User talk:Tkinias/arch20040117

Re Νικη: ευχαριστω πολι

How do I do the accents?

Adam 05:12, 20 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Again, welcome! - UtherSRG 19:49, 13 Jan 2004 (UTC)

Neon tetra's moved, no problem. Birds are capitalized by convention so I forget that the rest aren't. - Hephaestos|§ 15:05, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Tree of Life

Caps: Actually, we're moving to cap all organisms the way birds are.

Taxobox format: Thanks for the work you are doing. However, there is a significant difference (although I don't remember it) between these two:
Genus species Linnaeus, 1758
Genus species (Linnaeus, 1758)

Please do not remove the parenthesis! - UtherSRG 18:27, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

In re caps: that's a pretty significant departure from standard (American or Commonwealth) English usage. Chicago Manual of Style, the OED, and Merriam-Webster all disagree with that, as does FishBase for fish in particular. Is there a discussion going on about that idea?

See the discussion in Wikipedia talk:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life or one of the archives. - UtherSRG 18:51, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Found it: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life/Archive4#Common_Names - UtherSRG 18:54, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

OK. I would strenuously argue against that decision, but if that's policy that's been agreed on, I'll follow. —Tkinias 19:05, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It's the best compromise we reached. It seems that different sources vary widely, although some taxons vary wider than others. - UtherSRG 19:13, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

BTW, I'm not capitalizing "unofficial" common names, only the "official" (from FishBase) ones. Where I mention other names for the species, they don't get capitalized—isn't that the whole point of capitalizing the "official" names? —Tkinias 19:34, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

In re parens: I'm following Wikipedia:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life on using no parens. ICZN uses no parentheses, I note—see their list of new names. —Tkinias 18:43, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

It all depends on where you get the info from. I believe that with parens means the naming has changed significantly since the author named it. I use the IUCN [www.redlist.org Redlist] to get conservation status and author names, when I can. - UtherSRG 18:51, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Discussion on this: Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Tree_of_Life/Archive4#more - UtherSRG 19:00, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Gotcha. I think my confusion lay in that the ICZN stuff I looked at was all new names, so I failed to recognize the distinction. I apologize for introducing any confusion. —Tkinias 19:05, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Makes sense. No problem. :) - UtherSRG 19:13, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

BTW, you needn't follow me to do cleanup; I'm moving my articles and editing for caps, as well as fixing any parentheses problems if I see them. ;) —Tkinias 19:22, 26 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Dashes

First of all, thanks for fixing the format of the text on the Museum photo. About the dashes: the Manual of Style (wisely) says: The use of dashes is currently disputed. It goes on to say:

An em dash can have spaces on either side or not, depending on the writer's preference or in-house style rules; and some writers prefer to use the en dash (spaced) for this parenthetical use.

So I was justified in reverting your change. Both styles are perfectly acceptable and it's considered good etiquette not to change stylistic quirks like this (the same applies US vs. UK spelling, for instance). Let's not get involved in an edit war over this; I'm sure we've both got better things to do. Would you like to change them back, or shall I? () –Hajor 20:06, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

OK, I missed that part. There is no mention of using en dashes as ersatz em dashes in the section on the en dash itself. This is a UK style, no? Because of the rampant misuse of, e.g., hyphens in place of dashes, I just mechanically transform everything to em dashes where appropriate, according to the Chicago Manual of Style, which is the authority in my field. I've been marking a bunch of undergrad papers, so my metaphoric red pen is a bit quick to edit, you might say.

At any rate, I have no interest in getting into an edit war. Go ahead and put your en-dashes back ;).

I do think, however, that if there is no overall standard, we need to have some way of marking individual articles as en-US or en-UK, because the mishmash currently in use is often ugly. For example, if the article employs en-UK punctuation, it should also uniformly employ en-UK orthography. But that's probably a tall order for now. —Tkinias 10:44, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

UK usage? Hmm... just about anyone under the age of 40 who went through schools in the UK was educated in the if it feels good, do it school of grammar. Most of the time they just use hyphens in place of dashes: see The Scream for an example that'll chill your blood, or this (paras 2 & 12) on the BBC (the BBC!) this morning. Occasionally a dash, more often than not an en-dash not an em (ems are very rare), but always spaced.

The BBC's Web site, unfortunately, is more often than not a shining example of extremely poor English. Their copyeditors really need corporal punishment, IMNSHO—and that's not an US–UK thing at all. They seem to have an aversion to complete sentences, for example. —Tkinias 21:21, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thinking about it, I think what freaks UKians about US usage is the joined-upness of the dashes and the surrounding words; conversely, what freaks USians about UK use is the shortness of lone hyphens and ens. Maybe spaced ems would be the best compromise for here on Wikipedia; I suspect that'd be a lot less objectionable, for both camps. I think I'll do that on the Museum article, see if it's allowed to stand.

That mightn't be a bad compromise, akin to the US double quotes but with UK punctuation-outside style. —Tkinias 21:21, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

The Chicago Manual of Style? Oh, yes: I've got a battered 14th Ed. of that on my shelf, §8.36 of which "prefers that in all text, including notes and bibliographies, exact dates be written in the sequence day-month-year, without internal punctuation: 27 April 1981." Has that been rescinded since, or is it a case of a man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest? Thanks be given to the Wiki software function that automatically formats dates per the user's preference, which has probably saved us more edit wars than anything else.

That AFAIK still stands. I'm a bit pathological about dates, frankly; the Anglo-American MDY is the most bizarre and backwards thing I have ever seen. It is certainly true that good academic style in the US requires DMY dating, regardless of vulgar use. Unfortunately, it's a bit of a losing battle to try to get US students to write dates "properly." —Tkinias 21:21, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

And, tongue placed firmly in cheek first, take a look at m:Guerilla_UK_spelling_campaign for a related issue. Cheers, –Hajor 15:49, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I see you also changed "artefacts" to "artifacts" in that same article – that's definitely not cricket, old boy! –Hajor 21:05, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Sorry about that. Artefacts is not even an acceptable alternative spelling in en-US and I was not in US–UK mode while editing, but in paper-marking mode. —Tkinias 21:21, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Thanks for the interesting and gracious comments. I take particular note of what you say about the use of date formats: after having DMY thrown back at me a couple of times in work for U.S. customers, I let myself be convinced that it was as un-American as Trotsky. It's good to know there's still a pocket or two of logic there, albeit in the rarified realms of academia. Ah, and the BBC -- it feels so disloyal to criticise it, but things certainly aren't what they used to be there. Anyway, thanks again, and I'll see you in the edit summaries. Best, –Hajor 22:39, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I know what you mean about not wanting to criticize the BBC; I used to live by the World Service short-wave broadcasts when I lived in the Middle East (pre–easy Internet access), but as you said, "things certainly aren't what the used to be"... —Tkinias 22:45, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Greek names

You write: "Constantine decided to found a new capital for himself and chose Byzantium (in Greek, Vyzántion; today's Istanbul) for that purpose."

This phonetic rendering suggests that in the 4th century the Greeks were already pronouncing beta as a "V" as in modern Greek. Do you know this to be true? What are your sources? If not I would suggest it is an anachronism. Adam 09:38, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Similarly with "Heraclius fully Hellenized the empire by making Greek the official language, and he took the title vasiléfs (king; in Latin, basileus)." Did Heraclius really pronounce epsilon-upsilon as "ef"? How do you know this? And also, if you are going to be consistent, why is he not called Eraklios? Adam 09:44, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Of course, I don't know exactly when the phonetic shifts occurred; I'm not sure if there is consensus among linguists on that. What is pretty certain, though, is that the β was pronounced [v] by the time the alphabet was borrowed by the Slavs, as they needed to invent a new letter for [b]. I note also that in all Russian borrowings from the Greek, the words are pronounced as in Greek (e.g., the prefix auto- is in Russian авто-, pronounced as in modern Greek.) As to whether this occurred before or after Heraclius, I don't know; the evidence seems to be that by the time the Slavs were interacting with the Eastern Romans, though, pronunciation was more like modern Greek in these respects. (The grammar, of course, is clearly not anything like modern demotic...). I made a note of this on the Talk:Byzantine Empire page, which is probably the more appropriate place for this discussion. —Tkinias 09:55, 1 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Science, Scholarship, and Wissenschaft

The problem with this discussion - carried over from Talk:Imperial Germans is that it is based on a both very old and very active discussion on the form and organization of scholarly inqiuiry. Indeed, it is true that Wissenschaft is not "science", or rarely was, because the concepts kept shifting within their relative contexts, and there was a time when the German concept was key for American science reforms as well. The problem with the "arts and sciences" divide, of course, is that it leaves out the "social sciences", which historically oscillate between "physics envy" and being method-based and the more humanities-focused, object-based form.

This is one aspect, but for our discussion, I would argue that the adjective or adverb "scientific" is definitely used more generall - and of course this is not a question of definition anymore, but one of usage, which can actually be empirically determined. I'd say that the, I think, prevalent notion of science/scholarship in the academic sense today is captured well by the Odo Marquard quote, "science is what recognized scientists recognize as science", i.e. that it is about playing a game by the rules. These rules exist for specific communities as well as overall in time and space - Fleck, Merton, and Kuhn would be the three guys who have theorized this the best. (Personally, I think it's desastrous to leave the "truth connex", i.e. the claim that scientific inquiry can up to a point relate to the truth in the sense of a congruence with reality, the latter being to a good part independent of perception, although any perception becomes part of it, but that is another discussion. :-))

This being so, "scientific" means "playing by the recognized rules of organized academe", and I really think that this is how the word is used in the US discourse; scholarly, I think, sounds a bit more archaic and humanities-biased (the wikipedia article on scholar also used to make this point until 6 days ago, as I just saw), although I myself prefer it, because I think (with Gadamer) that the natural sciences are necessarily subsidiary to, and in some sense a function of, the humanities, rather than the other way round. I don't think that there are any Marxist connotations from the Anti-Dühring days and its claims of Marxism as Science with that word anymore, at least not when you say "in scientific articles".

Clossius 06:26, 6 Apr 2004 (UTC)