User talk:Jscool101

Arapaho language
Hi! Welcome to Wikipedia. Thanks for your work expanding the Arapaho language article! However, you did revert a number of my edits without any comment or edit summary, and without explaining on the talk page what you thought was wrong with them. It's generally considered polite to use edit summaries when making substantive changes to an article, to explain what you are doing and, if necessary, your rationale for doing it. And I'll admit it's pretty frustrating for me (I'm only human!) to have all the work they had just done reverted without any explanation. Besides which, since you reverted a number of my edits at once, rather than further editing the article that resulted from my edits or reverting individual edits of mine, you ended up reverting a number of different kinds of things.

Some were minor stylistic stuff (whether some words were bolded, etc.) that don't ultimately have a huge significance and are partly a matter of personal preference (though I would contend they improve the article's readability). Some were things like my removal of excess spaces from the vowel chart or wikilinking "voiced bilabial stop" that presumably shouldn't have been controversial. Some were more substantial things like my change of the table to a comparison of Arapaho with Proto-Algonquian, in which I had explained my reasoning on the article's talk page. Some were spelling or grammar corrections (like possessive "it's" > "its") that unequivocally made the article better by improving its English. In my edits I had also condensed references (that is, multiple instances of the same reference were linked to the same note, rather than by repeating the reference); I removed the spelling "hiinonoei'tiit" because, as I explained in my edit summary, I could find no examples of its use outside of Wikipedia mirrors; I reworded the paragraph on Arapaho prosody because as written it was somewhat rambling and and in places mentioned general aspects of tonal languages (speakers can hear the tones better than non-native speakers) instead of Arapaho specifically; I moved the info on Gros Ventre and Nawathinehena to their own articles because I felt it wasn't really relevant in this article, though perhaps some info on other Arapahoan dialects/languages would be appropriate. In my edits I also added additional references, both for some of the material you added and for the material I added.

In other words, basically, I'm hoping we can have a dialog about the article (preferably on the article's talk page) and how to continue improving it. But you should try to avoid in the future reverting sourced material or large numbers of changes without explaining your reasoning.

Thanks, --Miskwito (talk) 17:19, 3 November 2011 (UTC)