Interesting: whoever edited that article miscorrected "cobble" to the likely more familiar but incorrect "cobblestone".
I've seen a huge increase in such errors over the past decade, both in terms and tense. I don't know how to explain it but it is discouraging. Sometimes the errors are quite confusing until you realize what happened; this one is quite minor.
Hmm. What do you see as being incorrect here, and what's your justification?
My 1982 paper dictionary agrees with Wiki sources that you can use the word "cobble" either as a short form of cobblestone, or as a verb for paving streets with such stones.
You can also use a different word, written the same, "cobble" for a now largely obsolete trade and some related things but this document clearly has nothing to do with those so that can't be what you mean.
In Minecraft "cobble" is certainly understood to be short for cobblestone. A "cobblegen" is either an arrangement of materials (lava, water, something heat resistant) so as to cause the game to make and replace cobblestone blocks when you mine them out, so as to obtain unlimited amounts of this building material, or in modded Minecraft it's a more compact machine which makes this material, perhaps in very large quantities indeed, and maybe related materials like sand.
Cobble (the noun) is a term for a small stone, and in particular a geological term these days such as would be picked up and used for the purpose described. It is retroglossed in an abbreviation for the cobblestone paving in an urban setting, but this article references the more basic term. An abbreviated dictionary like you’d have in your house might drop the more basic use but a full dictionary like the OED would not.
Note that in the US “cobblestone streets” is often used to describe what are not even cobbles but setts (square trimmed blocks) which are still found in some older US cities like Boston or Manhattan and European cities like London or Paris.
I think the traditional difference between cobbles and a cobblestone something is the same distinction as pebbles vs a pebbledash something.
A pebble is of course a small rock. Pebbledash describes the decorative finish — which is made of pebbles and other material like cement or concrete — on some physical thing. You would say “my new house has pebbledash walls” or just by itself as a shorthand where it implies an unsaid word: “the pebbledash [finish] on this property gives it a delightfully vintage feel!”
So historically speaking, cobblestone describes a type of surface finish made of cobbles, and the two words have been quite separate.
Aerial is a fun one too. An antenna has components such as bolts and fixtures and junction boxes, but most prominently it will have a wire or other metal object that is thrust into the air: that is to to say a component that is aerial, or the aerial component.
Once I learned that distinction, saying “aerial” instead of the more precise “antenna” seems very quaint, like saying “wireless” for radio or “pianoforte” for piano. It’s not exactly the same as cobbles being used in cobblestone finishes, but they are interesting examples of nouns and adjectives merging into each other.
In this case I think cobblestone is correct? They tested natural stones (Merriam Webster: cobblestone - "a naturally rounded stone larger than a pebble and smaller than a boulder") vs the hand made stones for this particular task.
"cobble" is more frequently a verb in my experience, to "cobble something together". The dictionary does say cobblestone as a noun = cobble as a noun though. So although they seem to be equivalent I think the original objection is that in some dialects / regions it probably just flows better in a sentence? Probably another subtle british vs american english thing. (I'm american) -- edit My brit friend says it's a stone until it's in a road, then it's a cobblestone.
Cobble is what a geologist would call a medium-sized water-rounded piece of rock if it was free or embedded naturally in a matrix (like glacial till or sediment). They’d only call it a cobblestone in the context of like, paving a street or driveway or something.
However, I don’t think that makes it wrong for people / other disciplines to call it a cobblestone.
I've seen a huge increase in such errors over the past decade, both in terms and tense. I don't know how to explain it but it is discouraging. Sometimes the errors are quite confusing until you realize what happened; this one is quite minor.