I encounter a number of questions where the question starts with a disclaimer asking to be excused for their poor English etc..This is actually redundant because the post will anyway be reviewed and the mistakes corrected.
My dilemma is that while reviewing such posts, should I delete that disclaimer as it is anyway being reviewed or should I leave it alone. From SO's perspective, it doesn't make any sense to retain such disclaimers as the question has been reviewed and polished.
If you are going to make an edit to the post, clean up the English, make it more readable.
At that point, remove the disclaimer as it no longer adds anything useful.
Arguably it never did, except make people a bit more tolerant for spelling and grammar issues, but if those are fixed, it is no longer relevant.
Removing disclaimers, salutations, "thank you in advance", signatures, and similar should all be done as part of an edit to tidy up the post. They're not substantive content changes, they're fluff-removal, and very much to be encouraged as part of a comprehensive clean-up edit.
The caveat about changing content applies specifically to deterring people from changing the fundamental meaning of the question: edits should clarify what the question was all along, making it easier for others to understand and to answer. Whereas if an edit were to change what a right answer would actually be, then that would be an undesirable content edit.
There is one type of disclaimer that should be kept in: any disclosure by the OP of a connection to something they are linking to: so if they are linking to their own blog, say, and have said so, then that disclosure should not be removed.
I can understand, and agree, that "removing" such noise type of phrases about "I'm not native English ..." is indeed a good approach to cleanup questions, etc. However, how about adding these SE features:
Within the user profile, provide an optional field where people can specify "the language they learned on their mother's knee" (or any variation of that), if left blank then English is assumed. Followed by let's say 7 extra optional fields in which they can specify their 2nd, 3rd, 4th, etc language (in my case 4 such field would be sufficient).
Within the rectangle to display a user's reputation, image, optional moderator diamond, etc, also include a 2 char indicator for the 1st, 2nd, 3rd language, followed with some "..." indication if the 4th or more language indicator was completed also.
Using this approach, you'd achieve multiple benefits:
Moreover, this might be interesting for SE as a company also:
Makes sense?
