Fun and games: /msg Excalibur The irony of being called to a higher academic standard by someone whose main method of argument is ad hom focused on the pre-eminent scholars in the field (with extra ad hom!) continues to amuse...

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Chronology: Joined October 24, 2002; Level 2 November 27, 2002; Level 3 February 21, 2003; Level 4 May 17, 2005; Level 5 almost certainly never, sadly.

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Copyright: Contact me if you wish to use any of my everything2.com "works" for any purpose. My terms are fair and include any/all updates I might make to "commentary" style work like Hu Jintao, pinyin, or nautical mile. I honestly didn't think it was necessary to include this paragraph, but recent events have shown me otherwise!

Why We Nuke: Transitional Man, whose work here I generally love, wrote a poorly explicated "justification" of "nuking" in a node entitled Why We Nuke. I immediately messaged him with my objections to that writeup, but got no satisfaction. While this could have spawned a discussion about "who edits the editors", I decided instead to post a "response" to the writeup. It was immediately popular, with a dozen or more cries of "bravo" and "well said" coming in from surprising quarters. Then it was nuked. Which, amusingly, actually proved my central point. The writeup could not have been nuked on quality or factual or, in fact, any of the other reasons given in Transitional Man's w/u. It was nuked on a whim by an editor who clearly didn't understand what I was trying to say. After much catbox discussion, and many private messages, I've decided to post my (slightly edited) writeup here. I'll take it down when it's no longer relevant or true.

Why We Nuke -- A Response

The answer to the question posed here -- why, in fact, "we" nuke -- is, sadly, not listed in the FAQ or anywhere else. That's not to say there isn't an answer, but we need to dig substantially deeper than platitudes and/or our personal bookmarks, favourites and preferences, to find it.

Comparisons between the "editor" role here on e2 and the job of editor for a book, magazine or newspaper are seductive, but terribly misleading. In "real life" as we revealingly say here on the interweb, I am an editor, so am perhaps well placed to discuss these differences. And since "nuking" is the primary power of editors here on e2, we need to briefly discuss and define before we move on to "why".

Novels. An editor's role in the production of a novel is a complex one. There are the standard tasks of correcting spelling and grammar mistakes; the "coach" role that many great editors have played; and, of course, the role in the power structure of publishing, which could be expressed "If you don't make those changes, your book will never see the light of day." Note that none of these roles are routinely perfomed by "editors" here at e2. Some editors here, to be fair, do go out of their way to offer opinions, and some may even message a writer upon discovery of a spelling error (although that's never happened to me, and I'm not a perfect speller). The closest an e2 editor comes to the role of a "real" editor is the power role, but even that is exercised post-hoc. Sometime after a writeup is published, an editor may "nuke" it according to their own opaque sense of good and bad and what "fits" here.

Periodical publications. Here the "real life" editor has all the tasks mentioned above for novels, but also a larger space and formatting role. A 1,200 word submitted article must be cut down to 1,000 words for the column space allowed, for example. The editor of a periodical also has substantial time pressures, and may have a significant role in the "meeting deadlines" part of the game. Almost none of this is relevant to e2.

E2. Editors here, almost without exception, have no formal training. Indeed, in browsing the nodegel one literally falls across a variety of writeups purporting to authoritatively discuss this point of grammar, or that spelling error, or a confusing account of sentences ending with "but". Yet even these, surely an editor's meat and bread, are largely of dubious factual quality. I recognize that we have no single styleguide - but that is simply another disconnect between editors and "e2 editors".

Ok, so we're now explicitly aware that "editor" here means something different than "editor" everywhere else. I'm sure we knew that anyway, but it's good to be clear about these things.

Why, then, do "we" nuke? If it isn't to respond consistently to any single charter of style, or fact-checking, or grammar, or spelling, or subject matter. If it isn't the start of a process where the editor works with a writer to improve something to an acceptable standard. That's not to say that these things don't occur -- they do -- but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Is it to "improve the nodegel"? To "prune"? To "raise the bar"? Is the answer simply "quality"? No, no, no, and no. To prove any one of these false to yourself, open another browser window, pull up e2, and click Random Node ten times. If you don't come across at least four things (more likely six or seven if you discount nodeshells and Webster 1913) that would certainly not be here if any sort of systematic "pruning" was going on, then keep clicking because, as you do, your skewed sample will rapidly normalize, and you'll find yourself unable to believe that there is any sort of quality benchmark at work here at all. It has been suggested that Random Node is not, in fact, random, and that it's designed to show "bad" nodes. If that is the case it only makes my point here stronger. If there are tools for identifying poor quality -- and nuking is for quality -- why is there so much crud remaining?

In fact, the only possible conclusion one can come to, after assessing the mountains of evidence, is that (to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln) "we" nuke stuff that isn't like other stuff that's the stuff we like. Sometimes. When we feel like it.

Worse than that, "we" actively keep and promote personal cadres (or, in some cases, pantheons) of "good writers" whose stuff we habitually upvote and C!, and whose style we therefore subconsciously (or consciously and proudly) wish everyone else's writeups could adopt. Which is, of course, the very definition of the common writer's horror story about the "real world" editor who took their book, and tried to rewrite it into someone else's book, or even into their own. Or who seemed to be stuck in some other narrative, and used editorial powers to drag the story closer to some false ideal.

So what's to be done? There are some things being done already. But beyond that, beyond the vital and important rethinking that continually goes on about what and who we are, what can more generally be done? We (non-editor noders) can demand a return to the Editor's Log of old, where editors listed what they were nuking and why, because open beats closed anytime. We can stop pretending that there are easy feel-good answers to the question Why We Nuke, and to the other hard questions.

And this last is something we can all do, starting now.