Talk:List of women linguists

Sorting, correcting, robot wars
The top of the article says
 * This is a list of women linguists.
 * Manually update list | Find images
 * This list is generated from data in Wikidata and is periodically updated by a bot.
 * Edits made within the list area will be removed on the next update!

And that's all she wrote! In other words, you can "Manually update list", but your edit's not going to last; apparently the only way to edit the list is to modify Wikidata.

And the list needs editing! Specifically, it begins — evidently Luise Hercus has a space or other invisible character in front of her name in Wikidata— and it ends mindlessly and mechanically sorting by Unicode order rather than English alphabetical order.
 * Luise Hercus
 * A. Sumru Özsoy
 * Aale Tynni
 * Zuzanna Ginczanka
 * Ágnes Rapai
 * Ágota Bozai
 * Åse-Marie Nesse
 * Élisabeth Gille
 * Émilie du Châtelet

The normal way to fix these problems would be with Template:Sort:
 * {&zwj;{Sort| Luise Hercus | Luise Hercus}}
 * {&zwj;{Sort| 1 = A. Sumru Özsoy}}  [Equivalent to the name without template, but see next paragraph.]
 * {&zwj;{Sort| Agnes Rapai | Ágnes Rapai}}
 * {&zwj;{Sort| Agota Bozai | Ágota Bozai}}
 * {&zwj;{Sort| Ase-Marie Nesse | Åse-Marie Nesse}}
 * {&zwj;{Sort| Elisabeth Gille | Élisabeth Gille}}
 * {&zwj;{Sort| Emilie du Châtelet | Émilie du Châtelet}}
 * {&zwj;{Sort| Emilie du Châtelet | Émilie du Châtelet}}

Unfortunately, Template:Sort/doc says "A table using this template should use it in all rows." But even if we did, the bot (not specified in the text of the article, and actually plural) would undo all our work. See, e.g., what became of 's corrections of czech → Czech (3), irish → Irish, bulgarian → Bulgarian, chilean → Chilean: two hours later,.

Furthermore, the bots, plural, are already edit-warring. When undoing 's typo fixes, 's also changed   to , with the space that puts her at the top of the list as I write this. Less than 10 hours later, 's changed it. And then ListeriaBot reverted Yobot's change, and vice versa, and so on, each bot hitting the page every 24 hours or so. I confidently predict that today or tomorrow Yobot will undo ListeriaBot's change, and until ListeriaBot gets back to this page Luise Hercus will appear in proper alphabetical order by her first name... unless one or both of the bots' programmers see this and do something about it first.

Although I started writing this comment on Talk:List of women linguists, the problems here are clearly not confined to this article, but may be present in any sortable table that is updated from Wikidata by a bot or (even worse, see previous paragraph) bots. I expect that there are lots of them, but I haven't found any while writing this, and won't spend any more time searching. This article is named "List of women linguists", not "Table of women linguists", and if there's a way to search for sortable tables that are bot-maintained from Wikidata I haven't found it. So as well as auto-notifying and  by linking their usernames from this comment, I'm going to link to it from short comments in some articles that seem to be relevant, and ask about it in the Teahouse. Please keep general discussion of the issues here, at least until somebody moves it someplace more appropriate (and of course announces the move here). Please me to discuss. --Thnidu (talk) 20:19, 3 September 2016 (UTC)


 * I am no expert in Wikidata, but I assume this is because some languages capitalise nationalities and some don't, so what's "correct" on Wikidata leads to errors being constantly imported from Wikidata back here. RexxS seems to have become Wikidata's de facto ambassador to humanity, so might want to comment. &#8209; Iridescent 20:43, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * I'm afraid the ambassador job is going to need someone with greater capabilities than I have. Most of the problems you're facing are inherent in the way the bots are working. They are no smarter than the programming that they receive, but sometimes a note to the bot-owner can fix a problem (e.g. ask Magnus if he could arrange for ListeriaBot to capitalise nationalities when delivering to en-wp). Much as I appreciated Robot Wars (TV series), I've stopped the bot fighting over Luise Hercus by going to her Wikidata page and removing the space before her name in the label. I think a note to the Wikidata devs about trimming whitespace from entries might be in order, along with a link to https://xkcd.com/327/ - but I'm not hopeful. As for the sorting problem, Sort is no longer recommended - see Help:Sorting. Here's a table with a mixture of entries, some using data-sort-value and some not:
 * I'm afraid the ambassador job is going to need someone with greater capabilities than I have. Most of the problems you're facing are inherent in the way the bots are working. They are no smarter than the programming that they receive, but sometimes a note to the bot-owner can fix a problem (e.g. ask Magnus if he could arrange for ListeriaBot to capitalise nationalities when delivering to en-wp). Much as I appreciated Robot Wars (TV series), I've stopped the bot fighting over Luise Hercus by going to her Wikidata page and removing the space before her name in the label. I think a note to the Wikidata devs about trimming whitespace from entries might be in order, along with a link to https://xkcd.com/327/ - but I'm not hopeful. As for the sorting problem, Sort is no longer recommended - see Help:Sorting. Here's a table with a mixture of entries, some using data-sort-value and some not:


 * They seem to sort okay in my browser. YMMV. I would normally suggest you let the bot dump a list in some subpage and use it to create your working list elsewhere, with all the bells and whistles you want. If the bot updates are too frequent for that kind of manual processing, you really need to find a bot operator to write a bot to do the sorting, tidying, etc. just for you. Hope that helps --RexxS (talk) 22:33, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * , I'll check later from my laptop; I'm using my phone, and lists aren't sortable in mobile version. --Thnidu (talk) 22:55, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * : Yes, it sorts properly from my laptop in the desktop view. --Thnidu (talk) 23:48, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Wikidata-generated bot-maintained lists such as this are extremely unsatisfactory and very frustrating for so many reasons. One other major problem is that the entries are based on categories that are often incorrect or misleading. For example, this list of linguists includes Aale Tynni and others who are clearly not linguists at all. They are apparently included in the list because they are categorized as translators, and Category:Translators is under Category:Linguists by field of research. I tried to fix the problem by removing this category, but it was reverted, so Aale Tynni is still in the list. Wikidata-generated lists are an interesting experiment, but they clearly do not work satisfactorily, and should be abandoned so that Wikipedians can do their job properly! BabelStone (talk) 20:51, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * , I agree with you completely. See next section. --Thnidu (talk) 20:53, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * The bot edits are based on Wikidata and not Wikipedia categories as far as I know. wikidata:Q300874 has called Aale Tynni a linguist since 2013.[//www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q300874&diff=93195083&oldid=81105364] PrimeHunter (talk) 22:34, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Alas, though I followed the link, editing Wdata is not as transparent as editing WP, so I was unable to change "linguist" to "translator" there. --Thnidu (talk) 22:55, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * It's just another thing to learn. You have to click on the [edit] next to what you want to change, type in your change - you'll usually get a drop-down list to pick from as you type - and then click on [save]. It's not too bad once you've done a few. I've updated for you so that her occupation is now 'translator' instead of 'linguist'. I've left a reference to https://greencardamom.github.io/BooksAndWriters/tynni.htm which should help make the change stick. Let me know if there are any problems. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 23:16, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Alas, though I followed the link, editing Wdata is not as transparent as editing WP, so I was unable to change "linguist" to "translator" there. --Thnidu (talk) 22:55, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * It's just another thing to learn. You have to click on the [edit] next to what you want to change, type in your change - you'll usually get a drop-down list to pick from as you type - and then click on [save]. It's not too bad once you've done a few. I've updated for you so that her occupation is now 'translator' instead of 'linguist'. I've left a reference to https://greencardamom.github.io/BooksAndWriters/tynni.htm which should help make the change stick. Let me know if there are any problems. Cheers --RexxS (talk) 23:16, 3 September 2016 (UTC)

I made ListeriaBot, so some replies here: Let me try to summarise: The only thing that wasn't clearly stated (bot edits/replaces table), user-changeable (different row template), upstream (space in WIkidata name), or SEP (other bots) is the sort order. Is that correct? I can add an option to specify the locale as an option, to enforce a specific sort order, if that is required. (As documented on Wikidata list, you can also specify "family_name" as a sort order, though that would have the same Unicode "issues" (where "issue"="sorted correctly, just not English").) Would you like me to do that? --Magnus Manske (talk) 15:05, 5 September 2016 (UTC)
 * apparently the only way to edit the list is to modify Wikidata - Yes. That's what it says right on top of the table. Thank you for reminding us.
 * No, it says in small print "This list is generated from data in Wikidata and is periodically updated by a bot. Edits made within the list area will be removed on the next update!" It also says, with a hyperlink and thus in color and rather more conspicuously, Manually update list, as though the usual procedure for most Wikipedians editing articles were actually useable on this page-- which it is not. "Here is your hotel room. Good night. &mdash; Oh, by the way, at some point during the night you will be tossed out into the hall. Sleep well." --Thnidu (talk) 05:22, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Despite your overuse of qualifiers, it does say the bot will replace the list, at the top of the list, and the "manually update" link does not go to the edit box but to the bot page, so you can manually trigger an update. Feel free to improve the wording, or the font size, if you feel either is cleverly deceiving you.
 * evidently Luise Hercus has a space or other invisible character in front of her name in Wikidata - Whatdoyaknow, RexxS went to Wikidata and fixed it!
 * Yes, trivial for anyone who knows how to edit Wikidata. Like (I assume) most Wikipedians, even those of us with ten years' experience or more, I don't. (See my exchange above with and .) --Thnidu (talk) 05:22, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * "sofixit" has been one of the key policies that made Wikipedia a success. People who can figure out the wiki markup syntax should have no problem changing a label by clicking on an "edit" link.
 * mindlessly and mechanically sorting by Unicode order rather than English alphabetical order - I find this particularly amusing, since I put the Unicode sorting in place because someone complained about the ASCII (English) sorting.
 * Yes, indeed. It's very amusing to find Unicode sort order in a list of names in the English Wikipedia. Rather, it would be amusing if it weren't annoying, which it is. --Thnidu (talk) 05:22, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * ...ListeriaBot reverted them all - Yes. It does that. As you had already discovered in your initial complaint. But thanks for reminding us, yet again.
 * If by my "initial complaint" you mean my first mention of ListeriaBot, that was the first mention. Your browser or editor has a sequential search function, I assume, yes? --Thnidu (talk) 05:52, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * You complain about the bot reverting your edits, but in the first few lines of this section you wrote, you actually cite "Edits made within the list area will be removed on the next update!". So the bot works as advertised, and that is bad, somehow?
 * "The bot" != "ListeriaBot". As its creator, you naturally understand what bot is being referred to. As one entirely unfamiliar with the process, I naturally did not. I said, "If by my 'initial complaint' you mean my first mention of ListeriaBot, that was the first mention." I stand by that description. --Thnidu (talk) 14:15, 7 September 2016 (UTC)
 * the bots, plural, are already edit-warring - Well, my bot is tasked with generating the list/table. If other bots change it, maybe talk to their operators? Put the page on a bot-specific don't-change-list? I try to generate good wiki markup, but the source material used is Wikidata, and Wikidata is not designed to cater to English Wikipedias obscure markup whims.
 * I didn't know what your bot was supposed to be doing until I read that bullet point you wrote; did you think I did or should have? -- And to repeat a point I made above, the sort order of the English language is not particularly obscure, nor is it a mere "whim" in an English encyclopedia. And to repeat something you said, "ASCII (English) sorting" was already in place before you implemented Unicode order in its place. Unicode order certainly has its place, and an important and valuable one, but a list of names in an English encyclopedia is not it. --Thnidu (talk) 05:52, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * This article is named "List of women linguists", not "Table of women linguists" - Really? You would rather have a "*"-list? With inline images? Or what exactly is your point here? If you want your own, bespoke list or table rows, not a problem - check out Wikidata list, specifically "row_template".
 * The only point I was trying to make was that I could not figure out a way to search for tables based on Wikidata. To repeat myself:
 * This article is named "List of women linguists", not "Table of women linguists", and if there's a way to search for sortable tables that are bot-maintained from Wikidata I haven't found it.
 * --Thnidu (talk) 05:22, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't get this. Where are you "searching for tables/lists based on Wikidata"? On Wikipedia? Google? What do you hope to find? --Magnus Manske (talk) 08:58, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * WP's own search box. I was trying to find out if there were many such tables. --Thnidu (talk) 14:15, 7 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, thank you, that would be quite helpful. And does a sort by family name necessarily preclude ordering those names according to the locale? I should think not, since one is a matter of extracting a string from the appropriate field of a database entry, and the other is concerned with the relative ordering of the strings so extracted. --Thnidu (talk) 05:52, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Family name sort should have the same issues as "normal" sort, I just mentioned it as an option that could apply in this case, independent of UTF8 horrors. Speaking of which, I found a solution, and it works in testing, but not on the web server, so I am waiting for upstream. --Magnus Manske (talk) 08:42, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Update: Upstream changes have been made, will be pushed out tomorrow. --Magnus Manske (talk) 09:01, 6 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Sorting should be fixed now. Updated this page to test, others will be updated automatically on the next bot run. --Magnus Manske (talk) 08:28, 7 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Many thanks! I'm looking forward to seeing it. --Thnidu (talk) 14:15, 7 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Indeed, it sorts beautifully now. Thanks again. --Thnidu (talk) 19:16, 8 September 2016 (UTC)

Addendum: You might also want to give your input here - this will be the basis for the upcoming, "official" Wikidata-based list generation! --Magnus Manske (talk) 15:34, 5 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Clearly I'm not the only one to be misled by the contradictory messages at the top of this page: Since then,
 * First, User:Grant65 added two people to the list and corrected the misspelling "philsnthropist".
 * Then ListeriaBot removed the additions and restored the misspelling.


 * You said
 * Despite your overuse of qualifiers, it does say the bot will replace the list, at the top of the list, and the link does not go to the edit box but to the bot page, so you can manually trigger an update. Feel free to improve the wording, or the font size, if you feel either is cleverly deceiving you.
 * "[Y]ou can manually trigger an update" on that page if and only if you understand how to do it. Though it's clear as crystal to you, it's clear as mud to me: not being a dev, I haven't the faintest idea of what to do there. The link says "manually update", which from all my wiki experience means "enter the editor and make your changes there in wikicode" -- not "manually trigger an update", which would at least give a clue that ordinary wiki-editing skills just might not be sufficient.
 * I do not "feel free to improve the wording", since nothing I can think of would help, except perhaps something along the lines of "If you know how to manipulate this bot (namely, ListeriaBot), click here to trigger an update. If not, you're SOL", which would be inappropriate in so many ways. And come to think of it, does this "triggering an update" allow the experienced Wikidata bot user to change the data in Wikidata and thus the list, or does it just start the bot on its appointed round of reversions earlier than it would normally go in its 24 hour cycle? That would be no help at all to someone in my situation.
 * BTW, I am taking my ideas to Wikidata, per your suggestion. But it doesn't fit in any of the use cases listed on Wikidata:List generation input, and there's no talk page there, so I will put them on Wikidata:Contact the development team #Misleading header generated by Template:Wikidata list.
 * --Thnidu (talk) 01:01, 18 September 2016 (UTC)

And the beat goes on...
See User talk:ListeriaBot.

--Thnidu (talk) 09:26, 29 January 2017 (UTC)


 * This is a too late response, but: You should really not blame  and his bot. The bot is simply just doing what a Wikipedia editor has told it to do. The initial person that put it in was . I suppose the problem is in the interface between editors, Wikipedia, Wikidata and the bot. I regard the bot as good and very powerful, but I also see an issue between Wikipedia editors that wants Wikidata-generated autogenerated lists from the bot and Wikipedia editors that do not want it, or does not fully appreciate how the bot operates. As pointed to by Magnus there is a discussion for a list generation tool alternative to Listeria. I am sure the Wikidata development team would be happy if you could provide some input, but I am also afraid that the development has been hanging there for   several years: Probably because of priorities and the complexity of the issue. &mdash; fnielsen (talk) 15:41, 17 December 2018 (UTC)

What's a linguist?
Entirely apart from the above comment, this list includes many women who are translators but not linguists, i.e., practitioners of the scientific study of language. This conflates two entirely different professions. As expressed in List of linguists,
 * A linguist in the academic sense is a person who studies natural language (an academic discipline known as linguistics). Ambiguously, the word is sometimes also used to refer to a polyglot (one who knows several languages), or a grammarian (a scholar of grammar), but these two uses of the word are distinct (and one does not have to be a polyglot in order to be an academic linguist). The following is a list of linguists in the academic sense.

I propose
 * 1) listing the translators among these women in (the appropriate subcategory of) Category:Translators
 * 2) removing them from this list unless they are also linguists in the academic sense
 * 3) adding a note to this article similar to the note quoted above from List of linguists.

At first I also proposed creating a List of women translators, but Category:Women translators has already been discussed and deleted (Categories for discussion#Category:Male translators). What's more, the arguments advanced there for deleting both categories (as was done) might also be applied to this list, though I am not suggesting that.

Please me to discuss. --Thnidu (talk) 20:49, 3 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Agreed, and I'd suggest we start with this version, which removed many non-linguists. Nikkimaria (talk) 14:56, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Quite so. But since this list is bot-generated from Wikidata, the bot has already reverted the article to what it was before, or very similar. I don't know how to edit Wikidata; do you? That's what is required. --Thnidu (talk) 16:40, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I think the source of the majority of the non-linguists on this list is that at some point somebody (a non-native speaker, I guess) marked everybody in Category:Translators as a linguist on Wikidata. But it should be easily fixed. I can do a similar mass-update that will remove the linguist property from every entry that is in Category:Translators (or a subcat) but not in Category:Linguists. Unless anyone can think of some edge cases that might screw up?
 * It's very easy to edit individual Wikidata entries, by the way. If you go the article on Wikipedia, there's a link in the sidebar called "Wikidata entry". Follow that and you'll be taken to the Wikidata page where you can edit any of its individual properties, for example you could remove the property "occupation: linguist" and add "occupation:translator". –&#8239;Joe (talk) 16:53, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Seriously, ? You're going to try to tell us that someone from here could just hunt down the dozens of inappropriate entries on this list, remove the property from all of those entries, and they're not going to have any consequences?  You want people to waste hours of time because another website doesn't have the same definition of "linguist" as this project does? Risker (talk) 16:58, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Wikidata pulls its information from Wikipedia (and a small number of other sources, but mainly Wikipedia, and mainly the English Wikipedia), so it's not like there was some big discussion there about the definition of "linguist". Somebody just made the mistaken assumption that the people we describe as translators are linguists. Wikidata is also a wiki (clue's in the name), so people make mistakes and other people are free to come along and fix them. I've already updated several of the entries that identified as not being linguists with no "consequences", but I realised that most of them are these misclassified translators so it would be quicker to mass-update them.
 * What I'm proposing won't take hours. Writing the query to remove translators takes some background knowledge but I'm offering to do that and it'll take minutes. We'll then need to check the list for other miscategorised entries, but I don't think there are many.
 * Seriously, the more I get drawn into these discussions the more I get the impression that people are writing these polemics against Wikidata without the slightest idea of how it actually works. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 17:11, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Shame, then, that you don't really know much about me, ; I'm one of the people who ensured that Wikidata received reliable funding to continue its development. I'm not opposed to Wikidata. But I am opposed to bots driven by uncurated Wikidata entries overwriting human editing on this project, and would be opposed to it on any project. The bots are edit-warring with people who know what they're doing. It's pretty likely that one of the bots creating Wikidata properties will go back and re-add "linguist" to all of the entries even if someone from here goes and removes it, and then we will be back in exactly the same position.  Wikidata is not a reliable source. Risker (talk) 17:23, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Then I find it exceedingly strange that you are here arguing that something those funds are being used to develop is without merit. The only circumstance where bots have overwritten a human edit is when somebody expressly ignored (or pointily removed) the big notice at the top of this page saying "if you edit below this line, a bot will overwrite your edit." –&#8239;Joe (talk) 17:35, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * It seems you are deliberately missing my point. The bot should not be re-adding information that is inaccurate and incorrect; it should not be undoing curation by human editors. The fundamental principle by which the bot is editing is exactly the problem here - that it has an inalienable right to override every other editor on this project, using data that has never been verified. We'd indeff an editor who did that.  Risker (talk) 17:43, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * If I am missing your point, I assure you it's not deliberate. The bot will preserve changes by human editors done in the correct way, i.e. by updating the underlying Wikidata. We don't expect bots to act like people, we expect them to act within specified and well documented bounds, which this bot is doing. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 19:04, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * People are already wasting plenty of time looking for linguists and getting lots of translators who are not linguists. There are scads of ambiguous words in English, which is why we have DAB pages, and why I proposed above that we
 * add[ing] a note to this article similar to the note quoted above from List of linguists: A linguist in the academic sense is a person who studies natural language (an academic discipline known as linguistics). Ambiguously, the word is sometimes also used to refer to a polyglot (one who knows several languages), or a grammarian (a scholar of grammar), but these two uses of the word are distinct (and one does not have to be a polyglot in order to be an academic linguist). The following is a list of linguists in the academic sense.
 * --Thnidu (talk) 17:08, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * That sounds like a good addition to me, . We could do to expand the lead with other relevant background too, per WP:SALLEAD. But I still think it's worth removing Wikidata's description of translators as linguists, unless you think that's a controversial position? (I wouldn't describe a translator as a linguist myself, but I'm not an expert.) –&#8239;Joe (talk) 17:16, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Another option would be to filter out translators from this list only (without changing the underlying Wikidata), although this might remove people who are both translators and linguists in the academic sense. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 17:21, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * That definition is meaningless as long as the bot is programmed to add anyone with a "linguist" parameter on Wikidata. And since ordinary Wikipedians (i.e., the 98% of editors who do not know how to program the bot to find certain things) cannot modify the bot's activities, we're still back in the same boat. You are insisting that an editor here must edit a completely different project in order to correct information on this project.  You may think Wikidata is easy to use, but it isn't really.  Adding a parameter there is darn hard if you don't know what you're doing.  It took me half an hour of determined effort to figure out how to add a parameter, and I've got 10+ years of experience in editing wikis.  Risker (talk) 17:28, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

I like your earlier suggestion, to "remove the linguist property from every entry that is in Category:Translators* (or a subcat) but not in Category:Linguists* [or a subcat]". That would avoid the overlap cases. (BTW, "subcat" also seems to describe my frequent condition when immobilized by a lapful or chestful of purr that I cannot make myself disturb. ... Such as now. Please blame any typos on the weight imposed on my wrists. :-) ) --Thnidu (talk) 17:32, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * I don't get this. I had these in double-brackets ..., but they weren't appearing at all in the display: it showed "every entry that is in (or a subcat) but not in [or a subcat]". Whisky Tango Foxtrot??--Thnidu (talk) 17:53, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * If you just write  in double brackets it put this page in that category. To link to the category you have to put a   before it, e.g.   → Category:Foo. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 19:01, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

If Joe's filter, the one I refer to immediately above this (17:32, 27 December 2016 (UTC)), is botified, it won't be necessary for ten-year veterans like you and me to struggle with editing an unfamiliar database. --Thnidu (talk) 17:37, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * Actually, no, it still means someone has to go and edit Wikidata to identify people who aren't really linguists because they're translators. There are other inclusions in the current list who aren't translators either, and so that would mean another filter, and more fiddling over at Wikidata. At any time, someone at Wikidata could add new entries without the additional parameters, or remove the parameters used for filtering; the content isn't within the control of this project. It's still entirely driven by off-wiki data, except now it requires experts in bot programming to do it. Wikipedia is supposed to be the encyclopedia that anyone can edit, not the encyclopedia that sucks unreferenced info from elsewhere using programming that almost nobody can write.  Risker (talk) 17:54, 27 December 2016 (UTC)


 * If there are no objections, I will go ahead with the simpler option of filtering out translators from this list locally. It may well be deleted in a few days anyway. There are clearly very strong feelings on this use of Wikidata and my intention here was not to rehash that debate, just to try and demonstrate that quite a lot of the issues that have been raised can be fixed without abandoning the Wikidata list format. I realise it's not straightforward and that not everybody is going to want to get involved with Wikidata editing, even if it's just updating individual entries. But as another wiki-decadian, there are lots of things around here that I find a challenge to get used to: intricate templates, Lua modules, obscure policies, etc. I don't think the unfamiliarity or learning curve associated with a new feature should outweigh its potential benefits. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 18:04, 27 December 2016 (UTC)
 * The problem now is that, when there are people such as Tokiko Iwatani who are described on Wikidata as both linguists and translators, they have now been removed from the list. It looks to me that as it happens she is wrongly described as a linguist but that is reflective of the very high degree of inaccuracy on the Wikidata material. I have gone through about half the relevant enwp articles removing "linguist" from Wikidata where it seems not to be justified but I have little confidence that my work there won't be overwritten by a bot or petscanner or whatever. If Wikidata is ever to succeed it needs editors, not just automated or semi-automated tools. Also, Wikidata requires substantive policies and for the few that are there, such as wikidata:Help:Sources, they need to be attended to and strengthened. I find it deplorable that the information in Wikidata is generally an unsourced shambles and deeply saddening that this is being spread to Wikipedia. When an editor creates a situation where this erratic and erroneous material appears on Wikipedia by an edit-warring bot it is irresponsible for the editor not to be correcting obvious errors. Thincat (talk) 11:07, 29 December 2016 (UTC)

Names in other scripts
I've gone through and added English labels to entries that only had the name in Cyrillic. If somebody could also transliterate the ones in Armenian, Hebrew and Persian that'd be great. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 18:38, 27 December 2016 (UTC)

Why a Misc section?
If my counts are right, there are 663 entries in this article: 417 in the 37 national lists and 246 listed under "Misc". Most of the latter entries include nationality. So why are over a third of the entries classified as "nationality: miscellaneous"? --Thnidu (talk) 04:45, 18 January 2017 (UTC) Thnidu (talk) 04:45, 18 January 2017 (UTC)
 * Because they didn't have nationality set on their Wikidata entries at the time this list was last updated from Wikidata. –&#8239;Joe (talk) 08:40, 18 January 2017 (UTC)

Organization by national origin not field of study
I wonder why this list is separated into sections by national origin but there is no field for field within linguistics (e.g., philology, sociolinguistics, language acquisition, corpus linguistics, etc.). The nation of origin of these women is far less important that their areas of study. And, linguists tend to get around--they may have done their major work elsewhere. I'd like to reorganize, but after looking at the various bot discussions above it seems pointless. Any way to make that change? --Gotanda (talk) 10:03, 4 July 2018 (UTC)


 * The bot integration discussed above was removed, so you're free to reorganize however you please. Nikkimaria (talk) 00:52, 5 July 2018 (UTC)

Rewrite
I've moved my rewrite to mainspace, however there are still some things that need to be done, but which anyone is welcome to help out with. As for major changes, the inclusion criteria is notability and being a linguist as defined at the article linguist. There is a hidden comment in the lead which details the specifics and gives examples of what does not qualify based on actual entries I removed such as spies, poets, and polyglots. I have also created an edit summary which briefly explains the inclusion criteria and provides a template, {{subst:LoL Item}}, which I've been using to consistently format the entries.

As for what still needs to be done: Best, Wug·a·po·des​ 08:50, 20 August 2019 (UTC)
 * Each section needs to be alphabetized, and the whole list double checked for errors (there were a lot of names and I'm not perfect)
 * Where known, the birth and death dates should be included
 * Each entry should have a brief blurb stating where the linguist is from and her subfield
 * The lead could probably be expanded some

Table format and information
Since the list is now quite long (yay!) and text-heavy, I’ve made a start with converting it into a sortable table with thumbnail images, similar to List of women anthropologists and List of women botanists. So far I’ve done the letter A. Hopefully it’s an improvement, but please revert if not.

If there’s no feedback after a little while, I’ll continue working down the alphabet.

We could add additional columns: However, each additional column will make the page less friendly to those on smaller screens.
 * Date of birth
 * Date of death
 * Nationality
 * Subfields?
 * Language specialism (if any)?

We should probably also harmonize the short descriptions. “Linguist” is redundant given that everyone on here is a linguist. Some people have nationalities provided, others not. Would love to get some input on this! Muspilli (talk) 13:15, 27 August 2023 (UTC)