JTDirl wrote:
Stevertigo wrote:
- Jay's announcement framed essentially "Im in an Edit war with a Chinese
guy who cant write English."
Now hold on a minute. That is a complete and utter lie and fabrication, Sv.
I don't know the particulars of the page in question (I can't find its name!), but I agree that this isn't what you said.
But that had /nothing/ to do with my letter on this list. That came about because six times in the last eight weeks I came across articles on wiki that were unreadable because of poor english. When I mentioned this to others, other wiki users contacted me on AIM and ICQ (on which I have been on a lot lately) to tell me 'wait until you see this one!', they producing other articles, one in particular a blurred mix of Swedish and English that users of neither language could make neither head nor tail of.
Ah! this explains why you made a bigger deal out of this than a lot of respondents (including me) seemed to think was warranted. ^_^
But in any case, we all seem to agree that improving the English is good (whether or not that amounts to merely standardising the dialect). Have you created a [[Wikipedia:]] page yet to report pages whose English needs to improve? (You haven't been using [[Wikipedia:Votes for rewrite]], but perhaps this isn't exactly what you want.) If you do please let us know, because even if you and Steve (and RK, and I, and LittleDan ...) continue to disagree about the theoretical value of unusual dialects and ESL (and misunderstanding each other as we do so) ... meanwhile people can start making corrections!
As "lets make a point of singling out foreigners who cant write English like the Queen does." A very hasty and unthought response - that was perhaps better expressed as a question of intent. Apo.... to James, and even Robert.
That is /not/ what I was doing.
In the interests of peace, let me point out that you misunderstood SV. Just before this was something like «I interpreted JTDirl as ...». As he says above, this was hasty and unthought of him, so he's giving you an "apo...." -- which seems to be as much of "apology" as Steve is capable of writing. ^_^
It is a /professional/ encyclopædia that is intended to be taken seriously,
To be pedantic, it's /not/ professional, but as I don't take "professional" to be a compliment anyway, I'll interpret this as you intended. As a serious encyclopædia, and in English, it needs to use language that will be understood by a wide variety of English users, and thus needs to stick to fairly standard usages. There still isn't anybody that's disagreed with that, so despite any other misinterpretations, what we actually do on Wikipedia should be in accord.
-- Toby