I've sent a message to Trang about this. Hopefully, she'll let us know soon if she allows reasonable changes like (presumably) this one.

Unadopting. Anyone who wants to change or delete it can do so.

If you were referring to the rule #5, "Do not edit a sentence if, by itself, it is correct", I don't think this rule should be applied so strictly here in situations where:

1) The modification doesn't change the meaning.
2) The sentence was an orphan sentence.

Rule #5 was mostly meant for people who aren't familiar with the graph structure, and would want to edit a sentence, by completely changing its meaning, instead of unlinking it. But in my opinion it's fine to adopt a sentence and edit it without changing the meaning, as long as the sentence didn't belong to anyone.
If the sentence belonged to someone, then it means that someone cares (or may care) about the linguistic value that the sentence carries, so you can't just change it without discussing about it with the owner and/or the rest of the community. But when it comes to orphan sentence, things are different.

If you are rather the conservative type, then you can adopt it and add the necessary tags (archaic, obsolete, whatever).
If you are a bit less conservative, you can post a comment to suggest a modification, add a "@change" or "@needs native check" tag, and wait a bit if anybody reacts to it. Then adopt it and edit it, if no one reacted.
And if you're not conservative at all, you can just adopt an orphan sentence and make it sound more natural to you, even though the initial sentence could be correct in some context, but is rarely used nowadays.
Whichever way you choose, it's fine.

The only risk when you modify a sentence of "low usage" into a sentence of "high usage", is that people who translated the sentence may have made a big effort to also mirror this rarity of usage in their translation, and you would kind of destroy that effort by changing the sentence. But it's quite unlikely that a sentence that required an important translation effort would remain orphan.

Yes, it's okay for anyone to change an orphan sentence in order to improve it.
There's just one tricky thing with Japanese sentences: if there were Japanese indices attached to the sentence, then they will need to be updated as well.

@Trang
Does it mean that we won't be blamed anymore for changing an orphan sentence that was not wrong? Even if someone finds the original one perfectly good?

Anyway, I think the guidelines on the wiki needs to be revised if you want to change the current situation. Without clearly stated guidelines, people would keep criticizing us when we do anything drastic.

@tommy_san, yes it means that you won't get blamed for changing an orphan sentence that was not wrong but didn't sound very natural. If anyone blamed you for it, I would be interested to know the reasons.

Ideally, there should be no orphan sentence at all. Even if I'm rather conservative myself when it comes to editing or deleting sentence, I think it's better to have an adopted sentence that has been improved, rather than an orphan sentence that may remain forever orphan + an improved version of that sentence.

If anyone really has a problem with orphan sentences being edited even if the initial version was not completely wrong, then I wouldn't mind assigning them all the orphan sentence, and they will then be able to decide if those sentences should be edited or not.

> I think it's better to have an adopted sentence that has been improved, rather than an orphan sentence that may remain forever orphan + an improved version of that sentence.

OK. I see your point.

I need to think for a while to decide how I deal with orphan sentences.

The problem is that we can't really turn "bad" sentences into "good" ones. What we can do is only to turn sentence that we wouldn't use into ones that we'd use. By doing so, we might remove a sentence that nobody would say, but we might also remove a sentence that a lot of people use.

If there are some native speakers of English who use "much the same", for example, I'd prefer to wait for them to adopt the sentences using it. Of course you could say that they can add new sentences using it anytime, but it could take years before it occur to them to do so.

I'm sure that if I changed all the Japanese sentences as you suggest, many expressions and grammatical patterns that some people actually use would be lost from the corpus. I'm not sure if that's a good thing.

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