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One of my questions has recently been edited and I’d like to know why “is gone” is used was changed to “is gone” used, in fact people use that thing rather than is gone uses something, i.e. this gotta be the passive voice, doesn’t it?

And why was tenses changed to constructions? Is tense unacceptable there?

Here is URL to the revision: https://ell.stackexchange.com/posts/159058/revisions

I just want to know why as I’m confused.

Thank you in advance.

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    Hi - I've moved this over to Meta, because I think we need to discuss as a community why such an extensive rewriting of your question was done. As the author of the question, you may roll back your post to a previous revision if you don't agree with a particular edit. Just open the revisions and click the "rollback" link on the revision you want.
    – ColleenV
    Mar 13, 2018 at 13:34
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    Here is the section in the help center on Why can people edit my posts? How does editing work?. The Is it really pointless to edit questions to use correct English on ELL? discussion is related.
    – ColleenV
    Mar 13, 2018 at 13:41
  • Got it, thank you! I didn’t know I can rollback a revision. But I still wanna know if there are mistakes in the specified question.
    – user70960
    Mar 13, 2018 at 13:42
  • One of my recent questions was also unnecessarily and wrongly edited. As I was about to roll it back, ColleenV beat me to it. On the other hand, as someone with less than 2k reputation, sometimes I put in a lot of thought into editing others' posts while being painstaking in giving constructive and helpful edits, just to wait a long time to get it approved--and potentially rejected--by more senior users. It's kind of frustrating. I stopped editing posts after a while.
    – Eddie Kal
    Mar 13, 2018 at 13:44
  • Well my opinion is that those edits went too far and changed some things that were "style" preferences instead of actually making the question more clear. We should discuss as a community whether or not this might have been too much editing.
    – ColleenV
    Mar 13, 2018 at 13:44
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    "Please DO NOT edit this question, even though it contains mistakes. Thank you!" may I know the reason? Stack Exchange is a community-moderated site, and in general, the community edits the posts to improve them. It's (almost always) never to mock someone's language skill.
    – Andrew T.
    Mar 19, 2018 at 14:30
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    @EddieKal Because this is site for English Learners it's usually helpful to see the mistakes made by the original poster in order to judge relative English ability. It may seem trivial to correct basic things like spelling, capitalization, or punctuation, but in my opinion it is of little use for a student to concentrate on some esoteric point of grammar if they're going to ignore these fundamentals -- and while I might answer the question anyway, I often include a side note urging them to focus on these basics, if they want their writing to be taken seriously.
    – Andrew
    Mar 20, 2018 at 19:58
  • @EddieKal when I edit a question it's usually to first improve formatting, to make the question easier to understand. After I might clean up some minor spelling or other grammatical errors when I think the student would have normally caught them, and if I think they are a distraction from the main question.
    – Andrew
    Mar 20, 2018 at 20:01
  • @Andrew I understand and agree with your point. What I was trying to say is as much as the reputation system helps implement and maintain a positive culture for learning and being serious in asking and answering, its drawbacks manifest in the editing privilege. There are countless times where advanced users put in edits that users will lower rep would never get approved for. Many times I see edits by users with 2k+ rep that are minor corrections, and I know fosho that if I attempted the same edits there are bound to be comments along the lines of "trivial" or "doesn't make it easier to read."
    – Eddie Kal
    Mar 22, 2018 at 15:51
  • @Andrew For a low rep user like me, I have to strike a precarious balance between not correcting grammatical errors to reflect OP's English proficiency and making the post easier to read. Previous discussions on this topic on Meta (links omitted in the interest of time) have been helpful in providing a guideline for new users like me, but it's dispiriting on the other hand that some high rep users don't have to and factually don't follow guidelines.
    – Eddie Kal
    Mar 22, 2018 at 15:57
  • @EddieKal Keep in mind that what is "OK" and "not OK" can change over time as the community changes. I think this edit went a tiny bit too far by changing something that should have been explained instead, and the OP was a little bit put off by it, which is why I wanted us to talk about it on meta. Those who have earned the privilege to make edits without peer review are still answerable to the community. The vast majority of edits made on ELL are intended to be helpful, so we just need to talk to each other when we think an edit maybe went too far.
    – ColleenV
    Mar 23, 2018 at 0:13

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It's interesting how you omitted the most important part of the edited phrase:

I often see "is gone" is used in past or future tenses. Is that right?

That was changed to:

I often see "is gone" used in past and future constructions.

The way the sentence is worded, you do not need the second is. (I don't think it's ungrammatical, but you certainly don't need it.)

I think someone might have thought that:

"is gone" is used

might read a little awkwardly (because of the two instances of the word "is"), and offered to make an improvement.

As for why tenses was changed to constructions, that might have been because you referenced the future tense. Check out what this blogger has to say about that:

For generations, English teachers have drilled their students in the notion that English grammar has three verb tenses: past, present and future. Rubbish! English has two tenses, past and present.

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    It might have been nice if the revision comment (or a comment under the question) had explained why "tenses" was being changed to "constructions" instead of just saying "minor fixes". Correcting the mistake of calling "future" a tense could have been addressed in an answer instead of an edit, where the reasoning could be explained (especially since even native speakers might have been taught future as a tense).
    – ColleenV
    Mar 13, 2018 at 22:12

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