I work as a proofreader, and it’s often disheartening to see users ask questions or start discussions with no punctuation at all. Do people perceive this as paternalism? Or do others see it as a desperate attempt to maintain the illusion that the community is solely made up of an academic audience?
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Its an interesting question!
Fixing small things like the above sentence would probably be fine. Depending on the context of your community.
Completely proofreading/fixing someone’s post might not be perceived as very friendly. But low-quality, badly written posts will also harm your community in the long-term.
It’s a tough balance, but doing it with the understanding/support of your existing community members does make sense. If people want to belong to your community… they have to abide by the standards of your community.
On the other hand, if this is your personal opinion, which isn’t shared by your members… then no, probably better to let it slide.
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For example, we have a QA/support category where topics are kind of expected to be questions (we have the “solved” functionality). In one case, topic title is some kind of one-word whatever, while the actual question is buried in OP. 
But I probably shuldn’t go overboard, yeah.
My language includes accented characters and people feel like they don’t need to use them, that sticks out like a sore thumb as well.
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Really depends on your environment, the kind of criticism you are comfortable getting and the expectations you set for your users. To give context to my answer, I run an internal Discourse instance for a software company where I’m the only native english speaker(out of tens of thousands of staff).
I used to reach out to the user and teach them how to write a title. After a year of this I realised I was wasting my time and theirs. Now I re-title about 30% of topics. They tend to fall into two types:
1. The “one worder” - I just go straight into this and change it
2. The “not specific enough”
My aciton depends on the following question: “Are the right people already particpating?”
- No: Edit title
- Yes: Set a reminder for 2-3 weeks. The 2-3 week delay is to allow users to resolve the topic with the title they are familiar with. When the topic is effectively resolved, I will change the title to something that is specific to the problem - which is sometimes easier to do after the solution is posted. By this point the OP might be a little irritated, but they don’t interact with the topic anymore anyway, so there’s less attachment/ownership felt on their side.
For me, Q&A requires content refinement to be successful. Yes, people can always ask new questions, but giving a question a bit of a polish a few months after people have stopped discussing it can make the difference between a clear question and answer vs thread with unclear purpose.
This is spot on. I think Titles are fair game, and I only fix typos in the bodies of people I am close to personally.
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imho: yes it is, but only when critical.
For me this includes important keywords and the title that might be important for search or discovery.
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We follow this routine in our community too.
Correct key-worded topic titles are essential for not only the internal search but also crucial for SEO when people are trying to find an answer without even knowing we exist
For the post content itself, we’d be there all day trying to correct the grammar in every post. So we don’t.
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Back in the day, Jeff would often fix up typos in my posts here. After the initial confusuion, I was usually relieved.
I now do it a few times a week for others for small things (mostly speling errors 
). I will with a bit more frequency fix up an unclear topic title.
For a post body, my edits are generally limited to a word or two that is clearly misspelled or just wrong. For a title, I am more likely to re-write the whole thing (e.g., “Need help” becomes “trouble with xyz and abc” or “xyz broken because abc”)
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The filter that one of our technical writers told me was, “Does this improve the readability”? I will liberally go through and update formatting, whether adding code blocks or removing template elements that should have been removed.
When it comes to the nuts and bolts of the topic, like grammar or spelling, I’ll leave those as is. Our community is very international and English is not their first language, so I feel they are more tolerant with grammar and spelling.
As for titles, it’s not uncommon for people to put a full sentence in their title. For these cases, I’ll move that sentence in their topic body and come up with a new title for them—either by using the Discourse AI or plucking keywords myself.
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Personally I feel that what sets Discourse sites apart, generally, is a focus on active moderation. This is part of it. Long may that continue.
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Definitely. I’ve only noticed this after setting up ours, I wasn’t aware of how trust levels work. It’s a small community and I’m not sure how many high level participants we’ll have, but giving trusted people more and more power to help moderate is a really cool thing!
I think I’ll continue to edit titles. In posts, us owners will strive to set an example with our writing.
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