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Comment by ttiurani | Hacker News Reader

> I'm going to impose my preference on everyone else, even though the term has been part of standard contemporary English for a long time.

At least I, as a non-native speaker, find the edited sentences always easier to read. They simply make the text better.

As the entire point od Wikipedia is to make knowledge accessible with co-writing, I find it just wild that people would object to better language.

So who exactly is imposing their preference on the world: the one making the text easier to read, or the one objecting to the edits?

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I find this to be a false equivalence.

People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of". Bland articles that directly communicate the language can be more or less tasteful depending upon who is reading them. Almost assuredly sentences can be written without "comprised of" that are also definitely not bland.

But classifying something you find easier to read as better language for everyone doesn't make it immediately true for everyone.

Additionally, it's not about a person making text easier to read or not from one (or multiple peoples') perspectives -- this appears to be about someone going on a stylistic crusade en masse. Objecting to the edits being an act of 'imposing their preference on the world' feels similar to the political mirror-projection kind of argument that can happen.

I think there is interesting discussion to be had (is it better? are there good ways to use it? when/where/how? what is the ethicality of editing articles like this? is a disclaimer wiki entry enough? etc etc), and maybe we can focus on that.

I can't see how eliminating a common misuse of an otherwise dead word wouldn't be clearer to nonnative speakers and less painful to the brains of native speakers. There are a lot of people who want to add dead vocabulary back to sound important and they'll succeed often enough with words that are at best unnecessary synonyms that convey no additional information. We don't really have to give them the benefit of the doubt when they do it completely wrong.

This conversation has gone back in a circle though. The original parent comment here pointed out that none of the arguments given for why it's a "misuse" hold water. "I can't see how eliminating a common misuse wouldn't be clearer" is not a responsive reply to "it's not a misuse."

I thought the article was clear enough. Comprises with no preposition matches its first and uncontested use. The preposition form is using the second more debatable form to create the first in a way that implies ignorance or wordiness any editor should correct.

> People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of".

I think that phrase is always incorrect. I suspect the problem is that people aren't used to words that take a list as their direct argument, like "comprise".

Wikipedia leans heavily to descriptivism (as do nearly all lexicons, these days). So there's no incorrect usage; there's only usage that jars, for some people.

I don't go around telling people they're ignorant because they can't speak their mother-tongue properly. That would simply be rude. But English text intended for publication should be correct English; it shouldn't be garbled, whether because it's written by a non-native speaker, or a native speaker who isn't well-read.

That implies that there is such a thing as "correct English". This seems obvious to me, but that's exactly what descriptivists deny.

Let's not get into whether "literally" is a synonym for "figuratively".

Correct according to whom? The language you speak is the result of thousands of years of casual communication by billions of human beings. Precriptivism of a living natural language is hubris.

What seems like perfect English to you is not perfect to everyone.

> The language you speak is the result of thousands of years of casual communication by billions of human beings.

Disagree. The language I speak didn't exist 800 years ago. The Anglo-saxons wouldn't have understood me, and I wouldn't have understood them.

And there were barely a billion human beings just 800 years ago - forget about thousands of years.

I didn't mention "prescriptivism", although it's obviously the opposite of descriptivism.

I thiink you mistake "prescriptivism" for a sort of law-making,like grammar-nazis. I mean something more like a general acceptance that words do have particular meanings, and that it's possible to be wrong about the meaning or use of a word.

Whether or not that is the case, once enough wrong'uns do their thing it becomes correct, correct? Whatever the history or logic or what have you. So it becomes more a question of whether "90k instances on Wikipedia, has made it into dictionaries" is either far too late, or merely a lost cause.

With all due respect, if you're not a native English speaker you really aren't in a position to judge what constitutes "better language". I speak fluent Spanish but I wouldn't presume to correct a native Spanish speaker on their style.

I also wouldn't base your opinions of what makes for good English on the ramblings of one Wikipedian whose primary argument seems to be that they had to work hard to learn to use the word a particular way and so everyone else should for the rest of time.

> With all due respect, if you're not a native English speaker you really aren't in a position to judge what constitutes "better language"

They said "find the edited sentences always easier to read" and that's valuable regardless if you're a native speaker or not. Of course, what "better language" is as subjective as "clean code" so probably won't reach any consensus there.

But all of this is highly subjective in the end, so everyone's opinion is equally worth, native speaker or not.

I was responding to this:

> I find it just wild that people would object to better language.

They're either saying that their own sense of what is more legible is enough to define what is better, or they're buying into the pedantic arguments in TFA.

As to what is easier to read, I think the English Wikipedia should be written to be legible to native English speakers. This is better for everyone: native English speakers can read their Wikipedia, and English learners get exposed to actual English usage rather than a simplified version.

In this case, it's not obvious to me that any substantial portion of the English-speaking population sincerely gets confused by "comprised of". It feels much more like the insistence on not ending sentences in prepositions: a rule for the sake of having a rule.

EDIT: In fact, "comprised of" recently overtook "comprises" in published books:

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+o...

> This is better for everyone: native English speakers can read their Wikipedia, and English learners get exposed to actual English usage rather than a simplified version

Side note, there is an actual "simplified english" wikipedia. So even early learners who want a simplified resource have one aside from regular Wikipedia. https://simple.wikipedia.org/

For the record, I agree with your criticism. I did generalize my experience without enough justification.

It was a 30 second runaway comment and the latter part clearly doesn't hold up against scrutiny.

> But all of this is highly subjective in the end, so everyone's opinion is equally worth, native speaker or not.

That subjectivity doesn’t equate to the equal worth of all opinions. It just means that no one opinion can be considered universal.

That lack of universality doesn’t mean that picking any one direction is as good as picking any other.

If I strongly prefer a Victorian style, giving my preference equal weight is likely to make the content far less valuable, because my preference is not a common one.

It would be necessary to examine the goals behind the content: the audience it is intended for, the desired effect on that audience, the nuances lost by preferring audience B over Audience A, the impact of that loss, etc.

Everyone should be allowed to have a preference, absolutely, but applying individual preferences to content does not lead to equivalent outcomes.

With all due respect, I am a native English speaker and I agree with the GP. I wouldn't go as far as the Wikipedian in question (I surely have far better uses of my time than to make many tens of thousands of edits over a trivial nitpick), but the end result does read better and I'd have a hard time justifying a reversion of such an edit.

Also, considering that plenty of non-native English speakers read the English Wikipedia, there is plenty of value in the English writing in the English Wikipedia being maximally clear without sacrificing the intended meaning of the text. Dismissing feedback out of hand on the basis of "well the person giving the feedback ain't a native English speaker" misses the point of Wikipedia being a resource for everyone.

Broadening this beyond Wikipedia, the English language itself "is comprised of" countless words and grammatical structures yanked straight out of other languages, often by non-native speakers importing features of their native languages for all sorts of reasons. Knowing this history, I hereby authorize non-native speakers to critique the language and elements thereof; it's just as much their language as it is mine, and they therefore have just as much a right to it as I do.

> but the end result does read better

What tiny fraction of one percent of the edits would you estimate you have actually read?

Enough to extrapolate with a reasonable level of confidence.

It’s not obvious to me that only native speakers should have the right to pronounce on linguistic changes or the aptness of linguistic use. Some possible arguments, and responses:

1. Non-native speakers lack the competence necessary to make such pronouncements.

It’s false to deny that many non-native speakers acquire near-native competence. So if we think that ordinary native speakers have the right to pronounce on these questions, at least some particularly skilled non-native speakers should too. Perhaps the claim then is that there’s a high standard that only a few native speakers and no non-native speakers reach. It’s unclear what would motivate that view; given that language is something we all use, it is doubtful that e.g. the perspicacity of a particular construction should only be commented upon by the most skilled speakers.

2. Native speakers’ claims to influence languages should have priority over those of non-native speakers.

We might simply view this as obvious, in which case there’s something of a conflict of interest. I think the more plausible argument is grounded in the use of language. Someone who never uses French will not really have particularly important opinions on its use. The problem here is that it’s unclear why native speakers’ intuitions are really more important. The English language is surely just as important to a Nigerian civil servant who operates nearly entirely in English as it is to one in Whitehall. The difference between non-native speakers and native speakers don’t seem relevant unless we take being a native speaker per se to be of import.

I should have said ‘conflict of intuitions’, not ‘interest’; it’s too late to edit now.

Simplifying the language, so that non-native speakers can understand it, doesn't automatically make the text better. That's a wild assertion. Worse yet, Simple English Wikipedia exists for that exact purpose.

I agree and that's why I referred to "the edited sentences" and not English in general.

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