Fair warning to those who find discussion of how full of fail the Simple English™ projects are annoying and pointless, you probably want to skip this.

Simple's [[List of fruits]] says at the head of the list simply "The following are all fruits" (and links to [[Fruit]]). It includes, among other things, strawberries. Knowing that strawberries aren't fruits, I went to see how [[Fruit]] was defining things.

So [[Fruit]] defines fruits in neither a culinary nor botanically correct sense (and fails to mention the distinction at all). In the "see also" section it helpfully links to "[[Berry fruits]], like strawberries, blueberries, and blackberries". Well, strawberries aren't berries at all, but I thought I'd play along and see what it said there.

At [[Berry]] we're told: "The word berry is used for many different kinds of small fruits that has many seeds and can be eaten. Some examples are strawberry, raspberry, blueberry, and lingonberry. A berry can be either one fruit (like strawberry) or many fruits joined together like raspberry)." Ok, it's kind fof a common-sense definition. Further on it says "However, botanists (people who study plants) say that strawberries, blackberries, raspberries and boysenberries are not berries."
Instead, they say that tomatoes, eggplants (brinjals), guavas, pomegranates and chillies are berries."

So if I ask a botantist if strawberry is a berry, they will answer "Did you know that eggplants are actually berries"?

What does it say at [[Strawberry]]? "A strawberry is a plant that grows fruit that people eat. It is not accualy a fruit, but and enlarged end of the plants stamen." By sheer coincidence, the second sentence was just added yesterday, complete with typo.

Well, since you failed to mention the distinction either, in your "Knowing that strawberries aren't fruits" statement [clearly you are strictly using the botanical sense, since in the culinary sense they damn well are] above, it's hardly alone.

I suspect the "culinary sense" of the word actually entirely lacks an operative definition anyway, since it's a matter of common usage and is shaped by half-baked memes like "did you know a tomato is really a fruit?" - so Simple can hardly be blamed for that one.



That sentence does not make that claim (i.e. that botanists would make an unrelated claim about eggplants in response to a question about strawberries) - but is it not reasonable to say that they would not say "berry" if asked what a strawberry is, and might list eggplants if asked for a list of examples of berries?

The problem is that the articles are written by people who do not know what they are talking about - they are gatherings of chit chat about the subject rather than using a knowledgeable approach to creating a simplified article. That someone should consider adding fundamentally incorrect English to Simple is an indicator of failing to grasp the purpose of the project.

Surely, correct spelling should be a fundamental requirement, given that the target audience is assumed not to have good language skills for whatever reason?

There oughta be a separate Simpleton Review somewhere for this stuff — just not here.

Jon Awbrey

You're right, I thought t would be obvious to people here that I was referring to the botanical classification, not the common sense definition of fruit, but I should have been more specific. On the other hand, I don't pretend to be an encyclopedia.


I was taking a bit of playful liberty with the "instead" at the beginning of the second sentence, but you seem to be missing my point. What is a strawberry accoridng to Simple English™ Wikipedia™? We're told it is a fruit. But it is also not a fruit. It is a berry. But also not a berry. So if it's not a fruit and not a berry, what is it? We're never told. It's "and(sic) enlarged end of the plants stamen," which makes it what? A stamen?

Try this gem from Simple's strawberry article:

"Guess when"?

See the corresponding articles on Wikipedia™ - they're actually fairly good. I'm not sure why the Simple English™ versions of them can't even address the idea that one word may have more than one meaning and usage. Or even provide a reasonable definition of "fruit". There seems to be an assumption here that the readers are not only lacking in English but also unable to understand anything not written for somewhat slow children.


I warned you!

I was going to post it in articles, but it's not really about any specific article. I'll stop if people find my occasional posting about Simple English™ projects annoying.

Seriously, if you have this kind of time to waste, go hash it out over there.

Jon Awbrey

I agree. But as a fair chunk of their small community consists of those banned from EN, there is a problem. Simple Wikifolk need have a better grasp of the English language than EN Wikifolk, and that's clearly not the case.

Majorly, to his credit, has suggested sorting out the mess, with one thing being the banning of IP editors and the removal of editors banned from EN (at least those obviously the same as those banned from EN). I think it's a great start.

I made a point of warning readers that it was about Simple English™ Wikipedia™, and I've offered to stop posting about Simple projects if people generally find it annoying. I understand that you find it annoying, but what's with the attitude? Why not just stop reading the thread instead of posting a snarky message? Seriously.

Actually, I think looking at Simple is a very instructive exercise as it highlights how the lack of competent project leadership destroys what could be a very useful project, and has the potential to be a project that has some hope of being within the scope of the masses.

Potentially it demonstrates the way Wikipedia was envisaged to work: a data gathering exercise not for publication on Wikipedia, with editions published based on proper editing of that resource for the appropriate target market. To give Alex his due, he has recognised this and identified a specific market together with some characteristics that would impose on the project - essentially taking a responsible attitude to what is appropriate for use in schools.

If you got Simple right, then that would give a lead to the real Wikipedia.






Hmmm. I'll get me coat.

•

Simple Enough For Ya?

So, in short, this is an "Encyclopedia" article that says that strawberries grow fruit that isn't fruit.

I'm enlightned now, in a Buddhist sence.

Luís Henrique

Perhaps Wikipedia stands to encyclopedias in the same way strawberries stand plants.

It "grows" knowledge that isn't actually knowledge, but an enlarged end of its editors monomanias.

I don't usually disagree with Jon Awbrey, but here I will. I've given up thinking that Wikipedia Review will ever be a "serious criticism only" site. That's why I helped co-found Akahele.org as a higher-brow (and wider-reaching) companion. I also hope that Jon will wish to contribute a guest article at Akahele, soon.

For me, Wikipedia Review is like reading the "Ann Landers" column or watching 10 minutes of The View, and I personally take a brief delight in learning of all the various ways that Wikimedia Foundation projects are failing. Even the obscure, picayune stuff such as this strawberry vexation.

Maybe Jon's upset because "I ring strawberry" is an anagram of "Awbrey stirring". He just can't help be agitated when someone rings up the strawberry thing.

I remember when the Media Feeds didn't interest me at all, and now they strike me as being some of the more useful resources at the Review. The external media are slowly, slowly getting more intelligent, while the Review just gets dumber and dumber. I mean, if you're really such a True Believer in Wikipediot Ways, and all you have to talk about is reams of stuff you could just easily fill Wikipedia talk pages with — why the hell dump it here, except maybe to spam us out of existence? I still post links back to the Review on many of my external comments — but then I have to ask myself whether there's really anything here that would help Inquiring Minds from the Outside World — and I get more and more hesitant to even bother.

Jon Awbrey

There's another aspect of this that people might be missing here, and that's the aging of the Simple community.

Remember, Simple English WP was never really meant as a Wikipedia for people with limited English skills. It was meant as a pressure-valve to remove child users/editors from the main WP project, since those editors often cause problems due to emotional immaturity, not to mention lack of education (the latter being much less of a concern for the WP folks, but still a problem).

That was all the way back in 2004-2005, and now it's 2009 - most of the young-ish folks running that project originally are now 18, 19, 20 years old. I suspect most of them have simply left altogether, but those who have worked their way back into the main site are now concerned about the caliber of people who have been siphoned off of en.wikipedia to replace them. That's probably why we occasionally see people who are interested in what happens there, IMO.

Mr. Dogbiscuit's point regarding the parallels in the way the Simple WP has developed relative to the main site are still valid, of course... though there's a clear difference in the way it recruits and retains users. That might not matter all that much, but in effect, Simple solves the "expert problem" very neatly, by simply not having any.

A strawberry is a fruit. What are you on about? It's not a veg or nut, it has seeds in, so it's a fruit. If it's not a fruit, tell us what you think it is.

Familiar feeling. This thread is pathetic--only word I can think of.

Well, we could always scare away the nerds, by making WR even more BADSITE to them.
I'm thinking Brandt-style outage and outrage. (sorry)

What the hell are you talking about? First off, you're completely incorrect about what it was created for. It was created for people with English as a second language, despite what you believe. You claim it was a place to dump problem editors. Wrong again, this is a fairly recent occurrence. There is not a single person who was around at the beginning who is still there regularly. The longest serving admin has been there since 2006. The project was started in 2003.

It's unfortunate Simple has a reputation as a dumping ground for people from enwiki, and it doesn't help by spreading lies about it. People claim a "large proportion" of the community are banned enwiki users. This is utterly false - Christianman16 is just about the only active editor who is banned on enwiki, and he is currently being discussed on a noticeboard. If it were up to me, he'd have gone long ago. Not just because he's annoying and immature - but because he's a Christian POV pusher, and it seeps into articles, making them worse than they already are.

How would you know?


What's a fairly recent occurrence? I doubt any of the users/editors who actually moved over to Simple from WP in the first 2-3 years of its existence had actually caused any real problems on WP - the ones who had were presumably banned, like everybody else. The point is that people who are past their mid-20's tend to see people who are 14 or 15 as ticking time bombs, just waiting to go off. (Or maybe those "hair-trigger" bombs that go off when you look at them funny, etc.) So, they encouraged them to go somewhere else, where they "might feel more at home."


That's essentially what I wrote, isn't it? I wouldn't have expected anyone from the early days to still be there. They've either left altogether, or moved on (or back) to en.wikipedia.


I certainly never claimed that, nor would I expect it. Wikis are hardly an effective means of behavior-modification - even WP diehards know that much.

Botanically it is a "false fruit." In fact, it's a false berry, too!

True fruits are dervived from the ovary of the plant, with the seed inside and the rest derived from the ovary wall, called the pericarp.

A lot of plants use other parts of the flower to make fruit-like stuff, some of it very sweet, but it's not ovary, and is thus termed pseudocarp. Strawberries are one of these. You can see that the seeds are sort of on the outside-- the reason being that they're one top of an underlying structure, rather than in the middle of the thing, as in a true fruit (a grape, say).

This is a botanical not a cookbook or produce definition! Pears and apples actually surround the seeds with a sweet flesh which isn't the true fruit, either! (The ovary only makes the core of the apple or pear). And it gets confusing as a lot of anatomical fruits like tomatos aren't sweet, and some are even dry and inedible (many nuts, where it's the seed you eat and fruit you throw away).

So let me get this straight — if you'll excuse the expression — it's not so much a fruit as a trans-vegetable?

Ja Ja

Worse than that. Nearly all "vegetables" are botanical fruits, also. At least the ones with seeds are. So squash, cucumbers, beans, and even radishes and carrots are perfectly good fruits (though potatos don't qualify).

Speaking of Candide Apples …

Jon

I know what you meant, but just took it as akin to somebody asking if AIDS can sometimes turn fruits into vegetables. Best to ignore and expound on the actual subject.

Who are you people, and what have you done with WR?

Jon

Perhaps a different thread would be more to Monsieur's discerning taste?

Looks more like the wrong parallel universe again.

Hardly the first time that's happened …

Jon

I'm not even sure which forum this would go in.

It's just a slow day. I mean, over on WikiEN-L, they're talking about something called the "slog rate," which apparently is some sort of number to quantify the decaying state of WP articles. However, the guy who started the thread forgot to define the term... hilarity should have ensued, but as usual, nobody bothered to make any decently funny guesses as to what it meant.

Someone else started a thread about the charity status of Wikimedia UK for tax purposes, but rather than actually discuss the issue, they got into a big argument over whether or not the person's quoting of the entire article (which then ended up in the list archives for all to see) constituted "fair use."

But Wikipedia's still a big Drama Engine, so something's bound to happen... could be five minutes from now, could be five days. You just never know!

A quick search on Google seemed to suggest that "slog rate" is some statistic in the sport of cricket, and that "slog rank" has something to do with colon cancer.





Meanwhile, the contributor who started the thread about the UK charity status was:

Gwern Branwen

I dare... no, I double dog dare... someone to say that five times fast, without messing up. Put it on YouTube if you can do it. I will pay $20 to the first person (or their preferred charity) who does that.

Greg

I can't even say it once...

I can do it, but hell if I'm putting myself on Youtube!

Funniest post of the whole thread.

Do these projects have a purpose? The Wikimedia Foundation has one, but the Wikimedia Foundation doesn't run the projects, they just provide bandwidth and hard drive space (and "urge[] the global Wikimedia community" to do things) in the hopes that their purpose will spontaneously get fulfilled (since, after all, Friedrich Hayek said it would in "The Use of Knowledge in Society").

Well, Simple has the purpose of creating an encyclopedia of all human knowledge in Simple English, but it is such a large scope as to be impractical. Alex has had an attempt to redefine the scope along the lines of "an encyclopedia in Simple English of subjects appropriate to schools" but that sounds rather ill-defined too - Wikipedia without the porn.

It is a worthwhile question, because although the main encyclopedia has the aim of creating an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, it is an endless task, and aside from a few half-hearted attempts to procude a publishable subset, there is no evidence that the WMF have any idea how to turn the mass of verbiage into something that would be a finished product.

Arguably people have voted with their fingers and have found Wikipedia good enough for every day stuff, but what is presented now is rather different from what one imagines ought to be the finished product, which should implicitly include reliability as part of its goal.

If they'd called it Basic English Encyclopedia, they might have taken a clue from that, and started to get traction on the project (or at least, on SOME kind of project). See what a difference a name makes? That which we call a rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but on the otherhand, if the sweet smell of the rose is actually what we're after, it's best not to call it the garlic encyclopedia.

They might have had a clue from the description included with the Simple English Wiki, but that would assume that the putative writers of Simple were literate...

No, I'm afraid the problem is worse than that. Basic English is well-defined, but "Simple English" which is what Simple Wikipedia keeps demanding, is NOT.




Ah, basic vocabulary! They must mean Basic English where there's a limited set of words and you can't go outside them....

No. They give Basic English as an example of simple English, but stress that there really aren't any limits or boundaries for the limitation in vocabulary (if there were, that would make them think hard. And decide if that was ALL they wanted).

No, they just want the words simpler than on WP. Whatever the hell that means. And the sentences shorter (but God help you if you limit the sentence word count to some N). No limit on article length, though.

Basically, they don't KNOW what they want. They just know they want it simple. And good. And easy. And useful. And well written. And best. See above. if you think I'm joking.

It comes down to the same root problem though: the assumption that you do not need a reasonable level of education to be suited to the task of writing an encyclopedia, that a mass of inadequates can get their egos stroked by thinking they are as good as clever people.

This is where I think Simple makes the problem more obvious than looking at the main one. Given that the task of Simple is potentially one of translation - given that the best source of Wikipediese is the main encyclopedia it is from there one would expect them to go - why is it that this project fails to even get past first base?

There are plenty of articles which, as we have seen with the strawberry, are simply "Here is my ignorant view of the subject, suitable for ignorant people." which seems to be the acceptable approach. Why is the Strawberry article saying something different from the main article? Perhaps these people are so ignorant that they cannot understand the main articles?

It seems also that they have a tag line that Simple is intended for those whose first language is not English (though I am not convinced that is what the authors think). To me, if that is the only aim, that means that it should attempt to keep the concepts at the same level, just explained in simpler, more basic, terms.

Simple does annoy me though because with good management I can see that it has the chance of producing something useful. I think it is indicative of the fundamental failure of crowdsourcing as a means of generating useful work without (crowdsourced) management - societies generally look quite favourably on tasks that are seen to be for the greater good, so I could see that Simple could be positioned as a worthwhile venture. Can crowd-sourcing work with a proper management team to guide the work? I'd have thought it could work better, but would the mob simply refuse to be directed?

Mobs can usually be directed, but historically, you don't want the direction of people who like to use mobs to do their bidding.

Well, Simple does claim that it wants more basic vocabulary without loss of information. This being always honored in the breach than in the observance, because I've never seen it happen, ever. What do you suppose would happen if it were REQUIRED that no Simple article would have less information or less understanding of the subject than the article on the same topic in Regular Wikipedia?

Chaos is what would happen! But a great experiment.

"Write articles on Simple as though writing in English-only for Albert Einstein who is sitting in his study at night, and has no access to an English-German dictionary. His English is insecure and basic. But of course his Geman is great (even his French is good) and he'll certainly understand your math. So just use him, as intended-audience."

The whole definitions of fruits and vegetables are a major problem pre-wp. The best I heard was a science editor on the ABC (Aus publci radio) who said fruits are those which go better with ice cream and vegetables go better with gravy.

I generally follow this, otherwise eggplants and tomatoes, chilies, capsicums and mushrooms for that matter are fruit....

Cas

After the warm reception this got here, I've stayed away from it, but it since it hasn't died yet, I'll just add that according to Simple English™ Wikipedia™, a [[Strawberry]] is once again just a plain old fruit. Glad someone fixed that crazy "stamen" thing, whatever that was about...

Carry on.