Right. This is a message board, not a reference book. Minor typos are pretty much irrelevant. The chance of screwing up the “correction” is too great to allow random editing by anyone.
If you notice a mistake in your own post, the easiest way to fix it is to just make a follow-up post and note the correction. If the mistake is serious enough (and few are) you can ask a mod to fix it.
Note that some editing is allowed, per the rule:
If a reference is confusing, this would allow additions such as “Bob Dillon [Dylan]”, but I wouldn’t advise it. Simply spell the name correctly in your own post. Whatever you do, don’t change someone else’s text; instead, make your own addition within square brackets.
There is really no reason to add “[sic]” to someone else’s post when you have directly quoted it. The purpose of sic is to emphasize that the mistake is in the original, and not something that you made. If you have the actual original in front of you, adding sic is pointless.
Speaking only as a poster, I think it depends. In ATMB or GQ if it is a simple typo, it would likely be jerkish. In the Pit, MPSIMS or IMHO not so much. Not so sure in GD and P&E. Leaning towards jerkish or at least off topic so don’t do it.
What if it’s not obvious, but the poster clarified later. (I often mistype “now” and “not”, for instance.) Would it be okay for a poster to come along later and incorporate the correction, perhaps with a note in their own text or via something obvious like [poster corrected to: “not”]?
I would argue that it should be okay to do that, so long as it is transparent what you are doing.
I’d say unless they see a problem with the erroneous part being quoted again and again they should repeat enough of the text then for people to use that to quote.
I think trying to make a rule that actually works for all more or less reasonable edge cases, that wouldn’t be more often used improperly, as “non-edge cases” are so much more frequent, is a fool’s game.
On this board, I wouldn’t say so. There is just an expectation of being corrected on even minor things as part of the culture. I’ve seen it many times without anyone seeming upset or people getting modded.
Only if the remark is clearly mocking or hostile have I seen anyone take offense—and those mostly happen in the Pit.
But he said making a big deal out of it. My experience here is that most corrections to “a minor typo” are done in passing, or politely in a stand-alone post. I do think making a big deal is jerkish, unless it’s in the pit.
Of course, sometimes a “minor typo” is repeated enough, and despite being exposed to the correct spelling, or directly corrected, that one can begin to suspect that it’s not just a minor typo anymore.
If I feel compelled to correct a minor typo, this is how I do it. Enclose the clarification in brackets, either instead of or after the error, as is standard practice everywhere else, as is provided for in the forum rules.
But the thing I’m worried about personally is correcting a typo subconsciously. This isn’t a problem when I use Discourse’s quote feature, but I worry about it a lot when I write the quote box by hand. I could do something like Bob Dillon → Bob Dylan without even noticing.
The problem with assuming a poster made an obvious error, is that there is some possibility that they wrote what they did intentionally and indeed you are wrong.
For instance, there is a new, up and coming freestyle rapper named Bob Dillon and the poster meant to use his name. Your “correction” ruins a great post.
It can’t be helped if I never read “Dillon” to begin with. I was talking about a transcription error on my part that counteracts someone else’s typographical error.
