Horhius555

Shabo language and warm welcome

Dear @Horhius556, first, let me welcome you to Wikipedia! It is a thoroughly good thing that you have decided to improve this now 20-year old online encyclopaedia, and an article like Shabo language could certainly use some improvement!

As you have seen, when you make an edit to a page on Wikipedia, it will often incite some kind of reaction, sometimes positive, but quite often also some further editing or even an outright reversal. When I saw your edit introducing the theory of Ihor Rassokha, I was first tempted to revert this outright, but it is fair enough to mention that Rassokha did merit the Shabo language worthy of his consideration. For that reason I left the reference in there and toned down some of your original wordings. Apparently, you did not agree with my edits, and so we have had some back-and-forth editing. Generally, let me assure you that it is fine when editors on Wikipedia have differences of opinion, but when after a number of edits no consensus can be found, it is recommended to take the heat from the page and to relocate the discussion somewhere else, either to the article's talk page or to the talk page of one of the editors, which is what I'm doing now.

Let me also affirm that you have done some things right, like using the edit-summary feature in a helpful way that explains your edits. All this assures me that you are here to contribute constructively to Wikipedia, and that's why I'm hoping that this discussion will eventually lead to good results.

Next I need to apologize to you for probably hurting your feelings by calling Ihor's article not a reliable source. All the more it did not help that in the heat of the argument I compared Ihor's theory with QAnon, which was absolutely not called for, and you were right to complain about this to me - please take my heartfelt apologies for that! This may be especially the case if, as I suspect, you are the author Ihor yourself. So writing the following will not come easy to me, and it won't be easy for you to read this. The good thing about the Virtus journal is that it makes its articles freely accessible, so I was able to read the article in question. I must say it as clearly as this: according to my judgment as a trained linguist this article does not qualify as academically acceptable research, and it does by no means present sufficient data to establish any phylogenetic or linguistic connection between the Shabo language and Sumerian, or, for that matter, with Austroasiatic languages. To begin with, such a connection would be extremely surprising, to say the least, and therefore presenting such a theory would require first-rate data and absolutely watertight networks of argumentation, but none of that is present here. Firstly, although the first page of the article is entirely dedicated to supposed similarities between Ethiopian and Indian haplogroups, no data is presented on Shabo-specific haplogroups, probably because it doesn't exist. So we don't really know in which way the Shabo fit this particular picture. In any case, linguists have come to reject phylogenetic evidence in the reconstruction of language history, because it can be quickly shown that language and genome often go very separate ways. Be that as it may, the really weak part of the article is the linguistic comparison, as very unconvincing wordpairs are presented as obvious cognates, without any kind of presentation of how a reconstruction may be accomplished, and even in this way the numbers of cognates reached is so low that comparative linguists would always throw it out as within the range of statistical coincidence.

The level of English use in this article makes it very clear that it has not undergone any copy-editing, not to speak of any kind of peer review, in spite of the protestations you made in one of the edit summaries. Virtus on their webpage (which I have studied carefully) also makes no claim whatsoever that their publication is peer reviewed. In effect they have taken the author's money to publish an article that is not publishable elsewhere, and provide a semblance of an academic publication, which this unfortunately is not.

All this means that according to Wikipedia's regulations on reliable sources and fringe theories, we need to put the reference to Ihor's article into perspective by giving pointers to its academic shortcomings, if we don't decide to take the reference out entirely. If you insist on your original wordings, there is not much else I can do about it, because I am just an editor of Wikipedia as you are - but since I care about the quality of the Shabo language article, I will then present the matter to the Fringe theories noticeboard of Wikipedia, where administrators will come to a ruling on how this will need to be presented in the article. I cannot predict how the ruling will go, but it may well result in the total removal of the reference to Ihor. For now, I will revert you one last time in order to put Ihor's article in proper perspective. If you revert this again, I will proceed as described above. Landroving Linguist (talk) 23:13, 17 January 2021 (UTC)

update: another user already made an edit to that effect, so I will leave it as that, with the same result if you should revert that other user's edit. Landroving Linguist (talk) 23:29, 17 January 2021 (UTC)