[WikiEN-l] Re: Wikipedia in the news

[Sheldon Rampton]

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."

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.

--Sheldon Rampton