Quote:
Originally Posted by Hitch
See now, there you go Wolfie. That's a good idea. That way, everybody gets what they want. RobertDDL gets to put up his edited versions, the purists get the less-fixed version, and RobertDDL gets more traffic. Everybody wins.
Hitch
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Except that, sorry, I won't do it. With each comma or letter that I change I'd have to decide, is this a correction, or is this an edit? Sometimes, it's not easy to decide - this superfluous comma here, was that a speck on the paper, or was it in the print edition that (for instance) Gutenberg has scanned? When it's not a speck but a printing error, can I remove it? And fixing other printing or OCR errors - correction, or edit? A mis-spelling of a character's name in one instance - should I correct it? There are so many instances where it doesn't seem clear-cut to me - and why would you trust me to make the right decisions? And what about my footnotes, for instance - would they be included in the "purist" version or not? My author's biographies? And changing chapter numbers from Roman to Arabic - permissible or not?
I wouldn't be able to make two versions, a purist and an edited one, with "editing" and "correcting" neatly and unquestionably separated. And even if I could, making two separate editions would about double the amount of my work.
With my own editions, I am only answerable to my own judgment. I want to keep it that way. I had not wanted to start this discussion, I had not remotely expected it to start - all I had wanted was to get an answer to a little problem that had vexed me, how to deal with a set of two conflicting rules, or at least to me they had seemed to conflict in the case in question. I have worked on my website and on my editions for ten years now, and, as long as I can, I'll keep working on them - this is not something I feel the need to compromise on.
And as to the increased traffic I'd get, if most people here prefer the "purist" version, and I posted it here, then they woudn't go to my website for the edited version, would they? And since I don't have anything to sell (not even visitors' data to Google), more traffic isn't that important to me.
No, I'll keep doing my work, and some will approve, and others won't, but they won't be harmed by it.