[Ietf-languages] Reliability of Wikipedia (was: RE: ***UNCHECKED*** Re: language variant subtag "tongyong" addition request (for Chinese langugaes romanization))

Although I’m neither the list master nor the Reviewer, I’d like to suggest that we use one Subject line (the original one) for discussions about the Tongyong Pinyin request, and a different Subject line (the one I’ve just started) for general discussions about the reliability of Wikipedia and other resources.

I know this started with Michael asking Phake Nick to improve the Tongyong Pinyin request by adding a Wikipedia reference, but it has spun off into a thread of its own that is quite unrelated to Tongyong Pinyin. Identifying these separate topics with different Subject lines will help us keep track of what’s being discussed, and perhaps ignore the bits we don’t care about.

Thanks,

--
Doug Ewell | Thornton, CO, US | ewellic.org

From: Hugh Paterson
Sent: Friday, December 28, 2018 19:22
To: David Starner
Cc: IETF Languages Discussion
Subject: Re: [Ietf-languages] ***UNCHECKED*** Re: language variant subtag "tongyong" addition request (for Chinese langugaes romanization)

@David  I concur with your assessment of the sometimes absurd and un-academic nature of the Ethnologe's citation practices. Unfortunately I don't work in the SIL department which makes the choice on if it is expedient to cite their sources or not (nor does SIL claim that the Ethnologue is an academic work or is it a standard). I do work with orthography research. I understand the appeal for fast, easy, and free, but in my experience Wikipedia citations are just as subject to the impact of edit wars on Wikipedia as the textual part of the article. So, just because an "original" source such as a standard, ruling, or legal document might be reference at one time in the history of a given Wikipedia article, it doesn't mean that that citation will be part of that entry into the future.

I would hope that the citations for IETF documentation could follow the same rigor that wikipedia follows, which includes the content at the following links and includes a prohibition against original research (meaning it needs to be published elsewhere first [2] and second that saying wikipedia says it is not good enough [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Identifying_reliable_sources
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:No_original_research

all the best,

On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 2:49 PM David Starner <prosfilaes@gmail.com> wrote:
On Fri, Dec 28, 2018 at 11:22 AM Hugh Paterson <hugh_paterson@sil.org> wrote:
Does adding information to Wikipedia help ease the acceptance of new tags? are IETF decisions based on Wikiality?.
 Wikiality: the idea that “any user can change any entry, and if enough users (editors) agree with them it becomes true.”

As opposed to EB, where for the article on conjuring for the 13th edition, the author focused on the amazing stunts of Harry Houdini... who also happened to be the author. Much like the 10th edition, which was written by John Nevil Maskelyne, and focused on John Nevil Maskelyne. The 
Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography is notorious for having over two hundred fake biographies hidden among the real ones.

SIL is hardly invulnerable here, either. According to the Ethnologue, Esperanto has 2,001,000 speakers. Why? Well, there's no actual cite, but if one searches Google, which is itself pretty Wikiality, Wandel 2015 might refer to an article that extrapolates from Facebook rather sketchily. If you go to Wikipedia, you would find some discussion of how many speakers there are, with full cites, that would inform you much more accurately of the range of estimates.

The advantages of having one person write the article, and one editor check it, are known, but letting two people declare something true isn't inherently better than letting enough editors declare something true. And Wikipedia is pretty much the only freely-accessible encyclopedia that covers the subjects we need to refer to. 
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-- 
Hugh Paterson III Innovation Analyst
Innovation Development & Experimentation, SIL International 
Contact & CV : http://hughandbecky.us/Hugh-CV/