they are worth because they require time from other editors to review the changes, and they fill up the pages' history entries, making it harder to find the more substantial, important edits. There are some exceptions of course - if something really is written badly then it should be changed, but minor stylistic edits are generally undesirable.

If you find a change that you'd like to make but are not certain about whether it should be made or not, you can always ask me if you want to. Drop a message here and I'll reply as soon as I can.