Just so you know: usre is the British version of "user" and thus, is not a typo Cheers.

Hey, I laughed. I'm known to be wrong about these things but I think they're just playing around.

I disagree.

See also [[wakner]].

Meanwhile, the shitrain falls and falls and falls .

You couldn't make it up. Where the hell has all that money that's supposed to have been spent on schools gone?

No, regardless of the amount of money spent on schools, students in America will not learn anything about British English as it is completely irrelevant to the standardized test. The decision to raise the English teacher's pay or replace him or her with somebody else will often be based on these scores and little else.

From what I remember, "British" variations were often used as examples of poor spelling. A typical question might read:

Check the box (or fill in the bubble, or whatever) for the [one and only] correctly spelled word:
[ ] memorise
[ ] memerize
[X] memorize
[ ] memarise

What does this have to do with students in America? On the other hand...



I guess he fancies himself British as he was born there or something. Saddening.

Check the box (or fill in the bubble, or whatever) for the [one and only] correctly spelled word:
[ ] usre
[X] user

Is that so hard? Even in America?

I suppose though that he may have extrapolated from the absurd American "center" to the altogether more elegant British English "centre".

No, I'm only saying that U.S. curricula make no distinction between "non-U.S." spellings and "completely wrong" spellings.


Actually I'd disagree on the basis that less phonetic != more elegant, but I'm sure there are cases where it works the other way.

I think that in large part the differences in spelling in words such as "center" vs "centre" stem from the anachronisatic way that many (most?) Americans pronounce the letter "r".Rhotic accents So more or less "phonetic" may be in the ear of the beholder.

You'd have more room to talk there if so-called "non-rhotic" British people properly omitted the "r" sound totally, rather than instead attaching it to random syllables like "idear". Not distinguishing a sound is not the same as not using it.

They do that in Boston, too. It's as if they had all these "r" sounds left over that they've taken off of other words, so they've gotta add them in elsewhere. It's something like "I pahked the cah in hahvahd yahd and lurked at the stahs sipping my sodar."

Damned annoying wankres.

"Dys-rhotic"?



What I meant was however you pronounce centre/center you probably rhyme it with "enter" (an english verb with no regional spelling variation) and not with "entre" (a french preposition).

Damn you, Brett Favre!

Another I just noticed:



From here.

He goes on to clarify, "OK, time of least disruption. That would be around 2 to 5 am EST. I have found that few edits are made during those periods."

Sounds reasonable to me, but Iridescent jumped on him as some kind of American swine. Really, Iridescent? Isn't it possible that Wikipedia does, indeed, have a period of least use?

It has a time of least use, by definition, but I doubt it's statistically significant. I'd seriously question whether "least use in America" equates to "least use globally" even on en-wiki, and would very strongly suspect that the reason he sees fewer changes at 0200-0500 EST is that his watchlist is by definition going to be biased towards subjects that interest him, which, if his list of interests is anything to go by, are all on Virginia and thus will be most heavily edited when Virginians are active. Someone with their main interest in Indian history, say, will see completely the opposite pattern; someone like me, with interests in Nevada, NY and England, sees a fairly constant "density of changes". (Also remember, those servers cover all the languages – the time of least use on en-wiki will be the time of peak use on Chinese Wikipedia and Russian Wikipedia, too).

All I know is that if I have a paying client seeking to get an article into Wikipedia, the best time to pull the trigger is after 1:00 AM Eastern, in the wee hours of Saturday or Sunday morning.

What does "statistically significant" mean in this context? Have you looked? I bet it's a relatively stable difference, as it was in 2002. There are just more English-speakers on the hemisphere defined by the U.S. through England. Most of this clump is asleep/busy between about 430-930 UTC, especially the 145 M or so in the Eastern Time Zone. That's a good chunk of the world's English speakers, and considering that much of the English-speaking population resides in places with relatively low internet connectivity (Nigeria, India), there's a visible difference in most site's traffic. The Aus/NZ people pick up some of the slack, but there's a hell of lot more wired English-speakers on this side than theirs.

I studied 3627 accounts with between 1000-2000 edits in 2007 (Alanyst supplied the data). This group will be skewed toward people with better-than-average connectivity, but it's not a terrible approximation. Here's how editing broke down in half-hour chunks:

00:30 118986
01:00 112178
01:30 109202
02:00 108120
02:30 103555
03:00 104917
03:30 101280
04:00 97680
04:30 93538
05:00 88560
05:30 84079
06:00 79893
06:30 74081
07:00 70112
07:30 67648
08:00 64384
08:30 63604
09:00 61723
09:30 64020
10:00 64468
10:30 66155
11:00 67090
11:30 69164
12:00 73177
12:30 79655
13:00 83857
13:30 88869
14:00 95249
14:30 99334
15:00 107948
15:30 112925
16:00 118651
16:30 120670
17:00 124953
17:30 125176
18:00 128772
18:30 128903
19:00 130397
19:30 132664
20:00 135841
20:30 134375
21:00 137407
21:30 133877
22:00 132343
22:30 128386
23:00 126125
23:30 121800
00:00 119391

Considering other languages, I think the low-period would shift a little more toward continental Europe, but I would bet a lot of money that there's a stable low period, and I would not be surprised if it was between 2-5 AM EST.

Or we could all be American swine. Oink.

Without reference to anything inside Wkipedia the USA's population, at 300,000,000, is much more than the population of Britain, Ireland, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand and Canada combined. India and Nigeria probably have more English speakers than any nation except the USA but but as a second or commercial language and they might not have much participation in Wiikpedia. Because English Wikipedia is by far the largest Wikipedia project theses geographies and demographics would tend to exert much influence on overall patterns, except for the occasional Wikipedian who manages to transcend diurnal patterns, and this mostly in Canada.

Major language edit rates for Wikipedia can be found at wikichecker, and it shows the low periods are centered around 0800 UTC for the English version.


More charts, graphs and stats are linked from Wikipedia:Statistics.

Great link. English towers so far above even the next closest projects, I would have to say that you, GBG, et al are factually right (hell, Spanish actually adds to English's trend, and Japanese--not shown, would likely cancel out some of Europe's phase shift). Eva Destruction and others are factually wrong.

But I think this is a "principle" thing--it's rude to point it out.

I, on behalf of all Yankees, apologize for NeutralHomer's rude certitude. We obviously have inferior political correctness.

There are fairly consistent times where I find the WP servers slow for me, Sydney 6 AMish I think.
Cas

Great, so as I expected, the US nerds don't go to bed until 3-4 AM.

Isn't it nice to be unemployed.

You are in Sydney? Interesting.

Well, to be fair, Pacific is -7/-8, but this is an aggregate, and is at least partially true. I've looked at a lot of editing patterns, and most people are sometimes active after their local midnight.