Aardvarchaeology

Eight years! How time flies...

I've never contributed original content, but I've corrected quite a few spelling and grammatical errors. I love that site.

Posted by: Larry Ayers | January 15, 2009 5:26 PM

I've only ever contributed one article to Wikipedia, because I realised that it's one of those things where once you start you might never stop. When someone contributed a very outdated article on my pet count though I felt I had to step in and set it straight, and by the time I'd finished there was about two lines of the original left. It's only your posting this that's made me go and look; I was afraid it might all have been reverted back to crap. But in fact about ten people have put in work making my citations fit style and so on and the basic thing remains there. Cool :-)

Posted by: Jonathan Jarrett | January 16, 2009 5:57 AM

I've grown rather exasperated with the English Wikipedia, I have to say, though I still use the German version on occasion (with a little help from Babel fish). I looked up some info on geology once, found some very outlandish statements that couldn't possibly be right, so I wrote to a fellow at a local university, listed in one of the footnotes to check up on it. He wrote back with a joke at my expense basically telling me not to believe anything I read in Wikipedia. Another time, I looked up something on "Las Posadas," a Latino Christmas celebration I knew a little about and found next to nothing in English, so I entered my own notes from 30 years ago plus a translation of the Spanish song. A week later, someone hadn't just edited it but deleted the entire thing, substituting a much shorter Spanish-only text -- in the ENGLISH Wikipedia site. Evidently it's a sin not to speak Spanish in English Wikipedia land. I put in some data on Black English, also (being a linguist, I added full footnotes). This, too, was completely deleted and replaced by unfootnoted text. SIGH. As my German Grandpa used to say, "A little is enough and enough is too much!" I'm sticking with Google.

Posted by: DianaGainer | January 16, 2009 8:13 AM

DianaGainer,

I just went to Wikipedia. I didn't look up Black English, but a search for Ebonic turned up a wealth of information, complete with footnotes and links, all quite accurate as far as I could tell. (The only sour note was I got redirected to "Ebonics", a ridiculous name for a language.)

Have you been back to check up on it lately?

Posted by: Riman Butterbur | January 18, 2009 12:33 AM