A couple of comments in the recent Siksimiisii! thread linked to the blog Mii Dash Geget: “Ojibwe, Algonquian languages, historical linguistics, and randomness.” The About page says “Posts here generally use linguistics jargon without explanation” and provides a list of “some good introductions to basic linguistic concepts”; it ends with a story, in Ojibwa followed by English, from William Jones, Ojibwa Texts, whose last line is Mii dash geget/And it was true. Some recent posts are Squib #1: “Winter” in Algic (“the Yurok and Proto-Algonquian terms—Yurok kipun and PA *peponwi—are cognate with one another and can be traced back to a Proto-Algic etymon **pəpwən-, despite some complications to clear up”), A Few Modest Terminological and Notational Proposals (“I use the well-established label Algic to refer to the family encompassing Algonquian, Wiyot, and Yurok, and Proto-Algic for its protolanguage”), and Wikipedia Sucks (“I am concerned by how ubiquitous is the practice of practically everyone, including plenty of otherwise reasonable, intelligent people, quoting or citing or linking to Wikipedia” — check out the parade of horrors cited there and marvel at those who think Wikipedia is a reliable source). This is absolutely the kind of thing I love, and I am adding it to my RSS feed.
I find that the main value of WP is finding links to other sources, that you can then evaluate for yourself.
As Ozaawaabineshiinh implies, though, it’s easier to point to the problems that to suggest viable solutions.
It’s also worth pointing out that Elon Musk really hates WP. That’s a pretty powerful point in its favour ….
[It’s not unlike the BBC; myriad problems, but before getting too hostile one should reflect deeply on the fact that the current Tories loathe the BBC and go out of their way to undermine its independence and operational viability at every turn.]
Oh, I don’t hate Wikipedia, I use it every day and would miss it terribly if it went away. But I would never treat it as a reliable source of information, any more than I would some of my friends and relatives who know all sorts of obscure things but also tell stories that are more engaging than fact-based.
Wikipedia remains very heterogeneous; some articles, not always the ones marked as such, are as good as a university textbook or even a review paper, others at least link to scientific literature, yet others are fiefdoms of people with axes to grind… some are lifted from the 1911 version of Encyclopædia Britannica complete with the racial type of the beys in Macedonia in the present tense… some are cobbled together from popular sources that were already outdated when they came out decades ago… and some are crackpottery.
Yes, we know that, but the problem is most people don’t, and treat it as if it were the Britannica.
In particular, the poor state of etymologies (including place names) in NAm languages on Wikipedia reflects the abundance of bad published sources. For every Bright or Goddard there are a hundred compendiums full of thrice-recycled dreck. There are probably people who are so used to reading this stuff, that they would not trust a monosyllabic river name to mean ‘river’, rather than ‘where the abundant glimmering water flows’.
It’s also worth pointing out that Elon Musk really hates WP.
Does he not have a point that it is tainted by left-wing bias?
I think (like our Tories and the US Republicans) he genuinely believes that the only genuine ethical principle is naked self-interest, and that in consequence all actual human virtues are merely a plot to sabotage Humanity and take away all his money.
Does he not have a point that it is tainted by left-wing bias?
No.
People of that kind believe that all basic decency is ipso facto Left Wing, if not Radical Socialist.
(As an actual Radical Socialist, I suppose I should feel quite flattered, but I feel I owe it to Truth to point out that in fact it is perfectly possible to be a decent right-winger. Such people are beleaguered, and need our moral support more than ever.)
But rather more to the point of the post: great site!
More posts please!
I’m someone who does recognize left-wing bias in many settings. Can’t say I’ve noticed that in Wikipedia.
Did you have an example or is it just a mission to sow more seeds of distrust and see where they grow?
Some of the “Wikipedia Sucks” post is about Wiktionary. Editorially, Wiktionary is separate from Wikipedia, and en.wikipedia and other foo.wikipedia are each separate.
I don’t know how wiktionary’s etymology sections could be comprehensive and uptodate while avoiding plagiarism; for most words the number of citable sources is between 0 and 1.
For many languages foo.wikipedia is the preserve of a few cranks or ideologues. This increases the attraction to Foo speakers of reading and editing en.wikipedia instead. Has anyone seen scholarly sources citing foo.wikipedia for foo ≠ en?
In the limited domain I actually have any specialised knowledge of (basically, just bits of Volta-Congo) Wiktionary is about as good as it reasonably could be: the problem is that even “authoritative” published sources are often both not very good and pretty sparse. There isn’t much you can really rely on, but that reflects the state of the literature rather than being the fault of Wiktionary.
The shining exception is of course comparative Bantu, but I would have thought that more or less anybody interested in that would go to the actual sources, which are pretty accessible (hurrah!), rather than Wiktionary anyway.
Other stuff is hard to get hold of anyway. I recently found out that Larry Hyman did a whole reconstructed vocabulary of Eastern Grassfields, but the only place I can actually find it is in annotations supplying potential proto-EG cognates in a book which is actually about reconstruction of one of the Northwestern Bantu groups. The Eastern Grassfields material was never actually published, and the annotations are taken from a manuscript that only the author of the NW Bantu book had access to. Grumble …
My controversial theory is that wikipedia is sometimes a good source and sometimes a not-so-good source. Not unlike e.g. any given edition of the Britannica in that regard. The tricky question is whether one can identify patterns that will let you know with any reliability when it’s good and when not. One problem is that there are certain cues and tics that are pretty good signals that a given article is *not* reliable, but the absence of those cues and tics is maybe necessary but not at all sufficient to assure one that a given article *is* reliable.
My unrelated question is who are these (apparently numerous) people who insist on saying/writing Algonquian instead of Algonquin and what’s their political agenda and how do we get them to stop?
JWB: It’s like conflating German with Germanic or Italian with Italic. They are just sloppy and ignorant.
As to Wikipedia, I tend to be with you. If it’s written sloppily, I mistrust the contents. Not foolproof, but helps with sifting out a great portion of the bad.
as of Y’s comment, this thread has swept the Recent Comments list, which happens less often than you’d think!
I recall years ago (before WP was even thought of) reading an article about this issue in the whole broad context of media in general.
What criteria do we actually use in deciding whether a newspaper article (say) is credible, in the usual case where we actually have no independent way of verifying it?
In practice, we seem to place a lot of weight on things like style and format and general tone, all of which are, logically, quite irrelevant. Or are they? If not, why, not?
The management, i.e. Wikimedia Foundation, has quite arguably some sort of a “left-wing taint” of spending a lot on various inclusivity boondoggles (“recruiting more women to edit” has been a stated goal for years but mostly results in producing weird things like “notational fine-tuning for supposedly making wikicode more appealing to women”), but the median editor remains an independent volunteer who may not even be aware of any of this happening… I wouldn’t know just from practice myself, if I hadn’t poked my head into some of the debates & articles about this elsewhere. Any corporate types like Musk might be lost about how little influence WMF actually exerts on the editing.
Or alternately maybe this is all about a couple edit-wars on a few specific topics a la 4Chan, where there’s probably a “left-wing” bias (i.e. progressivist bias, not a shred about socialism to it) in what gets said about them in published sources; and which then naturally ends up duplicated in Wikipedia & left up despite extended ongoing protests from passing-by netizens with personal experience to the contrary but nothing to refer to.
Hey, I linked to Mii Dash Geget from here before! I just assumed Languagehat was already familiar with it.
Wow, chi-miigwech (thank you so much) for the shout-out!
I wasn’t expecting most of the replies to be about the Wikipedia post :). I agree of course that the quality varies widely, and there are some genuinely very good articles, that easily rival or surpass “normal” encyclopedias — though in my areas of greatest domain knowledge, they’re very rare, which inevitably influences my overall perception. And I also, of course, use Wikipedia all the time for minor things (or for finding sources). But I do also see some people that I respect uncritically just citing Wikipedia a lot, which, again, may be appropriate for individual articles but isn’t appropriate as a general practice. If you can’t tell, that post was also just born out of frustration of having constantly run into terrible articles recently, and needing to vent about it…
I also am aware that Wiktionary is separate, and I do trust it more for English and other major languages than I trust Wikipedia about stuff. (But warning: do NOT trust any of the Algonquian or Algic stuff on there, or in many cases etymologies for English words of Amerindian origin. The best easily accessible source for such etymologies is dictionary.com, which uses the RHD, where the relevant etymologies were overseen by Ives Goddard.) I’d forgotten that I treated them with so much equivalence in that post. I should change that.
>My unrelated question is who are these (apparently numerous) people who insist on saying/writing Algonquian instead of Algonquin and what’s their political agenda and how do we get them to stop?
I mean, to be fair, it’s an easy confusion to make. The name for the family wasn’t chosen very well…
Eh, Wikipedia is just the easiest think to have an opinion about…
Sapir called the family “Algonkin”, too.
Have you considered publishing any of this?
I wasn’t expecting most of the replies to be about the Wikipedia post
Yeah, in retrospect I’m sorry I mentioned it. I should have realized it would be catnip for Opinions.
I don’t have the capacity to write a useful comment about Algic, but I read several posts, enjoyed them and learned something.
“The Wikipedia Article on Abhartach” (https://cassidyslangscam.wordpress.com/author/johndonnelly01/).
Checking some of the archives, I was struck by:
— Lewis and Clark using a chain of translators, English–French–Hidatsa–Shoshone–Montana Salish. That’s one more than David Eddyshaw’s, here.
— A weird but there-you-have-it sequence of sound changes, Proto Algic *we to Proto Algonquian *o to Proto Eastern Algonquian *wǝ in some environments. The arguments are elaborate (as they should be) and I haven’t looked at them in detail.
(Eddyshaw’s English–Mooré–Dyula–Something Else, here.)
“The Wikipedia Article on Abhartach”
not to be confused with the wikipedia article on agharta, which is surprisingly – dare i say, suspiciously – restrained.
—
but i don’t want to stay entirely in the derailment lane, so let me also say how much i appreciate the longer posts, like this one on tisquantum, and the one on wolves. to me, part of the glory of blogs as a form is that they allow for longer explorations / explanations as well as shorter pieces.
The Tisquantum post is indeed very much worth reading.
I suppose that’s the other and equally pernicious extreme from “publish or perish”.
(Well, it’s not the extreme. The extreme is the tradition of Siouanists never publishing anything all their lives, so if you weren’t lucky enough to know them personally, their knowledge is lost.)
From that Tisquantum post …
Not just Massasoit’s people, but all who have been properly brung up.
This is what is going on when Pwyll (Prince of Dyfed) meets Arawn, King of the Otherworld in a forest at the very beginning of the First Branch of the Mabinogi (when neither of them yet knows the other.) The very first thing Arawn says is that he is not going to greet Pwyll, and Pwyll responds that he does not know how to interpret this without knowing their relative ranks. (In fact, although Arawn does outrank him, that is not what he is talking about. When the situation is explained, Pwyll – quite properly – greets Arawn first.)
I’m someone who does recognize left-wing bias in many settings. Can’t say I’ve noticed that in Wikipedia.
Did you have an example or is it just a mission to sow more seeds of distrust and see where they grow?
Check out the WP article on white flight. With regard to the causes of white flight, it treats violent crime against whites as an afterthought, failing to mention it in the intro except in reference to the situation in Africa, and then hiding it at the bottom of the subsection for the United States. If however you read neutral or conservative accounts of the era such as Levine and Harmon’s The Death of an American Jewish Community: A Tragedy of Good Intentions (extremely even-handed book), it’s clear that soaring violent crime and disruptive behavior in neighborhoods and especially schools was one of the primary causes.
There are good places to discuss that, such as the talk page for that Wikipedia entry. There are bad places to discuss that, such as here.
Yeah, what Y said.
Wikipedia’s entire raison d’être is to create a robust common good, accessible under non-commercial terms. I don’t think anyone should be surprised that the Wikimedia Foundation has “leftist values”, such as, for example, recognizing that an encyclopedia written overwhelmingly by well-off men will present systematic bias.
Never mind the values, what concerns me is the falsity presented as truth, and unremovable because of crazed Wikieditors who think they know everything.
My breaking point came when I researched the history of a London club and corrected the mistaken account presented in the article (needless to say, I provided references), and had it reverted by someone who told me snottily that the version in the article was the one offered by the club itself, and “they should know.”
WP is better than nothing. And I actually don’t mean that in a damning-with-faint-praise sense. It’s much better than nothing.
And it is actually hard to see how it could be radically improved without becoming something so different that it would lose the particular value that it has.
Musk and his fanboys hate it, not because of left-right politics as such, but for the same reason that they hate democracy – which, likewise, is horribly flawed, but still much better than any of the top-down We-know-best models they favour because they feel that it is their place to Lead. They hate the very idea of bottom-up social organisation, which WP embodies, however imperfectly (and it is very imperfect.)
They imagine that they are Alphas in a world of Betas, and that any social structures which don’t incorporate this adolescent fantasy as the Fundamental Truth about Human Nature are illegimate and evil.
Sorry, Hat. Y is right. This is not the place.
The monograph- to short book-length piece on Tisquantum was indeed fascinating and very thoroughly thought through and researched. Thanks, Ozaawaabineshiinh.
Is there a more important work of fiction on the disappearance of tight-knit Jewish (and other ethnic) communities and their replacement with alienating slums in Depression and post-War America than The Last Angry Man? The novel doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page. (The film starring Paul Muni does, but I’ve never seen it and have no idea of it’s any good.)
There are cultures where it’s the other way around.
That’s wrong under Wikipedia rules – it’s not the “neutral point of view”.
@Brett: more important by what gauge? just thinking about the yiddish jewish strain, i’d point to douglass sadownick’s novel Sacred Lips of the Bronx, much of grace paley’s prose work (especially the stories with faith as their protagonist, in particular “The Long-Distance Runner”), melanie kaye/kantrowitz’ short stories (collected as My Jewish Face, if memory serves), joan nestle’s collection “A Restricted Country” (not quite fiction, but narrative prose), and in a slantwise way tova’s poem “stop all jewish cooking now”.
tova’s poem “stop all jewish cooking now”.
I was intrigued, so I looked it up; here it is, for those with JSTOR access. A snippet to give you an idea:
Nice stuff; thanks, rozele!
At our synagogue, a member recently mentioned how she felt her assimilative father would be proud of her Jewishness. I have no doubt he would.
Yet her comment also communicated an attitude not unlike that of “assimilation… this betrayal to your people”, a sense that he really would have been “more Jewish” – more openly, religiously Jewish — but didn’t feel comfortable with it in an American context. That her self-expression was more true to his inner sense than his own self-expression.
And that’s quite possible. But as someone who grew up Unitarian, I suspect many of the members of my childhood congregation actually believed themselves militantly secular, not merely secular to avoid having to belong to a group they felt would be looked down on. And more American than Jewish. Those who grew up Jewish didn’t eschew Jewish heritage or ethnicity, but I think they considered themselves above religion.
I felt patronized on behalf of this woman’s father.
But since I don’t know him, that’s preposterous. So I guess I felt patronized on behalf of some other father of some other woman whose story does match the one I’ve told myself.
Still I get why she felt that, and why someone might write of it as a betrayal. I’ve been grappling with it a lot. What a sense of belonging means, and what one may feel one owes to a group. My kids (12 and 8 years old) were asked to write letters to Israeli soldiers in family school, without even a note to us parents beforehand letting us know that would be the morning’s activity. I wrote to say that while I didn’t judge (and don’t) those who wanted their children to take part. that in a congregation advertising itself as a home for families with mixed backgrounds, writing to Israeli soldiers felt like a step too far.
There’ve been several other moments when I’ve felt like an outsider. The rabbi saying he couldn’t imagine sending a child to a non-Jewish summer camp. A guest speaker saying the only proper reaction to Oct. 7th was to stuff more Torah into your children. A big part of me feels like it’s understandable that much of the congregation would in the wake of Oct. 7th feel the need to pull together. But when a group pulls together, those on the edge of the group just feel stretched, and I guess I’m writing here to communicate how stretched I feel.
Yeah, all that stuff is immensely complicated, and can be agonizing if you have to navigate it personally. Thanks for writing that.
Fit, and the world fits you. Stretch, and you stretch alone.
There’s also shrinkage. As I get older I find that my old clothes don’t fit anymore. They seem to have shrunk.
To me, that’s the most striking comment Ryan has ever made here. Now I don’t what to think. Which is as it should be.
The latest Equalizer film The Final Chapter has a scene at the beginning in which an old Italian doctor asks McCall whether he is a good or a bad man. He answers after a pause: “I don’t know”.
In a scene at the end, the doctor reminds McCall of his answer and says: “Only a good man would say that. That’s why I trusted you.”
Thanks indeed, Ryan.
As the PERL slogan goes: There’s more than one way to do it.
Sometimes I feel that these words should be embroidered on samplers in letters of gold.
This phrase is often associated with the PerlLanguage. Unlike other languages (notably Scheme), Perl intentionally contains many simple expressions that are equivalent in result. Its inventor, LarryWall, is trained as a linguist. He has this crazy notion that sometimes phrasing a sentence differently might make its meaning clearer…
In my modest experience, you don’t need to be a linguist to hit on the idea of rephrasing. People and AI chatbats conceal their plagiaries by rephrasing things, as DE often reminds us.
Speaking English loudly to foreigners with deficient English is similar to rephrasing, when the purpose is to make things clearer. It’s not always successful, but after all nothing is, in this vale of good intentions.
Larry Wall has talked explicitly about the ethos* of Perl being influenced by natural language, and you can see what he’s driving at, though I’m not convinced myself that it is really much more than a vague metaphor.
I like the slogan anyway, though. Glory be to God for dappled things, as the Jesuit said.
* I was going to write “design”, but that does rather invite the comment “Wait … Perl was designed?”
I feel like wikipedia is a bit like the scientific method (not a perfect analogy, obviously) – it’s a process and not a completion, and people supposedly using it properly don’t always match up to the ideal, but that doesn’t mean the concept is flawed.
And I do think perhaps some caution or circumspection might be beneficial when criticizing it (I don’t mean what people are saying here, but maybe in broader social media venues), because there are bad-faith critics of it out there who just want to burn the whole thing down because their feelings were hurt by an entry on their disastrous self-driving car company or whatever.
It’s a very general tendency in human groups to provide positive feedback to those who prioritize their connection with that group over the various other competing obligations and interests they may have in their lives and thereby encourage or pressure others to do likewise. It often requires above-average leaders to recognize that (in many circumstances) the group also benefits from the more modest levels of presence and participation of others who are never going to make it that sort of dominant focus in their lives and it is thus prudent to make sure that such people don’t get alienated or feel like they’re being told that if they don’t increase their level of commitment they ought to just leave. When current events understandably make some people think it’s the right time for them (and thus presumptively for everyone …) to increase their level of commitment to the group, that no doubt makes an already difficult dynamic more difficult.
And of course Ryan’s situation may have some additional wrinkles and undercurrents that aren’t captured by this deliberately high-level abstraction. But as an alumnus of early Seventies Unitarian Sunday School (the stereotypes are all true! we were taught to sing more different verses of “Kum Ba Ya” than you would believe existed!) I wish Ryan well.
There’s more than two verses? Oh, the humanity …
I really don’t like the reflexive pro-Israel stance of even the most liberal Jewish congregations. That to be certified as a rabbi, someone has to spend at least a year living in Israel is part of the problem. However, Judaism is not a universalist religion, and it is tied to a specific physical region, so I don’t entirely see a way around this.
The fact that most organizations are focused around a smaller group of core members has always been a frustration for me. I was one of the most active people in my Reform congregation six years ago. Almost every Friday I was there greeting people before evening services. However, even then I was clearly not part of the clique that dominated the Jewish culture in town. At the Jewish cemetery downtown, I discovered an undocumented grave that had been completely overgrown. There was subsequently a whole event organized by the local Jewish community organization to celebrate this rediscovery, but I was not even invited, and the discovery was attributed to someone else. After my divorce, the congregation made it clear I was not welcome. Inquiries about volunteering opportunities generally went unanswered, but occasionally I was told that my participation was simply unwanted.
this deliberately high-level abstraction — indeed, I read the first paragraph as about improving Wikipedia, and was nodding in agreement
That sounds really tough, Brett
@Stu, I have a feeling that lots of developers are supremely uninterested in the semantics of the code they put together, results are what counts and denotation-preserving rewrites, what are those? Refactoring is that thing that IntelliJ does innit? This is why we get “if boolean == true then” instead of nice things.
And my sympathies to Brett and Ryan. I haven’t known any observant jews here in Denmark, and I have no idea how much pressure there is to support Israel. But the head rabbi of the largest congregation (Jødisk Samfund i Danmark) was raised there from the age of four (and his father was a member of Knesset). There are two other congregations, one of which is Reform-allied and (claims to be) supportive of LGTBIQ++ members, but my impression is that most non-observant jews are in the big one (because big) and send their kids to its school which “strengthens the jewish consciousness of pupils as regards their religion, the Hebrew language, and knowledge of the State of Israel.” Also it has two military police posted, like each of the synagogues and the embassy.
(On the other hand I have a very good idea of the pressure to support the Palestine People if you want your bona fides as a leftist. At least there is no overt antisemitism from that side, but I’m not on the inside; media discipline is pretty good and their PR people know what’s up and what’s down. It can’t be fun to be a left wing jew these days).
But when a group pulls together, those on the edge of the group just feel stretched
That ought to be a proverb; it certainly brings back memories. My sympathies and best wishes.
occasionally I was told that my participation was simply unwanted
Two Jews are rescued from a desert island where they have built three synagogues. Why? “I go to mine, he goes to his, we both boycott that son-of-a-bitch on the hill.
jew
Lowercasing Jew is offensive in English, because it implicitly denies proper-noun status.
@Lars: I have a feeling that lots of developers are supremely uninterested in the semantics of the code they put together, results are what counts and denotation-preserving rewrites, what are those?
Sigh. It’s so bad that I’ve stopped using the word “semantics”. Instead I speak about the behavior (Verhalten) of the code. Of course the initial reaction to that is often a stunned silence – but they can hardly pretend not to know what Verhalten is. What stuns them is the idea that behavior counts – what the code does and how, what they do (and how) when coding or “refactoring” …
I no longer ask questions like “do you understand generics / concurrency in Java?” The instinct of self-preservation requires an answer of “yes” to that question, with no thought at all. Instead I say “let’s put the technical details aside for the moment – what are you trying to do?” If in response someone starts off with “I’m trying to get the generics right here …” I say “no, let’s leave generics aside. What are you trying to do ? What do the business specs say ?”
Never mind the values, what concerns me is the falsity presented as truth
It’s precisely a WP value that given a choice between truth and verifiability, verifiability wins.
It’s precisely a WP value that given a choice between truth and verifiability, verifiability wins.
For some values of “value”, I suppose.
Verification is left as an exercise for the reader.