User:Lambology/sandbox

Wikipedia Project

1.     What is the "grade," if any, that the article has? What is its indicated importance?

The article is graded as start class on the Wikipedia quality scale. This means that the article at the beginning stages of what is considered a complete article. Some information is missing or is perhaps unclear. The indicated importance is rated as high because it is considered and important linguistic article despite the incompleteness of the information.

2.     Is each fact referenced with an appropriate, reliable reference? Is everything in the article relevant to the article topic? Is there anything that distracted you?

One of the issues I had with the article is that while there are some references, the items that do have the citations are not explained clearly regarding how they relate to the topic. What is included might be useful for someone who has a linguistics background but it would not be useful for someone lacking linguistics background who has encountered the term lexeme and wants to know more about the concept. I also feel that the Decomposition header could be changed to Formation with a discussion on the different ways lexemes are formed.

1. Is the article neutral? Are there any claims, or frames, that appear heavily biased toward a particular position?

The article itself is neutral but it does appear to be biased towards SIL definitions. It is hard to determine what a lexeme actually is based on what information is actually present.  

1. Where does the information come from? Do these seem to be neutral sources? Choose three sources cited, and find them yourself.

The majority of the sources, 4 out of 6, are from sil.org which is a linguistics organization. I do consider SIL to be a neutral source since the organization’s goals are related to language development and revitalization however the links contain basic definitions and one or two examples. I feel that there is not enough information in the citations for a reader to get a good understanding of what is being discussed.

1. Are there viewpoints that are overrepresented, or underrepresented?  If your answer is "yes," (a) indicate what viewpoint(s) you think might qualify as overrepresented, and (b) what viewpoint you think might be underrepresented.  What leads you to this conclusion?

I think lexeme formation is underrepresented in the article. The subsection Decomposition touches on some of the ways lexemes are formed, but it also misses other lexeme formations. It also does not provide any examples which again makes the article difficult to understand for someone who does not have a linguistic background.

1. Check four citations. Do the links work?  Is there any close paraphrasing or plagiarism in the article?

Of the 6 citations from the article, 4 are working and easy to access. One of the links is a mistake since it is not a citation but instead leads to the lexeme run. The links have been paraphrased and are not word for word copies but what actually appears in the article isn’t very clear especially to someone who does not study linguistics.

1. Select and list up to three major topics or issues raised about the article from the Talk page related to the article. Do you agree with what the contributors say, or not?  Why?  

a.    “Run” example is not clear enough. I agree with the Talk regarding this topic because based on the article it is not clear whether run is one lexeme covering both noun and verb or whether it is two lexemes. Later in the article, there is talk of syntactic categories but the way the rest of the paragraph is written, it makes it sound like lexemes are just verbs which would lead a reader to a false understanding of what a lexeme is. The article needs to clarify that lexemes can be a word that has different senses that change its category.

b.    Lexemes and lexicons. There is a sentence in the article that simply states “a lexicon consists of lexemes” with no other context available. I agree with what is said in the Talk that there is not enough information for a reader to determine what kind of lexicon, mental or dictionary, is being discussed.

·      When you're ready, craft 2-5 new sentences in your sandbox, that you think should be added to the article, or edit a section that you believe requires editing.  Provide a reliable source in support of your addition or editing, as you learned to do in the online training. 

Original text: A lexeme belongs to a particular syntactic category, has a certain meaning (semantic value), and in inflecting languages, has a corresponding inflectional paradigm; that is, a lexeme in many languages will have many different forms.

A lexeme is the head of a distinct syntactic category, has semantic value, and has an inflectional paradigm in languages with inflection. Since lexemes have separate dictionary entries based on their grammatical category, a word which has multiple meanings would be classified as a different lexeme based on its word class. For example, when using the word run, there are two separate lexemes which are run☂, one for the verb and its paradigm and another for the noun and its paradigm.

Reflection

The article on lexemes is graded as a start class which means that it is in the beginning stages of being a well formed and well written article but it is not quite there yet. I agree the assessment of Wikipedia because I feel like some parts of it are very technical and other parts are not well formed. Also, I feel that the article would not be helpful to someone who knows nothing about linguistics. One of the issues is with its choice of using run as an example. In the talk section, someone asks if the run as a noun is a separate lexeme than run as verb, or if run includes both the noun and the verb form. Now that I have taken a morphology class, I know that there are at least two separate lexemes for run but if I just relied on Wikipedia I would not be sure.

There has been a serious lack of editing on an article that is important to linguistics and morphology. Comparing the edit history from 2008 until 2016, there have only been minor stylistic changes to article which do not help its comprehensibility. This article was written for people who study linguistics and even then, the article doesn’t really provide the information about what a lexeme is. I think the article should be rewritten beyond the minor edits that I did. What I changed provides a minor clarification but it does not fully inform a reader about lexemes.