Should we be editing old posts to reflect "C-canon/EU"=>"Legends" rename by Disney?

Question

I noticed a recent trend editing my posts (I assume other user's posts too) which pretty much amounts to:

• Replace pre-Disney canon level mentions with "Legends" in text
• Replace (or add) "legends" tag instead of "EU" tag

The edits in and out of themselves are harmless, my only 2 concerns with them are:

• Volume: If ALL Star Wars posts get edited that way, the site gets spammed with largely meaningless bumps (well, it'll generate me extra rep so perhaps I shold shut up and not raise the issue? :)

  If only some posts are edited, we have inconsistent styling throughout the site.

• They don't seem like a MAJOR improvement (especially if only a minority of old posts are edited due to volume concerns). Not really a major reason to avoid such edits (IMHO), but worth thinking whether we need them.

I'm not providing teh links to avoid calling out specific users doing the edits.

To clarify: I'm not really objecting to the edits per se, just want to have a coherent policy.

Answer 1

We don't need to actively edit out all mention of the EU and the previous levels of canon (G-canon, T-canon, etc.), but a user should edit posts to the new, correct terminology if

1. the user is editing the post for something else anyway (spelling corrections, tag cleanup, etc.)
2. the post is already on the front page (e.g. an old question got a late answer)
3. a new question has been asked and marked as a duplicate, and the old question it is a duplicate of uses the old terminology

I think this is a good middle ground to update/correct the terminology while avoiding the work and spam from purging the site of every mention of the EU and old levels of Star Wars canon.

As for the tags, it is not necessary to substitute star-wars-legends for star-wars-eu, since they are synonyms (and the former is the master tag). See this meta post. As I mention in the linked meta question, I don't think it is necessary to edit star-wars-legends into all the old questions about Legends. But if the above criteria are met (e.g. a user is already editing a Legends question) we might as well add the tag.

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Some background:

I am one of the users (perhaps the only) making the edits in question. An example is my edit to a question about R2-D2. In this case, I was editing the question to remove the character tags (the issue of character tags came up recently in chat, and we have an existing, highly upvoted answer on meta arguing against the use of almost all character tags). When editing posts, I proofread the text and make any other edits that seem necessary. In this example and other cases, I updated the terminology and added the relevant star-wars-legends, which did not exist at the time the question was added. The question specifically allows a level of canon (in the old terminology) which has been deemed Legends, so the tag is relevant.

It's probably also worth mentioning that when star-wars-legends was first created, I did specifically edit a few questions just to add it. This was because users must have score >= 5 in a tag to approve synonyms to it, and no users had such a score since star-wars-legends was new. By making these edits, I was able to get approval to make the old star-wars-eu its synonym. Such edits are no longer necessary.

Answer 2

I don't think it's absolutely necessary right now (because we still understand the distinction), but it seems to do no harm aside from bumping a lot of old questions to the front page (and I've gotten some extra rep from it myself too, so no complaints on that count here either).

Longer term I think it is useful in that it provides additional clarity to the answer. The issue of Star Wars canon can get a bit gnarly sometimes, and being able to say things like "this explanation comes from Legends" or "this explanation is fully in canon" (without requiring someone to go off and search whether or not a cited work is canon themselves) is going to be helpful to people searching for content in the future.

So long as the edits are at least correct, I say let it be.

Answer 3

I don't see the point in completely removing the entire mention of previous canons, leaving them to the edit history. Although Disney has created new Canon levels, it doesn't mean that people are only going to be interested only Disney or Legends canon.

If a user wants an explanation that only uses previously established levels of canon, then the Disney canon and Legends canon descriptions are useless to them.

To preserve the "heritage", I would suggest edits to include both terms.

G-Canon

Into

Disney Canon (Previously G-Canon).

This way, older questions get visibility and we passively educate users on which old canons fall into the new canons (without having to specifically look that up.)

Lumping every pre-existing canon works well for Disney's continuity model, but not necessarily for satisfying the users. The different levels of canon were developed for a reason, and that wasn't just because there was discontinuity between canons.

Otherwise, I agree with Null about when to edit.

Answer 4

No.

I think heritage of the world should be preserved. After decades, if a guy finds a Star Wars question from 2012, he should be able to find the true canon of that time.