Talk:Sergei Starostin

Untitled
I noticed that Starostin's article is a little small, so I've added some extra links relating to his proposed theories under the heading See Also. --Glengordon01 02:17, 11 July 2006 (UTC)

Requested move

 * The following discussion is an archived discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. No further edits should be made to this section. 

The result of the move request was: page moved. Vegaswikian (talk) 20:05, 20 January 2011 (UTC)

Sergei Starostin → Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin — There are more "Sergei Starostins" then just Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin: consider Sergey Nikolaevich Starostin for example (although the usual spelling is different, in Russian in would be the same name). Because a mistake I did, I now can't just move the page on my own, as I have already created the page named Sergei Anatolyevich Starostin. I'm sorry for my mistake. Please, help me to move this page there though, so that I can create a disambiguation page here, linking to both Sergey-Starostins (and potentially to all other people with this name, should they be present in Wikipedia). Arseni (talk) 18:44, 13 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Support. You could have probably just asked to move this; it's more of a housekeeping move anyway.—Ëzhiki (Igels Hérissonovich Ïzhakoff-Amursky) • (yo?); January 14, 2011; 14:48 (UTC)
 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page. No further edits should be made to this section.

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RfC Starostin's role on Wikipedia
Starosin was undeniably a notable academic and his having an article on Wikipedia certainly seems highly warranted. That said, there does appear to be an issue in that a huge percentage of his theories have been rejected by scholarly consensus. This has lead to some issues on Wikipedia where he is heavily cited on articles which relate to his (not accepted) theories and is generally given a lot of weight as a scholar. While he undoubtably was a scholar, he nonetheless appears to be, by scholarly consensus, simply incorrect in many cases. For example:

Dené–Caucasian languages devotes an entire section to Starostin's theories

Nortwest Caucasian also devotes a paragraph to Starostin's take on it, and probably undersells that it's a take which has been rejected by most linguists.

Nostratic languages has several paragraphs dedicated to Starostin's approach to Nostratic

Austric languages likewise dedicates a block of text to his work

Borean languages contains a fair amount of references

Austric languages contains an expansion of the theory by Starostin

All of these theories have been widely rejected by mainstream linguists, ranging from considered fringe (Nostratic) to limited but firm minority support (Altaic). To be certain, Starostin was a linguist who worked on most of these macrofamily proposals in a serious manner, and he actively contributed to the field. However, in light of their broad rejection by linguists, feels like a very substantial WP:UNDUE and WP:NPOV issue. Given he was a researcher on those theories and some are as developed as they are because of him, it does seem he warrants mentioning, but I'm definitely uncomfortable with how his theories are presented, consistently, on Wikipedia considering the reaction of the broader linguistics community. This especially is true when Starostin is cited as an authority on highly controversial topics without just how controversial they are being made clear. I've asked the Linguistics Wikiproject for comments but it seems quite inactive right now, but this does appear to be causing accuracy issues for Wikipedia, particularly in light of many of these theories undergoing a major change in acceptance throughout the 20th century, with early acceptance transitioning into later rejection as more evidence became available. Warrenmck (talk) 04:02, 11 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Hi Warren. This is rather an atypical use of RfC, which is usually applied these days to resolve editorial disputes by presenting already determined (but controversial) solutions and soliciting community feedback on whether to apply said solution (or which of several solutions to apply).  So I think you're going to run into issues with many respondents here feeling this proceduurally improper.  Personally, I don't mind you send up a flare in this manner--and by sheer dumb luck, this happens to be an area in which I have some formal background (albeit involving skills I have mostly not exercised in decades)-- but it is unclear how exactly your average respondent is likely to be able to sort these issues out without your narrowing matters considerably: respondents usually give feedback on a discrete issue or two: they are not typically expecting to be asked to simply engage with a broad issue over numerous articles without any clear proposals or initial direction.  I'm also not seeing where on WikiProject linguistics you raised concerns about Starostin specifically, and that does seem like your best bet for getting the type of engagement you are looking for here in the long run--though yes, it has gotten quite quiet there over recent years, as with a great many WikiProjects. All of which is to say, don't be surprised if this gets procedurally closed.


 * That said, here's my limited immediate feedback, and a promise to lend a hand with the work as you get along: I agree that Starostin's work needs to be approached with some skepticism.  Or more to the point for our purposes here, I agree that sources do treat his more notable theories/frameworks of reconstruction with some skepticism.  But of course, that is very much the nature of the beast when it comes to reconstructed macrofamilies: the comparative method (and I gather I am not telling you anything you do not already know) breaks down the farther back you go in extrapolating reconstructions from reconstructions, rather than from a corpus of extant or historically attested morphemes/phonemes.  So of course at a certain juncture the speculation starts to dominate over the empirical, and the more wild hypotheses that result speak more to the titillation of the non-expert (even to the extent of psuedoscience/psuedohistory) than to anything the academic historical linguist is likely to find compelling.  As far as I can tell Starostin (or at least his most notable theories) really straddle that line, so I understand your reservations.  But bluntly, you're going to find a bit of such theories in the articles you list above, because they too involve concepts that are situated at that distant point in time and near that nexus of legitimate research and broad speculation.


 * Unfortunately, highlighting these nuances is no easy task, because the details are quite technical and difficult to share with the average reader (let alone to move past in discussion when edits are disputed). When you have a figure whose theories about the distant past speak very strongly to those who have no formal background in comparative/historical linguistics, but who have a lot of...shall we say a combination of passion and credulity about the ancient/prehistoric cultures and languages speculated about, and you can see where they are starting to go off the rails, but not even one in 10,000 Wikipedians is going to follow you if you try to explain why...yeah, recipe for potential frustration.  But, that doesn't mean we can't make an effort at it and hope we don't run into too many editors pushing pie-in-the-sky notions of ancient megacultures and/or unified origin points for half of all modern languages.  On which article would you like to start to our focus?  SnowRise let's rap 07:08, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Thanks for taking the time, this is a great reply! I agree and understand this is a nonstandard use, I’ve been back and forth with users about this for weeks and frankly the conclusion I’ve arrived at, which may be wrong, is that this is a gap in Wikipedia’s policies which doesn’t have an easy solution (hence the policy tag), because I feel that the amount of very reasonable looking fringe-y edits actually outpaces the ability to monitor the edits. And sorry, to be clear I posted about macrofamilies in general on the wikiproject.
 * I appreciate the help! I think getting a few linguists on this will be helpful, for sure.
 * 1. I think that starting with the big one, Altaic itself, followed by Nostratic are probably good calls. Altaic is more of a challenge as it’s obviously less fringe, but its status should be much clearer.
 * 2. Standardize the infoboxes, particularly the labels used to their acceptance. Right now it appears to be arbitrary, and many are listed as “hypothetical” which is both true and misleading.
 * 3. Expand Macrofamily to include minor proposals with limited acceptance which currently have their own articles, and merge them in there. Obviously not for important theories like Nostratic and Altaic, but absolutely for Boreal and Dene-Caucasian, for example.
 * The last one would allow for a centralized discussion of some of the concerns, flaws, and tentatively positive things stemming from using the comparative method in this way and would discourage expanding the article to a needless level of detail for a fringe theory. For example half the articles on deeply unpopular macro family proposals I’ve found recreate gigantic cognate tables in full from the one paper proposing those theories, and when really cleaned up mainly result in stubs.
 * but yeah, big undertaking. I’m not quite sure how feasible this is but I’ve had more than one discussion in the past few weeks with a layperson who was actively misinformed by Wikipedia on these topics. Warrenmck (talk) 18:22, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Austric strikes me as probably warranting it's own article, from a review of the sourcing: it's also one of the better structured of these. I'm not necessarily opposed to you merger proposal but the problem you are going to run into (especially if you have gatekeeping editors as your comments seem to diplomatically suggest, and which I can well imagine for this subject area) is that these articles are all going to pass GNG easily; you might find some help at FTN pushing back against some of the more questionable sources, but dollars to doughnuts you just harden the resolve of those looking to keep while doing so.  So since, GNG is satisfied (or at least likely to be perceived as satisfied) for each of these articles, you're going to have to make your argument on a WP:PAGEDECIDE basis.  Which is difficult in its own right.  If you're going to pursue that route, you will need to get your ducks in a row, and be able to push convincingly for consensus.  You can offset any local editor/original authors ownership issues with a combination of (more standard) RfCs, WikiProject notices, FTN involvement and maybe even a village pump posting, to make sure outside perspectives weigh in as well, but as discussed previously, this is not going to be the most digestible of conversations for your average editor, so even with soliciting broader community input, its going to require work to get a consensus to delete those articles in favour of a merged article, specially considering they already have no trivial amounts of content that will have to be pared down.


 * As to the infoboxes, that's lower-hanging fruit, I think. I agree that the afore-mentioned parameter should go: the level of acceptance of an academic theory is never good content for the infobox, I dare say: that is always something that is going to context and nuance to relate.  Set up as is, it's just an invitation for WP:original research/WP:SYNTH; sources don't frame the verity of such proposals of genealogical relationships is such terms, so it is clearly an enthusiastic indulgence of some editor or editors that has placed these evaluations in there, which is an issue, needless to say: "linguistic classification" (the label for the parameter) is not even a technical term in the field--or at least not in the sense it is used here; I suppose you might have some use I have forgotten in language typology.


 * Okay, so Nostratic first? I do think that the lead already does go some way in establishing that the theory has limited and diminishing buy-in by the mainstream, which is good.  I notice also that we have Campbell working for us in the 'Status' section: in the event we do get others with a linguistics background involved, that could have some persuasive value at least.  Sn</b><b style="color:#99d5fe;">o</b><b style="color:#b2dffe;">w</b><b style="color:#B27EB2;">Rise</b><b style="color:#d4143a"> let's rap</b> 08:21, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
 * "Austric strikes me as probably warranting it's own article, from a review of the sourcing"
 * And this is what's really troubling about this whole situation. It certainly *looks* like an article that may warrant being here, but that isn't necessarily the case. "From a review of the sourcing" seems to be a particularly tricky one when it comes to linguistics, since the first half of the 20th century saw a lot of support for theories that wasn't carried through as our understanding of the comparative method got better, leading a lot of historical proposals to become fringe. Not saying that's a hard and fast thing and it does appear you know your linguistics, but this is why I'm trying to build consensus at the wikiproject.
 * "As to the infoboxes, that's lower-hanging fruit, I think. I agree that the afore-mentioned parameter should go: the level of acceptance of an academic theory is never good content for the infobox, I dare say"
 * It definitely should for linguistics, you have plenty of families with varying degrees of support, some of which are on the way up, some on the way out. It does seem you have a degree of familiarity with the field, so I think it's an important indicator for things like Altaic, which have wider knowledge but not actual knowledge of its current status, etc. Removing it would increase ambiguity.
 * "Okay, so Nostratic first? I do think that the lead already does go some way in establishing that the theory has limited and diminishing buy-in by the mainstream, which is good"
 * Thanks! I'm going to keep hammering at Nostratic, and Altaic's the big one I'd like to see cleaned, since it's a decent article but the balance is all off.
 * "You might find some help at FTN pushing back against some of the more questionable sources, but dollars to doughnuts you just harden the resolve of those looking to keep while doing so. So since, GNG is satisfied (or at least likely to be perceived as satisfied) for each of these articles, you're going to have to make your argument on a WP:PAGEDECIDE basis. Which is difficult in its own right. If you're going to pursue that route, you will need to get your ducks in a row, and be able to push convincingly for consensus. You can offset any local editor/original authors ownership issues with a combination of (more standard) RfCs, WikiProject notices, FTN involvement and maybe even a village pump posting, to make sure outside perspectives weigh in as well"
 * FTN has been very helpful already, but I'm not going to lie, that's way, way, way too high a burden to remove misinformation from Wikipeida. I've said since I started this, and it's not gotten any less true, that I feel this situation is highlighting a huge gap in the policies of Wikipedia on dealing with this type of situation. Warrenmck (talk) 19:35, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Ehh, I don't know that this is an especially potent example of policy shortcomings, if I am honest, Warren: the guidelines in question are balanced to address different editorial needs that are sometimes in tension, and in the aggregate they work pretty well. The issues that complicates the process in the present case are two-fold:
 * Ehh, I don't know that this is an especially potent example of policy shortcomings, if I am honest, Warren: the guidelines in question are balanced to address different editorial needs that are sometimes in tension, and in the aggregate they work pretty well. The issues that complicates the process in the present case are two-fold:


 * 1) the subject matter. I just don't think that the average editor (indeed, the average person) fully appreciates just how technical and empirical the process of establishing genetic relationships between languages truly is.  Most people are unfamiliar with concepts such as universal grammar and nativistic elements of natural language in the human brain broadly speaking, so they don't understand just how regular and fairly universal the transformations of phonemes (and to a lesser extent, morphosyntactics) can be across time, and how the comparative method thereby allows us to reconstruct older forms (albeit with error creeping in the farther back you go without attested corroborating data from other forms of linguistic/arechological research).  Most people probably hear "historical linguistics" and think we are talking about developing a corpus of individual language based on written records and such.


 * The reason I am warning you that the task is going to be a little more difficult than normal here is that, if the changes get disputed, and there is a deadlock that needs to be solved by availing of community discussion tools, you/we are going to have to try to explain all of this, along with a lot of the technical details of how reconstructions work, and it's not going to be any easier to parse than any number of other highly technical scientific language. In fact, in  a way, there's even extra wrinkles in that, unlike say, a subfield of theoretical physics, where the language, models, and shorthand may be very technical and inaccessible, at least the average editor is going to come to that discussion expecting the complicated math and notation.  Here the field is not as broadly recognized for being as analytical and based in the processing of raw data by fairly reliable transformative rules.


 * 2), your suggested approach is, afterall, a non-standard one. You are, afterall, suggesting that we merge articles which do satisfy notability guidelines individually, and for which there is enough content to justify standalone articles.  Even for purely psuedoscientific subjects (of which these articles do not in my opinion qualify), we still maintain separate articles if the subject is WP:notable and not better discussed as part of another article. As a general rule, the approach to such subjects is to make sure they are appropriately framed in the article in question, not that the article itself be excised.


 * Again, I'm personally not per se opposed to your merger proposal on a WP:NOPAGE basis, but you are going against the grain in adopting that strategy: it's a difficult tact to take under ideal circumstances and particularly likely to get sticky if you perceive that there are ownership issues involved in the articles in question, because you are going to need to get consensus here. When I tell you that you're going to need to be prepared in that respect, to have your ducks in a row and be prepared to use every community tool to get extra eyes on the matter, short of WP:CANVASSING, I don't think that this reflects an unreasonableness in the policy or flaws in Wikipedia's ability to remove undue content: it's more a reflection that your approach here is a bit of a moon shot, all things considered, so I want you prepared for how much work is likely to be involved.


 * And 3), I don't think it's altogether accurate to describe this is an issue of 'misinformation' necessarily. Most of the sources here easily qualify as RS and come from actual academics.  It's just that in some cases, they are a little dated and/or out there in the wildnerness when it comes to where the consensus currently is on which macrofamilies (if any) have any strong empirical legitimacy.  I mean, it's not like any of these linguists are suggesting the source language group originates from the lost continent of Atlantis.  They are merely saying "this massive language family (with a partially reconstructed proto-language) looks like it definitely has a relationship to this one over here!"  And while the mainstream historical linguist might look at their evidence and say "Ehhh, that seems like a bit of a stretch / fanciful thinking", it's not exactly a world class case woo, either.  And convincing the average editor that these notions are a little, as I said earlier, pie-in-the-sky is going to require a lot of reference to a lot of (for non linguists...and maybe some linguists as well) very dry sources.  Even then, we need sources that speak very directly to these theories being past their date / half-discredited, so we don't run afoul of WP:SYNTH ourselves.


 * So yeah, in my opinion, not really an issue with Wikipedia's standard approach to these issues, just a lot of complications because of the subject matter, the low involvement from established editors with requisite technical knowledge in these areas of late, the amount of sourcing that will need to be reviewed, parsed, and discussed, and your WP:BOLD (but not necessarily wrong) preferred approach to it. Again, not trying to discourage you, just frame where we will be headed with this project of yours. You will need a lot cool to rise above any ownership issues and convince respondents to community notices that yours is the approach that comports with WP:NPOV/WP:WEIGHT and WP:Verification if these matters get vigorously disputed, and it won't help you to do so if you go into the process feeling that the work is because of unreasonable community standards: better to accept an internalize those standards at the outset (unless you are planning on changing some first, which is a whole other thing): that way you are better equipped to make sure all of your arguments are going to be well rooted in said policy, rather than making IAR arguments that are less likely to fly. Oofta, that was a mouthful: I may be a mediocre polyglot, but I'm a superior megaloglot. ;) <b style="color:#19a0fd;">S</b><b style="color:#66c0fd">n</b><b style="color:#99d5fe;">o</b><b style="color:#b2dffe;">w</b><b style="color:#B27EB2;">Rise</b><b style="color:#d4143a"> let's rap</b> 22:08, 14 July 2023 (UTC)


 * On a side note, these issues do seem more generalized than Starostin in particular, so I'd recommend we take further discussion back to WikiProject Linguistics, supplemented by your discussions at FTN. <b style="color:#19a0fd;">S</b><b style="color:#66c0fd">n</b><b style="color:#99d5fe;">o</b><b style="color:#b2dffe;">w</b><b style="color:#B27EB2;">Rise</b><b style="color:#d4143a"> let's rap</b> 22:22, 14 July 2023 (UTC)
 * It's funny you mention the "if the changes are contested" considering the current situtioon on Proto-Human! I'm aware that what I'm trying to do is a little nonstandard, but I think there's sound reasoning in this case; not every proto-language proposal warrants its own article, but some do have enough interest that they're brought up in the literature with a small degree of regularity. Essentially, I think many of these proposals would have enough written about them to warrant their inclusion on a broader article about macrofamilies while not necessarily being prominent enough to warrant their own article. If that changes (such as, possibly, with Dené–Yeniseian languages), then the article can be reworked a bit and a link to the larger standalone article in question included.
 * Basically I think it's a bad idea to simply purge information from proposals which are seen as tentative or under investigation until some magical threshold that the linguistics community itself hasn't even decided on, but just because something was mentioned once in a paper and a couple of people were convinced doesn't necessarily mean it warrants its own article.
 * Also, I do want to make sure to mention that I won't be attempting to just... purge a whole bunch of articles on my own. The degree of changes I'm willing to attempt to make will depend on the amount of outside involvement there is in making them. I'm proposing something bold and a substantial change, so I don't think this is something that a single editor should be doing, especially when it involves merging multiple pages. That said, just because something is nonstandard doesn't mean it's not potentially the right approach.
 * "The reason I am warning you that the task is going to be a little more difficult than normal here is that, if the changes get disputed, and there is a deadlock that needs to be solved by availing of community discussion tools, you/we are going to have to try to explain all of this, along with a lot of the technical details of how reconstructions work, and it's not going to be any easier to parse than any number of other highly technical scientific language"
 * And this is why I actually think there's a Wikipedia issue at play, because this isn't a reasonable number of steps to place in front of cleaning up misinformation. "Be Bold" doesn't work when the block needing extirpation is well written and reasonable looking and a degree of expertise is needed to see through it. I'm aware that there's no easy solution, just I don't agree that what we have is acceptable. This discussion should need to happen, properly, once (which is actually exactly what I was hoping to do here with Starostin's theories). After that, we're mostly talking about repeating the same discussion each time. The nature of what needs to be done to clean up fringe linguistics on Wikipedia means that the same type of bath needs to be given to a whole bunch of articles. Just recently my pass through on cleaning up a few articles brick walled very hard on cleaning a fringe table out of Proto-Human (just to make sure I mention @‎Mathglot here, not because I'm concerned they may want to weigh in but I don't want to come across as having a sidebar about our current editing situation without mentioning them) and someone objected. That's totally fine, but I fully expect this exact situation will repeat itself at random intervals while attempting to do this, and that creates a pretty massive energy barrier to correcting misinformation on Wikipedia, which feels like a shortcoming.
 * I think we're getting into the topic that's been raised on WP:FTN rather than with Starostin edits, to be fair. Thanks for the time and perspectives, though! Warrenmck (talk) 23:06, 14 July 2023 (UTC)


 * Responding to RfCs (even atypical ones) can be an education in itself.
 * Unlike User:Snow Rise I know nothing about this subject and can therefore be said to fall into the "but not even one in 10,000 Wikipedians is going to follow you if you try to explain why." category.
 * A quick bit of research tells me that your basic point, which I do understand, looks to be valid. Users like me will expect 'specialist' editors like you to have made as sure as you can that the information in our articles properly represents any consensus in the field - while still acknowledging the outlying but significant theorists and their theories.
 * I think your question boils down to asking how you can achieve that.
 * I would suggest that you have achieved the first step in starting to build a consensus here on your basic point that (I think) is Starostin's theories have been widely rejected by mainstream linguists and blindly citing him can mislead.
 * With other willing and knowledgeable editors like User:Snow Rise contributing you can take that consensus forward to any article of concern and use it as a foundation for any caveats you feel those articles need and to help persuade any editors that take a contrary view.
 * All of that is good but I can't see any way of doing this without patrolling articles that may be affected. Revitalising the WikiProject Linguistics might provide some assistance. Lukewarmbeer (talk) 09:00, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I think that there's an important point here:
 * A quick bit of research tells me that your basic point, which I do understand, looks to be valid. Users like me will expect 'specialist' editors like you to have made as sure as you can that the information in our articles properly represents any consensus in the field - while still acknowledging the outlying but significant theorists and their theories.
 * I think your question boils down to asking how you can achieve that.
 * I think this will inevitably result in edit wars, which is something that has been noted on the the articles for these topics before. There is a contingent who adhere to these theories that have spent a large amount of time normalizing them on Wikipedia, and while I don't think that this is any kind of organized effort, I do see places where this false consensus already creates problems. I tried AfDing a minor predominantly self-publishing Nostraticist recently and was accused of advocacy and trying to quash a perspective, because the way that these articles are written unless someone takes the time to correct everything simultaneously there's a strong sense of false controversy present in many of these articles.
 * The reason I wanted to RfC this, as much as I'm aware that this is a nonstandard use of it and I wiffed the procedure a bit (and just to tag @Snow Rise here because this is relevant in reply to them), is because this appears to be a case where specialist knowledge reveals a systematic issue with Wikipedia, and potential edit warring between two factions creates a sense that this is a controversial topic in the field, when it is not. I don't know how many times Wikipedia has addressed this; I can definitely think of a few specific old ArbCom cases where they basically had to adjudicate on scholarly consensus, but the two high profile instances I can think of involved a hot edit war, and I'd rather avoid that situation arising at all, hence not really wanting to plow ahead and be too bold without attempting to raise consensus. Warrenmck (talk) 17:59, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * OP, please review WP:RFCOPEN and WP:RFCBRIEF, and actually post an independent, brief, neutral RfC statement under the template, this is the simple blurb that gets transcluded to the community to respond to, your own opinions should be completely separate from the actual RfC statement. I have also removed the Wikipedia Policy category per WP:RFCCAT, which explicitly states that discussing applications of policy is not the purpose of that category. Best, ~Swarm~  {sting} 16:08, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Sorry for the lack of brevity. I included the policy flag because I'm genuinely not sure if a policy exists here (see the discussion above), rather than an application of a policy.
 * Warrenmck (talk) 19:30, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * You could also post on the fringe theories noticeboard. The definition of "fringe" applied there is very broad. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 17:59, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * That's probably a solid idea and something I should have lead with. I did tag a few of the macrofamily articles (see Nostratic languages) as undue weight to fringe theories, so I likely should have been quicker on that. Warrenmck (talk) 18:00, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * You could also post on the fringe theories noticeboard. The definition of "fringe" applied there is very broad. -- Random person no 362478479 (talk) 17:59, 11 July 2023 (UTC)
 * That's probably a solid idea and something I should have lead with. I did tag a few of the macrofamily articles (see Nostratic languages) as undue weight to fringe theories, so I likely should have been quicker on that. Warrenmck (talk) 18:00, 11 July 2023 (UTC)

A few random thoughts (and thanks for the ping):
 * I agree that an Rfc doesn't feel like the right format here. Do you want this to run for a month, and then count up !votes to see where to go with it? Seems unfeasible.  Agree it should be procedurally closed (not to shut down discussion, but rather to make it a non-Rfc one).
 * Quoting:
 * Very true, and we have WP:N and WP:PAGEDECIDE to deal with that. No special linguistic training needed for this step; can be done by bean-counters. This is not the part where domain expertise is helpful.
 * Very true, and we have WP:N and WP:PAGEDECIDE to deal with that. No special linguistic training needed for this step; can be done by bean-counters. This is not the part where domain expertise is helpful.

Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:58, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Some of the difficulties that points out are inherent to any non-hard science discipline; I've seen a similar type of step-carefully, who-is-mainstream, who-is-outside-it issue in sociological discussions. (Philosophy is probably another one; maybe  would be willing to add their perspective on this.) I'm more familiar with hard sciences, where "first they laugh" paradigm shifts do happen and drive progress in the field. I get the impression that in the humanities, if there's a paradigm shift, it strikes early and gathers steam from some brash young Turk like Chomsky savaging the eminences grises and taking them apart with a superior theory that generates early excitement and then slowly takes over the world; does it ever happen that a new, "laughed-at" theory in sociology, philosophy, or linguistics is ever resurrected from early ignominy or opprobrium to win out in the end? Or, have I got it all wrong, because I lack depth in this field? (Maybe this is too o/t for here; sorry.)


 * Mind if I reply to this on TFN instead of here, since this is more general than Starostin? Warrenmck (talk) 01:13, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
 * Feel free. Mathglot (talk) 02:24, 15 July 2023 (UTC)
 * I did, and tagged you. Hope that helps clarify some things!
 * Just a last aside, I'm aware of this being a nonstandard use of an RfC. However, it worked. Sure, it was nonstandard, but it was also outside of WP:RFCNOT. WP:NOTBURO, and an RfC request got more people in which actually has helped to develop a tiny bit of consensus where there wasn't one before. I think this was well within the principle of use of an AfC, if not the letter. Warrenmck (talk) 02:28, 15 July 2023 (UTC)