One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake

https://medium.com/backchannel/meet-the-ultimate-wikignome-10508842caad

by interkats • 11 years ago

181 167 11 years ago

javajosh• 11 years ago

Henderson was born in Olympia, Washington, the middle child of a father who worked for the state government and a mother who taught math in middle school...

Is it just me or do other people have this curious fascination with the manner in which reporters describe the obscure everyman subject? It's kind of a unique thing, when you think about it, boiling down an entire person to a few superficial data points. It shares something with minimalist Eastern art, you know, the sort that uses like two brush strokes to represent a lion. And yet these reporter "brush strokes" inevitably seem far less descriptive than the art, and far less expressive of the reporter's "artistic" intentions--it's like there's an algorithm somewhere that generates these descriptions (perhaps described in a handbook of reporter style?).

c0ur7n3y2• 11 years ago

Language is comprised of rules that change over time. If everyone understands a sentence, how can it be incorrect? I suppose I'm just confused by crusades like this.

sjcsjc• 11 years ago

You'll hate me for this. "... comprised of ..." is incorrect.[1] Please forgive me. It occurred to me you might be trolling, but I concluded you weren't.

[1] http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/grammar-rules-and-tips/com...

c0ur7n3y2• 11 years ago

That mistake was intentional. My point was that language isn't programming, it's not exact. You understood the sentence and we successfully communicated. I'm a fan of correct grammar and I try to use it. But this article documents a very extreme reaction to a non-problem in my opinion.

tim333• 11 years ago

Grammar guides are not infallible. Usage changes over time. From thefreedictionary.com/comprised:

"The traditional rule states that the whole comprises the parts and the parts compose the whole. In strict usage: The Union comprises 50 states. Fifty states compose (or make up) the Union. Even though careful writers often maintain this distinction, comprise is increasingly used in place of compose, especially in the passive: The Union is comprised of 50 states. Our surveys show that opposition to this usage is abating. In the 1960s, 53 percent of the Usage Panel found this usage unacceptable; in 1996, only 35 percent objected."

I'm kind of like the view that people use language to communicate as they feel fit and then grammar guides should record how a language is used rather than try to dictate how.

eggoa• 11 years ago

You're right, of course, but it would be nice if "comprise" didn't have to have two opposite meanings.

jeremysmyth• 11 years ago

...and so goes the language in many other ways.

He literally laughed his head off, and I could care less.

PakG1• 11 years ago

Biweekly, farther vs further, and so on. Many words have two completely disparate meanings, whether the meanings are formally accepted or not. It sucks. I don't know if one more word added to the list is such a big deal, given how big the list is.

muxxa• 11 years ago

"comprise" would be currently going through a transposition of meaning if English was an oral language. This should be perfectly fine and English would be the richer for it, i.e. we'd have a new useful way of 'aggrandizing a sentence' (as he mentions as a negative in his 6,000 word essay). Instead the 'hero' of this article is contributing to the fossilization and stagnation of the English language, making his case by appealing to etymology and notions of logicity [1] and precision more suited to a formal grammar. He specifically calls out its' novel usage (post 1970!) as being a negative.

I think his efforts are generally good, in so far as the phrase 'comprised of' might be a good signal that a new wikipedia contributer is trying to aggrandize their contributions over and above their knowledge, but I think he is misguided in dictating how language aught to be used.

[1] made up word, perfectly understandable

rayiner4• 11 years ago

Relaxation of rules makes language less precise, and when phrases that mean different things come to mean the same thing, then expressing distinctions requires more words and clumsier constructions.

Also, take your example: "Language is comprised of rules that change over time." The correct alternative is shorter and simpler: "Language comprises rules that change over time." Most people don't even know that there are two perfectly good verbs "to compose" and "to comprise" that let you avoid the "is ... of" construction. If people see the clumsier construction in "good writing" they will never know that there is something better.

atburrow• 11 years ago

Isn't your "Language comprises rules that change over time." statement invalid as well? The word comprises should be used when there exists a definite set of items.

For example: "That house comprises 4 rooms" versus "That house comprises at least 4 rooms". The second statement should be "That house is composed of at least 4 rooms" because the room count is not an exact quantity.

pavel_lishin• 11 years ago

Your certainly write, it wouldn't of mattered for most readers.

microtonal• 11 years ago

That's a different kind of error, namely an error in phoneme to grapheme conversion. So, if you want nitpick, do it right ;).

At any rate, language changes. Both meanings of words, what is considered syntactically valid (see, 'because ADVERB'), and how phonemes are realized. Of course, that does not mean that one shouldn't point out errors (they're vs. their vs. there). However, sometimes errors become common usage.

dragonwriter4• 11 years ago

Language is comprised of rules that change over time. If everyone understands a sentence, how can it be incorrect?

In the case of misuses of "comprise" like yours, because everyone doesn't understand it: when the phrase "is comprised of" is used, its not clear if the meaning is "is composed of" or "includes", which indicates a potentially non-exhaustive listing of constituents, or "comprises", which indicates an exhaustive listing of constituents.

The preservation of clear, distinct, and precise uses improves the ability to communicate ideas. Truly, language usage evolves over time, but it evolves due to the aggregation of choices people make, and those choices can improve or hinder communication. It is good to make those choices with open eyes -- and to advocate for better choices and against worse ones.

bweitzman3• 11 years ago

I don't think the distinction between exhaustive and non-exhaustive constituents is something that most people would pick up on.

Using overly precise wordage that not everybody understands is just as bad as not being precise enough. In fact, it might even be worse: if you detect some ambiguity, you can ask for clarification. If you don't know the difference in words, you can't even tell that you don't know and might interpret the sentence incorrectly.

evanpw• 11 years ago

It's possible for a sentence to be understandable, but still be jarring to read. His user page gives another example: "could of". If you see that phrase, you know what the author meant, but it interrupts the flow of reading. There's also the issue that an article (especially on Wikipedia) seems less credible when it contains spelling and/or grammatical errors. It gives the impression that the author wasn't careful when they wrote it, or that the article hasn't been widely reviewed by others.

taejo• 11 years ago

Every English speakers understands "Dogs bites mans", but every English speaker also agrees that it's incorrect.

belorn• 11 years ago

It can sometimes help to look at a more extreme case. In the Swedish language, words get bound together in order to differential different meanings of the same word.

For example, frozen chicken liver is spelled "fryst kycklinglever" while if you typed "frozen chicken lives" it would be "fryst kyckling lever". Sadly, splitting words incorrectly is the most common form of grammatical mistake in Swedish, so this result in enormous amount of sentences being hilariously incorrect. Most people will of course understand the intended message, as frozen chickens in boxes are unlikely to be alive.

pvarangot3• 11 years ago

frecuently when about english is the topic mistake programmers understandable with nice to read, usually avoid those programmers recommend I as crappy code is written if no fuck is given about aesthetics of something to communicate has been written

logfromblammo3• 11 years ago

Correctness includes accuracy and precision.

Improper or nonstandard use of a word may reduce the precision in an alternative phrasing of equal conciseness.

This is the same reason why I carry on an utterly futile crusade against the use of the word "amazing" as a popular synonym for "doubleplusgood". We have synonyms to color the context and add subtle shades of meaning to our sentences. When they are employed inappropriately for an excessive duration, some opportunities for subtlety and artistry in language may be lost forever.

There was a time when "fine" was better than "good". But now one of the meanings is a level of quality that is merely passable or acceptable. Having ground "fine" as a descriptor of quality down to a dust of exceedingly small particle size, shall we also do the same to "amazing"?

"Mom, this pot roast is amazing--not as good as last night's tacos, but definitely amazing."

"You ungrateful brat! Leave this table and study, so that you might improve your pitiable grades from 'amazing' to passing."

ScottBurson3• 11 years ago

Don't forget "fantastic", "stupendous", and "awesome"!

to3m• 11 years ago

For all intensive purpose`s ,your write ,but is they`re really any need to disperage on peoples` pet hobby`s ?

Myselfs` experience has been that even descriptivist`s have a braking point ,they`res always something that make`s them cry ,,, `stop !`, even when its' clear enough what is meaned !!!We`re is you`re point .I wonder!

Of coarse ,perchance the point is mute ,nobodies` going too pursuede the gy to stopp useing his toothcombs`,,,

TillE2• 11 years ago

The article doesn't even properly explain the mistake. Though it's easy enough to look it up in a dictionary and see that the "of" is superfluous.

bmmayer1• 11 years ago

The user's wiki page does explain what is wrong with "comprised of": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Giraffedata/comprised_of

vinceguidry• 11 years ago

"Comprise" has very specific usage. If you refuse to learn it and use it anyway, it makes you look to someone who does know that usage like you're trying too hard to sound smart by using words above your pay grade. I can see why people get activated one way or another over it. "Comprise" is a line toed in the dirt, a battle over what language means and how it should be used.

ashark4• 11 years ago

"To comprise" is differs subtly in meaning, too.

It implies encompassing or comprehending, not just being the sum of these parts. It places the whole above its constituents. Insisting on using it as a perfect but "smarter" synonym for "to be composed of" is poor writing and contributes to what may be the eventual loss of that word and, with it, our ability to succinctly express that notion, for no useful purpose.

gnu8• 11 years ago

I went on this crusade once, and it was completely unrewarding. I failed utterly to either stomp out the error I was targeting, or to piss anyone off.

The best way to enjoy Wikipedia is just to log out and read articles.

DanBC6• 11 years ago

What did you try to change?

jobu• 11 years ago

Filing this away in my memory for future reference. It will be interesting to see if one man can change the direction of a language, even in a small way.

Language is a fluid thing, and the phrase "comprised of" seems perfectly natural to me (and probably most people). Once something like that happens it's usually on the way to becoming grammatically correct, regardless of what the current grammar rules state.

JoeAltmaier3• 11 years ago

'Correct' because people favor an irregular usage is a weak form of correct. I favor the effort to try and keep the language regular. Following rules makes it easier to learn and teach.

tankenmate• 11 years ago

And you included my pet grammatical peeve; "try and". And so I favour the effort to try to keep the language regular; various English spellings notwithstanding.

Sir_Cmpwn• 11 years ago

Something that bothers me is the recent (past few hundred years) effort by (English speaking) humans to stop the development of the language. When did it stop being okay for the language to evolve? Isn't part of the beauty of it that it changes, that people use it differently, that words have new meanings?

spdustin3• 11 years ago

Regular is measured by consensus, is it not?

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 11 years ago

Once something like that happens it's usually on the way to becoming grammatically correct,

I wouldn't call that correct. Just "accepted". Accepting inconsistent grammar makes it more difficult to communicate, not less so.

_delirium2• 11 years ago

None of English is correct by that standard: it's a hodge-podge of a language with inconsistencies down to the root. Hence the prescriptivist grammarians of the 19th century who tried to Latinize its grammar, reasoning that English might be improved by grafting a foreign but regular logical structure onto it. But they mainly succeeded in introducing further irregularities, throwing some Latinate bits into the mix.

jordigh• 11 years ago

Correct and accepted are the same thing.

There's no Platonic perfect language. Whatever the majority thinks is good language is good language.

Sometimes a minority with high social status is able to convince the plebes that their language is more correct too, but the plebes will still speak their language as they please whenever the elite minority aren't listening.

josu• 11 years ago

The mistake:

Although “comprise” is used primarily to mean “to include,” it is also often stretched to mean “is made up of”—a meaning that some critics object to. The most cautious route is to avoid using “of” after any form of “comprise” and substitute “is composed of” in sentences like this: “Jimmy’s paper on Marxism was composed entirely of sentences copied off the Marx Brothers Home Page.”
There’s a lot of disagreement about the proper use of “comprise,” but most authorities agree that the whole comprises the parts: “Our pets comprise one dog, two cats, and a turtle.” The whole comes first, then “comprise” followed by the parts. But there’s so much confusion surrounding the usage of this word that it may be better to avoid it altogether.

http://public.wsu.edu/~brians/errors/comprised.html

cletus• 11 years ago

Obligatory xkcd: http://xkcd.com/1108/

Age old argument of whether grammar is prescriptive or descriptive [1]. Anyone who has seen or read Shakespeare should be aware of how English has changed in the last few hundred years. Go back 1000 years and Old English would be utterly unintelligible to any modern English speaker.

Often I encounter people who get a bee in their bonnet about using nouns as verbs or people who are too persnickety about "less" and "fewer". Or the New York Times getting a bug up its posterior about "tweet" [2].

I find the effort some people, including the "comprised of" guy here, spend on this kind of thing somewhat bizarre and a little sad.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_prescription

[2] http://afterdeadline.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/15/the-tweet-...

bweitzman3• 11 years ago

I'm of the ilk that grammar should for the most part be prescriptive while dictionaries should be descriptive. And this is actually not a grammatical problem but a semantic one.

"The book is composed of many pages" "The book is comprised of many pages"

If one of these is incorrect, it can only be because of the meaning of the adjective phrase "comprised of". The actual structure of the sentence is fine.

In my opinion, I think either one is totally acceptable, as long as the meaning is clear.

spacecowboy_lon2• 11 years ago

Doesn't work in english which doesn't have a regular grammar in the same way latin does

TillE2• 11 years ago

There's a difference between evolution and mistakes. Otherwise why aren't we validating hundreds of extremely common spelling and usage (eg, "equivocate" when they mean "equate") mistakes? That's how the language is being used by native speakers, after all.

Then we really would be back in the 16th century.

ashark4• 11 years ago

“He has, like, 15,000 edits, and he’s done almost nothing except fix the incorrect use of ‘comprised of’ in articles.”

Oh man, truly that is God's work. It's likely too late, but it would be nice to save "to comprise" as a distinctive word with its own shades of meaning and differing usage from "to be composed of". Should one become a perfect synonym for the other the English language will have suffered a loss.

melling• 11 years ago

How about a quest to clean up "anyways" on HN?

kazinator6• 11 years ago

"to comprise" is distinct from "to be composed of", because the latter is actually "to be", with a past participial phrasal verb.

"to be comprised of", on the other hand, is not distinct from "to be composed of".

ashark4• 11 years ago

"to comprise" is distinct from "to be composed of", because the latter is actually "to be", with a past participial phrasal verb.

This is like writing that the company "Apple" is distinct from "John Deer" because one name consists of one word and the other of two, in that it's both true and beside the point.

I don't think that fact had escaped anyone, and they are distinct for more reasons than one being a verb and the other being a verb phrase.

"to be comprised of", on the other hand, is not distinct from "to be composed of".

The people choosing the former over the latter—to whom we are clearly deferring if we accept the spirit of your statement, which I take to be that one may be replaced with the other in a sentence with exactly no modification of meaning—seem to believe they are not quite the same. If I may venture a guess: they think the former is a smarter or more formal but otherwise perfectly identical version of the latter. Still, that is a difference not without significance, and one I trust you did not intend to dismiss.

Further, they differ in a way that the people committing the (if I may) error do not anticipate: to a good portion of those who understand how to use "to comprise" in the ordinary fashion, its use in this manner is a sign of poor writing, of the sort a well-intentioned but inexperienced high school student might produce. This is the exact opposite of what is intended in the typical case, I expect.

(Apologies in advance for any grammatical, word usage, or spelling mistakes I have undoubtably made, to preempt posts about that.)

jeremysalwen• 11 years ago

I looked this up, because I was confused about what authority deemed this part of the English language a "grammatical mistake". Meriam Webster notes

Although it has been in use since the late 18th century, sense 3 is still attacked as wrong. Why it has been singled out is not clear, but until comparatively recent times it was found chiefly in scientific or technical writing rather than belles lettres. Our current evidence shows a slight shift in usage: sense 3 is somewhat more frequent in recent literary use than the earlier senses. You should be aware, however, that if you use sense 3 you may be subject to criticism for doing so, and you may want to choose a safer synonym such as compose or make up.

So it's not even an issue of grammar, it's just a meaning of "comprised" that some people reject. And it's a usage which is clear, widely used, and doesn't have logical issues (like "could care less"). Go figure.

chulk90• 11 years ago

The phrase "could care less" has a logic error. It makes more sense for someone to say, "I couldn't care less" when the person wants to express that he doesn't care.

brianmcc2• 11 years ago

In the UK, we pretty much always use the "couldn't" version. I'm guessing "could care less" is an Americanism; it always jars for me when I read it.

teh_klev2• 11 years ago

Don't get me started on "could care less", my eyes sting when I read that. My other pet hate is "so fun", as in "that was so fun"...I blame those US kids channels for that one.

kmm• 11 years ago

Who cares if it has a "logical error", whatever that even means, if you understand. And I know you understand it.

Millions of people use this idiom completely intuitively, following their instincts of language that I, as someone who doesn't have English as their native language, can only be jealous of.

"I could care less" is either meant to be taken sarcastically, or it came to be because the "dn't c" consonant cluster is hard to pronounce, the same reason you don't pronounce the 'l' in could, the 'k' in knee, knight or knave, the 'p' in psychologist or pneumonia, or half the letters in Wednesday.

tracker1• 11 years ago

see: sarcasm

ewzimm• 11 years ago

It is a grammar issue. Words often have common uses that don't make grammatical sense. "Comprised" means "included" or "contained." You wouldn't say that a group was included of four people or that a group was contained of four people. It's semantically backwards. Confusing it with "composed" makes it more difficult for people to understand its meaning when it's used correctly.

rayiner4• 11 years ago

It is an issue of grammar.

"To comprise" has the same grammatical usage as "to include" although the two words mean subtly different things. You'd never say "the care package is included of cookies and candy bars" and it's equally incorrect to say "the care package is comprised of cookies and candy bars."

If you want to imply that the care package has cookies and candy bars, but also may have other things, you say: "the care package includes cookies and candy bars." If you want to imply that the care package has just cookies and candy bars, you say: "the care package comprises cookies and candy bars."

vajrabum• 11 years ago

It is in fact an issue of grammar. Irregularity is primary feature of human language grammar--a source of delight to some and a source of annoyance to others. One of my favorite examples from language acquisition research is the small child who says "I goed to the store." In this case it's literally the exception that proves the rule.

dbbolton7• 11 years ago

As a linguist, it is absolutely not an issue of grammar. The grammar is 100% correct. Nit-picking over the so-called "correct" definition has nothing to do with grammar.

It is an issue of semantics, and a rather arbitrarily prescriptivist one at that. Actually, I'm not even sure I would say it's a semantic issue. Most speakers will easily understand the intended meaning.

aetherson2• 11 years ago

Well, maybe giraffedata will precipitate a change in language in which it becomes less acceptable again.

I don't really understand the impulse people have to say, "Language is constantly in flux and there is no authority on what is correct usage. Thus, you should not try to change people's language and I am the authority telling you this."

If you're descriptivist, then one of the things that you should describe is people's bottom-up attempts to change language by, say, excising 47,000 uses of a phrase from a commonly read reference material.

viewer5• 11 years ago

If you're descriptivist, then one of the things that you should describe is people's bottom-up attempts to change language by, say, excising 47,000 uses of a phrase from a commonly read reference material.

I don't think descriptivists are obliged to treat a one-man crusade on a phrase with the same gloves as the grand-scale evolution of that phrase in the first place. 47,000 instances of "comprised of" across a zillion wikipedia articles written by a bunch of people is evidence of lingual evolution; one guy reverting those all to "comprised" isn't further evolution, that's just one guy changing something he doesn't like.

mturmon• 11 years ago

Merriam-Webster uses a very permissive standard for grammar compared to most other usage guides. I like them, but you have to be careful following their advice. If you read their words fairly, you will note they say that "comprised of" is rejected by some readers.

It's the whole descriptive vs. prescriptive thing, and MW explicitly adopts a descriptive standard (they say so in their preface). A good introduction to this larger question is David Foster Wallace's (excellent) essay in review of Bryan Garner's (fantastic) usage guide (http://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/HarpersMagazine-2001-0...).

If you are interested in usage, and are not familiar with Garner's book, I recommend it. (http://www.amazon.com/Garners-Modern-American-Usage-Garner/d...) It is superior to MW for most writers' purposes. (For students of linguistics, MW might win out.)

Garner, incidentally, doesn't much like "comprised of" -- http://www.lawprose.org/blog/?p=2385 (“invariably inferior”).

curun1r2• 11 years ago

It's yet another fight between prescriptivists and descriptivists over what defines correct language usage. English is full of examples where incorrect usage became pervasive enough to become accepted as correct. But some people fight that process because they don't like that the language changes as a result of people using it ignorantly.

For me, it really comes down to how you view the purpose of language. If the purpose is to convey meaning as accurately as possible, then these changes devalue the language since the usages that result from ignorant speakers are, by nature, less precise. The oft-cited "begging the question" has a very precise meaning that's difficult to convey in other terms. When ignorant usage widens the meaning, we lose the ability to easily refer to the more narrow meaning.

On the other hand, you can view language as a shared cultural identity that's always shifting and evolving organically. In that light, these minutiae are pointless because the majority of speakers don't understand the subtlety and never will. You can try to educate people, but you'll just end up alienating them. As humans, we're evolved to learn language from our environment and the people who talk to us, not from a textbook. So why would we consider the textbook version to be the canonical version?

These two viewpoints are diametrically opposed and yet are both reasonable and there are many well-educated people on both sides.

eridius3• 11 years ago

Well said. Though I think that in the context of an online encyclopedia, being precise has far more value than in most other contexts, and so the prescriptivists are in the right. This should be recognizably true even if you take the side of the descriptivists in other contexts.

svachalek• 11 years ago

I have to say I find myself on both. In general I find the descriptive view of language to be far more flexible, pragmatic, and realistic. But certain phrases such as "all intensive purposes" evoke such a strong response from my gut that I just cannot abide it.

mcphage2• 11 years ago

there are many well-educated people on both sides

However, there are not many linguists—y'know, people who study language and how it works—on the prescriptivist side. There are a lot of well-educated people who reject evolution, too, although you'll note that not many of them are biologists.

dragonwriter4• 11 years ago

It's yet another fight between prescriptivists and descriptivists over what defines correct language usage.

I'm not sure that's accurate. Being a descriptivist doesn't stop you from wanting works that are important to you to adopt clear and consistent style; the mere fact of having a usage preference and seeking, within a collective work, to have that preference consistently applied is not equivalent to linguistic prescriptivism.

bane3• 11 years ago

I've found that whenever anybody gets a burr up their ass over some minor grammatical point, they almost never know what they're actually talking about, have not even the most cursory understanding of language or grammar and have instead built some foundation of their identity on a rule they wrote memorized and see anything that goes against that rule as a violation of their self-image.

mtviewdave• 11 years ago

To some people, fussing over a certain set of grammatical issues is the mark of an educated person. I remember one person who got angry with me when I responded to their lecture on the word "decimate" with a little bit of historical linguistics. Probably because it seemed like I was undermining their self-image.

What's interesting to me is which items are in the set of things to be fussed over. Split infinitives, yes. Is-doubling, no. "Decimate", yes. Any other borrowing from Latin, no. It's so arbitrary, yet some people cling to it so fiercely.

mtVessel• 11 years ago

*rote ;)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rote_learning

jedberg2• 11 years ago

About 8 million English Wikipedia articles are visited every hour, yet only a tiny fraction of readers click the ‘edit’ button in the top right corner of every page. And only 30,000 or so people make at least five edits per month to the quickly growing site.

You know, I used to make edits all the time. I stopped doing it because every single one was reverted. I'm willing to accept that maybe a few of the edits were possibly incorrect, but I know for sure most of them were correct. And yet the "owners" of the page are so uppity that they revert them anyway, so I gave up.

_delirium2• 11 years ago

What kind of edits did you make? I fix grammar and spelling stuff semi-regularly, along with sometimes more substantial edits, and haven't had that experience. Fairly often when I fix a typo, the author whose typo I'm fixing even clicks the "thank" button next to the edit. I recently had a minor hobby of tracking down a/an mixups, like "an member", and I got no flak for that.

Jtsummers2• 11 years ago

Not GP poster, but years ago (so not recent, at all) I tried editing both for grammar and content. In a variety of article types (movies and books, technical content like math and CS topics) nearly everything got reverted. For instance, if I corrected a plot point listed in the plot summary for a movie it'd be removed. As an example, imagine an obviously wrong statement in the summary of Batman saying that his alter ego is Clark Kent (trying to remember the actual articles, this wasn't one, but they were just as bad). This is clearly wrong and easily verifiable, but someone would revert the edits and dispute it in the talk pages. If an algorithm were incorrectly described on a CS page I would try to correct it, leaving comments in the discussion about why I was making changes. They were almost all reverted to incorrect pseudo-code or python implementations. Again, these were easily verifiable (in some cases by literally copy/pasting the python code and trying to run it). It was just an exercise in frustration so I gave up. Maybe things are better these days, I haven't bothered since 2010 or 2011.

jedberg2• 11 years ago

Mostly grammar edits as I would see them while reading. This was many years ago (before the thank button I think) so maybe things are better now.

I gave up trying to edit Wikipedia and instead I contribute by giving them money every year.

kevin_thibedeau• 11 years ago

Spelling, minor grammar errors, and graffiti is all I'll fix nowadays. I won't bother rewriting awkward sentences or the commonly encountered repetition of the same facts in different paragraphs. I sure as hell won't add new content. That consumes too much of my time for something that will likely be reverted by a pedant who can't stand for their precious to be touched by someone else.

spacecowboy_lon2• 11 years ago

I had the same problem when doing edits about a major uk festival - second is size to Notting Hill.

I used to run one of the main events (1000 participants and 200k Spectators) and was a co-opted member of the councill committe - The objecting wikapedian was some student from a european country who would have zero idea about what is notable in the UK

DanBC6• 11 years ago

In my experience that kind of rapid revert has got a lot better recently. I think there was a change in things like Twinkle, and Rollback. Also the "vandal patrol" style pages got leaned on.

I agree that some people do revert too much too quickly.

a3_nm2• 11 years ago

A nice thing about Wikipedia is that all history remains public in the vast majority of cases. In this light, I think it would be better to provide links to your reverted edits, so that we can try to understand why they were reverted, and we can apply them again if they were erroneously reverted and the error is still there.

leephillips• 11 years ago

I have a lot of sympathy with this guy and his hopeless quest. But when he says, "It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things", surely he knows that never stopped anyone: http://lee-phillips.org/literallyEgregious/

NoMoreNicksLeft3• 11 years ago

Legally, he should be permitted to beat people with a crowbar if they protest his edits.

PaulHoule• 11 years ago

It is pretty funny that if squash "it's" to "its" 100% of the time you get superhuman performance compared to average people.

learnstats22• 11 years ago

One Man's Quest to ensure that his way is the only way. This illustrates a serious problem with Wikipedia.

It does not allow diversity of thought or opinion - here, it doesn't even allow natural evolution of language over time - if a "wikignome" has decided something is canonical for Wikipedia, then it is. No argument.

No matter how many people believe this is now acceptable usage, one person - typically one white man - has the right to sanction every single one of them.

We are supposed to tell wikignomes that their work is valued (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiGnome). But I don't think this work should be valued.

cheriot• 11 years ago

I get the feeling there's more behind your comment than the article.

If "comprised of" is something that copy editors agree on and the rest of us just don't know about then it seems pretty reasonable. Language evolving is a good thing, but keeping non-fiction writing on the conservative side makes sense.

abandonliberty• 11 years ago

Encyclopedias should be information, not opinion. Reality isn't democratic. Mind you an article such as the one on global warming or the global warming controversy does address the diversity of thought or opinion.

However, there is no good place to store controversy around the meta-structure of wikipedia: the grammar and phrases we use. Perhaps what we are missing is an article discussing the use of "comprised of".

There is an argument, both illustrated in the article and some comments here - and both those who argue for pedantry and laisez-faire have valid points.

DanBC6• 11 years ago

Village Pump or Manual of Style would be the normal places for meta discussion of mass changes of "comprised of". If the editing is problematic it goes to ANI and then amybe RFC and eventually Arbcom.

Edit: and some Wikipedians really do like talking about this stuff. Look at hyphen, minus, en-dash, and em-dash for an example of discussions spread out over several article talk pages, several meta spaces, with some Arbcom action. There are easily 500,000 words just on different dashes.

learnstats22• 11 years ago

Encyclopedias should be information, not opinion.

Yes, OK. Grammar trolling the whole of wikipedia does not add information - it just serves one person's opinion.

Aoyagi• 11 years ago

Yeah, well, I keep removing apostrophes from (most) plurals. It's a plague. Except I'm not proficient enough to make any software that could help me, so I do that only when I happen to stumble upon it, heh.

bartozone• 11 years ago

If Webster added an additional meaning of comprised to actually make this phrase grammatically correct, I wonder if his world would fall apart? ...

jorjordandan• 11 years ago

reminded of the brilliant David Foster Wallace essay "Tense Present" which is THE BEST

http://instruct.westvalley.edu/lafave/DFW_present_tense.html

bbarn• 11 years ago

On the one hand, it's dedication. On the other, it looks a little like Aspergers or something on the Autism Spectrum. The man is so strict in a routine that he wears the exact same clothes and follows the exact same schedule every day. He's obsessed with an incredibly minor detail to the point of making a life commitment to change it.

carlob• 11 years ago

This looks very similar to a question I asked yesterday about enthuse :)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8985364

raldi• 11 years ago

Are we looking at the next winner of the Ig Nobel prize for literature?

realusername• 11 years ago

Sadly there is just no way to prevent a language to evolve, even with an official language body. As a French speaker, they tried that with a very conservative body which is deciding what is good and what is wrong (Académie française).

The result is that the written language is now separated from the spoken language and both evolved separately. (that's also why the vocal recognition in French does not work well but that's another story). So the alternative is much worse than just accepting that the language is changing.

DanBC6• 11 years ago

I feel sorry for this editor now that these edits are known.

It'll be interesting to see if their edits start attracting reverts and discussion.

Perhaps someone with skills could do before and after charts of edits that stick and exits that got reverted?

kazinator6• 11 years ago

This bizarrely obsessed gentleman is very wrong.

The alleged mistake is exemplified in the article like this:

The Wikipedia editorial community is comprised of many interesting people.

Supposedly, this should be "composed of" or "made up of".

However, that is incorrect. The verb "comprise" is simply being turned into a passive form according to an established pattern which generalizes over many, many English verbs:

    subject verb+tense object
    -->
    object "to be"+tense verb+pp preposition subject

For instance:

    A eats B       ->   B is eaten by A

    A includes B   ->   B is included by A

    A included B   ->   B was included by A

    A had included B -> B had been included by A

    A makes up B   ->   B is made up of A (composed)
                   ->   B is made up by A (invented, tidied)

Under this transformation, the preposition has to be suitably chosen to match the verb. It is related to its semantics. For instance "of" doesn't go with "include". And the "make up" example shows that multiple prepositions are possible, depending on the semantics.

To insist that we may not apply this pattern to "comprise" is a very bad case of prescriptivism. It's right up there with insisting that a diaeresis be used in writing words like cooperation, that sentences may not end with prepositions, or that infinitives may not be split.

Here is the real issue:

In modern English, "to comprise" has two meanings which are opposite! It means both "to constitute" (be a part of some whole: to make up) and "to contain" (be a whole, containing something else: to be made up of). The passive construction "to be comprised of" applies to only one of these meanings. It does not work with the "contain" meaning, regardless of what preposition is chosen. For instance:

    This country comprises twenty states. (contains)

    * Twenty states are comprised {of, by} this country.

Whereas:

    Twenty states comprise this country. (constitute)

    This country is comprised of twenty states.

We cannot indiscriminately wage editorial war on "comprised of" based on the assumption "comprised" always means "contains"! "The Wikipedia editorial community is comprised of many interesting people" is simply the passive form of "many interesting people comprise (constitute, not contain!) the Wikipedia community".

dragonwriter4• 11 years ago

If we applied the pattern to "to comprise" (which means, roughly, "to made up of exclusively"), then the sentence would be something like "Many interesting people are comprised by the Wikipedia editorial community" because the "A active verb B" form is "The Wikipedia editorial community comprises many interesting people", so the "B passive construction + preposition A" form would have to be "Many interesting people <appropriate form of "to be"> comprised <appropriate preposition> the Wikipedia editorial community".

kazinator6• 11 years ago

I am not seeing the exact issue you're trying to explain, but let me attempt to write a correct sentence, and its passive reversal (allegedly incorrect):

"Interesting people comprise the majority of the Wikipedia editorial community."

"The majority of the Wikipedia editorial community is comprised of interesting people."

Note that, in modern usage, "to comprise" has two meanings: "to constitute" and "to be composed of". These meanings are opposite!

That is the reason for the contention. The "be comprised of" reversal only works for one of the meanings.

js2• 11 years ago

Why doesn't the wikipedia have a style guide to address language issues such as this?

gayprogrammer• 11 years ago

We need a GNU Grammar Compiler for the entire English language. Then all we need to ask is, "Does it compile?"

josefresco• 11 years ago

Am I the only one extremely bothered by the "By hand, manually. No tools!" line?

Read the article, tools everywhere!

"He begins by running a software program that he wrote himself"... "he used Google to find the 15,000 or so instances of the phrase"

Surely in the very, very beginning he was doing it "manually" but it seems he's built his own tools, and is blurring the lines between bot/human.

jongraehl• 11 years ago

Let's leave aside the current crop of folks who're still reclining in the easy insight of "there is no objective truth".

If you don't want to seem like an idiot, then don't write like an idiot just because recent descriptivist dictionaries were pleased to take note of the increasingly widespread misuse. You will be judged and you won't always have time to explain your principled write-like-an-idiot stance.

Unless you couldn't care less how you come off, because you already care the minimum possible amount.

One Man’s Quest to Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake

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