Well, I’m not an early riser so late to the party, but I see little to add to the discussion that has already taken place in my absence. Many excellent points have been made.
I particularly agree with others who pointed out that you need to take care to be more accurate about things you are saying and especially in how you quote another poster in a thread. I’ll just caution you that we all have our pet peeves, and quoting out of context is one of mine. You’d have done better to simply reply to @enipla’s post than to partially quote his words.
I’m fine with whatever means is made, as long as it’s crystal clear. And I generally try to also include a “pardon my snip” in the text of my replies. As others do when they bold or italicize sections and reference that it’s also a modification of the original.
I think it’s fair to say that if you’re quoting someone, and you’re modifying what they said, be extremely careful. It’s very easy to misrepresent or at least mangle their meaning in the process, and that’s strongly discouraged. Even if that wasn’t your intent.
It’s one of the ways you can’t afford to be careless. It’s like discussing a very sensitive topic, or using loaded language; you can do it, but if you do, you better be precise, clear, and deliberate in how you choose to do it.
Since the OP itself has been well dealt with IMO, here’s an observation about something adjacent. Namely, clearly identifying partial (not internally edited) quotes of longer posts.
Back in the vBulletin days you could easily multi-quote, but you could not easily snip-quote. You had to first quote the whole post then remove the parts of the quote entire that you didn’t want. At which point it was easy to remember to add elipses or [snip] or whatever indicator wherever you removed content.
In Discourse, partial quotes are a very normal thing. Highlight just the portion of someone’s post you wish to quote and click the " Quote pop-up thingy. Which encourages not calling out in any obvious way that what you’ve quoted is an excerpt. E.g. from the post just above mine:
What I’ve included is verbatim what @Atamasama wrote. It’s nothing but the truth. But it isn’t the whole truth. And it isn’t called out as such. Simple enough for readers to notice if the snip is real short and the post it came from is nearby. Not so simple the less that’s true.
Back in the vBulletin days I’d tend to include ellipses either on the same line or a separate line to indicate where elided leading and trailing text was. e.g.
signals that this is the lead sentence of an interior paragraph that goes on longer than I’ve quoted.
So that’s the set-up. Here’s the observation:
I see that the general board culture now after a couple years of Discourse has become that neither I nor very many other people do the partial quote ellipses / [snip] thing very often. Unadorned partial quotes like my first example are by far the rule, not the exception. I’m not trying to complain about the practice here with this post. Just pointing it out and wondering what anyone else thinks of this.
Is this
A problem needing some pushback from mods until a new norm takes hold?
Just the way things are, neutral and innocuous?
Or something in the middle, sorta vaguely un-kosher, but not an actual problem to any but the most persnickety (read "anal’) of posters / readers. [Unless the selective omissions are motivated by someone being a jerk. In which case the problem is the motive, not the absent ellipses.]
Good luck training this herd of cats. Resistance is futile.
I tend to go between the second and third opinion myself, with a side order of #4. Anal me wants to be better / more precise, but lazy me says “Eh, who cares?”
This is very true, and I have gotten myself in trouble by not realizing that readers did not have the same context that I did as the composer of the post that was partially quoting someone else. The result of my partial quote was that I implied that the person quoted had a point of view which they manifestly didn’t have (I don’t remember which poster that was, but I apologize again for that error).
I like your suggestion about ellipses (or something) before and/or after the partial quote (whatever is appropriate) so readers know there was more stuff there that you didn’t quote.
I think with quotes that do not omit anything internally, perhaps ellipsis at the beginning and end is desirable, but it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Using ellipsis does not absolve us from being careful that the quoted portion accurately and fully reflects what the quoted poster wrote on the aspect that we are replying to.
We’ve all experienced exchanges where people half-read and half-quote our post, snipping off the caveats and qualifiers to make it look as though we are making some ill-considered absolute claim, and then just restate the same caveats and qualifiers.
Since Discourse doesn’t even let you quote the entire post directly above yours, i feel the intro and outro ellipses are implied. Internal ellipses are quite different.
I agree in general. But if you quote something that looks like a complete thought but isn’t, and then respond like it was a complete thought, that can still be misleading.
In that context, I’ve taken to quoting a bit more than what I want to reply to, but then bolding the main part.