[WikiEN-l] Babel template en-5

[Stan Shebs]

Timwi wrote:

>>It's simply that it's extremely rare for a non-native speaker to have
>>absorbed all the culture and reflexes that inform a native speaker.
>>[...] even less-educated native speakers can pick out the foreigners,
>>even though they might not be able to articulate what cues they are
>>noticing.
>>
>
>This might apply to writing novels or translating films or something, 
>but surely not to Wikipedia.
>
I don't have any good real-life examples to put up here, but likely
cases would include judgement whether a particular phrasing is neutral
or slanted, or what is the most common term for something. For
instance, native US speakers have a finely-tuned sense of when the
"N-word" is offensive or not (as our article explains in some depth),
and considering the number of our articles that use the word, it
would be good to have editors that know how to use it appropriately
in articles. I suspect that even an average high-school senior from
Arkansas would get it right more often than an anthropologist from
Sweden.

Stan