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Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

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Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#171

Post by Ekaros »

joecool1029 wrote: post #26

Wikipedia often purges things with no rhyme or reason. See the vandalism of the Sony Exmor article because one of one editor deciding arbitrarily that it needed a good content cleansing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exmor https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Exmor (Original list) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Elk_Salmon/List_of_Sony_E...

I hope they start to kill lists in general. Like for example listing details of countries. Clearly those are not encyclopaedic and do not belong into Wikipedia by their standards...

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#172

Post by rvnx »

jasomill wrote: post #156
redmorphium wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"My itinerary is comprised of four hotel stays." ---> "My itinerary is comPOSED of four hotel stays." or "My itinerary coNSISTS of four hotel stays." Much better.

"I'll be staying at four hotels."

This. Simple, direct, and much more intelligible.

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#173

Post by rvnx »

George83728 wrote: post #142
housemusicfan wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No one seems to understand Wikipedia operates as a system of lords and serfs, where a powerful few pull this crap all the time . Most relevant example I can think of is when Mac OS X was renamed and stylized to "macOS" someone went and systematically did a find and replace all instances of "OS X" to macOS even in situations where it made absolutely no sense as the article was explicitly talking about prior versions.…

I'll never understand people who are sticklers for 'correctly' using some corporation's trademarks. "Can you xerox a copy of that for me?" "You know, our photocopy machine is made by HP and the Xerox corporation doesn't like when people genericize their..." Why the hell do they care on the corporations behalf? If you aren't being paid by that corp to care.. then why?

"Can you xerox for me, or can you IBM my software" ?

Never heard of such, I understand why they get upset if someone sprinkle the sentences with ads.

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#174

Post by rvnx »

rossriley wrote: post #159
mihaic wrote: post #55

It was all dumb pedantry until the point where the editor talked about removing instances of "comprised of" inside quotes. Sure, you can add an elipsis if you want trim a quote, but altering words in a quote is equivalent to lying, even if a mild form of lying.

The correct way to do this in most style guides is to add (sic) to the quote which means you're aware of the incorrect use but are quoting directly.

It's not incorrect use.

If you add "sic" you try to make the speaker sound like an idiot and that you have the right way.

Plus, "sic" pushes the attention of the reader toward this specific word, when it may be a waste of time of the reader.

The personal phobia for certain words (of the writer) shouldn't impact the reader.

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#175

Post by zowie_vd »

v-erne wrote: post #147
cookiengineer wrote: post #131

This leaves a bad taste in my mouth because of our history in Germany. There was a bunch of institutes for the "Erhaltung der deutschen Sprache" which were all founded under the umbrella of a quasi-propaganda organization that officially was just a society/club. [1] They created their own "purified" dictionary with a "clean language" that was trying to find replacements for foreign words, and strengthen the nationali…

I'm rereading Orwell's 1984 and this all seems a bit like Ministry of Truth and its whole newspeak ordeal (of course MT was a bit more absurd - they wanted to get rid of all ambiguity in language also). I wonder if this was maybe Orwell inspiration?

The inspiration for Newspeak is Basic English, which is much like Esperanto but with English words (at least it's described as such — I'm not actually very familiar with Basic English myself). Constructed languages had some avid supporters back in the early 20th century, looking to make some constructed language the international language. Though I don't know much about Basic English, the unique looks of Newspeak definitely come, directly or indirectly, from Esperanto's ideas for keeping the vocabulary small and simple. To illustrate, in Esperanto the word for "good" is "bona", "bad" is "malbona" ("ungood"), and "to improve" is "plibonigi" ("to moregoodify").

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#177

Post by [deleted] »

tysam_and wrote: post #97
ttiurani wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm going to impose my preference on everyone else, even though the term has been part of standard contemporary English for a long time. At least I, as a non-native speaker, find the edited sentences always easier to read. They simply make the text better. As the entire point od Wikipedia is to make knowledge accessible with co-writing, I find it just wild that people would object to better language. So who exactly…

I find this to be a false equivalence. People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of". Bland articles that directly communicate the language can be more or less tasteful depending upon who is reading them. Almost assuredly sentences can be written without "comprised of" that are also definitely not bland. But classifying something you find easier to read as better language for everyone doesn't make it immediate…

[deleted]

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#178

Post by fatfingerd »

tysam_and wrote: post #97
ttiurani wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm going to impose my preference on everyone else, even though the term has been part of standard contemporary English for a long time. At least I, as a non-native speaker, find the edited sentences always easier to read. They simply make the text better. As the entire point od Wikipedia is to make knowledge accessible with co-writing, I find it just wild that people would object to better language. So who exactly…

I find this to be a false equivalence. People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of". Bland articles that directly communicate the language can be more or less tasteful depending upon who is reading them. Almost assuredly sentences can be written without "comprised of" that are also definitely not bland. But classifying something you find easier to read as better language for everyone doesn't make it immediate…

I can't see how eliminating a common misuse of an otherwise dead word wouldn't be clearer to nonnative speakers and less painful to the brains of native speakers. There are a lot of people who want to add dead vocabulary back to sound important and they'll succeed often enough with words that are at best unnecessary synonyms that convey no additional information. We don't really have to give them the benefit of the doubt when they do it completely wrong.

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#179

Post by irthomasthomas »

Now please do same for "factoid". The recent inversion of the definition of factoid is a much bigger problem. The term originates from medical science and means "a FALSE fact that is believed to be true after appearing in print". But some journalists miss understood it to mean "a small, but TRUE fact." Their new definition was false, but is now believed to be true after appearing in print.

So, the modern definition of factoid is, itself, a factoid.

Making this, er, fact well known will be useful to future historians, who, when they encounter the word in early 2nd millennium texts, are going to have to puzzle over whether or not the factoid mentioned is actually meant to be true, or false.

Edit, btw, the suffix "oid" means "resembling", so, a factoid is something resembling a fact. Therefore, factoid contains its own definition; and we still butchered it.

Re: Wikipedia user edits over 90k uses of “comprised of”

#180

Post by prepend »

p-e-w wrote: post #10

The justifications given in that essay leave a really bad taste in my mouth: > I believe using "comprised of" is poor writing, because > It's completely unnecessary. There are many other ways to say what the writer means by "comprised of". It adds nothing to the language. That's true for many, many other words. In fact, most instances of definite and indefinite articles "add nothing to the language", since the actual…

It seems like the editor is just fishing for a reason to make lots of edits and backed into logic so their stuff doesn’t get reverted.

I love wikis and knowledge bases but this is exactly the kind of stuff that detracts.

On one case, who cares what this person does with their time.

On the other case, it wastes the attention of 90k authors who need to figure out whether they care and have their writing style overridden by a rando.

I think the correct way to do this is to appeal to a writing style that gets argued over (sometimes perpetually) and when settled then the 90k edits can be made. This edit would be an argument presented to change the style guide.

Since “comprised of” is proper usage I doubt it would be proscribed in the style guide.

In my org I used to waste minutes of having writings where people expressed preferences for “and” vs “&” or Oxford comma or whether data are plural and edited things back and forth. Then I just found a style guide and adopted it and ask that people not revert changes based on preferences that break the style guide.

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