Ellencwaine

Edit explanation

"(Undid revision by Jeandré to suppress criticisms of org du Toit (talk))"[1]

I reverted your edit because the explanation made no sense. What do you mean? Gordonofcartoon (talk) 11:09, 15 January 2009 (UTC)

GLM

Re [2]. I agree absolutely. But we have to find third-party sourcing for any such analysis. Gordonofcartoon (talk) 01:43, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

Sourcing

Re this edit, see [Talk:Global Language Monitor]]. It would help if you explained your edits. Gordonofcartoon (talk) 16:22, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

These points (which in any event are self-evident) are made by Zimmer & Nunberg.

Where? If the quote is available, in a reliable published source, add it by all means. But if it was in Language Log posts, I'm uncertain how that would count on the reliability scale. Gordonofcartoon (talk) 11:25, 26 January 2009 (UTC)

Let me see if I have this right. You have a series of claims made on a web page and in media interviews by someone with no credentials as a linguist, citing a "secret algoritm." The claims are disputed by a number of academic linguists and lexicographers, most of them well known and all associated either with major dictionaries (the OED, Webster's New World) or major research universities (Penn, Berkeley) and with extensive publication records in referreed journals. You then say, well, since these were made in blog postings or in online publications (e.g. Slate) I'm not sure how "reliable" they are. Would you feel better if they were published in a book, e.g., by the people who have published Payack? What exactly confers "reliability" here?
- unsigned post by Ellencwaine (talk · contribs)

What exactly confers "reliability" here?

Wikipedia:Verifiability (which is one of Wikipedia's core policies), particularly the section on self-published sources WP:SPS.

The thing to remember is that Wikipedia, largely, doesn't assess reliability and verifiability by personal credentials, but by the credentials of where/how it was published (e.g. peer-reviewed work rates higher than non peer-reviewed, and so on).

WP:V#Reliable sources and WP:SPS give an indication of the scale of credentials - and blog postings by known experts are unfortunately a grey area, best not used unless they've said the same elsewhere in more formal forms of publications.

I never said there were any problems with Slate: it's long-standing publication with evident editorial oversight. As to books, self-published books rate pretty low on the scale.

P.S. Could you sign your posts? You just type four tildes ~~~~ at the end, and the signature is automatically filled in. Gordonofcartoon (talk) 12:51, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Look, again: these are people at first-tier research insitutions with dozens or hundreds of papers in related areas of linguistics in refereed journals, or who are the editors of major dictionaries, telling you that this is bullsh-t, and you're telling me, well, we at wikipedia won't credit something unless it appears in a published book, whatever the writer's credentials: that is to say, we value the authority of a nameless book editor more than that of, say, the tenure committee at the University of Pennsylvania, or the lexicographers of the Oxford University Press. Or to put it another way, we will report the views of some bozo with no credentials who puts up his own web and wikipedia pages and gives interviews of the press, but we will not report criticisms of those views by established authorites unless they appear in published books. (Tell me, is this the way you'd want Congress to follow this policy in making economci policy, or would you make an exception for the advice of a Princeton economist? ) And where do you draw the line -- if a Nobel=prize winning chemist says such-and-such would you say, Oh, well , publish a book that says that and then I'll consider it authoritative? And if not, why would you dismiss the judgment of the editor of Oxford American dictionaries in an area in which his expertise is equally compelling? Ellencwaine (talk) 01:56, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

you're telling me, well ...

No, I'm not. You 're getting into a snit about scenarios that don't reflect either what I said or what Wikipedia says. Go and read Wikipedia:Verifiability. Gordonofcartoon (talk) 02:44, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Well, you certainly give the "Global Language Monitor" the degree of respect that it seems to deserve. (I'd almost forgotten about this outfit till this talk page of yours reminded me.) But Gordonofcartoon gives good advice above. Among it: please sign your messages. (As he says: "You just type four tildes ~~~~ at the end, and the signature is automatically filled in.") -- Hoary (talk) 23:25, 22 February 2015 (UTC)