This is an archive of past discussions with User:Ikiroid. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page.
Hi Clyde, I saw your post on Ndsg's talkpage. Do you agree with my idea of closing peer review and simply diving into FAC? Is there anything we should consider first that neither Ndsg nor myself have already thought of? I would appreciate your input. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)21:02, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
First off, your headings look weird. I would consider rearranging the stuff at the top of your talk page to fix it (unless you like it that way). As to GR, I would reccomend closing the PR, listing as an FAC, and going here to get a few more copyeditors to take a look at it during or before the FAC. You seem to almost be one yourself, but another pair of eyes never hurt.--Clyde (talk) 21:13, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for the pointers. I'll wait for Ndsg to make a response, and then based on his input coupled with yours we'll make a decision. By the way, what do you mean by "headers?" Are you referring to section titles? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)21:18, 25 March 2007 (UTC)
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I responded, but you might want to know that asking someone to respond in an FAC is usually frowned upon. Do it with care.--Clyde (talk) 00:32, 29 March 2007 (UTC)
Sorry, I was on a two day trip and I'm still getting everything back together. I did manage to make one edit on the hotel's wifi network, but naught else. I'll be happy to help elsewhere, now that I'm back. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)16:05, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
It's OK if we don't get a large amount of votes, articles are basically promoted based on quality, not the direction of the FAC discussion. Take a look at the FAC of today's featured article, for example, which only received three support votes. I think the amount of discussion provided by Clyde will pull it through. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)20:07, 31 March 2007 (UTC)
Just seen your note. I've done all the Web citations per User:SandyGeorgia's comments; so that aspect is dealt with.
As for the colours, I do hope SG is the only objector! The MOS certainly doesn't prohibit the use of colour—let's see what other reviewers (if any) say. As a fallback we could always use the following coding:
Tone 1 Tone 2Tone 3Tone 4
But I'd certainly prefer to keep the existing setup!
Glad to see that User:SandyGeorgia is now satisfied with my Web citations, & has struck out his (her?) comments on that score. Let's see if anyone else feels that strongly about the colour-coding: I (or SG) have notified just about all the relevant Talk pages.
I had sudden misgivings about my reformulation of the tonal spelling rules, which are rather differently expressed from Chao's traditional 9 rules (or whatever it is). A hint of WP:OR? Not really: I think I could defend what I've done, if challenged, on the grounds that it's more a matter of presentation than substance. Anyway, I'll just keep quiet about it! --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk18:09, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
Well ... my head is still spinning. Not so much from the FA promotion as from the vertigo induced by the rotating barnstar you've awarded me! I think you deserve at least equal honours for bringing GR up to scratch, with your tireless improvements & suggestions—& not least for creating the splendid image at the top of the article. Quite a few other editors made extremely useful suggestions, & I shall thank them personally.
Done I've thanked the following: Ravedave, Clyde Miller, Ideogram, Xhantar, Sumple, Peripitus & DocRock. Have I forgotten anyone? If so, perhaps you could do it for me. I'm not sure whether it would be OK to thank SandyGeorgia for his/her review on the the FAC page—I don't want to commit a faux pas! --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk15:53, 3 April 2007 (UTC)
I'm personally delighted that the colour-coding got through. The general recommendation not to use colour is probably a good one; but in this case I think it was clearly justified.
Now, what do we do about the status of Spelling in Gwoyeu Romatzyh? After all, we've put in a fair amount of work on that too.
Hi. Thanks for the heads-up about the questions. However, I feel the questions by you and Sn0wflake have some overlap. So I am answering both of them together. Hope that is not a problem. If you feel any way uncomfortable, just let me know. I will answer them again individually. --soum(0_o)05:44, 2 April 2007 (UTC)
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Featured Language
What is the process for choosing a new featured language? I see a nomination page, but I see no voting or other mechanism for choosing one language over another, and yet you listed Turkish as May's language of the month despite the fact that it was not even on the Nomination Page. If you plan on responding here, please leave a note on my talk page—otherwise I'm likely to forget to check back! The Jade Knight11:37, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
There isn't a process for choosing it. Either User:Michkalas or I choose it from the nomination page. Originally, when we restarted the portal at the end of August we were the only people interested. I suppose we could set up a formal system—do you have any ideas? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)11:57, 4 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your suggestion about joining this Project: I'm flattered. Nevertheless, I don't think I will, as I'm really more interested in languages than writing systems. So why GR? you may ask. Well, I just felt I knew quite a lot about it (though it turned out there was lots more to learn!), having read most of Chao's work—& thought I could contribute something.
In fact, having discovered just how much time preparing an article can take, I'm not really sure how much more I'm going to do on WP. Maybe some wikignoming for the time being. As you may see from my contribs, I've been helping an editor improve what is already quite a good article on the Mendip Hills. What's more, the gliding season is just starting again here in the UK, & I want to devote some time to that!
Special note to spamlist users: Apologies for the formatting issues in previous issues. This only recently became a problem due to a change in HTML Tidy; however, I am to blame on this issue. Sorry, and all messages from this one forward should be fine (I hope!) -Ral315
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Good job on Image:Gwoyu.png! I noticed a small error in the pinyin transcription guóyǔ; the 3rd tone mark above u should be a caron (i.e. sharp end), not a breve (i.e. rounded end). Could you please correct the error? Regards, JoshuaChiew10:57, 11 April 2007 (UTC)
Request extention of semi-protection for Mother Teresa article
Hi, Ikiroid. I'm requesting that the semi-protection for Mother Teresa be extended. The semi-protection, due to expire on 4/14, has worked well; since then we've been able to get about halfway through the extensive efforts needed to upgrade the article to GA status. Unprotecting the article will mean that schoolage anon vandals will once again insert dirty words and well-meaning anons will junk up the article with lists, trivia and the like. Can you help? Thanks Majoreditor12:49, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
Hi Major, I know what you mean about the vandalism impeding cleanup. I checked up on the semi-protection request you made and the subsequent refusal. In terms of temporary protection, I'm inclined to agree with Deskana...however, you can wait out the first 12-24 hours of unprotection and evaluate how severe it is. Certain high-traffic articles can be indefinitely [semi]protected, although that is usually a last resort option. Looking through the history, however, I see only about 3-6 malicious edits per day in the time preceding semi-protection, so it doesn't qualify for being high-traffic. Let it go, and if it all goes to crap report to WP:RFP. I have it on my watchlist, so I'll help catch anything suspicious. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)17:07, 12 April 2007 (UTC)
re: Chatter
Well, hello there!
Yes - seems that Wikipedia has changed a bit after Esperanza's closure. We're only supposed to write an encyclopedia and not engage in futile conversations. Hence, I don't edit as much recently - mostly just run the bots and do maintenance stuff. And when it comes to the archiving bots, some people seem to be address me in a demanding tone as if I was employed here and paid some bucks for a 24/7 technical assistance. <eyeroll/>
Anyway, it's been a while since your first (and only, unless I missed something) RfA. Thought of a re-run? I honestly believe you'd make a great mop-wielder. :-) Cheers, Миша1320:47, 15 April 2007 (UTC)
I've been putting the reply to your post for too long, I guess and eventually nearly forgot about it. :)
Anyway, back to Esperanza, I feel the all the more disappointed, because it was really ESP that helped me integrate into the community (I'm a bit of a loner and outsider), learn the ropes of Wikipedia and deal with stressing situations.
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Guru, shmuru ... I'm a bit concerned about the Turkish article, good though it is in some ways. I really think it ought to have gone for PR & copyediting. The prose is odd in places (see my comments on the Talk page. What do you think?
Many of the supporters are Turks (some quite young, it appears) who are pleased that their language is in the limelight. Nothing wrong with patriotic pride, of course—but does it make for a good article?
As an IPA guru yourself, do you agree that the IPA in the Example poem should have stress marks? And what about the non-standard, informal method used in Sounds (eg Ánkara)?
These are just the sort of nit-picking points that were picked up when we submitted GR to PR & copyediting; & I think it's a shame to see a basically good article spoiled by this lack of attention to detail. I have to agree with many of User:Yannismarou's reservations.
You bring up a lot of good questions. Regarding your newfound position as copyeditor/PR guy, it's quite a normal process for wikipedians to become advisors and copyeditors as they get more experienced with the community and the system. Think back to Gwoyeu Romatzyh—my primary work was acquainting you with style and policy; you did the research and made seven times as many edits to the article as me.
It is also perfectly normal to have enthusiastic speakers work on a language article. Of course, beware of POV. There are some groups that maintain a sensistive peace with one another but often war over articles. Spend enough time in an article about a religion, war, or culture, and you'll probably find a few fanatics. It's #9 on User:Angr's Reasons to Leave. Also, look at the archives in Talk:Nanking Massacre as well as User:HRE.
In terms of IPA, I do think that the text should posess some suprasegmental features. In standard IPA, accents aren't used for stress— an upper dash <ˈ> indicates primary stress and <ˌ> is for secondary stress. They go before the syllable, i.e. [ˌkendisinˈden] for kendisinden. Also, you can use <ː> for vowel length (this comes after the vowel). For example, [kaˈbuːl] for kabul. The examples I gave are taken from the Turkish section of the IPA handbook, so I'll bet my life on this. I've actually gone ahead and cited some stuff in the phonology section with this book.
From the looks of it, this article has had a much easier run of copyediting than what we endured with GR. I am a bit disappointed to see that many of the editors wait for one of the wikipedians (User:AtilimGunesBaydin) to do anything before making a move. I don't think you should rewrite the article either—it's too much work for you to do at this time, and it really doesn't need it anyway. Make a few Botox injections here and there, but don't give it a facelift ;-)
Leet? Eek! Not for me, I'm afraid. I may have a look at your Phoenician alph, though. Actually, I'm not really looking for new things to copyedit: I've just been looking at the languages I know. I suppose I'm drawn to obscure topics where I don't risk running into too much competition (GR, Ottoman)!
The trouble with the Turkish article is that hardly any non-native speakers have been involved in it (apart from one or two Greeks, who may have a family connection with Anatolia). Because of this, & because few of the editors are trained linguists, they tend (naturally enough) to be blind to the features that non-Turkish speakers find either interesting or puzzling. For instance, one of them recently gave some examples of supposed ridiculous coinages by the T Lang Assoc, without even bothering to explain in English why they might be thought ridiculous (I've attempted to remedy that). Of course the same goes for even the standard grammar, which is interestingly different from IE.
It's usually not a problem to have a group of enthusiasts working on the article. Editors like yourself iron out the perspective problems, and peer review and FAC are even more strict than a single editor like yourself. I've read it and I can't find anything wrong, although now that you mention it, I'll admit that something isn't quite right. I've asked User:Angr to look over it, perhaps he could help out with the linguistic evolution and grammar. Personally, agglutinative languages scare the hell out of me, although they do have their advantages (such as a low rate of mutation and irregularity).
Well, I've left quite a few comments on the Talk page, only one of which (gazetemiz yazarlarından) has been followed up by anyone. If I had to single out a section that I feel unhappy about, it would probably be Grammar:
too much space devoted to reduplication (a couple of examples would suffice).
the description of devoicing of the abl. & loc. suffixes -den and -de is excessively verbose. Lewis puts it more succinctly in his Turkish Grammar, where he calls this "consonant assimilation in suffixes".
for purposes of exposition, much more use should be made of hyphens to separate the various suffixes: eg üzümümüzün, "of our grape", would be easier to analyse & understand if written üzüm-ümüz-ün. Lewis makes frequent use of this device (which is not,of course, used in the normal orthography).
"shortest word in Turkish" (o): pointless & silly, should be dropped. As for the invented Czechoslovak example ... well, it often comes up in these discussions, so I suppose there's some excuse for including it.
relative clauses/"verbals" (ie participles). This section was, I think, more or less lifted from Turkish grammar. The topic could be dealt with more succinctly (but at the same time more comprehensively) by using something along the lines of the examples I suggested :
bizi gören adam ("the us-seeing man — the man who saw us")
gördüğümüz adam ("the our-seen man — the man [whom] we saw")
This is a fundamental aspect of Turkish syntax, & should be dealt with properly.
I've gone into this at some length on your page simply because most of my comments have been ignored on the Talk page! By all means publish my remarks more widely if you want.
But all this should have been ironed out earlier by proper PR & copyediting. The problem is really one of their own making in rushing this through to FAC. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk20:46, 19 April 2007 (UTC)
Hi again Nigel. I've added a section to the intro, and I'll work on the concerns raised above. I had a long Friday, so forgive me while I play catch-up here :-) Looking at the list above, I think I'm going to change my vote in the FAC to a regrettful opppose while I clean up the article. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)18:10, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Already looking better. I've done a few bits & pieces, here & there. I've marked the "100% literacy rate" claim with {{fact}}. Your statement about "sentences in their own right" was a bit misleading (a final copula is required), so I've reworded that.
I'm glad to see that my old teacher Geoffrey Lewis has a short article of his own.
I get the impression that very few of the contributors to the Turkish article ever look at the Talk page—do you agree?
BTW Was it you who removed the entire section on intensive prefixes (bembeyaz, "snow-white")? It's probably worth a mention: I was only objecting to the excessive number of examples. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk11:45, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
Hi Nigel. As you can see, I didn't get too carried away with changing the article—Turkish is far from being my forte, and I am blessed with few references on the topic. However, I think I could look up the literacy rate of Turkey in the most recent World Almanac. I wouldn't be surprised if it was 100%—the USA has a literacy rate of 95%, I believe the UK's is 98%, and most of Europe is above 97%. Some nations do report having a 100% literacy rate.
If I remember correctly, I was the one who removed the secion about prefixes. I apologize, I was desperate to trim down the section, and I removed what appeared to be over-specific. Feel free to add it back in. I agree that few editors look at the talkpage—in fact, I think few of the people on the talkpage edit the article! We're dealing with two different camps of editors who do not cooperate well.
You mentioned earlier that you learned Turkish from a prominent professor at Oxford. Do you have any reference materials from the course that we could cite in it? If you give me the names of the books, I could possibly find them. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)18:29, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
Turkish (continued)
(outdent)Literacy rate Yes, the current rate shouldn't be too hard to find (I bet it's lower than you think). But that's only half the job done, because the claim is that previously (pre-1928) the rate was at "Third World levels". Maybe there are estimates from the early years of the Republic (early to mid-1920s, say). The problem is to justify the assertion about a "dramatic increase in literacy".
Prefixes I think I will replace a couple of examples of intensification, because this is virtually the only example of prefixes in Turkish. It's also fairly unique to Turkish: it's as if we said "wup-white" or "bam-black" in English.
Prof GL Lewis There are plenty of references given in his Turkish Grammar, but I'm not sure citing them in this article would add much. He actually tried out various sections of the book on us students. The main textbook we used for learning the language was—you guessed it—his Teach Yourself Turkish. We used the 1953 edition, which was at least partly written to improve communication between NATO allies in Korea (there were tables of equivalent ranks in the British & Turkish armed forces). TYT was completely re-written in 1989, of course incorporating material from TG and some passages of "ultra-pure" modern Turkish. Maybe TYT should be in the References: I don't know. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk21:57, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
Hi again! After you read this, check my response further down on the other thread too. I have a 2002 report of the literacy rate in Turkey, and it's 82%. The CIA factbook puts it at 86.5%, which is a bit more recent. Neither one mentions a perfect literacy—I'm wondering if the editor who added that note to the wikipedia article was only counting men, since the male literacy rate is 94.3% (much closer to 100%). In any case, I removed the "near 100%" claim. Regarding Lewis's earlier works, I think you could cite them if you were careful about what you added. Sections about vocabulary should obviously be handled with prudence. If the grammar has remained unchanged between 1953 and 2007, however, I don't see why we should hesitate citing it for such a topic.
I also cited the portion about the exceptionally low literacy rate before the introduction of the Roman alphabet. The section about vowel harmony is solid, and I assume that you are referring to the section on grammar when you speak of nouns and adjectives. It has good prose, although it is a little long and needs a few more citations. I removed a few of the more complex examples of ev's conjugation in order to trim down the section. Please tell me what you think, and feel free to revert any inappropriate changes that I might've made. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)21:57, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
I've come to the end of my contributions on this one (now, where have I heard that phrase before?). Have you looked at the article recently? I think it's now beginning to come into shape.
The main sections I've worked on are Grammar & Sounds, though I've gnomed a bit in other sections. I narrowly prevented them deleting a nice picture of a road sign at one end of a bridge over the Bosphorus ("Welcome to Europe"), in which I'd managed to find (& link to) three illustrations of aspects of vowel harmony.
As always, I'd value your reactions to my input: does it make things reasonably clear?
'Lo again Nigel! I'm sorry this post is so belated—I've been busy both on-wiki and off-wiki. Sinhala alphabet requires cleanup and referencing, and I've been devoting time to that. Anyway, I read over the article again yesterday and I made some minor changes to the introduction. You've done a lot of great work here, though I suspect that the FAC is going to fail due to the loose ends still present in the article. I agree with your earlier assertion that the article needs one or two peer reviews before taking another shot at FA. I still have to migrate the sources to Turkish phonology, and I have also come across some interesting information regarding the language reforms of the 1920s. Do tell me what article you plan to take on next, you're one of the most hard-working editors here and I'm eager to see where your fancy takes you! Cheers, The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)15:25, 29 April 2007 (UTC)
It has finally occurred to someone to request help from the League of Copyeditors! They should have done that weeks ago! Now all they need is a PR—though I suppose you could say that the what was intended as an FAC screening has ended up as more of a PR instead.
I'm not really planning to take on any article in particular: I just happened to get stuck into the Turkish one because I know something about it. I'll have a quick look at Sinhala, though—precisely because I know nothing about it. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk09:24, 30 April 2007 (UTC)
I wonder what's happened: after a month of frenetic activity everything's suddenly gone quiet on this article. Maybe they think it's OK, or perhaps they want it to be stable for a bit. It's certainly improved a lot recently; but the Dialects section, for example, is pretty listy & useless at present.
The LoC don't seem to have responded with much enthusiasm either. Have you got any bright suggestions? I shall be away for a week or so, & in any case have done all I can for this article. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk10:58, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Cleanup groups like LoC are often backlogged with requests, so it may take them a bit of time to get around to this article. I converted the dialect list into prose, although the writing is pretty basic and could use some improvement. We really need a PR for this, even an automated response could be potentially helpful. We could scout out some individual editors who are part of WikiProject Languages for help, but editors are often working on other things. We may simply be going through a period of dead editing—I too am swamped with other things including an upcoming RFA, so I regretfully admit that I'm not of much help at the moment. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)20:09, 3 May 2007 (UTC)
Dear Ikiroid
It seems like yesterday since this, isn't it?
But some things will never change...
Like you being so special, dear I! :)
Thanks for your beautiful words!
Love,
Hello again Cameron. The ge- prefix existed throughout Old English and into Middle English, although its pronunciation was different from its German counterpart. I think it was pronounced like [je] in Old English, if memory serves. By the time Middle English had come into existence, it had been shortened to y or i-, and it was used to form past participles. Middle English changed rapidly, partly because it was not the standard language of England at the time, being overruled by Anglo-Norman language. So, it is no surprise that it died out by modern english. I hope I answered your quesiton! The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)18:29, 21 April 2007 (UTC)
Yes, but you may want to restrict it to weak verbs. Also, have you considered having the prefix undergo a soundshift? For example, /je/ could become
/jo/
/e/
/i/
All of the above sound shifts occur with /je/ in languages. The first example occurred in Russian, which is why the letter <ё> was created in their alphabet. The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)03:10, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
I never knew that Russian had something similar. Interesting. I'll check out what the Scandinavian languages have and might consult you again later. I was thinking about leveling the strong verb/weak verb to all weak verbs, kind of like Afrikaans. Thanks again for all your time.Cameron Nedland14:10, 22 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for your support in my not-so-recent RfA, which succeeded with a final tally of (97/4/4)! I've never been able to accept compliments gracefully, and the heavy support from this outstanding community left me at a complete loss for words -- so, a very belatedthank you for all of your kind words.
I have done and will continue to do the utmost to serve the community in this new capacity, wherever it may take me, and to set an example others might wish to follow in. With a little luck and a lot of advice, this may be enough. Maybe someday the enwiki admins of the future will look back and say, "Yeah, that guy was an admin." Hopefully then they don't start talking about the explosive ArbComm case I got tied into and oh what a drama that was, but we'll see, won't we?
Surely some of you have seen me in action by now; with that in mind, I openly invite and welcome any feedback here or here -- help me become the best editor and sysop I can be.
Glad to see you're still active. :) I'm finally (I hope) finishing these off, and I just want to reiterate, belatedly, that I've always appreciated the community's support, and your trust in particular. Thank you. – Luna Santin (talk)01:28, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
TeckWiz's RFA
Hey Ikiroid. Thanks for supporting my unsuccessful RFA last week under my old name, TeckWiz. I'm now known simply as User:R. I hope to keep helping and improving Wikipedia alongside you. --TeckWiz is now RParlateContribs@(Let's go Yankees!) 23:38, 23 April 2007 (UTC)
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If you have a moment, take a quick look at this, which is up for FAC for the second time. I've done a fair amount of copyediting & suggested improvements over the last 2 months or so. It can't be far off FA, IMO. --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk10:50, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Hi Ndsg. I'm not a geologist or geographer, but I could understand the prose just fine. You may want to add more about history/politics in the intro, as well as go for at least one inline citation per paragraph. I don't know what topics are supposed to be covered in an article about a geographic location—perhaps you could get some help about content coverage at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject UK geography? It looks like User:Geologyguy has already done a bit of work on the article and could help you with that too. I suppose he'll know what should be added or removed. The sections on Climate and Ecology lack flow somewhat , in some parts they appear to be listing off facts instead of connecting them. I really like the article though, as well as the subject. It looks like a beautiful country—is it as nice as the photos make it out to be? The ikiroid (talk·desk·Advise me)18:55, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
Thanks for looking at this. I'm not going to do anything more myself on this article. I agree with you about the Climate section, though: it was the first thing I commented on.
Yes: it is a beautiful part of the country, but I haven't spent much time there. As it happens, I've flown over it several times in my glider (the quarries generate good thermals in the summer). My home base for flying is Aston Down, which is less polluted than the article suggests! --NigelG (or Ndsg) | Talk22:07, 24 April 2007 (UTC)
