Conversation started Dec 9, 2015 at 0:05.
MετάEd
MετάEd
Dec 9, 2015 00:05
@JasperLoy Auggh. I have made many corrections of factual errors in Wikipedia.
user174558
@MετάEd Well done, I am not as noble. I do not even have an account.
Anonymous
I've made most of my corrections anonymously.
Anonymous
I occasionally make an account, but then I usually forget what I named it :-)
user174558
That's why I delete my accounts once I don't want to use it, to avoid too many online accounts lying around and getting into wrong hands.
Anonymous
Linguistics is a really incoherent field.
Anonymous
Dec 9, 2015 00:08
Lots of different people use different lots of different names for things, and they refer to different sorts of concepts with those names.
Cerberus
Cerberus
Yeah.
user174558
Are there separate degrees for say English Language and Linguistics in universities?
Cerberus
Cerberus
And it often uses the same term differently compares to other fields.
Anonymous
When you read a single coherent book on the topic, written or edited by a single author or team of authors, you can get a description that makes sense and uses terms in a consistent fashion.
user174558
In math, one term can have different definitions, and one definition can have different terms too. But they are mostly well known conventions.
Anonymous
Dec 9, 2015 00:10
But it may be inconsistent with other sources both terminologically and conceptually.
Anonymous
Linguistics is not nearly as mature a field as mathematics.
Cerberus
Cerberus
Yeah.
user174558
So, what about my question above?
Anonymous
So when you create a crowd-sourced reference like Wikipedia and you try to describe something as incoherent as linguistics, it's really hard to describe everything in a useful and consistent fashion.
Cerberus
Cerberus
And sometimes certain linguists are adamant that theirs is the only proper terminology, despising alternative ones...
user174558
Dec 9, 2015 00:12
Huddleston wrote a scathing review of Carter and McCarthy's book!
user174558
The former cowrote CGEL and the latter wrote CGE!
user174558
What will CUP say? LOL.
Anonymous
So even though Wikipedia has professional linguists like Tim Osborne editing it, and even though there are a lot of good sources referenced properly on Wikipedia, and even though there's a lot of correction information there, it's really difficult to come up with good articles on each topic, and it may be next to impossible to do so by crowd sourcing . . .
Cerberus
Cerberus
Oh, well, such is life...
user174558
Most of the time, Wikipedia entry is the first page of something I google for.
Anonymous
Dec 9, 2015 00:15
So I don't mean to belittle the people involved or the effort they've put in. But I do think learning linguistics from Wikipedia is a bad idea.
 
Conversation ended Dec 9, 2015 at 0:15.