Formatting in quoted material

Question

An answer I posted ages ago was recently edited, and so I took a quick peek to see what had changed. The alteration was to capitalisation of 'MiKTeX', etc., which would normally be fine. However, the relevant parts were quotations, where I was pointed to what someone else had said (in comments). As such, I'd kept exactly the format they had originally used.

My question is therefore what the 'correct' approach is when quoting: do we stick with the original even if it's non-standard, or do we always standardise formatting (and presumably spelling)? Both approaches seem reasonable to me, so I'd like to see what the overall feeling is.

Note: If I'd been quoting another question or answer, it would be OK to tidy up the source and so the quote too. However, non-mods can't edit comments, so the situation seems a little different.

Answer 1

Obvious typos can and should be corrected when quoting, at least when not doing philology, which we aren't. I agree with @AlanMunn that we're in an informal environment, so there's no point in propagating a typing error or a nonconformity with common usage in the site, such as peculiar capitalizations of program names or way of writing package names (I'm not referring to another well known question about capitalization).

When we are faced with something that's not a typo, the question is more subtle. However one should take into account that comments are different from answers and many times it has happened to me that I realized a comment was not in the best form. In some cases I removed and rewrote it (the time limit for edit doesn't always allow for corrections post facto) if the problem is not simply a typo; but I'm afraid that some of them are imperfect (or even blatantly wrong) without any possibility to do something: if nobody draws attention to the error, they remain there unchanged, as it's impossible to check all our comments spread over hundreds of threads.

Quote the comment literally, if you want, or quote it indirectly: "In @XYZ's comment it is suggested to do in this way" and be polite in correcting the mistake.

Answer 2

Simple. We're taking the academic/legal approach here: Don't change quotes, that's why they're quotes. If you want to make it clear that some obscure spelling isn't your fault, but was in the source, add a [sic]:

I love lAtEx [sic], it's really awesome!

If somebody else changes a quote, make a rollback.

If you can change the source (e.g. because it's on tex.sx) and if it is an acceptable edit, you may of course change the source first.

Then again, if you're referencing a comment (or something else uneditable) that's misspelled and the typos are really bugging you, just paraphrase the comment instead of quoting it, or put it in reported speech: He is indeed very fond of LaTeX. / She said she really loved LaTeX, and that it was really awesome.

Edit:

So far I only addressed spelling. As for formatting, I'd say there are two approaches:

1. Get rid of all formatting and display the quote as plain text.
2. Keep the formatting as exactly as technically possible.

If you want to emphasize some part of the quote through formatting for purposes of your own, you can do that, but make sure to add a (emphasis by doncherry) at the end.