Talk:Yup'ik

ISO tag
I just removed a Cleanup lang tag from this article that read as follows: ''This article or section should specify the language of its non-English content, using lang, with an appropriate ISO 639 code. See why. (April 2020)''. It occured to me that this felt familiar and when I looked in the page history I founf that was because I'd removed it before, and in that in both instances it was added by. Since we hadn't talked about it the first time, we probably should now. My main points would be as follows:
 * I honestly don't know why you are adding it, it seems to me that most of the non-English words are obviously Yupik words and that the article makes this clear.
 * This tag is a suggestion it's not a rule so far as I'm aware, and it seems very obscure.
 * When you've been reverted once, you probably shouldn't do the same thing again, but of course I would completely understand if you, like, I did, simply didn't remember that this had already been tagged once.
 * Not to over-personalize this, but the rate at which these tags were being added would seem to indicate a focus on tagging as many things for as many minor issues as as possible instead of actually fixing any issues you see. (It also makes me wonder if you are using a script or something that is just searching for words it doesn't recognize, and you're tagging based on that?)

So, you may get the impression from all that that I am not a fan of drive-by tagging. It's kind of a pet peeve of mine to be honest, so I apologize if this comes off as a little harsh, just wanted you to understand my reasoning. Beeblebrox (talk) 05:26, 26 April 2020 (UTC)


 * Hey, Beeblebrox. Sorry about re-adding the same tag to the same article. I am in fact going off of a report (generated by the moss project) of the English Wikipedia articles with the most spelling errors, and I didn't remember I had tagged this particular one a year ago from the same report; it looks like I tagged hundreds of articles that month. With only one or two exceptions, for the other articles, either the tag is still there or other editors have pitched in to add the lang tags. These tags are required by the Wikipedia Manual of Style. Though it is obvious to humans who have the use of their eyes which text is Yup'ik, it is not obvious to other consumers of Wikipedia content. As the template documentation behind the "see why" link explains, screen readers will not apply the pronunciation rules of the correct language without these tags, making understanding the content difficult for visually impaired Wikipedia consumers. Because there are many thousands of pages that are missing lang tags, it is unfortunately not possible for one editor to fix all of them. The purpose of the template (which I did not create) is to attract the attention of editors who are interested in the topic, and of readers who are not yet editors (and secondarily to raise awareness of the need to consider screen readers when adding new content). It also adds the articles to a category where editors who are interested in adding these tags can find articles that need that done (Category:Pages with non-English text lacking appropriate markup). This is a standard method which is used on many tens of thousands of articles for lots of different reasons (see e.g. Category:Wikipedia maintenance categories sorted by month).
 * As the "see why" documentation mentions, lang tagging is also useful for spell checkers and other automated systems. The primary mission of the moss project is to fix spelling errors. Having untagged non-English text causes lots of correctly-spelled words to show up as English misspellings. To mark these as correct spellings, we bring the text into conformance with the Manual of Style, which in the long run will also allow us to spell-check the text against the appropriate non-English language dictionary. There are different procedures for dealing with pages that have one or four reported misspellings, versus those that have hundreds of reported misspellings, and different volunteers are interested in doing those things. For example, I also pull out articles that have a large number of legitimate English misspelling and punctuation problems and dump them into the existing Guild of Copy Editors work queue, with the copyedit tag. Those volunteers would rather spend a day reading an entire article and fixing grammar and spelling, whereas moss volunteers would rather spend a day fixing single misspellings on a few hundred articles.
 * I can see why some "drive-by tagging" might be annoying if editors aren't explaining why they added the tag and it's not clear or turns out not to have been warranted. But personally, I view adding of tags that correctly identify a problem as helpful, since that's a large part of the work of fixing problems. For example, it wouldn't be feasible for the Guild of Copy Editors to skim the entire encyclopedia looking for pages to fix; they depend on readers who are interested in the topics they are reading about to flag rough passages for them. (And thanks to their many copy-editing blitzes, they have nearly eliminated their backlog, so this is a real concern at the moment.) It would also be annoyingly inefficient for drive-by editors to add a cleanup tag instead of fixing a small problem, but I've only been adding this cleanup tag to articles where there are dozens or hundreds of instances that need to be lang-tagged. moss volunteers have in fact added many hundreds of lang tags as non-English words show up in the main spell check listings, usually one or two per article. Personally, I've spent many hours adding these tags when I'm cleaning up the "I didn't know how to resolve this" moss leftovers; that just didn't happen to be what I was doing yesterday, when I was catching up on processing a different report I hadn't looked at in a few months. -- Beland (talk) 18:43, 26 April 2020 (UTC)

Sentence seems to be incomplete
I'm writing about this sentence:

"The early schools for Alaska Natives were mostly church-run schools of the Russian Orthodox missions in Russian-controlled Alaska (1799–1867), and, after 1890, the Jesuits and Moravians, allowed the use of the Alaska Native languages in instruction in schools."

I feel like the phrase "all of whom" should come before "allowed". Could anyone please tell me if I'm right?--Thylacine24 (talk) 20:18, 4 June 2020 (UTC)

"Eskimo" can't be used to describe a people who self-identify as Eskimo people?
It seems like in the past few weeks a number of people have been on a campaign to remove the word Eskimo from various articles. I've just been reverted because a user felt I was "campaigning for my POV" when in fact I was restoring a previous version of the article. In point of fact, it is clearly those who are repeatedly removing the term regardless of context the ones who are "campaigning for a POV."

Now, I'm not saying I totally don't get it. The term "Eskimo" has been widely misapplied to refer to any native people's from northern areas, and in some places it is considered a racial slur. I do understand that. What I think others may not understand is that the Yu'pik actually are an Eskimo group. Many of them, if you asked their race or tribe, will gladly, even proudly, reply "Yup'ik Eskimo". It simply isn't a slur in this context.

If the the users who are insisting it can't be used in an article about an actual Eskimo people would care to explain why that is, I'd be interested to hear your reasoning. . Beeblebrox (talk) 20:13, 17 October 2020 (UTC)


 * Yes, some Yupiit use the term Eskimo, but others see it as a racial slur, so no reason to offend those Yupiit. The term did not derive in Alaska. The Alaska Native Language Center is a good, neutral resource on terminology, and their essay on the matter points out, "Although the name 'Eskimo' was commonly used in Alaska to refer to Inuit and Yupik people of the world, this usage is now considered unacceptable by many or even most Alaska Natives, largely since it is a colonial name imposed by non-Indigenous people. Alaska Natives increasingly prefer to be known by the names they use in their own languages, such as Inupiaq or Yupik" (ANLC). Yuchitown (talk) 01:20, 19 October 2020 (UTC)Yuchitown