User talk:Austronesier/Linguistic macrofamilies

Acceptance

 * "Labelling the acceptance with "promising", "controversial", "disputed", "rejected", "fringe" always needs a source."

This I think is going to cause problems. We have a plethora of people putting out macrofamily proposals which are simply ignored by the wider linguistics community, and "fringe" in particular is going to be next to impossible to find a straight cite that says that (believe me, I tried for Nostratic). One of the biggest issues in addressing these proposals I've found has been that a huge number of these proposals are generally just ignored on the irl equivalent of WP:BLUESKY. I doubt we'll find a great source calling Munda-Magyar-Māori out specifically, but it's clearly not a serious proposal at present. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 21:52, 7 May 2024 (UTC)


 * @Austronesier I've created a list of what labels are currently and where used on wikipedia here.
 * The full list is:
 * Proposed
 * Highly Controversial
 * Widely Rejected
 * Controversial
 * Hypothetical
 * Obsolete
 * Spurious
 * Fringe
 * Disputed
 * Generally Accepted
 * Dubious
 * Tentative
 * Defunct
 * Abandoned
 * Geographic / Cultural
 * No "acceptance" listed
 * Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 05:58, 8 May 2024 (UTC)
 * I can see your point. Most scholars don't even want to waste time to engage with obvious rubbish, so there's a lot of stuff out there that has never been commented on by those who are competent to do so.
 * Luckily, we can throw most of that straight into the bin with the help of WP:UNDUE. There might a residue of meritless proposals that have got at least a few mentions by historical linguists (without further assessement), and which thus could pass WP criteria for a short mention (e.g. in a sentence listing existing proposals), but I wouldn't put too much energy into this question right now as it feels like creating a solution in search for a problem. I feel we can handle a lot of this by WP:ONUS (which allows for editorial judgement based on actual competence) and a tough stance by regulars (NB without ever going into the FTN-rhetoric that btw I find just as off-putting as you do). WP:ONUS is of course not going to work if we want to trim/scrap long-standing content, but then I am confident we can rely on WP:UNDUE.
 * Thanks for the synopsis in your page, this is very helpful. I can see a lot of inconsistencies there (from my subjective perspective) and also a lot of assessements that look to be based solely on personal judgement by individual WP editors. I think what have done in Uralo-Siberian is exactly the way to go: finding consensus with editorial judgement, but fully based on texts written by experts. –Austronesier (talk) 10:40, 9 May 2024 (UTC)