User talk:Jsferreira

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You might also be interested in the Caribbean Wikipedians' notice board. Guettarda 23:53, 2 May 2006 (UTC)

Great addition to Trinidad and Tobago
Thanks, and welcome. :-) --TaranRampersad 19:48, 30 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Thanks as well, but please be a little judicious with external links. Guettarda 13:36, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Spanish is TT
You added to the TT article that Spanish (still spoken in the south of the island). Where? I can't say I have ever come across anyone other than a Venezuelan speaking Spanish. Guettarda 01:39, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Cedros is the main area I was referring to. There are many others. I have heard bilinguals in French Creole and Spanish as far north as Blanchisseuse, and other cocoa growing areas in the north and central areas. My own grandmother from Siparia grew up speaking it at home with her parents, siblings and relatives. Researchers such as Laurence, Moodie, Bryan and many others have been researching the Spanish of Trinidad since the 1970s, and have traced its presence in Trinidad to various waves of migrants from the mainland. The language is dying, but it is still there, not just in parang, placenames, and Trini words like flora and fauna, such as granadilla, cascadura, macajuel, morocoy, wabine; food, such as chicharon, pastelle, sancoche (and others such as burrokeet, duen, gayelle, gayap, picong, lagniappe, mamaguy, sapat, tapia, etc.). The T&T Tourist Board recently referred to the Trinidadian variety as a pidgin or even as a creolised variety of Spanish, but this is incorrect. It is Spanish that has been transmitted over the centuries without the kind of massive restructuring that is supposed to go in creole languages. If you like, I can include a list of bibliographic references.Jsferreira 11:34, 23 June 2007 (UTC)

Speedy deletion Alleyne, Mervyn C.
A tag has been placed on Alleyne, Mervyn C. requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done because the article appears to be about a person, group of people, band, club, company, or web content, but it does not indicate how or why the subject is notable: that is, why an article about that subject should be included in an encyclopedia. Under the criteria for speedy deletion, articles that do not assert the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable.

If you think that you can assert the notability of the subject, you may contest the deletion by adding  to the top of the page (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the article's talk page explaining your position, but be aware that once tagged for speedy deletion, if the article meets the criterion it may be deleted without delay. Please do not remove the speedy deletion tag yourself, but don't hesitate to add information to the article that would confirm the subject's notability under Wikipedia guidelines.

For guidelines on specific types of articles, you may want to check out our criteria for biographies, for web sites, for bands, or for companies. Feel free to leave a note on my talk page if you have any questions about this. Rudget . talk 17:43, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I've removed the speedy deletion tag for the following reasons:


 * It can be improved.
 * It has some notability
 * It has a diverse range of sources, which may help to verify any claims.
 * However, please make sure all the English is intact, some seems poorly wrote. Regards, Rudget . talk  18:08, 19 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, that seems alright. Well done. Rudget . talk  18:42, 19 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Would you like me to "adopt" you? The title sounds somewhat scary, but don't worry. I couldn't possibly adopt a user over the internet! It just means I can give you any guidance you want and possibly even do some Wiki-actions for you (although this is rare with my adoptees :P (fine selection, I think!)) - when you ask for it. Give me a reply anytime you decide whether or not to follow through (no laughs :)) with this offer. Regards, Rudget . talk  18:51, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Adoption
So, anything you want to know? Rudget . talk 19:22, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Basically what to do about this: 	This article or section may contain original research or unverified claims. Please improve the article by adding references. See the talk page for details. --Jsferreira (talk) 19:34, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
 * I've removed that tag, because I now feel the article conforms to Wikipedia policy on notability, and is reasonably sourced with independent references which makes it verifiable. As for the "Wikipedia for dummies" - I could suggest a couple of things: if you ever get stuck and I'm not online, go here for help, it never takes any more than 10 minutes to get a reply from an experienced user; another thing is, the introduction to Wikipedia (which is a brief sort of thing explaining how to edit pages) and finally the tutorial, it has a short explanation and links at the top, to various other help pages. There no PDF as per se, but I'm sure this makes up for it none the less. Oh and don't worry about making mistakes, all users do, and people are nice around here, so there will always be kind words exchanged when an erronous edit is made. Regards,  Rudget . talk  20:07, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
 * And you can reply on any talk page. It's up to you. I do both :D Rudget . talk  20:11, 19 November 2007 (UTC)

Thanks a mil - this was very helpful. Will be sure to harass you when in doubt. I will be part of the Linguist List project to spruce up the stubs for all Caribbean languages, and have to supervise a team of grad students, so no doubt I'll be hollering for help. Thanks again! J --Jsferreira (talk) 20:15, 19 November 2007 (UTC)


 * Yes, everything was fine. Apart from these two things, which I've removed. Just a little bit of advice: don't sign the talk page with signatures unless you are making a comment on a discussion, and the other box you add was a userbox, which is to be placed on your userpage, here. Hope this has let you understand :) Rudget . talk  15:42, 21 November 2007 (UTC)

Featured article review
nominated British African-Caribbean community for a featured article review here. Please join the discussion on whether this article meets featured article criteria. Articles are typically reviewed for two weeks. If substantial concerns are not addressed during the review period, the article will be moved to the Featured Article Removal Candidates list for a further period, where editors may declare "Keep" or "Remove" the article's featured status. The instructions for the review process are here. Cordless Larry (talk) 07:48, 26 February 2009 (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)

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