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I've seen a number of edits for style and formatting (for example here and here) that don't seem to add anything to the post or make things any more correct. In many cases these are changes that amount to personal preference, since as far as I'm aware we don't have any kind of a style guide. I have a couple of questions, then:

  1. Is there a style guide, and if so, where is it?
  2. If not, can we either: a) stop making minor edits for style or b) come to a consensus and create a style guide?

Some of the kinds of changes I'm referring to:

  • Enclosing file extensions on code tags: To me, this should not be done, because code tags are for code, and the name of a file extension is not code.
  • Italics for—well, everything it seems. Program names, electronic devices, HTML tag names.
  • epub vs ePub vs .epub and other variants, with equivalent versions for mobi.
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    Those edits were me (should have just corrected the grammar). I thought while I was in there I would conform to what I thought was what we agreed on (we had somewhat discussed this a while back meta.ebooks.stackexchange.com/questions/135/…). Looking at it now, it looks like we didn't actually come to a general consensus and the highest voted answer is not what I remembered (i.e. those edits I made were not formatted correctly).
    – Jason Down Mod
    Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 2:36
  • If we can agree on a style-guide, I'm all for it.
    – Jason Down Mod
    Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 2:37
  • Personally, I'm more for just not making edits for style and formatting unless there are definite readability issues. My worry is that excessive edits of that sort will seem nit-picky and turn people away from this site.
    – Tom
    Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 2:40
  • I would agree with that. It is rarely something I do. I blame those last edits on boredom.
    – Jason Down Mod
    Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 3:09
  • I know what you mean! It's hard to resist, too, when you're already in there
    – Tom
    Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 3:10
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    That first one badly needed an edit. It was one, long, run-on sentence, not to mention full of grammatical problems. The second was a closer call, but I personally think those were good (or at least defensible) edits: we do want to try to standardize file types.
    – elixenide Mod
    Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 4:15
  • If with code tags you mean pre-formatted text, this is generally used for file- and directory names, full paths and parts thereof as well. Althoug I would never use ".PDFs" as my filesystem is case sensitive and the lowercase extension far more common. Either "PDFs" (refer to the format) or ".pdfs" (refer to common extension) would be an improvement.
    – Anthon
    Commented Feb 7, 2015 at 8:28

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I would differentiate between those two edits. While the first cleaned up the wording and sentence length of the question, it is in my opinion an absolute useful edit. If a question is already touched for such reasons, I think it is perfectly reasonable to clean up the style to.

But regarding the second edit, I don't see the bare necessity for that edit. (On the other hand I can understand your boredom mentioned in the comments above - But there migth be enough other stuff left to do around here: answering some unanswered questions, writing tag wikis, cleaning up tags etc. ;)

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    But there migth be enough other stuff left to do around here: answering some unanswered questions, writing tag wikis, cleaning up tags etc. Touche :)
    – Jason Down Mod
    Commented Feb 5, 2015 at 15:28

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