Tim wrote:
Concluding factual inaccuracy or unreliability from mere grammatical imperfection is fallacious and prejudicial.
Well, it tells you *something* about the quality of the article. I'm pretty sure that the Encyclopedia Britannica would be concerned if one in five of its articles was riddled with grammatical errors.
Mark Richards wrote:
I don't think so, although, of course, the two sometimes do go together. We have some contributors for whom English is not their first language. Grammar and spelling are an issue for them where facts are not.
Someone who can't communicate well in English is more likely to produce inadvertent errors of fact. As one rather humorous example of this, years ago I knew a guy from Mexico with a thick accent who declared that he wanted "world piss." It took a few minutes before everyone figured out that he was actually saying he wanted "world peace."
In the stub articles I mentioned, the grammatical flaws in one were numerous but insufficient to prevent me from discerning the author's intent. In the other article, one of the sentences was so poorly written that I couldn't figure out the writer's meaning at all. When that's the case, I think poor grammar and spelling do indeed call "the facts" of the article into question.
The bottom line, though, is that an encyclopedia article shouldn't have errors of grammar *or* fact. I know some respected university scholars who have problems with spelling and grammar, but before their writings get published, someone fixes those problems. An article in the Wikipedia that has problems with spelling and grammar clearly hasn't been through the level of review that goes into a student's term paper, let alone an article for the Encyclopedia Britannica.
I'm not saying that contributors should be banned from Wikipedia if they have trouble with spelling and grammar. All I'm saying is that Wikipedia hasn't yet figured out how to match Encyclopedia Britannica with respect to the quality of its articles. Some individual articles in the Wikipedia are undoubtedly superior in quality to corresponding articles in the Britannica, but with the Britannica, *every article* comes virtually guaranteed to be accurate and well-researched -- and also correct in terms of spelling and grammar. That degree of confidence doesn't exist across the board for the Wikipedia.
--Sheldon Rampton