It may not sound politically correct to say this, but we do have a problem on wiki with the standard of english used in some articles by people who do not speak english as a first language. While the contributors write serious and worthwhile articles, their limited knowledge of english can produce articles that require major rewriting to reach a usable standard.
While that is being done on a case by case basis, some articles can stay on wiki for ages before anyone notices, or can be found by people who are busy elsewhere and cannot immediately do a rewrite.
Take this example from [[Chronopia]]: ------------------ The city is the largest city in Ereb Altor. It is said to be ruled by an great time-mage, but noone has ever seen him. Below the Emperor there is a huge army of lesser time mages, odinary-but-still-extremly-powerful-mages and a huge and extremly powerful army of elite-highlanders with necrological weapons.
it is simply impossible to revolt against the Emperor, but that does not mean that there is no crimes commited in Chronopia. Despite the ultrahard goverment with all its time mages and undefeatable, enless legions of elite warriors there are LOTS of crimes comitted everywhere - The Emperor does not care for the people that live in his city, all he cares about is time itself. ------------------
Goatasaur has been doing a lot of work trying to turn this article into readable english but there are many other articles in a similar vein that are barely readable. The [[History of China]] has been disastrously written by one person who continually refuses to accept there is a problem and reverts attempts to revert the article to a readable version rather than one littered with dramatically flawed translations of chinese words into english. Quite a few of our computer programming pages have similar problems with poor english making it difficult even for the expert, let alone the lay person, to understand what the article is about.
Most of the contributors to these articles are genuine, sincere and doing their best, but they are far below acceptable standard in an english language encyclopædia and risk damaging wiki's credibility as a reliable source.
My suggested solution: A special page perhaps listed on the Recent Changes pages at the top, to which people when they find grammatically and linguistically challenged articles can add them. Users when they have the time can work through these, rewriting or rewording them. We could even leave a message as part of the welcome note to new users telling them that we recognise that not everyone who contributes to wiki may speak english as a first language and that, if they have any doubts about their own ability to write a clear article in english, or if they simply want it double-checked, they can add it to that list.
Pending a rewrite, a tag line could be added (similar to the 'contents is disputed' line already used) at the start of the article, indicating that this is a first draft and is being updated and edited to achieve a comprehendable form of english. That way, someone finding the article on a google search would not think its standard is reflective of wiki as a whole.
JT
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james duffy wrote:
Pending a rewrite, a tag line could be added (similar to the 'contents is disputed' line already used) at the start of the article, indicating that this is a first draft and is being updated and edited to achieve a comprehendable form of english. That way, someone finding the article on a google search would not think its standard is reflective of wiki as a whole.
The problem is that what is proper English can be very subjective, and that pretty much all of the pages on Wikipedia are considered to be drafts, subject to later revision. Google searches might reveal a poorly-written article, but it could also reveal one of those "YEAY JOSH IS GAY" pages. We should just keep our own standards up and hope that others realize that the nature of Wikipedia is that we'll have some Brilliant Prose, and some articles that are sub-Brilliant Prose.
--- james duffy jtdirl@hotmail.com wrote:
It may not sound politically correct to say this, but we do have a problem on wiki with the standard of english used in some articles by people who do not speak english as a first language. While the contributors write serious and worthwhile articles, their limited knowledge of english can produce articles that require major rewriting to reach a usable standard.
I knew I would read this one day or another
But, to be honest, it took longer than I thought it would.
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James-
My suggested solution: A special page perhaps listed on the Recent Changes pages at the top, to which people when they find grammatically and linguistically challenged articles can add them.
Why not just add the page(s) to [[Wikipedia:Pages needing attention]]?
I do agree that we have some users on en: whose every edit should be proofread by someone else. To effectively do so, you can simply use the contributions list for that user. To avoid duplicate work, you could say something like
"I copyedit [[User:Engrish]]'s changes"
to your user page and possibly other relevant pages.
Regards,
Erik
Erik-
To avoid duplicate work, you could say something like
"I copyedit [[User:Engrish]]'s changes"
to your user page and possibly other relevant pages.
There must be some cyberspace law about everyone's English ending up garbled in all discussions that criticize other people's English. This should of course be "add to", not "say to", since the Wikipedia speech interface is still in alpha.
Regards,
Erik
JTDirl wrote in part:
It may not sound politically correct to say this, but we do have a problem on wiki with the standard of english used in some articles by people who do not speak english as a first language. While the contributors write serious and worthwhile articles, their limited knowledge of english can produce articles that require major rewriting to reach a usable standard.
My suggested solution: A special page perhaps listed on the Recent Changes pages at the top, to which people when they find grammatically and linguistically challenged articles can add them. Users when they have the time can work through these, rewriting or rewording them. We could even leave a message as part of the welcome note to new users telling them that we recognise that not everyone who contributes to wiki may speak english as a first language and that, if they have any doubts about their own ability to write a clear article in english, or if they simply want it double-checked, they can add it to that list.
Pending a rewrite, a tag line could be added (similar to the 'contents is disputed' line already used) at the start of the article, indicating that this is a first draft and is being updated and edited to achieve a comprehendable form of english. That way, someone finding the article on a google search would not think its standard is reflective of wiki as a whole.
All of Wikipedia is already a draft that's being worked on, and not only because of the quality of the grammar and spelling (that's among the least of our worries!). Supposedly, this is mentioned on [[Main Page]] when we describe ourselves as a "project to create" in the present. If you don't think that that's enough (a reasonable position), then discussion of that could go on [[Talk:Main Page]] (or [[Wikipedia talk:Welcome, newcomers]] or wherever). However, I don't see bad English as an *especial* problem.
That said, you're certainly correct that it'd be nice to have a page where we can report bad English that needs to be corrected. I don't see why this needs to be a Specialpage, much less needs to be linked to from Recentchanges. Just create it in the [[Wikipedia:]] space, publicise it, and use it. Better yet, it already exists: [[Wikipedia:Votes for rewrite]]!
The problem with this page is that it's hardly been used since last year, so it needs to be cleaned out. Either that won't take long, or it will give people a good list of needy articles to start on. In any case, once you start using it, you'll have to publicise it to get others to both report problem pages and help fix them. Hopefully, this mailing list thread will start doing just that!
(I used to watch this page, but it fell too low on my list of priorities. I'll probably have more time for Wikipedia in July, however!)
-- Toby
It may not sound politically correct to say this, but we do have a
problem
on wiki with the standard of english used in some articles by people who
do
not speak english as a first language. While the contributors write
serious
and worthwhile articles, their limited knowledge of english can produce articles that require major rewriting to reach a usable standard.
I think this is nonsense. Proper English is a product of specialization. English is not the property of English speakers, but a lingua franca that everyone owns. Hence, its destined to become simplified - phonetic - scratch that - fonetic speling iz tha furst thing laikli tu hapen tu English - or it should. Someday soon.
All that registered - I dislike the tone of enforcing propriety. It smacks of elitism. The articles that Ive seen - written in funky English - are generally intelligible - and If I come across one, Ill usually take time to edit it.
If someone wants to make it their perorgative to take this on as a task - and to enlist other in it, then so be it. Bat formalaizing som kaind ov Englo-defensyzm is the most tryvial of persuts. If that was the spirit in which this was raised.
-S
Stevertigo wrote in part:
Proper English is a product of specialization. English is not the property of English speakers, but a lingua franca that everyone owns. Hence, its destined to become simplified - phonetic - scratch that - fonetic speling iz tha furst thing laikli tu hapen tu English - or it should. Someday soon.
I disagree. A spelling reform is unlikely to be accepted by teachers without some authority's recognising it officially. Since there is no plausible such authority now (unlike in the days of Noah Webster for Americans), standard English spelling will continue to be taught, and thus it will continue to be used.
All that registered - I dislike the tone of enforcing propriety. It smacks of elitism. The articles that Ive seen - written in funky English - are generally intelligible - and If I come across one, Ill usually take time to edit it.
And so JTDirl will edit it as well. He'll even seek them out! ^_^
If someone wants to make it their perorgative to take this on as a task - and to enlist other in it, then so be it. Bat formalaizing som kaind ov Englo-defensyzm is the most tryvial of persuts. If that was the spirit in which this was raised.
I'm not sure that it was -- RK may have some points along that line -- but let JTDirl seek out articles whose grammar and spelling to correct. You don't need to do it as well, and he doesn't have to involve us; now that he's publicised his efforts, we can all do our own thing.
-- Toby
I think that a spelling reform, if ever created, has the potential to come up slowly like open source software.
Toby Bartels toby+wikipedia@math.ucr.edu wrote:I disagree. A spelling reform is unlikely to be accepted by teachers without some authority's recognising it officially. Since there is no plausible such authority now (unlike in the days of Noah Webster for Americans), standard English spelling will continue to be taught, and thus it will continue to be used.
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I don't think it is in any way elitist. Everyone who writes English writes that way. But I don't think we will ever get a true phonetic spelling.
Stevertigo stevertigo@attbi.com wrote:I think this is nonsense. Proper English is a product of specialization. English is not the property of English speakers, but a lingua franca that everyone owns. Hence, its destined to become simplified - phonetic - scratch that - fonetic speling iz tha furst thing laikli tu hapen tu English - or it should. Someday soon.
All that registered - I dislike the tone of enforcing propriety. It smacks of elitism. The articles that Ive seen - written in funky English - are generally intelligible - and If I come across one, Ill usually take time to edit it.
If someone wants to make it their perorgative to take this on as a task - and to enlist other in it, then so be it. Bat formalaizing som kaind ov Englo-defensyzm is the most tryvial of persuts. If that was the spirit in which this was raised.
-S
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It might be a good idea, when adding such pages to the [[Votes for rewrite]] page, to put in an explicit "needs copyediting" note. That's a different task--more congenial for some Wikipedians, less for others--than, say, NPOVing.
James Duffy wrote:
While the contributors write serious and worthwhile articles, their limited knowledge of english can produce articles that require major rewriting to reach a usable standard.
Once upon a time, when I thought I was going to be the next Great American Novelist, I took a lot of creative writing classes. One thing every teacher held was that good writing came from constant re-writing.
Having said that, I expect almost every article on Wikipedia, whether it was written by a native English speaker or not, could be improved by rewriting. After all, that is the Wiki way.
[snip]
The [[History of China]] has been disastrously written by one person who continually refuses to accept there is a problem and reverts attempts to revert the article to a readable version rather than one littered with dramatically flawed translations of chinese words into english.
What I see in this instance isn't a case of a non-native English speaker having a problem expressing her/his ideas, but someone who doesn't want to play nice on Wikipedia. Maybe someone not closely involved in the situation could intervene & try to figure out if said person is just being bull-headed, or actually has a concern that she/he needs help expressing to the rest of us Wikipedians.
We could even leave a message as part of the welcome note to new users telling them that we recognise that not everyone who contributes to wiki may speak english as a first language and that, if they have any doubts about their own ability to write a clear article in english, or if they simply want it double-checked, they can add it to that list.
Regardless of the outcome of this warming discussion, I think this would be a wonderful idea. I know I would be more likely to help out on the German & Latin Wikis if I knew someone would be willing to help me with my command of those languages.
Geoff