User talk:Joeystanley

Welcome!
Hello, Joeystanley, and welcome to Wikipedia! Thank you for your contributions. I hope you like the place and decide to stay. Here are a few links to pages you might find helpful: Please remember to sign your messages on talk pages by typing four tildes ( ~ ); this will automatically insert your username and the date. If you need help, check out Questions, ask me on my talk page, or ask your question on this page and then place  before the question. Again, welcome! &mdash; Cirt (talk) 00:29, 2 February 2014 (UTC)
 * Getting Started
 * Introduction to Wikipedia
 * The five pillars of Wikipedia
 * How to edit a page and How to develop articles
 * How to create your first article
 * Simplified Manual of Style

Re: Are you active?
Thanks for letting me know. I've sporadically done minor edits here and there, but on the whole haven't really had much time to edit, as you've noticed. &mdash;Umofomia (talk) 18:46, 24 April 2014 (UTC)
 * Reference

May 2014
Hello, I'm BracketBot. I have automatically detected that [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?diff=606773505 your edit] to Ambitransitive verb may have broken the syntax by modifying 2 "[]"s. If you have, don't worry: just [ edit the page] again to fix it. If I misunderstood what happened, or if you have any questions, you can leave a message on [//en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?action=edit&preload=User:A930913/BBpreload&editintro=User:A930913/BBeditintro&minor=&title=User_talk:A930913&preloadtitle=BracketBot%20–%20&section=new my operator's talk page].
 * List of unpaired brackets remaining on the page:

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, BracketBot (talk) 14:36, 2 May 2014 (UTC)
 * ', read, follow, win, watch, help, know, and try.

Punctuated equilibrium
Hey, I am still on from time to time. I'm not sure if it really needs its own page, as the shape and tempo of language change isn't all that well explored, but the section itself could definitely use some expansion. I don't think a lot of the recent work in computational modelling of language change, either from an agent-based modelling perspective, or from a phylogenetic perspective, has been really well incorporated in any of the relevant articles. If you want to do it, go for it, though. --Limetom 03:20, 4 May 2014 (UTC)

Disambiguation link notification for July 3
Hi. Thank you for your recent edits. Wikipedia appreciates your help. We noticed though that when you edited Yazghulami language, you added a link pointing to the disambiguation page Transitive. Such links are almost always unintended, since a disambiguation page is merely a list of "Did you mean..." article titles. Read the FAQ* Join us at the DPL WikiProject.

It's OK to remove this message. Also, to stop receiving these messages, follow these opt-out instructions. Thanks, DPL bot (talk) 08:55, 3 July 2014 (UTC)

Question
Would you please translate the entry "pt:Críticas à Rede Globo" for the wiki-en? Thankfully. 177.182.54.27 (talk) 14:24, 9 December 2014 (UTC)

Language-population update project
Hi. The 18th edition of Ethnologue just came out, and if we divide up our language articles among us, it won't take long to update them. I would appreciate it if you could help out, even if it's just a few articles (5,000 articles is a lot for just me), but I won't be insulted if you delete this request.

A largely complete list of articles to be updated is at Category:Language articles citing Ethnologue 17. The priority articles are in Category:Language articles with old Ethnologue 17 speaker data. These are the 10% that have population figures at least 25 years old.

Probably 90% of the time, Ethnologue has not changed their figures between the 17th and 18th editions, so all we need to do is change "e17" to "e18" in the reference (ref) field of the language info box. That will change the citation for the artcle to the current edition. Please put the data in the proper fields, or the info box will flag it as needing editorial review. The other relevant fields are "speakers" (the number of native speakers in all countries), "date" (the date of the reference or census that Ethnologue uses, not the date of Ethnologue!), and sometimes "speakers2". Our convention has been to enter e.g. "1990 census" when a census is used, as other data can be much older than the publication date. Sometimes a citation elsewhere in the article depends on the e17 entry, in which case you will need to change "name=e17" to "name=e18" in the reference tag (assuming the 18th edition still supports the cited claim).

Remember, we want the *total* number of native speakers, which is often not the first figure given by Ethnologue. Sometimes the data is too incompatible to add together (e.g. a figure from the 1950s for one country, and a figure from 2006 for another), in which case it should be presented that way. That's one use for the "speakers2" field. If you're not sure, just ask, or skip that article.

Data should not be displayed with more than two, or at most three, significant figures. Sometimes it should be rounded off to just one significant figure, e.g. when some of the component data used by Ethnologue has been approximated with one figure (200,000, 3 million, etc.) and the other data has greater precision. For example, a figure of 200,000 for one country and 4,230 for another is really just 200,000 in total, as the 4,230 is within the margin of rounding off in the 200,000. If you want to retain the spurious precision of the number in Ethnologue, you might want to use the sigfig template. (First parameter in this template is for the data, second is for the number of figures to round it off to.)

Dates will often need to be a range of all the country data in the Ethnologue article. When entering the date range, I often ignore dates from countries that have only a few percent of the population, as often 10% or so of the population isn't even separately listed by Ethnologue and so is undated anyway.

If Ethnologue does not provide a date for the bulk of the population, just enter "no date" in the date field. But if the population figure is undated, and hasn't changed between the 17th & 18th editions of Ethnologue, please leave the ref field set to "e17", and maybe add a comment to keep it so that other editors don't change it. In cases like this, the edition of Ethnologue that the data first appeared in may be our only indication of how old it is. We still cite the 14th edition in a couple dozen articles, so our readers can see that the data is getting old.

The articles in the categories linked above are over 90% of the job. There are probably also articles that do not currently cite Ethnologue, but which we might want to update with the 18th edition. I'll need to generate another category to capture those, probably after most of the Ethnologue 17 citations are taken care of.

Jump in at the WP:LANG talk page if you have any comments or concerns. Thanks for any help you can give!

— kwami (talk) 02:40, 4 March 2015 (UTC)

Thanks...
...for this sentence. Please correct if I erred anywhere. Drmies (talk) 15:30, 7 October 2015 (UTC)

ArbCom elections are now open!
Hi, You appear to be eligible to vote in the current Arbitration Committee election. The Arbitration Committee is the panel of editors responsible for conducting the Wikipedia arbitration process. It has the authority to enact binding solutions for disputes between editors, primarily related to serious behavioural issues that the community has been unable to resolve. This includes the ability to impose site bans, topic bans, editing restrictions, and other measures needed to maintain our editing environment. The arbitration policy describes the Committee's roles and responsibilities in greater detail. If you wish to participate, you are welcome to review the candidates' statements and submit your choices on the voting page. For the Election committee, MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:00, 24 November 2015 (UTC)

Latin American 10,000 Challenge invite
Hi. The WikiProject Latin America/The 10,000 Challenge ‎ has recently started, based on the UK/Ireland The 10,000 Challenge and WikiProject Africa/The 10,000 Challenge. The idea is not to record every minor edit, but to create a momentum to motivate editors to produce good content improvements and creations and inspire people to work on more countries than they might otherwise work on. There's also the possibility of establishing smaller country or regional challenges for places like Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Argentina etc, much like The 1000 Challenge (Nordic). For this to really work we need diversity and exciting content and editors from a broad range of countries regularly contributing. At some stage we hope to run some contests to benefit Latin American content, a destubathon perhaps, aimed at reducing the stub count would be a good place to start, based on the current WikiProject Africa/The Africa Destubathon. If you would like to see this happening for Latin America, and see potential in this attracting more interest and editors for the country/countries you work on please sign up and being contributing to the challenge! This is a way we can target every country of Latin America, and steadily vastly improve the encyclopedia. We need numbers to make this work so consider signing up as a participant!♦ -- Ser Amantio di Nicolao Che dicono a Signa?Lo dicono a Signa. 00:38, 27 October 2016 (UTC)

Hello, Joeystanley!
I have a question regarding this sentence on the "Variation (linguistics)" page: "This count of the possible occurrences can be difficult at times because some variants alternate with zero (such as relative pronouns that, who, and zero)." When you say that some variants alternative with zero, are you referring to the variations established when the relative pronoun "that" and who can be omitted or rather implied through the use of ellipses without the three periods denotation? If so, are you equating the number zero to nothing or the absence of "that" or "who" because of the author's use of ellipsis without the standard denotation?

If the answer is "yes" to either question, then do you believe this discussion of variation in linguistics as it pertains to what's left unsaid could lead to or has already led to a study of variation with metamessages and paralinguistics? Mwsomerville (talk) 02:11, 13 September 2017 (UTC)


 * What I'm talking about has nothing to do with whether the ellipses (…) is used in writing. Most sociolinguistics that study variation deal primarily with *spoken* language, so they would be interested in the differences between the sentences


 * I think you're funny.
 * I think that you're funny.


 * Which are both perfectly grammatical in American English. Whether this pertains to metamessages and paralinguistics is a good question and is one that I'm not equipped to answer. Joeystanley (talk) 18:22, 13 September 2017 (UTC)

I'm sorry for the confusion, Joeystanley. Some classmates in a course that I'm taking explained to me that you were talking about the use of "zero copula" (i.e., if we were talking about AAVE, "I think you funny" instead of "I think you're funny"). At any rate, thanks for responding! Mwsomerville (talk) 18:27, 16 September 2017 (UTC)