On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 12:09 AM, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.comwrote:
On 29 July 2012 22:57, Nathan nawrich@gmail.com wrote:
Can your masters degree in mathematics point out where in Wikimedia's statement it said "all" or implied anything other than having met some of Portuguese Wikipedia's top contributors? Not sure what the big deal is.
The word "all" actually appeared in my email that Steven was replying to. He claimed that a majority of Portuguese Wikipedians being from Brazil contradicted my statement that not all (top) Portuguese Wikipedians are from Brazil. That was a straw man argument, due to "all" and "majority" not meaning the same thing.
Given that this is a mailing list read by hundreds of people, would it make sense to discuss this particular grammar and word choice issue on a Meta talk page, and concentrate on the bigger issues here on the mailing list, that might be of interest to those not involved in this discussion on semantics?
(On the other hand, I would like to take this opportunity to applaud everyone here; I think it is a unique achievement that our community reads every report with such a keen eye for any factual error or exaggeration. If the seemingly most interesting error we can find on the first day of perusing it is the unclear distinction between 'majority' and 'all' in it, then surely the people who put this together have done a splendid job. Still, I would prefer, if we spent our time discussing the substance, rather than the presentation.)
Best regards, Bence