A couple of comments in the recent Siksimiisii! thread linked to the blog Mii Dash Geget: “Ojibwe, Algonquian languages, historical linguistics, and randomness.” The About page says “Posts here generally use linguistics jargon without explanation” and provides a list of “some good introductions to basic linguistic concepts”; it ends with a story, in Ojibwa followed by English, from William Jones, Ojibwa Texts, whose last line is Mii dash geget/And it was true. Some recent posts are Squib #1: “Winter” in Algic (“the Yurok and Proto-Algonquian terms—Yurok kipun and PA *peponwi—are cognate with one another and can be traced back to a Proto-Algic etymon **pəpwən-, despite some complications to clear up”), A Few Modest Terminological and Notational Proposals (“I use the well-established label Algic to refer to the family encompassing Algonquian, Wiyot, and Yurok, and Proto-Algic for its protolanguage”), and Wikipedia Sucks (“I am concerned by how ubiquitous is the practice of practically everyone, including plenty of otherwise reasonable, intelligent people, quoting or citing or linking to Wikipedia” — check out the parade of horrors cited there and marvel at those who think Wikipedia is a reliable source). This is absolutely the kind of thing I love, and I am adding it to my RSS feed.
I find that the main value of WP is finding links to other sources, that you can then evaluate for yourself.
As Ozaawaabineshiinh implies, though, it’s easier to point to the problems that to suggest viable solutions.
It’s also worth pointing out that Elon Musk really hates WP. That’s a pretty powerful point in its favour ….
[It’s not unlike the BBC; myriad problems, but before getting too hostile one should reflect deeply on the fact that the current Tories loathe the BBC and go out of their way to undermine its independence and operational viability at every turn.]
Oh, I don’t hate Wikipedia, I use it every day and would miss it terribly if it went away. But I would never treat it as a reliable source of information, any more than I would some of my friends and relatives who know all sorts of obscure things but also tell stories that are more engaging than fact-based.
Wikipedia remains very heterogeneous; some articles, not always the ones marked as such, are as good as a university textbook or even a review paper, others at least link to scientific literature, yet others are fiefdoms of people with axes to grind… some are lifted from the 1911 version of Encyclopædia Britannica complete with the racial type of the beys in Macedonia in the present tense… some are cobbled together from popular sources that were already outdated when they came out decades ago… and some are crackpottery.
Yes, we know that, but the problem is most people don’t, and treat it as if it were the Britannica.
In particular, the poor state of etymologies (including place names) in NAm languages on Wikipedia reflects the abundance of bad published sources. For every Bright or Goddard there are a hundred compendiums full of thrice-recycled dreck. There are probably people who are so used to reading this stuff, that they would not trust a monosyllabic river name to mean ‘river’, rather than ‘where the abundant glimmering water flows’.
It’s also worth pointing out that Elon Musk really hates WP.
Does he not have a point that it is tainted by left-wing bias?
I think (like our Tories and the US Republicans) he genuinely believes that the only genuine ethical principle is naked self-interest, and that in consequence all actual human virtues are merely a plot to sabotage Humanity and take away all his money.
Does he not have a point that it is tainted by left-wing bias?
No.
People of that kind believe that all basic decency is ipso facto Left Wing, if not Radical Socialist.
(As an actual Radical Socialist, I suppose I should feel quite flattered, but I feel I owe it to Truth to point out that in fact it is perfectly possible to be a decent right-winger. Such people are beleaguered, and need our moral support more than ever.)
But rather more to the point of the post: great site!
More posts please!
I’m someone who does recognize left-wing bias in many settings. Can’t say I’ve noticed that in Wikipedia.
Did you have an example or is it just a mission to sow more seeds of distrust and see where they grow?
Some of the “Wikipedia Sucks” post is about Wiktionary. Editorially, Wiktionary is separate from Wikipedia, and en.wikipedia and other foo.wikipedia are each separate.
I don’t know how wiktionary’s etymology sections could be comprehensive and uptodate while avoiding plagiarism; for most words the number of citable sources is between 0 and 1.
For many languages foo.wikipedia is the preserve of a few cranks or ideologues. This increases the attraction to Foo speakers of reading and editing en.wikipedia instead. Has anyone seen scholarly sources citing foo.wikipedia for foo ≠ en?
In the limited domain I actually have any specialised knowledge of (basically, just bits of Volta-Congo) Wiktionary is about as good as it reasonably could be: the problem is that even “authoritative” published sources are often both not very good and pretty sparse. There isn’t much you can really rely on, but that reflects the state of the literature rather than being the fault of Wiktionary.
The shining exception is of course comparative Bantu, but I would have thought that more or less anybody interested in that would go to the actual sources, which are pretty accessible (hurrah!), rather than Wiktionary anyway.
Other stuff is hard to get hold of anyway. I recently found out that Larry Hyman did a whole reconstructed vocabulary of Eastern Grassfields, but the only place I can actually find it is in annotations supplying potential proto-EG cognates in a book which is actually about reconstruction of one of the Northwestern Bantu groups. The Eastern Grassfields material was never actually published, and the annotations are taken from a manuscript that only the author of the NW Bantu book had access to. Grumble …
My controversial theory is that wikipedia is sometimes a good source and sometimes a not-so-good source. Not unlike e.g. any given edition of the Britannica in that regard. The tricky question is whether one can identify patterns that will let you know with any reliability when it’s good and when not. One problem is that there are certain cues and tics that are pretty good signals that a given article is *not* reliable, but the absence of those cues and tics is maybe necessary but not at all sufficient to assure one that a given article *is* reliable.
My unrelated question is who are these (apparently numerous) people who insist on saying/writing Algonquian instead of Algonquin and what’s their political agenda and how do we get them to stop?
JWB: It’s like conflating German with Germanic or Italian with Italic. They are just sloppy and ignorant.
As to Wikipedia, I tend to be with you. If it’s written sloppily, I mistrust the contents. Not foolproof, but helps with sifting out a great portion of the bad.
as of Y’s comment, this thread has swept the Recent Comments list, which happens less often than you’d think!
I recall years ago (before WP was even thought of) reading an article about this issue in the whole broad context of media in general.
What criteria do we actually use in deciding whether a newspaper article (say) is credible, in the usual case where we actually have no independent way of verifying it?
In practice, we seem to place a lot of weight on things like style and format and general tone, all of which are, logically, quite irrelevant. Or are they? If not, why, not?
The management, i.e. Wikimedia Foundation, has quite arguably some sort of a “left-wing taint” of spending a lot on various inclusivity boondoggles (“recruiting more women to edit” has been a stated goal for years but mostly results in producing weird things like “notational fine-tuning for supposedly making wikicode more appealing to women”), but the median editor remains an independent volunteer who may not even be aware of any of this happening… I wouldn’t know just from practice myself, if I hadn’t poked my head into some of the debates & articles about this elsewhere. Any corporate types like Musk might be lost about how little influence WMF actually exerts on the editing.
Or alternately maybe this is all about a couple edit-wars on a few specific topics a la 4Chan, where there’s probably a “left-wing” bias (i.e. progressivist bias, not a shred about socialism to it) in what gets said about them in published sources; and which then naturally ends up duplicated in Wikipedia & left up despite extended ongoing protests from passing-by netizens with personal experience to the contrary but nothing to refer to.
Hey, I linked to Mii Dash Geget from here before! I just assumed Languagehat was already familiar with it.
Wow, chi-miigwech (thank you so much) for the shout-out!
I wasn’t expecting most of the replies to be about the Wikipedia post :). I agree of course that the quality varies widely, and there are some genuinely very good articles, that easily rival or surpass “normal” encyclopedias — though in my areas of greatest domain knowledge, they’re very rare, which inevitably influences my overall perception. And I also, of course, use Wikipedia all the time for minor things (or for finding sources). But I do also see some people that I respect uncritically just citing Wikipedia a lot, which, again, may be appropriate for individual articles but isn’t appropriate as a general practice. If you can’t tell, that post was also just born out of frustration of having constantly run into terrible articles recently, and needing to vent about it…
I also am aware that Wiktionary is separate, and I do trust it more for English and other major languages than I trust Wikipedia about stuff. (But warning: do NOT trust any of the Algonquian or Algic stuff on there, or in many cases etymologies for English words of Amerindian origin. The best easily accessible source for such etymologies is dictionary.com, which uses the RHD, where the relevant etymologies were overseen by Ives Goddard.) I’d forgotten that I treated them with so much equivalence in that post. I should change that.
>My unrelated question is who are these (apparently numerous) people who insist on saying/writing Algonquian instead of Algonquin and what’s their political agenda and how do we get them to stop?
I mean, to be fair, it’s an easy confusion to make. The name for the family wasn’t chosen very well…
Eh, Wikipedia is just the easiest think to have an opinion about…
Sapir called the family “Algonkin”, too.
Have you considered publishing any of this?
I wasn’t expecting most of the replies to be about the Wikipedia post
Yeah, in retrospect I’m sorry I mentioned it. I should have realized it would be catnip for Opinions.
I don’t have the capacity to write a useful comment about Algic, but I read several posts, enjoyed them and learned something.
“The Wikipedia Article on Abhartach” (https://cassidyslangscam.wordpress.com/author/johndonnelly01/).
Checking some of the archives, I was struck by:
— Lewis and Clark using a chain of translators, English–French–Hidatsa–Shoshone–Montana Salish. That’s one more than David Eddyshaw’s, here.
— A weird but there-you-have-it sequence of sound changes, Proto Algic *we to Proto Algonquian *o to Proto Eastern Algonquian *wǝ in some environments. The arguments are elaborate (as they should be) and I haven’t looked at them in detail.
(Eddyshaw’s English–Mooré–Dyula–Something Else, here.)
“The Wikipedia Article on Abhartach”
not to be confused with the wikipedia article on agharta, which is surprisingly – dare i say, suspiciously – restrained.
—
but i don’t want to stay entirely in the derailment lane, so let me also say how much i appreciate the longer posts, like this one on tisquantum, and the one on wolves. to me, part of the glory of blogs as a form is that they allow for longer explorations / explanations as well as shorter pieces.
The Tisquantum post is indeed very much worth reading.
I suppose that’s the other and equally pernicious extreme from “publish or perish”.
(Well, it’s not the extreme. The extreme is the tradition of Siouanists never publishing anything all their lives, so if you weren’t lucky enough to know them personally, their knowledge is lost.)
From that Tisquantum post …
Not just Massasoit’s people, but all who have been properly brung up.
This is what is going on when Pwyll (Prince of Dyfed) meets Arawn, King of the Otherworld in a forest at the very beginning of the First Branch of the Mabinogi (when neither of them yet knows the other.) The very first thing Arawn says is that he is not going to greet Pwyll, and Pwyll responds that he does not know how to interpret this without knowing their relative ranks. (In fact, although Arawn does outrank him, that is not what he is talking about. When the situation is explained, Pwyll – quite properly – greets Arawn first.)