[Foundation-l] [WikiEN-l] IPA issues

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Wed, Apr 21, 2010 at 6:19 PM, Gerard Meijssen
<gerard.meijssen at gmail.com>wrote:

> Hoi,
> A lot of so called IPA out there is created by Americans for Americans and
> expect that certain sounds can be expressed by the ordinary Latin
> characters. The consequence is that such polution makes the whole of IPA
> hard to use.
>
> Consequently I argue that in order to save the usefulness of IPA at all we
> HAVE to be academically correct in how it is expressed.
> Thanks,
>     GerardM


I disagree to an extent of the first part of you post, and agree with the
second part.  I actually answered an email about this situation, the ticket
can be found here if you have access <
https://ticket.wikimedia.org/otrs/index.pl?Action=AgentTicketZoom&TicketID=4739987&ArticleID=5383349&ZoomExpand=0#5383349
>

The correspondent wasn't very, how shall I say, nice in the initial email or
the reply to my response, but here's what I wrote:


"The Wikimedia Foundation projects, which include the English Wikipedia, are
aimed
at and have a broad global appeal.  In fact, many of our contributors are
not
native speakers of English but use the project as a way to enhance their
knowledge
of English and providing translations.  We actively encourage that.

The "gobbledygook" is the International Phonetic Alphabet, contrived and
maintained by an international collection of linguists over a hundred years
ago as
a method, based on Latin characters, to phonetically pronounce even
unfamiliar
languages.  This method of adoption across our projects allow people from
around
the globe to understand a pronunciation no matter their language.

We are sorry that this is inconvenient for you and diminishes your interest
in
Wikipedia.  We do hope that you can learn the IPA from our language guides
available- it's actually pretty quick to catch on to and is a common sense
approach to phonetics.

You can find more information about the IPA here
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International Phonetic Alphabet> which
includes
external links to educational tools in learning the system!

Again, we do appreciate your concerns about the usability of Wikipedia."
-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan