User talk:Jim10701

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Hello, Jim10701, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are some pages that you might find helpful:

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Contents 1 Lucerne talk 2 arguably my weakest objection 3 Hi Jim 4 Re: Your 16 November 2008 edit to Ken Livingstone article 5 Lollardy 6 Southern American English 7 S Bear Bergman 8 Translation of "La Marseillaise" title 9 Cecil B Murgatroyd

[edit] Lucerne talk

Hi there, Jim10701. Thanks for chiming in on that Lucerne POV issue – it's good to know that someone agrees. Your post ("just how creepy reading about it here made me feel") made me laugh. Best, Pslide (talk) 04:31, 17 July 2009 (UTC)

[edit] arguably my weakest objection

Jim I'm not sure I share your feeling about mentioning PI as Wittgenstein's most important work (arguably). Is it not arguable? Is it not his most important? Seems like you must object to the arguability bit, but it is less than certain in light of other unpublished material. --Ring Cinema (talk) 13:05, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

From the excellent article Wikipedia:Avoid weasel words:

This page in a nutshell: Avoid using phrases such as "some people say" or any variations of the sort without providing sources.

Saying "which arguably contains his most important work" is the same as saying "which some people say contains his most important work." "Arguably" means "some people say," and therefore is a weasel word to be avoided. The solution (again from Wikipedia:Avoid weasel words):

Weasel words are words or statements that seemingly support statements without attributing opinions to verifiable sources. They give the force of authority to a phrase or a sentence without letting the reader decide whether the source of the opinion is reliable. If a statement can't stand without weasel words, it lacks neutral point of view; either a source for the statement should be found, or the statement should be removed. If a statement can stand without weasel words, they may be undermining its neutrality and the statement may be better off standing without them.

For example, "Middletown, NJ is the nicest city in the world," is a biased or normative statement. Application of a weasel word can give the illusion of neutral point of view: "Some people say Middletown, NJ is the nicest city in the world."

Although this is an improvement since it no longer states the opinion as fact, it remains uninformative:

• Who says that?
• When did they say it? Now?
• How many people think that? How many is some?
• What kind of people think that? Where are they?
• What kind of bias might they have?
• Why is this of any significance?

Weasel words do not really give a neutral point of view; they just spread hearsay, or couch personal opinion in vague, indirect syntax. It is better to put a name and a face on an opinion than to assign an opinion to an anonymous source.

Following that advice, I tried deleting "arguably," but the statement "which contains his most important work" is too definite an opinion to stand on its own without a verifiable source of the opinion. The editor who added that statement had not given a source, and I did not have one, so I deleted the statement.--Jim10701 (talk) 15:46, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

Would it do any good to mention that PI "is one of the most important works of our time" as in W T Jones's A History of Western Philosophy [Vol 5, p. 367]? —Preceding unsigned comment added by Ring Cinema (talk • contribs) 22:43, 22 August 2009 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean by "would it do any good," but there should be no problem at all with any properly referenced statement that's free of weasel words. Your suggestion sounds fine to me. However, if you're just paraphrasing the source, saying something like "of the 20th century" instead of "of our time" would be somewhat clearer, unless you plan to quote the source exactly (using quotation marks) and "of our time" is what it says.

[edit] Hi Jim

I've answered your good question on my talkpage.--Slp1 (talk) 21:55, 10 October 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Re: Your 16 November 2008 edit to Ken Livingstone article

Thanks for letting me know. --Jatkins ^{(talk - contribs)} 17:38, 26 December 2009 (UTC)

[edit] Lollardy

Moved to Talk:Lollardy#Caption_of_Wycliffe.2FLollard_picture.

[edit] Southern American English

You came to Talk:Southern American English with self-admitted ignorance and are now leaving the same but your off-the-cuff, self-righteous comment leads me to wonder whether you're a dick, a troll, or both. Either way, I don't think that sort of thing is appropriate. — Ƶ§œš¹ _{[aɪm ˈfɹ̠ˤʷɛ̃ɾ̃ˡi]} 08:15, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

I'm very sorry I left you with that impression. That's not what I meant to express at all. I was just very frustrated with myself for my inability to get my point across, and in the midst of that funk I realized I'd been making a very big deal out of how a Wikipedia article characterizes my speech, which really doesn't matter at all. I was taking something personally that I had no business taking personally, and so I backed off. I meant it to be abrupt, because I wanted to put it past me as quickly as possible, but I did not mean it to be rude or personally offensive to you or anybody else. But obviously I screwed up, because I did offend you, and for that I'm sincerely sorry. Thank you very much for telling me; otherwise I never would have known I did it. If there's anything else I can do to make amends, please let me know.--Jim10701 (talk) 22:52, 25 March 2010 (UTC)

JIm, I came upon this topic by accident and after having reviewed the facts, I would suggest that any incivility is clearly on the part of anyone calling someone a troll for making such an innocent remark on a talk page. I have similar experience from Wikipedians involved in linguistics. You have my sympathy and I see no reason why you felt you had to apologise so effusively.--Kudpung (talk) 12:55, 27 March 2010 (UTC)

Kudpung,
Thanks very much for taking the time and trouble to review the circumstances and leave this comment. It is very encouraging. But after several years, I'm coming reluctantly to the conclusion that Wikipedia and I just are not a good fit. This encounter with Aeusoes1 supports that conclusion but is by no means its sole cause.
I come to Wikipedia for information; I edit only if I come across information that is either incorrect or presented so poorly that it makes me cringe. I am not at all interested in participating in a colossal, million-headed blog, which I discover is what Wikipedia actually is. It is not an encyclopedia in any but an unacceptably loose sense.
Wikipedia functions by consensus of millions of contending egos, not by a serious, disciplined and orderly quest for truth. It will never be complete, it will never be stable, and it will never be a generally reliable source of information. It is not what I need or want. Unfortunately, Wikipedia has driven Encarta out of business, leaving Britannica as the only true online encyclopedia. I'm giving it a try now.
Thanks again for your support. I sincerely appreciate it. The effusive apology, by the way, is another typically Southern US phenomenon, like our poorly characterized speech. We simply cannot stand ever to make anybody unhappy.--Jim10701 (talk) 04:17, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Jim, probably unwittingly, you have made above one of the most poignant and well phrased criticisms of the Wikipedia that I have ever read. It deserves that more people sit up and read it - it should serve as a knee-jerk to the community, esecially to the editor who insulted you. I still persevere here becausethe Wikipedia is now irreversible and I wish to correct at least some of the misinformation. I respect your wish not to get further involved, nevertheless I do hope you will continue to log in when you use the encyclopedia and watch your talk page because I may be inviting you to comment in the near future on a major policy issue. If you are interested, please see: User:Kudpung/The IPA saga. You will have all the facts from both sides before you and I will not attempt to influence your opinion. You are also welcome to contact me by email. You --Kudpung (talk) 07:39, 7 April 2010 (UTC)

Kudpung,
I probably never should have signed up as a Wikipedia editor. I honestly have no interest whatsoever in doing it. Collaborative effort of any kind at all is not for me. If it were a thousand years ago, or if I'd been born in Greece or Ethiopia or India or some place where people still do it, and if I didn't like comfort so much (I think that's enough ifs to insure it can't actually happen), I'd be a hermit monk living alone in a cave on the side of a mountain.

I finally got around to reading about you on your user page, and it was quite an eye-opener. From your Thai-sounding (at least I got that right) user name, I assumed you were a non-native English speaker—how much wronger could that be? The other surprise is that you're only a year younger than I am. I'd been imagining a linguistically precocious South Asian in his mid-thirties frantically riffling through his English slang and idiom references!

Although I've been around as long as you have, I've had a very much different life. I've always hated travel, so I've rarely gone anywhere. I escaped the South, and that's as far as I cared to go. I couldn't deal with the stress of school, so I'm almost entirely self-educated. I have such an overwhelming fascination with the power and beauty of language that I haven't yet gotten past English and the conveniently dead classics. And my natural preference for being alone has meant a life lived primarily in my own company. I probably qualify as an eccentric. But I have an indiscriminate and practically insatiable curiosity that seems to grow only stronger the older I get. I have no interest in seeing the world in person, but my exploration of it and everything in and about it is constant. That's what brought me to Wikipedia.

Now that I'm writing this, it occurs to me that I may be the quintessential Wikipedia user. I am intelligent and curious about almost everything; my interest is unlimited in scope and insatiable in depth. I can spend hours winding my way through articles, opening dozens of links in separate windows and reading through them all eventually unless I get exhausted first and give it up.

So I am really a Wikipedia user, not an editor. As I said above, I got into editing only incidentally; it never was and still is not the real reason I'm here. So it is particularly disheartening for me as a Wikipedia user finally to see how defective Wikipedia is, and that the defects are fundamental and irreparable. It is an encyclopedia that caters to its creators instead of to its users, and that's a shame. By presenting itself to the world as an encyclopedia—a gigantic, free encyclopedia—it is driving out of existence legitimate and reliable encyclopedias that will not easily be replaced. It is one of the few genuinely tragic casualties of the internet, and the real losers aren't curious old farts like me but the kids who depend on Wikipedia as if it really were an encyclopedia because there's nothing else out there for them. No wonder they vandalize it!

I have no problem with Wikipedia's thriving as a playground in which editors with varying degrees of competence form their gangs and see who wins the particular mock battle they're caught up in at the moment; I only wish that were made plain to the billions of hapless readers who aren't in on the game. Only very recently did I come across a really nasty example of what that system produces. In my wanderings I stumbled somehow into the Creationism article, which is not a subject that interests me much. It startled me to find it using the word myth about Christian and other religions' beliefs, so I checked the talk page and found an ongoing, heated discussion about the word. I left my own comment about the wisdom of using such an emotionally charged word when talking about the religious beliefs of the majority of Wikipedia readers, but I don't expect the gang of thugs who emerged gleefully victorious with their consensus will pay any attention. Anyway, that was when I still cared about Wikipedia and had some hope for it. That incident more than any other is what convinced me that Wikipedia cannot be salvaged as a useful and reliable resource for the larger world outside its own contributors, which is the only world I'm interested in. (The quotation at the head of your user page from editor Jorge Stolfi says it brilliantly. Thanks for posting it.)

For some reason I feel an affinity with you in spite of our considerable differences, and I'm tempted to imagine an ongoing correspondence. But I've seen such glimmers before in the years since the internet emerged from the primordial slime from which all evolved and none was created, and they haven't materialized. I may really be too eccentric for such a congenial undertaking. But if you know of a way to exchange e-mail addresses safely in this godforsaken fishbowl with its mirrored surfaces reflecting the Wikipedia universe back in on itself, let me know and maybe we'll give it a shot.
--Jim10701 (talk) 00:15, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

Again, I concur on all points Jim. Somewhere on either my user page or my talk page is "Send an e-mail to this user" It goes through the Wiki software and gets sent to my real email. It's quite safe. The issue that I am fomenting on my user sub-page will affect site-wide Wikipedia policy. No specific knowledge of the IPA, languages, or linguistics is required. I hope you'll take a look at it because much of it represents classic examples of the problems you describe above. I'm not worried about which sideof the fence you fall, but I would most certainly value your feedback, just in case I happen to be barking up the wrong tree and wasting mine and other people's time. I haven't asked for any other opinions yet.--Kudpung (talk) 07:12, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

I sent you an e-mail message.--Jim10701 (talk) 22:12, 10 April 2010 (UTC)

[edit] S Bear Bergman

I relocated this discussion to the article's discussion page.

I also saw your comments here, and added my own thoughts to the discussion - see the talk page. Robofish (talk) 17:10, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Translation of "La Marseillaise" title

You wrote : « On July 15, 2010, you edited the translation of the title "La Marseillaise" from "The [Song] of Marseille" to "The [Song of] Marseille". I do not know French well, but isn't the word Marseillaise an adjective, meaning of Marseille, in the style of Marseille, or something similar? (I'm thinking of Lyonnaise, Bordelaise and similar adjectives as examples.) .... »

My reply : No, it is a noun in this case, but your analogy is somewhat correct. (A parallel in English might be "New Yorker", as in "You are a New Yorker", or "A New Yorker sang this song," or perhaps, the automobile "Chrysler New Yorker".)

The « Marseillais » was the name (noun) of a military garrison stationed in Strasbourg at the time of the French Revolution. Our national anthem is the melody sang by these troops, which is named for them. It is not named for the city, per se.

It begins with the particle « La » and takes a feminine form « Marseillaise » because it refers to « une chanson », "a song", which is feminine. (This is analagous to the French word for "Halloween", which in French is « La Toussaint » which would appear to take a masculine particle, but instead takes the feminine particle « La » because it refers to « la fête », "the celebration".)

I could not find the demonym for Marseille, « Marseillaise », in my AMHER or OED. I also asked a native English speaker who told me that such a word does not exist. (On the other hand, the demonyms for Lyon, « Lyonnais » and « Lyonnaise », are English words that appear in the AMHER and OED and other English dictionaries as you wrote in your statement.) So, it simply does not exist. The English language also lacks demonyms for most other large cities in France, for example « Nantais » for Nantes, or « Toulousain » for Toulouse, etc.

So, my thought process was this: If the garrison had been known as "Le New Yorker" (masculine), the song would be called « La New Yorker » (feminine). The actual garrison was known as « Le Marseillais », hence, the song is called « La Marseillaise ». A demonym for Marseille does not exist in the English language, thus « The Marseille » or « The [Song of] Marseille » was my translation.

As you can clearly see by my grammatical errors, my English is not good as it should be. (Please accept my apologies.) If you are a native speaker of English and wish to change the text of the article, please feel free to do so. I can only do what I think is correct at the time, and anyone is free to change it! with my best regards to you, Charvex (talk) 10:36, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

Follow-Up : You wrote: «  ...you edited the translation of the title "La Marseillaise" from "The [Song] of Marseille" to "The [Song of] Marseille". » --- Actually, your question does not make sense to me on another, more fundamental level. The square brackets are an insertion for clarity. If we remove the square bracketed word "song" from "The [Song] of Marseille" (before I made the change), it becomes: « The of Marseille ». I do not think this is good English, do you??!! Tchao ! Charvex (talk) 10:52, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

For the conclusion of this conversation, go here.--Jim10701 (talk) 23:18, 27 November 2010 (UTC)

[edit] Cecil B Murgatroyd

FYI, an editor has contested this proposed deletion and as a contested PROD, the article has been restored on request. I haven't dug through the sources the editor provided with respect to the hoax question, but I did see at least one promising reference via GBooks, please discuss the hoax question further with that editor (there's more info on my talk page from him). Cheers, --joe decker^{talk to me} 15:02, 20 May 2011 (UTC)