Select any sentence on this page. A small suggest an edit button appears. That is the whole interface, and this page explains where a suggestion goes after you press it.
It works on every page of the site except the homepage: these notes, the paper pages, the learning pages and the talk decks. The homepage is built from templates and configuration rather than from one source file, so there is nothing for a suggestion to edit. On the paper pages and decks, the notes open in a side drawer, from a Suggest an edit button at the bottom right of a page or the top right of a deck.
What happens when you select something
The page captures three things: the sentence you selected, about forty characters either side of it, and the path of the source file this page was built from. Together they are a text-quote selector — a way of pointing at a passage that survives the text moving around, because it describes the passage by its content rather than by its position.
You then type a comment, a replacement sentence, or both. A comment can be at most 800 characters and a replacement at most 400; the box stops you there and shows a count. You need one or the other. Pressing open on GitHub carries all of it into a prefilled issue form. Nothing is sent from this page; you see the issue before you submit it.
Saying who you are
The form has two optional fields: About you (up to 200 characters) and Source (up to 300). They are recommended, not required. Say who you are and link something I can check, such as a homepage, Google Scholar, DBLP or ORCID. If you are correcting a claim, give the paper or DOI that supports the correction. Suggestions that say who they are from get read first.
I cannot verify what you write there, so a published note shows it labelled
self-described. Only https links become links. Anything that starts with
javascript:, data: or vbscript: is refused.
What happens after you submit
A GitHub Action reads the issue and tries to find your sentence in the source file. It looks three times, from strictest to loosest: first for the sentence exactly as you selected it, then ignoring differences in whitespace, then ignoring inline formatting such as emphasis and links. If it finds the sentence in exactly one place, it acts. If it finds it in several places, or nowhere at all, it never edits the source: writing to the wrong sentence is a worse outcome than declining. A rewrite in that case stays as the issue for a hand edit (see below), and a comment is still published as a note.
What it does depends on what you sent:
- If you suggested a replacement that can be applied, it opens a pull request that changes that one sentence and nothing else.
- If you only left a comment, it opens a pull request that adds your comment to this page’s notes file. Merging it publishes your comment as a margin note, highlighted against the sentence it refers to.
Either way I read it and merge it by hand. Nothing reaches this page automatically.
When a rewrite can’t be applied automatically
Some rewrites are not safe to apply by script, so the Action does not try. That
covers text that crosses formatting such as emphasis or a link, text that
contains maths, text it cannot find or finds in more than one place, a rewrite
that contains $, \ or {{, and a rewrite that would change a page’s markup
rather than just its text. No pull request is opened. Your suggestion
stays as the issue, it gets the needs-manual-edit label, and the Action
comments to say why. I then make the change by hand. Your wording is not lost.
The limits, stated plainly
You need a GitHub account. There is no way around that: creating a pull request requires an identity, and the alternatives all involve either a server holding a secret or you pasting an access token into a web page. Neither is something I want to run or ask of you.
Anchoring can fail. A sentence broken across a table cell, wrapped in a footnote, or carrying heavy inline markup may not be locatable in the source even though it reads cleanly here. When that happens the automation does not guess. A rewrite stays as the issue, with a comment saying why, and I apply it by hand. A comment is still published as a note, though the note may not be highlighted against the sentence.
Long selections are refused. The cap is 300 characters, roughly one sentence, because the longer the quoted passage the more likely it spans formatting that does not survive the round trip.
Why bother
Writing notes like these in public means being wrong in public. The useful version of that is a correction I can apply in one click, anchored to the exact sentence that is wrong, with the reasoning attached and the author credited. The less useful version is an email I read three weeks later.
If you find a mistake in the maths on any page of this site, that is exactly the case this was built for. Select the sentence and tell me.