The Biblia Hebraica Quinta is the fifth edition of the Stuttgart version of the Hebrew Bible. (The first three editions were just called Biblia Hebraica and the fourth was called Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.) It is appearing in installments, so only part has been published. Compare a selection of versions of the article:

The Biblia Hebraica Quinta is the fifth version of the Biblia Hebraica.
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The Biblia Hebraica Quinta is the fifth version of the Biblia Hebraica, and when complete will supercede the fourth version, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia.
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The Biblia Hebraica Quinta is the fifth version of the Biblia Hebraica, and when complete will supersede the fourth version, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS).

So far, so good. Then it becomes gibberish:
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The Biblia Hebraica Quinta is a revision the fifth version of the, the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS).
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The Biblia Hebraica Quinta is a revision the fifth version of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS).

Now someone who doesn't know what he's talking about corrects the grammar.
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The Biblia Hebraica Quinta is a revision of the fifth version of the Biblia Hebraica Stuttgartensia (BHS).

So now it has become a revision of itself!

(*formatted for clarity. Kato)

This is, of course, what happens when you let anyone come by and edit things. They don't always seperate into clear vandalism and good edits.

Excellent. Here's another one.

This diff by IP 84.203.36.136 on 22:44, 10 January 2008 is a strange addition to the square of opposition article. It is essentially gibberish, and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sunderland06 has the good sense to revert it as a piece of vandalism, which it is. However IP 84.203.36.136 tries again, and this time Savabubble (who I don't think is the same as the anon IP, adds a picture). So the nonsensical edit is back, and no one reverts it, presumably because if it has a picture it must be OK, who knows.

And another. The article Philosophy has always been troubled, and most good editors have given up the troll onslaught years ago. On 2 January 2008 there was a massive barbarian invasion and the article gets badly hacked around, including this edit by 59.93.197.52 which completely removes the section containg the definition of philosophy itself (the object of much trouble and compromise and bloodshed in its time). Most of the attacks were repelled and repairs made but there was no one who spotted that the definition had been removed. Now the article has a big space between the opening sentence and the 'Doctrines' section.

Astonishing coincidence.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=185949846

Which suggests that the best thing we can do here at WR is to bear accurate witness in an understated and wry manner.

These things do happen, but we should keep in mind that deterioration of content is relatively uncommon. This type of deterioration is prone to occur on obscure subjects that aren't watched over by someone well-informed about the subject.

Unfortunately, those are the things that most need to be accurate, because the person reading the article will have no sense of whether or not the information is reasonable. If the article on Romeo and Juliet includes a war scene, most people are going to think "wait a minute, this isn't right".

Articles on items of popular culture are attended to much more frequently than articles on items of an academic nature.

Couldn't agree more. Now if someone would unblock User:Newport ...

Perhaps the system does work. I mentioned two absurdities about articles in an earlier post, which have now been corrected. One piece of nonsense has been removed here

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=183512525

by someone called 'Amarkov' (hmm doesn't he post here also). And another (a whole section of a flagship article that had been accidentally deleted and left for over a month was finally replaced here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=186377166

by my good friend user 271828182, who also left a splendid message on my talk page after I 'retired'.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=...oldid=178334807

I'm surprised he wasn't instantly banned by Durova & co for that one!

Mimetic Emasculation

That's a useful meme. It explains why the admins are so quick to emasculate newbies.

One of the recurring themes of the WP MMPORG is Mimetic Emasculation.

One problem is, people alter part of an article from Limey to American spelling or vice versa and not all of it. Looks so unprofessional.

It is a simple example where someone hasn't thought through the consequences. I created a couple of neutral technology articles, and did it in my usual UK spelling. It survived for a while and then someone came through and "corrected" the spelling. The problem I have, as a reasonable person is, do I revert, because in the end it is not important in the screwed up trans-Atlantic dialect of WikiWorld. If I let it go, someone "got away" with something, if I revert I feel I am being over-sensitive.

Generally on language, you see these "I know how to use language properly debates" pop up. It is worth looking at the article Data where there is a pedantic battle over data (which has biased the whole article into a debate). Scientific users, who use it in the sense of having test results will tend to use datum/data where data is a plural. However, in the computing context is almost always used in the uncounted sense and is therefore treated as singular. There are a swathe of articles in computing where there is a slow edit war. It is not helped by quoting scientific style guides which wrongly assert that data should only ever be a plural noun. Last time I looked, people hadn't managed to be consistent on the article, though the article now documents the debate and the pluralists seem to have staked out the most ground.

I have people correcting my appropriate use of whilst (I've generally given up using it on Wikipedia) and I have also people telling me that words like "uneducable" are wrong and should be ineducable even when written as a paraphrase from a 19th century document on asylums.

To me, it is one of the unsolved problems of Wikipedia: they need to realise that American English is wrong for British or whoever, but not important mostly, and British English is wrong for Americans (who seem to get mightily upset about the issue). I've spoken in America and had complaints because they could not understand my accent (very middle class standard English) - something that would not happen to an American speaker in Britain. ...and techies are the worst people for failing to understand how language works.

I don't see how they can meet their aim of having a published reference work if the language is not correct. I'd rather they just admitted it was an American work and then there could be a proper process of deriving alternative versions for Canadian, British, Australian and so on.

Conservapedia much better on this. Anyone caught reverting to British spelling will be blocked indefinitely.

The Concise Oxford has both spellings.



That's good?

I'm not too fond of WP's weird hybrid they have now, where British spelling is appropriate on articles about Britain or British people, American spelling is appropriate on articles about America or Americans, etc. There's times where it's not clear which is applicable. (Like Tesla, or Schwarzenegger. European, but rose to fame in America. Which spelling format is correct?) I use whilst myself, but have been told it's too stodgy and I should use other words instead.

It would be immensely helpful if they just said "American spelling" or "British spelling", I totally agree with you there. (Or maybe the English WP should be abandoned altogether, and we should all just move to the Esperanto Wikipedia. No way to fuck that language up.)