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Suspect is one word for it; the edits are definitely not improvements, either. Leaving aside the unnecessary expansion of contractions, there seems to be a lot of splitting compound or complex sentences (apologies for the secondary school grammar terms) into simple sentences that read poorly. I'm tempted to ask for a mod revert of the page to before they started editing it.

EDIT: They're now doing the same thing to My Real Daddy. Same needless chopping up of compound and/or complex sentences, same needless expansions of contractions.

I see they also did it to https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=Main.MainstreamObscurity and https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/article_history.php?article=Main.CondemnedByHistory

Could it be a text-plug in or something like it? They seem rather specific.

Is this really anything more suspicious than your average Serial Tweaker?

They do use bad grammar sometimes, though not that often. They spelled Ed Brubaker's last name "Btubaker".

Also, they write overly simplistically, and with the wrong word order.

• OLD VERSION: "...as well as writing a believable fan favorite romance with Natasha, to the point where he's now her definitive Love Interest."
• THEIR EDITED VERSION: "Brubaker also wrote for the character a believable fan favorite romance with Black Widow/Natasha. Bucky has become her definitive Love Interest."

EDIT: I have summoned them.

I'm not sure if it's a coincidence, but they stopped editing as soon as I sent them a PM about this discussion. But that might just be because they'd already been editing for 12 hours straight (no, really).

Regarding mightymewtron's question, it's not so much serial tweaking at issue here as their insistence on completely re-writing almost every example on multiple pages in a grammatical style that is often downright awkward to read; the example MichaelKatsuro quotes is typical. They seem to insist not only on expanding contractions, but also on breaking apart compound and complex sentences into simple sentences.

(For those who need a reminder of secondary school grammar, generally speaking, compound sentences join together independent clauses, usually with conjunctions ("and", "or", "but"), while complex sentences include one or more dependent clauses joined to the main independent clause with pronouns or prepositions. Every style guide I've ever read says it's not only all right to include compound and complex sentences when writing, it's encouraged - as long as it doesn't make the sentences difficult to follow. Unless you're trying to imitate Ernest Hemingway or William Faulkner, anyway.)

I'd revert the edits myself, but (a) I'd rather not do that without consensus or Word of Mod that such a thing is appropriate, (b) there are simply too many of them, and (c) some of the entries on Horrible.Live Action TV were my own entries, and reverting them might constitute edit warring.

"I'm not sure if it's a coincidence, but they stopped editing as soon as I sent them a PM about this discussion. "

Actually, I was taking a break to attend to a personal matter.

"there seems to be a lot of splitting compound or complex sentences"

I find that many of these complex sentences are reading poorly or assuming too much knowledge by the reader. One part of the sentence is reporting what an actor, writer, or producer actually did. Another is talking about what a reviewer of the work said in a book or newspaper article. A third is talking about audience reception. All at once, with no particular punctuation.

And someone mentions a random character, and expects the reader to know who they are talking about.

I mean, not all of them need reverting. Some were improvements, if you ask me.

^^ I looked over the entries in Horrible.Live Action TV from before you edited and they weren't too hard to follow. That also doesn't explain why you expanded contractions, dedicated an editing session to each entry, and didn't proofread.

But what I find most concerning is that you edited for twelve hours straight (if Michael Katsuro is correct)!

Agreed; this comes across as trying to solve problems where there are none, and instead creating problems in the process given that a lot of the entries haven't been carefully proofread and unnecessarily expand contractions. Just because an entry isn't worded the way you would have written it doesn't mean it needs to be completely re-written it unless it's grammatically incorrect or has problems with Word Cruft.

I'm still tempted to ask if the mods can revert the edits to Mainstream Obscurity, Condemned by History, Horrible.Live Action TV, and My Real Daddy. This sort of large-scale re-writing should, at the very least, be discussed first rather than done unilaterally.

There’s a principle on the wiki which I don’t think is explicitly written out as a general rule, but can be inferred from various special cases (which are explicitly written out, such as the the rule about American and British spelling): respect the stylistic choices of the original writer.

This means that you shouldn’t rewrite examples just because you would prefer them to be written using, for example, shorter sentences. Only do so if the text is ungrammatical, non-idiomatic or unclear, or if it violates the rule that each example should read like it was written by one person.

Condemned by History had several edits after the changes, so I did not revert those. The actual improvements can be remade, but try to do them all in one edit. I suggest using a basic text editor on your desktop and checking that there haven't been any new edits to account for. Removing contractions and simplifying sentences too much breaks the "one editor wrote everything" goal of example writing.

I've added Byzantine to my daily check-on list of tropers.