Marechiare wrote:
> Where did you get the proposition "That it's not annoying to people"?
> Do not attribute to me anything I did not say. I said:
> - "No, it most certainly is not."
> In reply to
> - "Because its irritating and rude."
>
> For many it is not "irritating and rude", for some it is. Both
> statements seem to be valid.  Some find that short single line
> wikipedia link to be "irritating and rude", many don't.

OK, I'm not totally sure you aren't trolling now, but I'll try and explain
this seriously one more time.

In one sense when you tell someone of a mistake they made, you are doing
them a favor.  However, there is always a fine line between unsolicited
advice and nagging.  And, when you do it on the PICList you are also
pointing out that same mistake to 2000 other people.  Now the fine line is
between helpfulness and public ridicule.

Imagine you are at a banquet and the guy sitting next to you stands up to
make a brief speach.  He says "... first I went to the store, than I went
home".  You wait until he sits down, lean over, and tell him privately that
by the way, that should be "then", not "than".  He might be thankful, or he
might be annoyed, but since it was done privately it could be acceptable in
some contexts.  What you are doing by correcting someone on the PIClist
however, whether you intend it or not, is more like standing up and saying
"You moron, that should be "then", not "than".  Why don't you come back when
you've earned your 7th grade equivalency certificate", and then you laugh
and everybody else laughs at him too.

There are times and places for correcting people, and times and places where
its irritating, belittling, and therefore rude.  The more publicly it's
done, the more likely it will be perceived as the latter.  Even the private
advice in the above example could fall into this catagory depending on
context we don't know.  The fact that the PIClist is highly public, there
are enough people here who struggle with english since it's not their first
language, and language usage is not the domain of the PIClist, you should
assume all such comments will be irritating to the recipient and seen as
belittling and rude by others.

Also keep in mind there are two classes of language mistakes.  Mere
accidents, typos if you will, and true errors where one didn't know better.
Correcting the former is rarely useful.  At best someone realizes that
something slipped thru his filters.  Correcting the second may be helpful
sometimes.  However, it's really hard to tell which is which, especially for
someone that didn't grow up with the language.  And there is no guarantee
that correcting the second type of error will be well received either.  That
depends on the context, person, nature of the error, previous history, and
proximity to dead fish.  In other words, it depends on various factors you
can't know, so you're essentially rolling the dice.

For example, when I wrote "its" intead of "it's" earlier, it was just a
typo.  I know the difference, and generally try to be careful.  Sometimes
I'm more hurried than other times and may do less proofreading.  Then this
is also the PIClist where a occasional slipup of that nature should be
forgiveable, I wasn't getting paid to write anything, and I think the
meaning was still quite clear.  When I saw your comment, I thought to myself
"Doh, how did that slip thru?", but I also thought your pointing out one of
the (I think) relatively rare times I screw up like that was unfair,
irritating, and that you were deliberately being a jerk.  I decided to let
it go because I think most people watching the interchange would have a
pretty clear idea of what was really going on (my minor mistake, you being a
jerk).

In contrast, the resistor power example from a earlier post is fair game
because it is within the domain of this list.  First we have a right, in
fact I think a obligation, not to let incorrect statements within the domain
of the list go unchallenged.  Second, since people come here to talk about
such things, they have implicitly requested advice on these topics.  Anyone
that can't handle being told, "no, it's 9W, not 45mJ, here's the math..."
doesn't belong here.  On the PIClist, that's very different from "no, it's
'then', not 'than', here's the dictionary reference...".

Hopefully this helps and you understand.  But if not, at least take away
that this is how it is whether you understand it or not.


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