User talk:VikSol

Welcome!

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Hi VikSol, I see you've been doing good work recently on Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages. I made some changes which contradict some of the things you added -- I hope you don't mind. If you like, we can discuss it at Talk:Chukotko-Kamchatkan languages. Ngio 22:10, 24 May 2006 (UTC)

Speedy deletion of Vladimir Dybo
A tag has been placed on Vladimir Dybo requesting that it be speedily deleted from Wikipedia. This has been done under section A7 of the criteria for speedy deletion, because the article appears to be about a person or group of people, 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 indicate the subject's importance or significance may be deleted at any time. Please see the guidelines for what is generally accepted as notable, as well as our subject-specific notability guideline for biographies.

If you think that this notice was placed here in error, you may contest the deletion by adding  to the top of the page that has been nominated for deletion (just below the existing speedy deletion or "db" tag), coupled with adding a note on the 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 would render it more in conformance with Wikipedia's policies and guidelines. Lastly, please note that if the article does get deleted, you can contact one of these admins to request that a copy be emailed to you. - Realkyhick (Talk to me) 06:14, 5 May 2008 (UTC)

Reverts to "Nostratic languages"
I mean this to be a friendly note re your recent mass revert of edits I'd made to "Nostratic languages". I do assume that your revert was in good faith. It would be in the best interests of the article, though, if, when reverting good-faith edits, you were to explain in the edit description why you were doing so. It isn't just a matter of demonstrating good faith &mdash; not to downplay the importance of that &mdash; but that when good-faith edits are reverted without explanation, casual editors will tend to conclude that good-faith edits to that article would be a waste of effort, since they would be subject to mysterious reversion, and their time would be much more efficiently spent elsewhere &mdash; stunting the growth of the article. (For example, I'm now unlikely to bother trying to correct any more grammatical or typographical errors in the Nostratic article.) Even a short generic explanation like (rv good faith edits whose purpose is unclear), appropriately applied, would do the job admirably. Claiming to be 'willing to discuss' the unexplained reversion doesn't really help, since casual editors aren't likely to be tempted by the prospect of gambling effort on a reverting editor with covert motives. Pi zero (talk) 18:29, 14 July 2008 (UTC)

Classification of Japanese
Licqua has presented his argument at Classification of Japanese. Could you respond? kwami (talk) 10:22, 7 April 2009 (UTC)

Sockpuppet investigation
The case was closed, with the following comment. VikSol (talk) 07:03, 19 April 2009 (UTC)

The evidence is very weak. Infrequent editors are not that uncommon an occurence, and an editor who edits rarely in a narrow field is inevitably going to have an intersection with a frequent editor. Leaping to an accusation of socking just because an infrequent editor agrees with a regular editor isn't in the spirit of WP:AGF, and given that the complainant was blocked for edit warring, there is an appearance of sour grapes here. The complainant needs to remember that the convention is Bold, Revert, Discuss, NOT Bold, Revert, Bold, Discuss. If your edits are reverted, take it to the talk page. Don't re-apply them, and demand that the person reverting you justify his revert. Mayalld (talk) 14:45, 15 April 2009 (UTC) Mayalld (talk) 14:45, 15 April 2009 (UTC)
 * Conclusions

Unreferenced BLPs
Hello VikSol! Thank you for your contributions. I am a bot alerting you that 1 of the articles that you created  is tagged as an Unreferenced Biography of a Living Person. The biographies of living persons policy requires that all personal or potentially controversial information be sourced. In addition, to ensure verifiability, all biographies should be based on reliable sources. If you were to bring this article up to standards, it would greatly help us with the current Category:All_unreferenced_BLPs article backlog. Once the article is adequately referenced, please remove the unreferencedBLP tag. Here is the article:

Thanks!--DASHBot (talk) 09:56, 25 January 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) Paul Newman (linguist) -

I posted this reply on the talk page of this bot's creator, Tim1357:

Paul Newman (linguist)
Hi, Tim1357,

DASHbot has left a message on my talk page saying I created an unreferenced article Paul Newman (linguist) and should add references. I am curious what kind of references you think this article needs to be properly referenced. This article includes a bibliography of 9 books by its subject, the linguist Paul Newman, contains 11 links to other Wikipedia articles, and contains 3 online links, 2 of them to articles on the author from reliable sources (one of them a website at the University of Indiana, another a website at the University of Hawaii), and finally an interview with Paul Newman from the scholarly journal Semiotica. The article text also contains direct references to published works, in the form "Modern Hausa-English Dictionary (1977)" and The Hausa Language: An Encyclopedic Reference Grammar (2000)". This provides enough verifiable material to make up a valid article on a person.  Furthermore, the article contains few or no controversial statements and certainly no personal observations, so it is not in any kind of danger zone.  I suggest your bot be fine-tuned to avoid these "false positives".

However, if you think there is some other kind of reference that is required (a reference to a paper scholarly journal, perhaps?), I would be grateful for the information.

Regards, VikSol (talk) 03:38, 16 March 2010 (UTC)
 * VikSol, you have to realise that Tim/DASHBot only notified you that an article that you created had an unreferenced tag on it (the big box at the top of the page). I'm fairly sure that Tim/DASHBot don't read the articles, or evaluate if it is suitably referenced or not, just checks if it has the  template on it.  That template was actually added to the article back in |June 2009 by another user.  Now as to whether the article deserves to have the tag.. probably not as it does have references, but they should really be inline references, not just listed at the bottom in an External links section.  There has been A LOT of emphasis on properly referencing BLPs recently, hence the focus by Bots and others.  Anything you can do to help reference any of the 40,000 unreferenced biographies would be greatly apreciated.  Tim/Dashbot's notification of the originating editors is part of this drive to reference all BLPs.  Regards, The-Pope (talk) 11:06, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

branch/group in AA
I've had this argument before. AFAIK, AA is the only family where we use "group" instead of "branch". But it's on more than just the main page: For example, at East Chadic language we say, "the constituent languages and language groups are". I remember Taivo being the one who's insisted that "group" is the proper term; I'm much more comfortable with "branch", which strikes me as less ambiguous.

BTW, I changed Egyptian back to 'extinct'. That's what we say on the Egyptian page, it's what Blench says, etc. Perhaps we should have a discussion on the language wikiproject page whether we should make a distinction between 'dead' and 'extinct' languages? Whatever we have for Egyptian should probably apply to Latin. Also, what we should do for languages like Ancient Greek and Old English (and Latin), which aren't really extinct but evolved into s.t. else. Maybe an additional parameter 'era' in the infobox? — kwami (talk) 22:36, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

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) 02:10, 4 March 2015 (UTC)