Lamest Edit Wars
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
> Angels & Airwaves: Forty-six reverts in one hour by two editors. The point of contention? Whether "Angels & Airwaves" is a band or "Angels & Airwaves" are a band. (British English requires "are", as the band comprises multiple people, while American English requires "is", as the band is a singular entity.) ALL-CAPS edit summaries laced with profanity and death threats liberally employed by one side.
I was also under the impression that the "efficiency" argument was at least partially influenced by Thomas Jefferson. I just did a brief search and I wasn't able to find reference to this online, but from my visits to his home at Monticello I recall that he had a unique style of writing - for instance, he tended not to use capital letters in his personal notes. He seems like exactly the kind of person who would have been vocally in favor of dropping unvocalized letters from words.
(or is it en-uk? Hmmm)
But I don't think that would happen because I don't see why Scotland would want to leave the UK but cling to 'we are still in GB -- no-no, it's geographical guys'. You don't hear the Republic of Ireland self-descring as 'in the British Isles' much, that I'm aware of.
UK is a reserved code due to past and current use in DNS.
Ukraine's code is UA.
Of course, its always hard to draw distinct lines. There are some lang codes with wikipedias that are similar to english like sco, jam and ang. (Not to mention https://simple.wikipedia.org but that is a bit of a special case)
Neither dialect says you have gotten to be kidding me, right?
I think it's the British that have lost the use of "gotten" in favour of "got".
American: I wrote them British: I wrote to them
Edit: Interestingly(?), the government official leaflet adds an "at": https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid...
I've never heard that construct. Are you by chance referring to Morton Salt's motto "When it rains, it pours"?
I think it was HN that lead me to the discovered not too long ago that the phrase originated from an early-20th-Century ad campaign of theirs following the introduction of magnesium carbonate, an anti-clumping agent: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morton_Salt
In the US - in the Arkansas Ozarks, specifically - I've heard the other version in the same context.
* Quite means something different. In British "quite good" is similar to "particularly good". In American it's more like "OK",
* Spelling of -ing form of words ending in l. Br: travelling, Am: traveling,
* Placement of stress on multi-syllable words. It almost seems like anything British people do is the opposite in America. Br: 'adult, a'ddress, ice 'cream. Am: a'dult, 'address, 'ice cream.
The word "research" is an odd one as it's pronounced as re'search as both verb and noun in BrE but 'research as both verb and noun in AmE.
But, of course, many British speakers now use the American way without realising (as evidenced by replies to my original comment).
If you're very posh then yes, but everyone else now uses the American sense. If you asked me what I thought of a TV show, "quite good" means I enjoyed it but I'm not that fussed if I don't happen to watch any more of it.
I think there is possibly a big difference between spoken and written language here. Would you really use "quite good" in that sense while speaking? I don't think so. I think British people would "meh, it's OK".
He's definitely a bit posh.
Humour aside, I don't think he's posh enough to use it in the intensifier sense. If he says something is "quite good" on TV I'd expect it to mean "good" but not necessarily "better than good". Would be interested to see your counter example if you do remember it.
Not really, it means something more like 'fairly' or 'reasonably' good.
And if you preface it with 'really', it doesn't mean you're not lying, it makes it more like 'bloody' good. (With possible implication that this was unexpected, again depending on intonation.)
I hear this quite a lot. In my experience we (Brits) use it mostly in your second sense, to moderate statements. We use it as an intensifier more rarely and usually in specific phrases: "quite right", "quite the ...". I believe the key difference is that we use the word with greater frequency than Americans. GLOWBE [1] is an excellent resource for checking such hunches if you are interested.
The more important thing, I think, is that Americans don't understand the first sense at all. You have to say "pretty good" or something to have the same effect.
Wikipedia seems to be more in line with my experience, too:
> In AmE the word quite used as a qualifier is generally a reinforcement, though it is somewhat uncommon in actual colloquial American use today and carries an air of formality: for example, "I'm quite hungry" is a very polite way to say "I'm very hungry". In BrE quite (which is much more common in conversation) may have this meaning, as in "quite right" or "quite mad", but it more commonly means "somewhat", so that in BrE "I'm quite hungry" can mean "I'm somewhat hungry".
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_American_and_B...
The more I think about it, I think the word can mean quite a lot of things and it's mostly driven by context and non-verbal cues.
It's interesting that you have such a different experience of it to me.
https://archive.org/details/EconomistBooksTheEconomistStyleG...
Something similar happened between Spanish Spanish and Argentinian Spanish.
I once used the phrase "a veces" in South America and I was corrected to "de vez en cuando". Both phrases mean "occasionally", but the first seems to me to be unfamiliar to South Americans. Maybe someone else can clarify exactly.
This doesn’t seem right (as an American)
That seems backwards to me? As an American, I would nearly always use "quite" as an intensifier.
Brits often understate, so it's arguable if "quite" means something different (as words are defined by usage) - or if the words mean the same, but are commonly used in understated terms in Britain.
So to say "that's not quite right" means you're close but something is off.
But to say "that was quite an adventure" means it was totally an adventure, as much as anything could be.
Now be quiet and quit while you're ahead ;)
I don't think this is illustrating two different uses. Note that "not completely right" means the same thing as "not quite right", but this is meant to illustrate that "quite" doesn't always mean "completely".
"If it were up to me..."
That's the correct grammar for when you have a conditional argument. I know that a lot of Americans don't know this rule at all (especially musicians) but I suspect that it is a regional thing and not strictly US vs. Brit.
Note that if the conditional reflects something that really happened, then you use was as usual.
"If I was wrong by saying that..."
In English, what looks like a plural form ("were") in place of a singular ("was") actually comes from a Germanic singular form of the subjunctive. Both the German words "waren" (plural indicative form - "we/they were ...") and "wäre" (singular subjunctive form - "(if) I/he were") become "were" in English.
(And to confuse things, in English, the plural subjunctive is also "were" and is thus indistinguishable from the indicative. "We were kings..." v. "If we were kings...")
In both languages, the subjunctive is used in this case for a condition contrary to fact - I am not the King of Germany (nor am I a German pop singer from the 80s!).
For example:
"Que tengas un buen día,"
would translate to:
"Have a nice day."
So, in Spanish the subjunctive is not strictly used for conditional situations. It is not really that you consider that the other person may have a bad day. The closest way to say that in English is: "May you have a nice day."
Like a lot of commentators are observing, it is not that clear whether you need a subjunctive. In fact, if you look at Afrikaans, there are only four tenses: past, present, future and historical present. And Afrikaans is considered a full scientific languages: You can translate any scientific article into Afrikaans.
On the topic of languages from South Africa, you also have noun classes in all of the 9 official languages that are not derived from European languages. These classes are a type of concord that have nothing to do with tense, but rather with types of nouns. They are also not strictly necessary, but they make it easier to follow a conversation. One way in which they achieve this is that if you say something like "I have an axe and a shovel," and later that "I often use it in the garden," then you will be able to know which one of the two you are referring to since they are in different classes and the word "it" need to be in concord with the noun. If they are in the same class, then you don't have concord distinction when referring to the object. I think the development of this feature are more to distinguish objects and subjects in sentences, as they are more likely to be different types of objects (e.g.: a human and a thing) and hence more likely to be in different noun classes. An axe being in a different class than a shovel is more of an coincidence.
"The doctor insisted that he spend the night."
vs.
"The doctor insisted that he spent the night."
The first sentence is how I would say it.
The second sentence sound very British to me.
I would use the second sentence for both cases. If I needed to distinguish them, I'd probably add something like "last week" or something to clarify things.
No, it's subjunctive vs. indicative.
The British form is indicative and past tense, which is not correct grammar under either British or American rules, but is used in common speech.
Replace the verb with "to be", e.g. "the doctor insisted he be here." vs. "The doctor insisted he were here." to illustrate that the past subjunctive doesn't fit.
The past subjunctive is almost exclusively used for hypotheticals, e.g. "If I were rich...."
This isn't hypothetical. This is a mandative statement, so we use the infinitive form of the verb even if the action took place in the past.
- Hey, how did you know he was the perp? He wasn't even on our suspects list!
- Remember when we asked him about our victim? He said, "If it was up to me", not "If it were"... which clearly suggested it was up to him.
As far as musicians go, you can find examples of people on both sides of the pond using or not using the subjunctive. Beyoncé sings "If I were a boy," while Thom Yorke sings "I wish I was special."
Whilst I can understand the argument for the latter being similar to "on purpose", it will never stop sounding wrong to my British ears.
I do hear 'by accident' but always (as a native speaker of British English, born and living in England) consider it an error.
I have at least heard of 'on accident' too, but interestingly it barely registers on Google's ngram viewer, even with 'American English' selected:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=accidentally%2...
Disclaimer : I came to this conclusion from being a native English speaker and picking up differences whilst learning foreign languages so don't take it as fact!
Interesting, didn't know the name for that, thanks!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Verb_phrase_ellipsis
> where Americans [...] "I could"
Which almost makes me grind my teeth in anticipation of 'care less' following it. (A BrE speaker would say 'could not care less', which has the benefit of, you know, actually making sense! ;))
So for your example:
> He gave it to Tom and I.
Change it to:
> He gave it to I.
That's clearly weird, so it should actually be:
> He gave it to me.
And then re-incorporating the other person:
> He gave it to Tom and me.
When I see your version in my mind it's a mistake and my theory is it's a common misunderstanding of the rule, consider the following slightly different scenario which is a super common mistake in my experience:
> Me and Tom went to the movies.
That is clearly wrong when applying the rule and should be:
> I and Tom went to the movies.
Although I feel that this sounds better:
> Tom and I went to the movies.
I think that what often happens (at least it did for me) is that children making the above mistake only ever see the correction without being reminded of or taught the actual rule, so they incorrectly assume the rule is something like:
> Always use "I" when talking about yourself and someone else.
I live in South Africa and we use British English, but I would expect the rule to be the same for American English too.
It annoys me so much more than the converse, wrongly saying 'me', because - as you allude to - it sounds like conscious effort, like they thought they were actively getting it right. That may not be true of course, it's just how it comes across to me.
AmE: in a moment; BrE: for a moment.
Obviously it's blurred, particularly in BrE with televisual influence from America. Although I notice Wiktionary gives the latter unqualified, and the former as US & proscribed.
The package will arrive from Amazon in two weeks
The package will arrive from Amazon in two weeks time
> The package will arrive from Amazon in two weeks' time
British, American
"in future" , "in the future"
"in hospital" , "in the hospital"
Also in British English it's more common to construct a sentence such as:
"A great car, this one." In American English we would almost always say "This is a great car."
Could you use it in a sentence?
There's an entire WP page on these differences that are pretty interesting.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_and_British_English_g...
As always, your local dialect may differ!
I'd probably say "in future, could you please refrain from eating loudly" but "in the future, we will have flying cars". "The future" would refer to the magical world full of fancy new technology, while "in future" is more along the lines of "from now on".
"I'm in hospital" makes perfect sense but "I'm in the hospital" works perfectly fine as well. I don't think either is incorrect in English.
Regarding the sentence construction, I wouldn't understand "a great car, this one" as a standalone sentence. Written, it'd have to be "it's a great car, this one". Spoken, I'd expect there to be either something spoken prior (e.g. "Isn't she lovely. A great car, this one.") or some kind of non-verbal cue (like a look of pride or fondness that essentially expresses the same thing).
But again, Australian, not English.
We'd never say "in future, could you please refrain from eating loudly." There would always be a "the" after "in".
"I'm in hospital." same thing, "in the"
If someone said "Isn't she lovely. A great car, this one." I'd think they were trying to imitate a Brit.
Here's a sample:
23:37, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - FOR THE LAST TIME, STOP AND DON'T COME BACK! undo
23:35, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - TYKELL, CAN YOU DO ME A FAVOR? DIE! undo
23:34, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - crying PLEASE STOP, PLEASE, I'M BEGGING YOU crying undo
23:33, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - I HAVE A GUN, I'M GOING TO SHOOT YOU NOW! shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot shoot undo
23:31, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - YOU REALLY HAVE TO STOP, FOR THE VERY LAST TIME, STOP OR I'LL KILL YOU! undo
23:30, 21 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 12,196 bytes +1 Reverted edits by Tykell to last version by Alex 101 - I KNOW YOU DON'T WANT TO STOP, BUT YOU HAVE TO STOP undo
00:09, 23 February 2006 Tykell talk contribs 11,705 bytes -1 No, we can't. Don't you know when to quit, kid? undo
23:42, 22 February 2006 Alex 101 talk contribs 11,706 bytes +1 now that I'm unblocked and this page is unprotected we can change it undo
I think if you're all-caps screaming you've lost the argument, and seeing this I'm actually quite embarrassed for the guy. Personally I think "$band is good" or "$team is winning" does sound a bit silly, but I've seen it so many times that I'm kinda used to it. Besides I suspect the same is true for an American hearing "$band are good" or "$team are winning". Either way it definitely doesn't warrant losing your cool like this.
It sounds normal to say that an American team like Lakers/Patriots/Giants are winning while a British team like Arsenal/United/City is winning.
Whos winning? Arsenal are (team)
Whos winning? Ronnie O'Sullivan is (singular)
Disclosure: I am English.
Arsenal are winning
Arsenal is the best team in the league
It's contradictory (as well as plainly false ;) ), but that's English.
https://twitter.com/search?q=%22arsenal%20are%20the%20best%2...
Something that comprises many people is treated as singular unless it's in a plural form.
-Arsenal is a team. -We are Arsenal players.
-There are many arsenals in Britain, but there is only one Arsenal.
If it's unclear you have to add words. You have to make sure the subject is singular. With Arsenal the singular nature of the word doesn't require it.
-There are many patriots in the USA, but there is only one Patriots football team.
In your example, Arsenal is the singular team. "Arsenal players are winning" is grammatically correct but not really used because players are understood to be part of a team.
From memory NBA, NFL, MLB use pluralized names but MLS and Indy Car Racing (or whatever it is called now) doesn't?
I don't follow MLS, but looking at the team names, they mostly look singular to me, apart from "New York Red Bulls". I suspect the Red Bulls are nearly always referred to in the plural by Americans.
E.g. Jazz, Heat, Thunder
Joking aside, it might sound odd to an American (or Canadian?) but British English would not distinguish between whether or not the name or “nickname” are singular or plural. So we would say:
The Seahawks are winning
Seattle are winning
Arsenal are winning
Rangers were relegated
I think this is the kind of thing where you can learn to tolerate the “wrong” one but it’ll always sound weird to you, whether “wrong” for you is British or US English :-)
Edit: I did think of a situation where we’d use “is” - when you’re referring to the legal entity or FULL name of the club. “Aberdeen Football Club is a Scottish professional football club based in Aberdeen”. This is pretty rare to see, and you’ll likely just see it in, ironically enough, the first line of a Wikipedia page.
"The Patriots are winning" sounds OK to me as an American. "The Patriots is winning" sounds totally wrong. "Arsenal are winning" sounds fine, "Arsenal is winning" also sounds fine.
Band names tend to be mixed. It's clearly "the Red Hot Chili Peppers are playing at..." but also "Primus is playing at...". (See also the edit war between "The Eagles" and just "Eagles")
perhaps why it sounds right
In my neck of the woods at least, whether the proper noun itself is a plural word is also a major factor. I would be more likely to say, "The Beatles are a band," but, "Led Zepplein is a band."
Angels & Airwaves is a fun one, because it's two different proper nouns, but "Angels & Airwaves is a band" still sounds more correct to my (Chicago) ears. I cannot provide any plausible-sounding rationalization for this opinion, but I will fight to the death to defend it.
Just like you'd say "Wells Fargo is a bank" even though it's obviously a huge corporation that is made up of thousands of people.
In some contexts it still makes way more sense to use the plural conjugations, like if you were to say "Angels & Airwaves are playing a great show", because at that point you're talking about what they (the band members) are doing. Likewise you would say "Angels & Airwaves are putting out an album" or "are retiring" because you're talking about the actions of the band members, as opposed to the business entity (the band itself).
Sorry, I'm a musician as well as a coder, so I've thought about the syntax of this before.
- "The Beatles are..." This means we're talking about those 4 guys in The Beatles
- "Metallica is..." Means we're talking about the band, not the 4 dudes.
And when that change happens (inferring the band vs inferring the band members) it doesn't change the meaning of the sentence, so nothing else matters.
I see what you did there.
Other language wikipedias also value topics differently. A British English wikipedia would prefer citations from Britain. In many national cases it would merit having more than one article or articles of different opinion.
It reminds me of the page on Toilet Paper[1].
It is 35,330 bytes
Meanwhile the page on Toilet Paper Orientation[2], of which there are two choices:
- OVER
- UNDER
goes on and on, and manages to weigh in almost 50% larger than toilet paper at 49,667 bytes.
Amusingly, "vertical" is actually mentioned, but how a hero got that in, I don't know. Probably killed or captured.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toilet_paper_orientation
But then the discussion becomes between "left" or "right"...definitely don't want to go there!
Whether you're right or wrong is so inconsequential that it is simply not worth the effort to try and change someone's mind on it. The consequences for putting it on "wrong" is what? It's slightly more inconvenient (in your mind) to tear a sheet?
Having a strong opinion on that subject or other similar ones and getting impassioned about it is a signal to me that one more desires to be seen as intelligent and right rather than actually searching for information or understanding.
For example about the legitimacy of the "Nobel Prize in Economics" as a real Nobel Prize.
In the end, the way history gets written is important for the propaganda of the future. And Wikipedia is the primary authority on truth in the current world. Wether we like it or not.
If it's your word against theirs, you lose. No matter how "technically right" you are. No matter what Wikipedia writes.
I honestly initially didn't care about the British Isles thing til I saw British people start to presume Irish people were naturally British and then use that exact terminology to justify why UK sovereignty should be extended over the entire island.
Just imagine if Britain was referred to as an "Irish Isle" and you'll start to see the problem in how people start to view the neighbours not as equals but as one belonging to the other.
I can picture some of my friends back home wondering what some Japanese-Brit kids are watching that gets them in so much trouble.
I think that would be such a rare scenario as to be worthless as a premise. Can you name a bunch of prominent examples where a lot of people were murdered, and it didn't generate terror in the population nearby the event (or broader, perhaps nationally, if it was at a genocidal scale)?
I can think of few examples from recent history.
Serial killers inspire terror in the population in the region where the killings occur.
Mass shootings cause terror.
Authoritarians/tyrants, civil wars and other military conflicts that genocide populations cause terror.
When is there ever a lot of murder without terror? The only cases I can think of that didn't have terror immediately associated, are the rare instances where the population didn't know until afterward, and even then it's likely there would be some terror felt after the fact. For example, nurses that get caught having committed mass murder (several prominent examples from the last ~40-50 years). Often they don't terrorize a population while they're committing murder, because it's unknown what they're doing, however it's also very likely the population feels some terror afterward in the form of lingering fear and loss of trust & security in the healthcare system. In that example, the infliction of terror merely occurs with a delay.
* element of intimidation
* violence against civilians / bistanders who don't have an immediate effect on the political goals of the inflicting organization
This IMO clearly excludes An Jung-geun and George Washington.
Don't police and MMA fighters in the ring intentionally use violence for their goals pretty regularly?
I think few people would call that terrorism; I'm not sure a definition is possible without the (admittedly unsatisfying) idea of 'legitimacy'
I don't find that clear at all. That definition is very broad and would include any country in any war, both offensive and defensive. It would even include any person defending theirself from an attacker.
It's also not literal. The literal meaning is anyone who instills terror for their goal.
Literally, lonely bamboo island (どくちくしま・독죽도²). I wonder if I'm the first one to come up with this portmanteau?
1: Not any time soon, obviously.
2: Probably. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Would be hell if you used it on a longer comment.
“This section is intended as humor. It is not, has never been, nor will ever be, a Wikipedia policy or guideline. Rather, it illustrates standards or conduct that are generally not accepted by the Wikipedia community.”
That the edit wars themselves (lame or not) can be query should be interesting for the students of the human mind and, maybe, even for future historians because it shows what was important in our time.
OFC some examples are clearly just the product of either drugs or a bad week, or more likely both.
Kind of like reading slashdot articles about "websites", hacker news articles about "capitalism", or newspaper article comment sections about "immigrants" in the late 20th/early 21st century. Or whatever. You get the point ;)
Let's say my parents are from A, I was born in B and live in C. There was an important and well known historical conflict between A, B and C fueled by nationalism at some point.
I am an established artist/scientist and I don't care about my own nationality. Is it important that people flame about it on my wiki article?
I think it's actually worse than StackOverflow.
At least that was what I used to think until recently. I spotted such a glaring omission on the Dutch wikipedia that I felt morally compelled to remedy it myself. I did the edit and sure enough within five minutes I was alerted that someone else had edited my edit.
Turns out he had just fixed a typo, sent me a thank you and added a new section of his own on something unrelated. For what it is worth, it was an uplifting little experience.
Still, wp is in my view easily the biggest achievement of the web, and I still care for it. I would often fix small issues, like you mention, this does not trigger any hostile response. Something else I found to work quite well to contribute without risking annoying conflicts : to translate articles from en.wp to other languages if their pages don't exist yet on the localized one. And of course, there always need help to revert vandalisms.
Also, I would recommend against having an account. Being IP based editor makes you more subject to scrutiny, but this prevents people deciding they don't like you based on your history. That's an advice I would give for any public discussion on the web, though (by always using fresh accounts).
The web lowered the barrier to entry and the Wikipedia editorial system somewhat raises it for anyone interested in creating something for the web.
I'm not trying to "call you out" on this; I'm genuinely curious - do you have anything to back up this assertion? I've had a couple of instances where I'd written something on a topic that Wikipedia had inadequately covered, and posted on the article's talk page. I included a link to my content, a note that it was my original research, and asked that other editors consider adding it as a source. In most instance - maybe every instance, as it's been a while and I'm not even sure if I could find all the places I'd done that - it was eventually cited and incorporated into the article.
I think you may have slightly misunderstood me, as you make examples of times where you've suggested edits to editors and they've been agreeable.
I was talking more along the lines of the syndication of content at scale, perhaps a "death by a thousand papercuts (or citations)" scenario where Wikipedia gets the pageviews, the visitors, the links.
For example, Wikipedia gets a lot of links as a 'credible' reference, and tends to rank well in search engines for the topic titles due to this. This pushes down all the other pages of course, including the pages that Wikipedia uses as citations.
I feel that content has been homogenised and centralised too much, and could go into that more but I'm sure you get my general gist, without any data to back it up.
On the flip side, there is additional added value from something like Wikipedia existing, like all the Natural Language Processor tools that get trained up on well-formed and structured text.
On the other hand, my usual way of reading wikipedia is by browsing localhost. All data of wikipedia is open (you can actually download its database) and under creative common, so it's perfectly legit to host it on your own computer - quite the opposite of centralized, in that regard.
Of course, using the whole database with the whole history is not really practicable nor useful, on a local computer. Personally, I use the dumps generated by Kiwix, which only provide the last revision at the time of generation of the dump. I download them using the torrents provided by Kiwix and keep seeding them, so it can hardly be more decentralized, in that regard :)
Yes, it's cool that the entire dataset is there to be downloaded and used as you please. I have a parser written for it as part of a knowledge graph- don't get me wrong there's good things about Wikipedia I think it just came with collateral damage. Case in point is just searching for any wikipedia title and seeing where it appears in search results, also most of the "knowledge panel" results in major search engines are derived from Wikipedia/Wikidata and deprive the original content creators of their visitors.
This prompted me to check back on some of my own (few) (very minor) edits, and one in particular has been reverted by 'an IP' (as I believe is the lingo). Not that I spent long on it, but mildly annoying (and to have it dismissed as 'trivia') and if I'd noticed at the time I might have been interested/incensed enough to Talk about it.
I don't really care, but of course I did add it for a reason, that it was missing and what I was looking for at the time when I found the page lacking.
I've also added a few photographs that were my original works, which I released to the public domain and included on relevant pages. It's odd to go back after a couple of years and find one of my photos on a Wiki page that I have since completely forgotten that I'd added.
Modern nationality is a highly complex topic related to not only geography, but also politics, language, religion etc. Often a dispute is not about providing information on a historical figure, but about "claiming" important people for your nation so that your collective "historical importance" is increased.
Branding a discussion as a lame diminishes the importance of the discussion. Taking as an example Chopin, the whole importance of of him being considered a Pole is reduced (you can even see it in the comments in this thread) to accusations of nationalism and tribalism. I'm worried that next time someone tries to take a more nuanced, more informed approach to editing they will stop themselves in the fear of being included in a piece like this.
Some places are horrific. The admin’s noticeboard (incidents) is horrible. Sadly it was an initiative I started over a decade ago.
> I'm worried that next time someone tries to take a more nuanced, more informed approach to editing they will stop themselves in the fear of being included in a piece like this.
Good! That's exactly why this article exists. Because for every person who _doesn't_ come across this article and draws a conclusion based on a nuanced, informed approach, another person will disagree with them because they drew the _exact opposite_ conclusion based on their own nuanced, informed approach. And then the debate will devolve into an entry on Lamest Edit Wars.
> This Liszt is incomplete; you can help Wikipedia by trying not to expand it further.
[0] https://i.imgur.com/hqiVtK6.png
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_serial_killers_by_numb...
> Be careful to avoid even the semblance of taking sides in the war. If one version was more or less accepted afterwards, it's OK to note that, but the fact that an edit war occurred means that neither side was "in the right all along".
What about when one party is actively spreading misinformation? A statement that no one is never right in an edit war just gives misinformation credibility.
(Examples could be that smoking is safe, climate change is a hoax, ect.)
An atheist and a christian could have an edit war on the article of Jesus, changing it between "Son of God and our Saviour" and "fairy tale character used to control masses", which would be absolutely lame despite the objective importance of the religious figure in question.
And while sensible people can at least resolve religious issues by accepting that they simply have opposing beliefs and no ability to disprove the other side, politics are even more complex in the sense that they include a lot of historical facts, not just ideological beliefs. This makes it more likely for people to feel like their truth is objective.
I would not say that people feeling strongly about something (and willing to act boldly because of it) somehow validates them or their conflict. That's what lameness means: is something socially accepted or condemned.
> All references to Kosovo should be understood to be in the context of the United Nations Security Council resolution 1244 (1999).
Which means, AFAICT, "We're not saying whether Kosovo is or is not a separate country, please don't flame us about it."
[1] https://www.who.int/emergencies/diseases/novel-coronavirus-2...
> The issue was resolved with an e-mail exchange with Microsoft stating that in their view it's an octothorpe symbol representing the sharp symbol, similar to how "<=" represents the less than or equal symbol, and that thus Microsoft does not disagree with ECMA. Written "Netscape" but pronounced "Mozilla", eh?
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikip%C3%A9dia:Guerres_d%27%C3...
In good dishes like hummus or people who accomplished something, all nationalities want to be part of their success.
This is the original, which visualised tweets: https://github.com/cedricpinson/globetweeter
https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:La...
"two opposing factions of British vampire hunters (the "orthodox" Vampire Research Society and the "revisionist" Highgate Vampire Society, "
Arguably tribalism is just the consequence of our species being social animals, and therefore at the core of our essence - for better and worse ...
Or do you really feel that my comment needed a citation here on HN (Hacker News)? And if it’s the latter, I’m genuinely curious what the proper HN etiquette would be.
My comment wasn’t attempting to be particularly scholarly or to be included in a referencable work.
Quite honestly, I wouldn’t know which reference to pull? Wikipedia? A highly Google ranked Psychology Today magazine article (q= difference+between+tribalism+vs+social+behaviour) ? The entire Google search result link?
At least 2 of the above options might have been interpreted as condescending, and the other one an almost random pick, the randomness of it becoming a potential point of critique.
So I’m genuinely curious how I might have done better.
Well, there's always http://n-gate.com/
> Various supporters of the US Libertarian party (founded in
> 1971) argue that they own the meaning of the word
> 'libertarian', that placing it next to 'socialism' is a
> contradiction in terms, and hence that libertarian socialism
> (described circa 1850) cannot possibly have existed. An edit
> war and request-for-deletion war ensues.
The question of the meaning of "liberty" and the compatibility of liberty with socialized means of production (and the meaning of "socializing") is quite a deep subject. So, not lame.
Its a kind of public secret that one should avoid working on topics where editors might disagree. I find those to be the more interesting ones.
(caveating that I realize the concept of caring about ablest language is relatively new for most people, and that this type of language is deeply ingrained in our cultural subconscious, but it still doesn't cost much to try to avoid it where we can...)
To me, not being a native speaker but having been part of the European demo scene 30 years ago, "lame" in the context of computing never means anything other than the opposite of cool, basically [2] which I of course assume is the meaning intended here.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ableism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamer
So people, please be charitable. Connotations of words differ, and English is spoken and written by people all over the world with different backgrounds :)
As a somewhat tenuous comparison, should we stop saying "goodbye" because it used to mean "God be with ye" and it's taking God's name in vain?
Thanks for a wonderful piece of trivia to start the week. I had no idea this was the source of the word, but it sure was [0]. And equally fascinating, good-day [1] predates good-bye by around 400 years.
Words have different meanings in different contexts and new meanings develop from previous ones. When I first read about how people want to ban the use of the word "supremacy" as in quantum supremacy, I thought it was satire.
Word used for insult can develop positive or neutral meanings later. If we take the approach that once there is negative association, the world is removed, it just limits the language without possibility that the word becomes mostly neutral.