71–80 of 84 posts
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I see that this comment get downvoted but I think we can agree on the facts that languages, just like species, die while other flourish. And that's fine. Survival of the fittest, right ? Not enough people speaking Greenlandic, too complicated even for it's own population who would rather speak danish ? The very reason I'm speaking English is because it was forced military during the 19th century by the UK and since t…
As an immigrant to an anglophone country, I noticed a few things: When people have varying levels of capability with languages, they’ll switch to whatever is the lowest common denominator — the language that the group can best communicate in. This tended to be English, even amongst a bunch of native speakers of a common foreign language. Moreover, this is context dependent: when talking about technical matters (espec…
I find this cultural Darwinism argument incredibly ironic, given how vocal factions in 2 of largest (native) English-speaking countries have been whinging about "their culture" being sullied by immigrants.
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The background here is that Scots is not really a language. Try asking a Glasgow taxi driver who addresses you in 'Scots' whether he knows any English. Robert Burns wrote in English, with some of his spelling reflecting pronunciation in the Scottish English dialect. The people who want it to be considered as a language for political reasons cannot be bothered to translate Wikipedia themselves. They read and edit Engl…
> The background here is that Scots is not really a language. This is supremely ignorant. Scots is its own language. It's a 'brother' or 'sister' of English, with both English and Scots being descendants of West Germanic languages. The fact that many (all?) Scots speakers also speak English doesn't mean Scots not a language on its own. You could make your exact same arguments that Irish isn't a language because you c…
James Joyce wrote in English, no Irish person pretends that he wrote in a third language distinct from English and Irish. The fact that they do not do so does not compromise the political basis for independence, republicanism or reunification.
If a Cork taxi driver, addressed you in Irish (very unlikely), and you asked him to speak English, the request would be both coherent and reasonable. The point you missed is that the Glasgow taxi driver would look at you with consternation and say "But, I am speaking English! What's wrong with my English?' (insert dialect spelling if you like)
Rabbie Burns wrote in the same language as his compatriots Louis Stevenson and Scott.
It would be ignorant if I did not know about the meretricious claim of a minority of Scottish people to have their own language, but it is not ignorant to reject that claim. I am Scottish fwiw.
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The background here is that Scots is not really a language. Try asking a Glasgow taxi driver who addresses you in 'Scots' whether he knows any English. Robert Burns wrote in English, with some of his spelling reflecting pronunciation in the Scottish English dialect. The people who want it to be considered as a language for political reasons cannot be bothered to translate Wikipedia themselves. They read and edit Engl…
Scots is somewhat partially intelligible in written form to English speakers, but that does not make it the same language as English. You might as well say that Spanish and Portuguese are the same language.
Geordie English is closer to Edinburgh 'Scots' than to RP English or US English or Indian English. Is it a dialect of Scots?
If nobody's reading them and nobody's writing them, then perhaps it doesn't matter. We could let Wikipedia-Greenlandic persist as its own evolved language that forks from the original. > potentially pushing the most vulnerable languages on Earth toward the precipice as future generations begin to turn away from them. OK? We have lots of dead languages. It's fine. People use whatever languages are appropriate to them…
I thought the argument point is letting it die is OK, but letting wrongfully translated text, becoming the source of AI to chuck out wrongfully translated text is not OK.
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> they don't deserve to have one By what unholy pact have you been beknighted as the bestower of wikis, my friend?
If the original authors stop maintaining an OSS project, and you are one of only a very few users, you have two options: do the work yourself, or watch it die. If you are unwilling to do the work yourself, then that's a signal it isn't important enough for anyone else to do the work either. Why should a wiki be any different?
> Wehr, who now teaches Greenlandic in Denmark, speculates that perhaps only one or two Greenlanders had ever contributed. That's the core issue, it's not those who use AI translator or worst like Google translate. If there isn't any Greenlander to contribute to their Wikipedia, they don't deserve to have one and instead must rely on other languages. The difference between an empty Wikipedia and one filled with trans…
"Only one or two" isn't zero. The problem isn't that a small community can only write a small Wikipedia, but that there's a global supply of fools who want to make every small Wikipedia bigger, even if they're completely unqualified to do so. Wikipedia is built around the basic principle that if you just let everyone contribute, most contributions will be helpful and you can just revert the bad ones after the fact. T…
For whom?
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Scots is somewhat partially intelligible in written form to English speakers, but that does not make it the same language as English. You might as well say that Spanish and Portuguese are the same language.
You might as well say that US English and Canadian English are different languages. Geordie English is closer to Edinburgh 'Scots' than to RP English or US English or Indian English. Is it a dialect of Scots?
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The Cebuano wiki is a similar case, not spoken often, but it was a personal project of an editor that was mad at political articles and started making animal articles in the Cebuano wiki. The solution is to differentiate and tag inputs and outputs, such that outputs can't be fed as inputs recursively. Funnily enough, wikipedia's sourcing policy does this perfectly, not only are sources the input and page content is j…
Many sources for Wikipedia articles refer to Wikipedia without citing it. Many journalists will work from Wikipedia, and most of Wikipedia's sources are journalistic articles. It happens to be that often this isn't noticed because the information obtained this way is true and uncontroversial. Citogenesis only documents examples where, by bad luck, the result is untrue information.
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The Cebuano wiki is a similar case, not spoken often, but it was a personal project of an editor that was mad at political articles and started making animal articles in the Cebuano wiki. The solution is to differentiate and tag inputs and outputs, such that outputs can't be fed as inputs recursively. Funnily enough, wikipedia's sourcing policy does this perfectly, not only are sources the input and page content is j…
> It is only when articles posing as secondary sources fail to cite wikipedia that a recursive quality loss can occur I've seen a college professor cite wikipedia in support of a false claim. On investigation, the text in wikipedia was cited to an earlier blog post by that same professor. I wasn't convinced.
1- citing wikipedia (or any tertiary source) is valid, the problem is just when the source is not cited. And also it's against wikipedia policy, but you are free to cite it elsewhere.
2- citing the tertiary source and citing the secondary source are distinct and valid. There is no "rule", in wikipedia or otherwise, that says you need to cite the underlying source. In fact citation chains can become quite deep, it would be very impractical. An example would be, you could cite the gospels when jesus talks with the devil. If we had it your way then you wouldn't be able to cite an apostle, you would have to attribute the quote to jesus, and furthermore if jesus quoted the old testament you would have to cite that? If you think the bible is an exception, consider case law, if you were to cite an attorney's defense and the attorney cited some cases, would you have to cite the original cases? If so, then which? There might be multiple, it's not just a citation chain but a graph.
In this specific example your professor was not just quoting himself, but his work is now part of wikipedia and importantly was not contested or was not successfully contested. Similarly to how a trademark works, you claim you own the trademark, and if a year or so no one contends it, you have a stronger case that it's yours.