User talk:V~enwiki

Hello there V, welcome to the 'pedia! I hope you like the place and decide to stay. If you need pointers on how we title pages visit Wikipedia:Naming conventions or how to format them visit our manual of style. If you have any other questions about the project then check out Wikipedia:Help or add a question to the Village pump. BTW, nice work on Games Workshop. Cheers! --maveric149

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Please don't leave on the account of Lir. A few of us are in the process of getting her banned again for bad behavior. --mav

NAWTY NAWTY LIR! Lir 08:38 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

Don't worry I'll be back, I just need to do my laundry, and I'm going on a week vacation fairly soon anyway. I don't think it's neccesary to ban her, she did stop with the lunik vs luna stuff after a bit of argument. I don't mind paraphrasing, I just didn't like the sentence which implied that I'd said her paraphrased comment before since it felt like words were being put in my mouth and I'm not dead yet so she isn't allowed to do a Shakespeare on me.

How strong do you think that it's not necessary to ban her? Is it just ‹If it were up to me, I wouldn't bother, but you do what you think needs to be done.›? If instead you mean ‹No, we shouldn't ban her, that would be a bad idea.›, then you may want to weigh in on the matter on the wikiEN-l mailing list. Mav is trying to ban her, and he even used your leaving the project as an argument for this. Of course, he (an honest person, after all) withdrew this argument after you said that you were coming back after doing the laundry, but he's continuing to press for banishment. So if you have a strong opinion, then you may want to take the opportunity to express it before it's too late. — Toby 22:54 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

Ummm Lir, I'm not trying to be condescending here and I'm worried that I will seem that way, but you do know the difference between being descriptive vs. being prescriptive ie, positive vs normative?

There're very good reasons why reference texts like Encyclopedias, Dictionarys, Thesaurus, Maps etc should be descriptive. For one it's less likely to become obselete or defunct as the way people do things is almost always the way they will continue doing things, whether others think they are correct or not. Also if common usage changes there's no heartrending or teeth gnashing about whether you should change your reference or not, you just do. Finaly you don't get idealogical wars over the "correct" way of referring to things since there is no "correct" way, just the way that is commonly used.

That's why although I can see why you'd want to call the Luna spacecraft Lunik ,and if I was writing a book on the subject myself I might refer to them your way, but I don't think it's apropriate for an encyclopedia to be determining the "correct"ness of a term, it won't change peoples minds, it may confuse them or alienate them as well as come across as being very preachy. And crud the laundromat closes in an hour or so :( -- v

I'm glad to hear you are not leaving the project. Other people have left temporarily because of Lir, several have greatly cut back their contributions and at least a couple have threatened to leave because of Lir and her kind. The naming thing simply drifts to article to article. --mav

V...I find it odd that you yourself agree that the naming should be different, yet you don't think it should be changed here. You say that it's not appropriate for an encyclopedia to be determining the "correct"ness of a term. Is that not what wikipedia is doing? (or rather mav, cuz I doubt anyone else would have changed all the satellite names) I don't think we should use a term simply because a large number of people use them. A large number of people can be wrong and I think we should concern ourselves with what is the best name for something. I do not believe it is appropriate to call foreign cities by anglicized names and I don't think it's appropriate to call foreign people by anglicized names and I don't think it's appropriate to call foreign objects by anglicized names.

Im very tired of hearing people in my region talk their racist hate against immigrants who, "Don't bother to learn the language". I am tired of American hypocrisy and it's superiority complex. If you are going to write about something foreign, you need to use foreign terms, that does not mean you need to use, say, the German name for electron in an article about a German scientists studying articles, but it would be respectful if you used the German names for the town, institute, people, etc. that were involved. Lir 09:17 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

I must admit I find it interesting that your reasons for wanting people use foreign terms instead of native English terms is rooted in your displeasure at people who object to immigrants who have failed to learn the native language of the country they're in.

This is because failure to learn the language of the country you're living in is arguably equivalent to failure to use foreign terms and instead use native ones. Both can be viewed as a failure of respect towards the culture that is being excluded. I don't view either as a lack of respect because anyone who would get offended in such a situation obviously has a very thin skin and little tolerance.

To expand on what I said before it's not about "right" or "wrong", it's not about "correctness", it's not about what is and isn't appropriate, and it isn't about respect, it's about practicality and what works. This is why the descriptive approach is better. It doesn't judge, because once judgement comes into it you get large amounts of disagreement and that in an open environment obviously spells disaster. The only thing people need agree on for things to work is for everyone to take a descriptive approach just like with NPOV where the only thing people need agree on to not step on each others toes is NPOV itself.

A book on the other hand doesn't need NPOV or a descriptive approach because it doesn't depend on the co-operation of (potentialy) the entire world to make it work, I can write my own opinions without qualifications and have my own idiosyncracies in my usage of terminology because at the end of it all that's my name on the front cover and that's who people know the opinions and views on what is and is not correct belong to.

So to summarise there're 2 reasons to follow NPOV and the Descriptive Approach:

Practicality and Attribution

• Practicality, because if you can get people to agree on a Descriptive Approach and NPOV then all people need agree on is those while still being able to keep their own ideologies. In essence a compromise to allow people with wildly differing opinions to be able to work with each other.

• Attribution, since edits can be made by anyone anonymously the authorship for Wikipedia is potentialy a fairly significant chunk of the entire world. This makes attribution of opinions or terminology largely impossible. This puts the onus on us to avoid making judgement calls if at all possible since we're always speaking for many other people and the Descriptive Approach to terminology although not quite as neutral as NPOV is the best we have in this case.

Hope this explains my POV on the topic.

-- v 16:07 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

The descriptive approach describes positively what people do do, while the prescriptive approach prescribes normatively what people should do. It's fairly well established among modern lexicographers, grammarians, and the like to be descriptive rather than prescriptive; they don't prescribe how the language ought to be (don't split infinitives! say "Lunik"!) but instead describe how it is (split infinitives are less common in formal writing, English speakers typically say "Luna").

Now, I don't think that it's exactly fair to draw this distinction into the present debate. As an encyclopædia, we should describe what Lunik did, not what it should have done, and we should mention what people call it (in English and Russian is probably sufficient in the English Wikipedia), not what they should call it. But that doesn't mean that we don't have the freedom to choose which words we want to use ourselves when describing these facts. Similarly, a grammarian is free to scrupulously avoid (sorry, "scrupulously to avoid" ^_^) splitting infinitives even while describing colloquial spoken American English, in which infinitives are regularly split. In short, the analogy is false.

That doesn't mean that there aren't arguments for using the more common terminology, including much of the argument given above. It does mean that the issue isn't the usual one of descriptivity vs prescriptivity.

— Toby 22:43 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

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Sorry, I hadn't slept for 18 hours when I wrote all that I'll repair it when I have the time to proofread. Stupid me. -- V 23:32 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC) Or anyone can feel free to go through and fix it themselves it's more embarresing but somewhat equivalent to a spelling mistake... -- V 23:40 Nov 18, 2002 (UTC)

I've already gone through and checked every instance of "descri" and "prescri"; they should all be fine now. We can focus on the argument itself (when you're awake), or alternatively copy it to wikiEN-l, where some discussion is already taking place. — Toby 02:40 Nov 20, 2002 (UTC)

Sorry haven't had net access for a while... only got a couple of minutes now... I will get to this... anyone want to summarise what happened on the mailing list? -- v

Good job catching my German/Russian confusion on the World War I page. john 05:07 6 Jun 2003 (UTC)~

Abortion

"Here is a conundrum for you: Start by thinking about how many political conservatives in the United states oppose abortion on the grounds that human life is valuable -- and consider this question: How many of those people also oppose a Minimum Wage and/or keep-pace-with-inflation increases in a Minimum Wage? (The Minimum Wage is the amount needed to keep human life alive and able to contribute to Civilization, right?) Can you explain why opposing a Minimum Wage is consistent with claiming value for human life? Remember the cliche "Actions speak louder than words"? If their actions do not value human life, then their claims regarding abortion should be ignored, right? Finally, if there is deliberate inconsistency here, can you think of a reason for it? I can certainly think of one! (But I'll save it for a later posting, as I await your answers to the preceding questions.) V""

Um... in places where minimum wage laws are existent and enforced, the wages are overwhelmingly far larger than the necessar amount to support human life. If your gonna use that sort of argument, I am going to counter it with a better argument- How about the fact that the pro-killing crowd is generally against killing in other places? Such as execution of murderers who are other wise going to go free or leech off of the prison system for life? These liberal people/arguments are always so extrememly inconsistent. . .

By the way V, I'm sorry if I've got the wrong person to laugh at. Zantaggerung 03:53, 18 April 2007 (UTC) Zantaggerung 03:53, 18 April 2007 (UTC)