On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 10:41:18 -0500, Sheldon Rampton sheldon.rampton@verizon.net wrote:
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."
I do not agree with that reasoning at all, some people do not learn english fluently as most western europeans do and it isnt a part of their daily culture, just because some chinese scholar has some trauble with grammar doesnt mean he doesnt have his facts straight. Do not assume that lack of fluency in a language indicates some sort of general "thinking problems". In fact, there are lots of people on the english, and probably other wikipedias who are far from fluent but have a much better knowlage of some issues than some people who are fluent in the language, for example some people from arabs countries which would be more known to middle-eastern issues than the general population of western europe and the states.
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.
Thing is, it's a totally unrealistic goal to reach some Britannica "standard", the two encyclopedias have a _totally_ different operating model, they have their flaws and we have ours, but we also have great strengths that they do not have. Rather than always try to be like Britannica an exploration of how we can levage our atvantages would be in order.
--Sheldon Rampton
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