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 am not in an edit war with a Chinese guy who can't write english. In the last couple of days, on request, and having then contacted other contributors to a page and sought their advice, I reverted that page that had been rewritten by someone whose ethnic origin I am unaware of because there was 100% agreement that
1) the version he wrote was seriously inaccurate; 2) his translations of words from chinese to english were universally regarded as seriously flawed (eg, translating 'emperor' as 'lord'); 3) the user had constantly removed contributions from others.
/All/ the contributors to that page argued that the particular user's english language difficulties contributed to the utter mess the page was in, but the problem was not just the linguistic mess but also the inaccurate translation and especially the systematic editing out of everyone else's contribution, and his revertion of a community edited text pulled together by Mav to his own unique and inaccurate one. I played no part in the discussion of the detail of the page, merely acted as an outsider who after consultation and with universal agreement reverted back to the Mav text, with the suggestion that everyone start again from there, along with a suggestion to that user on his talk page that he listen to other contributors on the page in question and stop deleting everyone else's contribution.
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.
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. I was making a concrete suggestion as to how we could /help/ users who know a lot of interesting information but who because of poor english linguistic skills could not express it. Some of the articles had been there for weeks unnoticed; one three months. Neither I nor the other people who contacted me had the time to fix all the articles. My suggestion, and I repeat it, was to create a special page to which articles in need of linguistic and grammatical proofing could be placed. It was to /help/ users with language problems, not to single out people for mockery.
BTW this is an /encyclopædia/, which means its articles /have/ to achieve minimum standards of accuracy, not just in content but in expression. This is not some sort of amateur scribble-box where any old rubbish will do. It is a /professional/ encyclopædia that is intended to be taken seriously, not as some semi-literate joke. A professional /english/ encyclopædia requires basic standards in terms of english. All I was suggested was that we apply basic professional standards to this project. Semi-literature articles, no matter how much quality information they contain, do no justice to the people who contribute them and the work they put into them, and risks turning a supposed professional encyclopædia into a laughing stock. I made my suggestion based on the professional needs of a professional encylopædia, and resent having my motivation twisted and misrepresented in the manner done by Stevertigo.
JT
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All I was suggested was that we apply basic professional standards to this project. Semi-literature articles, no matter how much quality information they contain, do no justice to the people who contribute them and the work they put into them, and risks turning a supposed professional encyclopædia into a laughing stock. I made my suggestion based on the professional needs of a professional
encylopædia,
and resent having my motivation twisted and misrepresented in the manner done by Stevertigo.
JT
Well, I already twice made mention that I had misunderstood you - so you dont need to spike the ball on that. Secondly - this is not a professional encyclopedia.
The assumption that there are standards beyond what reasonable people could produce is fine for an lofty pie-in-the-sky ideology - but what counts is what gets done. I'd also point out that you *might want to visit the Nupedia for an hour and read all of their articles. The whole idea there was the imposition of "academic standards" - and look where its got them.... Nuf Said. :)
-SM
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