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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I appreciate this topic, as I’ve struggled with the question too.
As my little forum got started, I was pretty heavily copy-editing early posts in the interest of things appearing polished. We also encourage linking to sources and references, which seems challenging to some users. So I was jumping in to add this stuff too. I hope it was received as guidance, not criticism.
With more traffic, the point comes where it’s just not possible to keep this up. So it’s kind of a self-solving problem. 
Similar to others here, I’m now mostly watching for unclear titles, and for misspellings that make a name or reference actually wrong. (And looking forward to the day I have mods to help.)
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As a counterpoint, I would tend not to do this. I think it may be a difference between a hobby/social site, which is my case, and a professional/support site, which is another case. Also, of course, a question of culture and expectations.
One of the common difficulties is that some proportion of people view online spaces as having over-protective moderation, and some people equate moderation with censorship, or with interference.
For some people an edit will feel like a paternalist move, yes. It will feel like a personal criticism. It will feel like an attack by “them” the mods, on “us” the powerless users.
So, be very aware of culture and of expectations, if the forum is a social space.
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Not okay.
Though you might derive some personal satisfaction, you would likely also be reducing engagement from your users in the process.
Seeing only perfect academic rigor in the language of all the other posts may intimidate some who don’t want to risk seeming foolish in front of their peers.
Should they work up the nerve to post at all, seeing obvious corrections applied to what they post would only compound those insecurities.
For others, unsolicited corrections might trigger irritation, or at the very least raise difficult questions of confidence; that what will be later attributed to them is what they actually wrote.
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This is my approach as well. A well written title is critical for search ability and is the most important communication.
This is curation which is important for the long term.
Regarding other edits, I will tend to correct typos (especially confusing ones) but not syntax/grammar. It’s their voice!
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I’m not sure about that voice point. Because quite often it is not matter of personality but weak english skills. On other hand, fixing just grammar errors is an awful job. Someone wouldn’t then do anything else.
At some point somewhere here I had a topic about similar things, when I was worrying if faulty english and fixing sentences using AI-proofreading could give wrong image.
Unspoken point behind it was
- credibility
- searches (world wide and inside a forum)
There was two things I didn’t realize even I should know better.
First was the fact that out there is zillion different type of spoken and written English, not only en_us and en_uk. Meaning mostly native english speakers have used to different englishes and dialects. Sometimes it may bother an individual and sometimes not, but that’s how things are.
Second was very finnish point of view. We have quite many different spoken dialects, but we should write using so called book finnish or clean common language. If one uses dialect or slang type language, it destroys credibility right away and gives… not so good first expression. So, my issues with right enough grammar was growing from that. When I took more realistic approach I stopped using proofreading (even I propably should use it, but it changes sentences too much to AI’sh). And it makes grammatical errors too every now and then and I don’t like to fix those too [1].
My weak point is I’m totally happy when someone fixes my error and badly formed sentences. And I equally agree that topic titles are priority and fixing posts is too expensive. But… we had here every now and then misunderstoods because of language barrier and that’s why we need AI-translators more than moderation in this meaning.
I don’t think any of non-english will be offended because of text edits. But… native speakers with bad english may be totally different story 
and that is very finnish problem in the meaning of our school system that is or was very strict about that. It didn’t matter if you could explain what you need of you can offer, but if one used wrong preposition or words in a sentence were in wrong order, the 9th gate of the hell would open ↩︎
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Personally I do find it overbearing and somewhat insulting. I can see the point of editing topic titles to be more clear but I do it very, very rarely. As to content of posts, unless the language is offensive no I do not think you should correct it at all.
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If you’re talking about objective issues (orthography, punctuation, etc), incomplete/meaningless topic titles, I couldn’t care less if someone dislikes being corrected. Don’t like it? Write properly.
Note: I think there’s quite a significant difference between having your own style and writing with mistakes.
Unfortunately, it’s a slippery slope/broken windows thing. The more you allow it, the more people will feel comfortable being sloppy about grammar. And saying “it doesn’t matter as long as you get the message” is hardcore copium, a lot of questions get self-resolved once the author tries to phrase them in a coherent text.
The only problem I see is it’s actually quite time-consuming to correct users once you reach a certain threshold. I was hoping it’d be something ai could do in the future (retroactively correct posts for grammar)
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Maintaining a forum structure can indeed rub some the wrong way.
That being said Moderation is indeed censorship & interference with a purpose.
We don’t want cat discussions in the Dog category. So topics and/or posts need to be moderated. Be it removed or moved. While also educating the member.
Myself? I never mind when someone fixes grammar or spelling in my posts. I often fix my posts on the fly when someone likes or replies to one of my posts and I notice it needs fixing.
Granted on Reddit; you often see ppl play grammar police more as way of poking ppl needlessly at times. Well it is Reddit so maybe more often than needed.
Bottomline it will depend on the community and the rapport the staff has with the community.
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I regularly set computer source code in code blocks. And sometime message the user to explain how this markup works. A bit of a corner case, I guess?
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A good relatively innocuous example. In a case like this, I might PM the user, pointing out the possibility, inviting them to edit their post, and offering to fix it up for them if they prefer. (In fact, I have done this, in the case of advising someone to put youtube links on their own line, to get the video preview.)
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