Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Miscellaneous/2016 August 11

= August 11 =

YouTube problems
hi im a youtuber wana-be and i got evrything exept a network i tryed to partner with freedom a netword with lots of benifits and no lock-in contracts - good so far?.... - good!

now look, i have waited a month and haven't fount a "learn more" button on my YouTube dashboard (witch is where its "ment-to-be" and if i don't find that button i cant join the network so i went to freedom.desk.com and made an account but when i tryed sighning in this showed up                              Hey! Please enter your email address to help us find any existing cases you might already have, and so we know how to reach you. You will only be required to do this once.

i keep puting in my email but it reloded the page AND I HAVE TO DO IT AGAIN AND AGAIN AND AGAIN so i went here to look for help. My question is how do i sign in to freedom.desk.com, to get help, from the people who are helping troubled freedom users, when the webpage wont let me. Please help. --Hyperion1967 (talk) 04:58, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I think you are trying to join Freedom! which is a for-profit network of YouTube contributors. Wikipedia is not connected with Freedom! but you can seek help at their business enquiry e-mail address support@freedom.tm I edited the OP's post slightly for compactness. AllBestFaith (talk) 10:05, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Konstantin Tsjernenko ?
Dear reader,

I wanted to look up just when Konstantin Tsjernenko was leader of the USSR from within WikipediA, unfornately Wikipedia could not find anything. But a query on Google brought up Konstantin Tsjernenko (in exactly the same spelling) in a WikipediA-article as it's first hit. How is that possible ?

Regards John — Preceding unsigned comment added by 217.122.68.187 (talk) 07:39, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Spelling differences, see Konstantin Chernenko. What happened when you clicked the Google hit? --Viennese Waltz 07:50, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Redirects are cheap -- Roger (Dodger67) (talk) 11:45, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * The first hit from Google shows up the nl.wikipedia, which is in Dutch, and is Wikipedia, just not this language. The second one Google guesses a changed spelling and is the English version. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 13:06, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * There are several schemes for Romanization of Russian, which produce different results, and none of which is especially dominant. Google's search engine is, perhaps unsurprisingly, really good (and Wikipedia's not so much), and in this case it's clearly better at handing this problem. Many search engines try to solve "nearest misspelling" problems using schemes like Levenshtein distance; mayhap Google has additional special handing to cope with transliteration. In general, Romanization of the world's many languages that use non-Roman scripts is a difficult problem with a collection of imperfect solutions. -- Finlay McWalter··–·Talk 13:40, 11 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I assume I'll get the usual tongue-lashing for this, but had the Russians adopted the roman alphabet, like the Poles, Slovaks, and Slovenians did, they would probably be among the world's top five powers. Russian is beautiful, subtle, majestic, my favoriote language, and just insanely hard for foreigners to learn.
 * Learning Cyrillic gets you nowhere other than Russia. (Serbia is Mordor and Bulgaria is somewhere between Prussia and Nubia.)  I am almost tempted to ask if there's an alphabetic version of penis envy.  In any case, Russian has, in essence five (or 6 or 7) vowels and 10 ways to spell them, plus three extra vowel signs with absolutely no sane use at all.  Ask any Russian speaker what "y" is and you will get a dozen answers. μηδείς (talk) 21:56, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Even the idea to write Russian in the godless Latin alphabet is, like, totally offensive and stuff. Asmrulz (talk) 12:57, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I'd suggest KOI-8 as the transliteration scheme, this way one could convert between old and new by just toggling the uppermost bit. Asmrulz (talk) 13:00, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Russian orthography works fine for Russians, but other than six vowels, a e i o u y and a soft sign j, the ju, ja, jo, je and i kratkoje are just unnecessary baggage. Of course the same  arguments against spelling reform can and should be made for most languages, especially those with long histories, large literatures, and a wide geographical spread. μηδείς (talk) 22:22, 13 August 2016 (UTC)
 * "just unnecessary baggage": That's fine as an opinion, but if you want anyone to take notice of it, a citation would be the way to go. I also call citation required on "just insanely hard for foreigners to learn". --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  00:01, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * : how about this: Language Difficulty Ranking from the US Foreign Service Institute. Rather surprisingly (to me), it groups Russian with the likes of Estonian and Finnish (notoriously hard for English speakers) and below (i.e. harder than) Indonesian, Malaysian and Swahili. (Just noticed that Medeis posted a similar link, though with apparently different rankings.) AndrewWTaylor (talk) 16:43, 15 August 2016 (UTC)


 * See How hard is it for English speakers to learn a language. Russian is class III, Spanish and Swahili Class I, German and Malay Class II.  Hungarian, Hebrew and Vietnamese Class III.  Chinese, Japanese, and Korean Class IV, presumably due to a combination of lack of common orthography as well as cultural distance.  (I would have though Korean and Japanese Class II, if just spoken.)  Presumably Georgian and Navajo would be Class V, but that is not adressed.  :Of course from a German, Greek or a Slovak perspective, Russian is probably a Class I language, given various close structural and cultural connections, but not for the Spanish or the Chinese. (This is from the extremely reputable American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, not just me or a blog.
 * As for the Russian vowel claim, no citations are necessary for what is simple math that is visually obvious. See iotation to get the gist of it.  Modern Russian uses 10 vowels, а э ы о у я е и ё ю, and then two ь й (!) extra signs for palatalization when the second five above are inherently palatalized.  It could get by with just six vowels a e i o u and ы (a sound that seems like "wih") and one sign for palatalization.  There is no citation need for a visual count or the simple truth 12 > 7. μηδείς (talk) 01:23, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
 * "Wih" is a common error for neophytes. The lips are spread, just as in saying "ee".  There is no "w" component of the sound.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:55, 15 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Yes, I said "seems like" because it's not accurate, but to an English speaker, words like "мы" we, do indeed sound like "mwih". It's the vowel of being punched in the stomach, just a bit higher than a schwa.  The /w/-like-ness-ity comes from the fact that the sound is high but 'not front.  Vat's why Russian is so bloody difficuwt, innit? The discussion is far to of base and technical here, and I highly doubt any of the Russophiles here would disagree if we sat down over a pivo. μηδείς (talk) 20:51, 16 August 2016 (UTC)

Where can I find a highest scoring international soccer game list?
Including U-23 teams like the 10 goals of the Germany-Fiji game yesterday. Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 21:32, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
 * You could look through Category:Record_association_football_wins. A list is available at de:Liste_der_höchsten_Fußball-Länderspiel-Ergebnisse. --Wrongfilter (talk) 11:33, 12 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks. German Wikipedia is awesome! (on football) Sagittarian Milky Way (talk) 20:56, 14 August 2016 (UTC)