The justifications given in that essay leave a really bad taste in my mouth:
> I believe using "comprised of" is poor writing, because
> It's completely unnecessary. There are many other ways to say what the writer means by "comprised of". It adds nothing to the language.
That's true for many, many other words. In fact, most instances of definite and indefinite articles "add nothing to the language", since the actual information is in the noun. Just leave them out, right? "I go house."
> It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things.
"To comprise" and "to be comprised of" contain the same word, but not in the same sense.
> The etymology of the word does not support "comprised of".
That's irrelevant to the current meaning of the word. This is called an "etymological fallacy"[1].
> It's new. Many current Wikipedia readers were taught to write at a time when not one respectable dictionary endorsed "comprised of" in any way. It was barely ever used before 1970.
Good luck reading Wikipedia, or any newspaper article, if you are uncomfortable with language coined during the past half-century. What exactly is that "Internet" thing people keep talking about? Note that "The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionaries regard the form comprised of as standard English usage."[2]
The author could have just written "I don't like 'comprised of', and I'm going to impose my preference on everyone else, even though the term has been part of standard contemporary English for a long time."
> > It's completely unnecessary. There are many other ways to say what the writer means by "comprised of". It adds nothing to the language.
I wonder if the editor read "1984" and straight up copied its ideas. In the novel, the totalitarian state of Oceania uses that exact same justification to promote the use of the Newspeak language:
> After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? ... Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not.
Orwell certainly did not take an "anything goes" approach to language, which is essentially what you and others argue for, in the mistaken belief that you're somehow striking a blow at totalitarianism. From my perspective, your position is much closer to the Newspeak ethos than that of someone who actually cares about correct usage.
It seems like the editor is just fishing for a reason to make lots of edits and backed into logic so their stuff doesn’t get reverted.
I love wikis and knowledge bases but this is exactly the kind of stuff that detracts.
On one case, who cares what this person does with their time.
On the other case, it wastes the attention of 90k authors who need to figure out whether they care and have their writing style overridden by a rando.
I think the correct way to do this is to appeal to a writing style that gets argued over (sometimes perpetually) and when settled then the 90k edits can be made. This edit would be an argument presented to change the style guide.
Since “comprised of” is proper usage I doubt it would be proscribed in the style guide.
In my org I used to waste minutes of having writings where people expressed preferences for “and” vs “&” or Oxford comma or whether data are plural and edited things back and forth. Then I just found a style guide and adopted it and ask that people not revert changes based on preferences that break the style guide.
> On the other case, it wastes the attention of 90k authors who need to figure out whether they care and have their writing style overridden by a rando.
On the other hand, if you're editing wikipedia and you expect your writing to not be subject to rando edits, you won't last long.
People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of". Bland articles that directly communicate the language can be more or less tasteful depending upon who is reading them. Almost assuredly sentences can be written without "comprised of" that are also definitely not bland.
But classifying something you find easier to read as better language for everyone doesn't make it immediately true for everyone.
Additionally, it's not about a person making text easier to read or not from one (or multiple peoples') perspectives -- this appears to be about someone going on a stylistic crusade en masse. Objecting to the edits being an act of 'imposing their preference on the world' feels similar to the political mirror-projection kind of argument that can happen.
I think there is interesting discussion to be had (is it better? are there good ways to use it? when/where/how? what is the ethicality of editing articles like this? is a disclaimer wiki entry enough? etc etc), and maybe we can focus on that.
With all due respect, if you're not a native English speaker you really aren't in a position to judge what constitutes "better language". I speak fluent Spanish but I wouldn't presume to correct a native Spanish speaker on their style.
I also wouldn't base your opinions of what makes for good English on the ramblings of one Wikipedian whose primary argument seems to be that they had to work hard to learn to use the word a particular way and so everyone else should for the rest of time.
Simplifying the language, so that non-native speakers can understand it, doesn't automatically make the text better. That's a wild assertion. Worse yet, Simple English Wikipedia exists for that exact purpose.
Well, yes, but other words aren’t wrong and irritating to many readers. The point is that the usage in question has several disadvantages, but zero redeeming features.
> "To comprise" and "to be comprised of" contain the same word, but not in the same sense.
That’s not the point. “To shoot” and “to be shot” contain the same word, but mean opposite things, but that’s a well understood result of active vs passive voice, and nobody objects to that.
However, imagine some people would start using “to be shot” to mean “to shoot”. So, they’d say “Peter was shot by Paul” to mean that Peter shot Paul, that is, Paul was shot by Peter. And then the dictionary would add that as a secondary meaning. Can’t you see how people might object to that?
I don't see it. The 50 states comprise the United States. The United States is comprised of the 50 states. You can change the word, and the exact same "issues" persist. The 50 states make up the whole of the United States. The whole of the United Sates is made up of the 50 states.
Well sure it’d be unsettling but like… what, are you just going to stop language from changing? Good luck with that. We’re just along for the ride, if people start using it that way, then that’s what it means now. Objecting to that is about as much use as to be pissed into the wind.
There are other common examples of active and passive meaning the same thing. "The document is printing" and "the document is being printed", for example. It has no merit other than a popular consensus that it's correct, which is all that's required.
There is no legal right "not to be irritated". It is incorrect to state that this particular case has "no redeeming features". The fact that the phrase is in common usage is all the justification it needs. What's next, "Won't is not a logical contraction of 'will not'"?
"Comprises" is frequently used in patent writing, but I have rarely seen it elsewhere. I think its use, both in patents and normal English, has a particular connotation, that "is comprised of" doesn't carry otherwise:
* When I hear "X comprises Y and Z," I think that the author is saying that X includes Y and Z as its key parts, but is not precluding the existence of other parts
* When I hear "X is comprised of Y and Z," I think Y and Z are the only parts of X
This might have originally been a misuse of the word "comprise" to mean "compose," but I feel like that's a pretty big distinction in meaning.
Interesting. I think when an author says "X comprises Y and Z”, they assert precisely that Y and Z constitute X, that is, are the only parts of X. Otherwise the author should have written “X contains” or “X includes Y and Z”.
Articles obviously add information: is it a specific, known house you are going to (I'm going to the house) or a non-specific/not previously referred to (I'm going to a house)?
When it's your own house you're going to, you could argue the definite article wouldn't add anything, and the phrasal verb to go home drops it (ie. I'm going home), though adding an article is possible and changes the meaning (I'm going to the/a home, in the context of a home for the elderly or some such).
This statement is true only if it is not possible to tell from the context if the noun refers to a specific/previously mentioned thing or not.
It would be possible to measure the amount of information contained in these articles, Shannon style, by taking a body of text, removing the articles, and then asking a bunch of english speakers ( that can possibly be approximated by a LLM ) to put back in the correct articles. Any uncertainty or variation would point to information being lost by the removal.
I would leave the argument but tweak the example given to support: it "adds nothing to the language" that we have many more or less perfectly synonymous terms, such as purse/handbag, pop/soda, and so on.
"I'm going house" contains less meaning than "I'm going to [a] house". Without the preposition, it could mean "I'm leaving [a] house" ("I'm going from house").
I read this and googled a bit and don't quite understand what the problem is with "comprised of".
The author says this "The 9th district is comprised of all of Centerville" should be replaced by "The 9th district comprises all of Centerville"? That's it?
Oh that misses my favorite, "egregiously" which means both done very well and done exceptionally wrong, the latter used more commonly, the former archaic.
But in my language we only use the original positive meaning, so I was deeply confused by English using it for a long time.
One of my favorites is “nonplussed,” because its evolution into two opposite things is both generational and split across British vs North American English.
I don’t love “is comprised of,” and think it can usually be replaced with something like “contains” or simply “is,” resulting in a better, more direct sentence. But I’m not going to go on a crusade against it.
Exactly. You know what else is completely unnecessary? The Eiffel Tower. Big Ben. The reflecting pool at the Mall in Washington, DC. Ten million other thngs. That something is 'completely unnecessary' is a completely insufficient reason to annihilate it, especially it it has wormed its way into common experience.
>Note that "The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionaries regard the form comprised of as standard English usage."
I've never found this a convincing argument. Think of when you use a dictionary: it's because you want to understand a word that you don't understand in its context. If it didn't include all uses, the dictionary wouldn't help you. A dictionary a tool to help consume language.
If you want help to produce language, you refer to a style guide. The barrier for acceptability is much higher there.
By fixing a common mistake on a collaboratively edited encyclopedia? What are you even talking about? Do you have any idea what an editor does at the New York Times?
But it’s not a mistake to everyone, it’s just a mistake in this person and some others eyes.
But it’s an accepted usage of the words.
I’m not exactly familiar with specific editorial duties, but it seems NYTimes editors allow “comprised of” [0] so they don’t seem to correct all occurrences of “comprised of” by changing text to “composed of.”
"I go house" is not standard English. When they said 'There are many other ways to say what the writer means by "comprised of"' it is implied that those other ways are standard English.
>The author could have just written "I don't like 'comprised of', and I'm going to impose my preference on everyone else, even though the term has been part of standard contemporary English for a long time."
But they are not imposing their preference. They are making an improvement that has a consensus and the edit is appreciated by the authors of the text and Wikipedia editors.
Look at the "Reaction to the project" and the barn star awards they got. People whose text was edited to remove "comprised of" thanked this person for their work. Only 1% of the time the edit was reverted. Their work is overwhelmingly viewed as a good thing for Wikipedia.
I suspect that this is an obsessive-compulsive thing. So as long as they're not making the articles worse then I say just let them do it if they need to.
Forgive me if I decline to take writing advice from someone who tells me "I go house" is meaningful English. It isn't. It's violates the rules of grammar, rules which are a description of the normal English as used by members of the English speaking community. English expects you to specify whether you go into, towards, around, out of, or through the window of a house, or the house that we already know we are talking about, or Joe's house.
the justifications in the essay might be poor, but it is sensible to restrict the language of wikipedia to be as unambiguous as possible, given its status as "authoritative on most topics".
For an example in the other direction, wikipedia should ban the word inflammable. Its original meaning, which some authors will definitely prefer (if they are pedants), is entirely the opposite meaning of the colloquial meaning. Should wikipedia pick a meaning for the word, which people are free to ignore, or just outright ban it? (except in etymology wikipedia, where it is an example of a word, rather than part of the explanatory grammar)
The most relevant argument is: this is an encyclopedia, its very purpose is to be precise. And words like "comprise" are specifically about defining the meaning and composition of terms. If the encyclopedia is sloppy with words why does it even exist?
Another point: the era of a human doing rote language cleanup is nearly over; surely an LLM can do better?
you're right that the essay is poorly argued. it all amounts to a whole lot of words saying basically "i don't like it" and trying to claim opinions as fact.
but also, i agree. i don't like it either. so i'm not sure the whole essay is necessary, but i appreciate the work this person is doing to remove the bad writing from wikipedia.
"Comprises" means "consists of". So "comprised of" means "consists of of". It's not just that some people dislike it; it's simply wrong.
Whenever I come across the word "utilize" in WP, I change it to "use" (with the edit comment "Don't utilize utilize"). Nobody's ever reverted me for that.
I think there is a proper use for the verb "utilize": it means "to render useful". But usually, it's just a substitute for "use" that sounds more erudite, or something. I think to utilize something is to take something that is useless, and turn it into something useful. That's not the same as using the thing.
I know this is shocking to people but if a phrase is systematically used by native speakers, it is then part of the language. There is no notion of native speakers being systematically wrong in linguistics. It wouldn't make sense scientifically.
In order to examine natural languages using the scientific method, linguists gather data (i.e. native speakers' spoken or written communication) and then analyze this (i.e. find predictive models of this data). Gathering data, then claiming the data is wrong is epistemologically unfounded. Languages simply are the way they are. This would be like gathering data from Hubble and then deciding photons are wrong because their behavior mismatch with Newtonian laws.
OK, but does that mean the phrase should be used as such in an encyclopedia?
For instance, the word "biweekly" now means both "once every two weeks" and "twice per week". I don't mind usage of that word for those two meanings. Obviously, linguists can gather data and analyze how it's being used. They may conclude that one meaning was more favored 50 years ago and the other meaning is now.
But when I'm reading an encyclopedia, I'd prefer it to avoid this ambiguous word.
There is a tension between prescriptivism and descriptivism, and it has to do with the rate at which the language evolves. Prescriptivism resists language evolution. Decriptivism allows the language to evolve as fast as people wish to evolve it.
Some rate of language change has to be accepted, but it needn't be as fast as if we rejected all prescriptivism.
We each prescribe or refuse to prescribe language rules as we see fit, and thus the language evolves at some natural rate.
Fully agree, same can be said about ever young generation’s slang.
What “bet”, “cap”, “rizz” and others used by the younger population isn’t wrong, it’s different and an evolution of certain terms.
I don’t study linguistics, but I can be sure there are terms we use today and take as normal-speak that were once the center of a younger generation’s slang vernacular.
An extreme example is the word retard. Years ago in normal speak you could say “After the EPA enacted stricter emissions regulations, this initially retarded the development of sports cars until new technology was implemented” other obvious examples are the medical angle of the word.
Today, you could use the word in such a way, it’s technically correct, however you’ll most likely get some odd looks.
Most uses of it today are either in specific comedic circles, or derogatorily towards another person/thing/animal etc
That's nonsense, not all native speakers have equal verbal fluency. Certainly new words or sentence constructions can be coined for amusement or efficiency and may catch on at scale, but if there were no such thing as correctness then there wouldn't be any such concept as incoherence.
A "systematic" change in the meaning of a word or phrase means that someone used it wrong once and enough people followed them in their wrongness that it became the norm. It's reasonable to say that once a new meaning has been taken up by the majority in this way it's not wrong anymore, but there is also a broad continuum between old usages and majority uptake of new usages where some users of the language in question may reasonably object to the latter.
For instance, I was once CC'd on an email thread at work where a senior leader made an obvious typo in reference to some Thing and everybody else on the thread blindly parroted it. This "alternate" usage was established and used systematically in the local context, but it led to a significant decline in general clarity and interpretability, and it was also not durable beyond the context of that thread. It was a mistake, simple as that.
"Comprised of" is probably past the threshold at this point, much like "rate of speed" and "how <thing> looks like" and so on and so forth. But—and I know this is shocking to some people—"correct" use of language does have significant advantages for communicating clearly, especially in writing. Prescriptivism and descriptivism both have their adherents because neither is right or wrong in the naive absolutist sense—balance is key.
It depends on whether you presume language knowledge to be descriptive or prescriptive. Neither view is right or wrong. For example, I'm a native speaker of C, yet my syntax errors are still errors.
u are looking at this from the pov of a linguist, not an editor...u might think this comment im writing isnt "systematically wrong" or whatever but u wouldn't write a wikipedia article this way
seriously tho if descriptivists had the courage of their convictions they would just stop capitalizing, there's no reason to
Not necessarily true. There are authoritative guides on English (e.g. the Webster dictionary) that grammar is measured up against. In fact, the main reason we have standardized spelling instead of people just writing what seemed right is because people actively tried to enforce a right and wrong way of spelling.
> It's not just that some people dislike it; it's simply wrong.
Language changes. Words frequently develop the opposite meaning of what they originally had—opposites seem to be semantically closer and more prone to switching than completely unrelated words. When a word changes meaning, it is not wrong to use it in the new way, and at some point it even becomes wrong to use it in the original way: if you used "terrific" to mean "inspiring terror", you would confuse most of your audience!
In this particular case what I find funny is that the author acknowledges that this semantic shift has been going on for hundreds of years and all that was holding it back was the language purists. According to their own account, when the purists fell out of favor in the 60s it was like a dam burst.
The "incorrect" usage recently overtook the correct one in published books:
Semantic shift is certainly a phenomenon, but that doesn't mean that it should always be embraced or is useful. There's a clear use for unambiguous and Technical language.
If you write a patent, statement of work, product specification, or contract with the wrong word out of ignorance, you only have yourself to blame
> Words frequently develop the opposite meaning of what they originally had
My favourite examples, because it also emphasizes some kind of ambiguity in the concept itself, are the english words "host", "hosting", "hospitality", "hostile", "hostage", with roots in the latin "hostis" (enemy), and the indo-european "ghosti" (guest, stranger).
I don't know if it's that simple, and in the case of "comprised of" I think there's good reason to attempt to make a correction. It's not that to comprise is some super common, popular verb that pops up naturally in our day-to-day language. It's relatively rare. My personal opinion is that people believe what they'd probably say normally ("x is made up of y", or "x contains ys" or whatever) sounds too simple in some contexts, so they reach for the the verb they heard some other people use that they presume is more correct and then use it incorrectly. People are conflict-averse and don't often correct their friends/colleagues/clients/whatever so it sticks around. So if the intent is to use a more correct word, surely people would want to know the actually correct way it's used?
And I'm all for "language evolves" - but there's always going to be a time when you correct people. If you have a kid who calls the ambulance the "ambliance" (common one for kids where I'm from) you don't just shrug and say "language evolves", you try to teach them the correct way to speak, spell and write.
I don't know where the line is - what should be corrected and what should be absorbed in to English - but I feel like "comprised of" should be corrected.
That makes as much sense as saying that "ne... pas" in French is a double negative and therefore "simply wrong" to use as a straight negative.
No -- language isn't math, and English and other languages are chock-full of inconsistencies and seemingly "illogical" things. Language ultimately rests on convention, on real life usage -- not logic. Arguing that a common usage is illogical is fighting against the tide.
"ne... pas" in French is nothing more nor less than the correct way of formulating certain kinds of statements containing a negative. If you left out either of "ne" or "pas" in such a construction, people would either laugh, or assume you were some kind of primitive language generator.
It's absurd that English speakers are so tolerant of incorrect usage. It's partly the pedagogic principle that "All shall have prizes" at the school sports day; but it's significant that if you try to correct incorrect usage, you get referred to literary figures such as poets and playwrights that used some term incorrectly, as if people like (e.g.) Pepys are authorities.
Interesting. If you look at Wiktionary or if you prefer, your favorite etymology dictionary, the word utilize is descended from Latin from the French word utiliser, via the Italian utilizzare which got it from the Latin utilis. All of those words mean to use.
I'd be the last person to say you're wrong. Matters of grammar and usage ultimately boil down to does it feel right and current usage. As is usual with these things, other people have different feelings about it. That's what dialect is I think.
Nevertheless, "use" is a better word. Using longer words, when shorter words are available that mean the same thing, comes across as pompous or pretentious.
Not entirely. Consists of (without a modifier like "in part") usually strongly implies completeness or functional completeness ("active ingredients") in the subsequent list, comprises is more free to be incomplete.
"Yeah no" and "No yeah" mean clear and different things, despite being superficially total nonsense. I've probably heard "comprised of" thousands of times in my life to mean "made of." What's wrong with phrases having meaning?
> I think there is a proper use for the verb "utilize": it means "to render useful".
I've never heard of that usage for utilize in my life. In a cursory search, I see that the definition of utilize is "to make use of", which to me sounds the same as "use".
Native, high-level speaker here: "comprised of" is not wrong. You're entitled to your tastes of course, but you'll have a richer understanding of the world if you include the shades in your model.
Thank you for taking a stand against the ever-encroaching scourge of "utilize." That one bugs me almost as much as "in order to" does. (Just say "to"!)
“in order to” and “to” have different shades of meaning, and sometimes different meanings entirely (although I guess you’re right that most instances of the first can be replaced by the second).
The Romanian for "to use" is "a utiliza." Bilingual speakers might find "utilize" more familiar and choose it as such. The same might be true of other languages, and a possible explanation for its popularity.
I agree with you. Frankly, utilize instead of use just sounds finicking. As an engineer, I'd use it in a corporate powerpoint that I make to impress management. These kind of things have no place in Wikipedia.
The (expected) face-value meaning of "comprised of" is usually best substituted by "part of": All Gaul comprises three parts -> Three parts are comprised of all Gaul.
Hey there, when you are quoting and ending a sentence, you should place the period inside the quotes. I understand if you are new to writing in the English language.
I don't know the right solution to this problem, but I wish there were some kind of effective defense mechanism in open society against activist superminorities. Pedants tilting at windmills shouldn't be able to alter the cultural landscape this easily. I am aware that their problem and my problem are privileged "first-world problems". The seeds of the open society carry the germ of this pathology, I guess.
>I don't know the right solution to this problem, but I wish there were some kind of effective defense mechanism in open society against activist superminorities.
Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority making the website their playground, though[0]. If you get rid of the superminority, the website literally couldn't function. The inner workings of Wikipedia are actually a fascinating rabbit hole to fall into, but the takeaway is that this behaviour seems to be ingrained into human nature. Basically, the majority consume, a minority produces, and a minority of the minority produces a lot. You can see this in any participatory system as well, not just Wikipedia.
We're talking about totally different minorities here.
Yes, a tiny proportion of Wikipedia users create a vast portion of the content. But that doesn't mean their views are minority views.
If those, say, 1% of users who are contributors, still map roughly to the same distribution of gender, race, nationality, political leanings, etc. as the group of all users, then there's no superminority issue. If they set policy according to their own discussion and voting, we wouldn't expect that to be substantially different from a larger group.
The problem is with superminority views -- if you asked 100 randomly selected users of Wikipedia whether all instances of "is comprised of" should be replaced with "comprises", probably only a tiny minority would agree. This is a superminority viewpoint, which is the whole reason why this story is generating so much discussion.
A superminority viewpoint imposing its beliefs is a problem. While a small group of editors that is merely numerically a "superminority" is in no way a problem, unless they turn out to be substantially unrepresentative of the larger population in their views.
> Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority making the website their playground, though[0].
It's more like the minority of the minority does a lot of spellchecking and editing, but it seems, much more plausibly, that a group much larger than a minority does the bulk of writing.
Any discussion of Wikipidia on HN is incomplete without a reference to Aaron Swartz's analysis of how Wikipedia is written:
"[He] concluded that the bulk of its content came from tens of thousands of occasional contributors, or "outsiders," each of whom made few other contributions to the site, while a core group of 500 to 1,000 regular editors tended to correct spelling and other formatting errors.He said: "The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around." [1]
The minority wants you to think that the website wouldnt work without them.
Reality is that their rules are only for you. They dont judge their own edits with same standards. If edits were anonymized tons od admins would get banned.
After your first sentence, I thought you were going to argue the opposite. This person's arguments seem to hold water. Aren't the people that argue with him and want to revert his edits a (very strange) activist superminority?
Maybe we need a defense mechanism against bike-shedding, no matter what color bikeshed one prefers?
You know, I'll take a very minority POV: overall, Wikipedia does a pretty decent job of reporting the facts. I'll trust what they say about some non-controversial person or event much more than any other media outlet.
Of course it's not perfectly unbiased, and anal super-pedants do make it intolerable to try to contribute. That said, they do at least make an effort to stick to the facts.
I'm not sure about "much more than any other media outlet" but for mainstream non-controversial topics it's probably pretty accurate. It may not be comprehensible for anyone who isn't already an expert, it's maybe pretty thin if the person/subject isn't part of the modern tech and hobbyist zeitgeist, but it's probably not a bad starting point especially if it has a lot of good cites.
The editor here is arguably correct in that the usage he's changing is incorrect.
You may find it pedantic (and I might agree), but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Does tilting at this particular windmill make Wikipedia worse? I would say it makes it better, even if in a very small way.
Even if you don't care about the incorrect usage, I find his argument that some uses are there just to make the prose sound more "intelligent" -- at the expense of clarity and ease of reading -- to be valid enough. I would much rather read "The residents are former New Yorkers" instead of "The population is comprised of former New Yorkers". The latter is unnecessarily complex for a sentence like that.
I'm sure someone can find a completely separate example of this sort of editing that actually is harmful. But the solution to that isn't "ban all edits of this sort".
It doesn’t seem like it’s that easy a task. I’d argue improving grammar and language in an encyclopedia isn’t altering the cultural landscape, I don’t think the usage of “comprised of” is a meaningful cultural artifact that requires embodying in an encyclopedias language style. I’d note the person also allows for people to revert the change without consequence if they feel passionate about the cultural landscape of “comprised of” usage vs generally accepted better alternatives.
I actually kind of admire these folks that do stuff like this. These sorts of obsessions are interesting artifacts of the internet’s cultural landscape.
You need to look at those who edit categories. Wikipedia no longer gives much credence to those who create, research and improve articles. It is now full of people poking around the edges.
There is one editor, BrownHairedGirl, who tags articles with “bare links” (note she does not actually change those links very often), and gets into battles about categories that has driven off dozens of users (if not more). They are the most toxic editor on Wikipedia but have amassed a group of followers who are of the same ilk - people who do nothing but poke at minor parts of Wikipedia but contribute nothing of significance - and will remove anyone who gets on their bad side.
Wikipedia is said to have hit “maintenance phase”. That’s ridiculous, there is a lot more to be writing about. Basically these people are killing the project. It’s a complete tragedy.
Edit: here’s an example of the vicious and petty actions they make - they created a category “Abusive, mean, petty Wikipedians” for people who use a particular category that is never filled in on their user pages. This has been there since 2017. We have one user who calls themselves the “category police” who is currently arguing such a divisive and abusive labeling of editors is quite acceptable. The irony is strong in that one.
Society always has people who contribute to specific things way more than the general population. And not even just generally in specific niches but some people are just highly productive and highly motivated.
I don’t think there can be a system to balance this without harming the wider system simply because these people make up the bulk of the work being done, and enforcement systems usually cause much of the same sort of power centralization, but often worse.
Of course not all of the work by these powerusers is useful but I can’t imagine a system that only blocks the bad work without harming the highly productive ‘good’ people who are trying to be more representative of the public. Plus stereotypically making the rules/processes is the easy part, because people are motivated at the start to fix things, but after it’s in place the actual hard work of enforcing it and doing it right is often neglected… or these same small groups of “powerusers” will also end up running the moderation and use it to explicitly control things even more.
Although those risks/issues has rarely stopped people from trying in the past.
The refrain of the left "what's the big deal, why do you care" is exactly the sort of lazy dismissal that makes people end up resting on their laurels and believing that "one small change" doesn't matter.
We need to get better at pushing back at the first small sign of nonsense, and not let things get really bad before people start to care. Ironically, this wikipedia edit is pretty much the most benign current example of a minority controlling a narrative because nobody cares enough to push back. See all the insane modern language policing.
1. Create a Wikipedia page explaining the confusion here (borrowing from author’s essay). But also ratify the “incorrect” as “not considered harmful and is permissible on wikipedia”
2. Encourage the author to do something that effects more positive sentiment with their time, even if it’s “wrong.” It could be this behavior is compulsive and author has problems controlling it. At least try to steer that energy, and just do not engage in fighting it.
Idk man, some good soul corrected a common language error on a site where many authors are not even native English speakers.
I am happy there are people willing to do the work for free and that Wikipedia is now better. Hopefully he corrects more errors in the future so I am less likely to pick up incorrect language in the future when I read the articles. Sounds like the right solution you are looking for to me.
The solution is to call it what it is - mental illness - and treat it as such.
Being a grammar nazi is one thing, but editing quotes to match a language that stopped evolving in the 1970s definitely oversteps the bound between quirky and actively harmful.
I'd even argue, in the vein of a sibling comment, that willing to label the activist superminorities that run things as mentally ill is very important. They're usually obsessive/perfectionist and workaholics, yet we're supposed to commend them and follow in their lead.
i find grammar obsession on the internet to be insane overall. you ever use the wrong their/there/theyre and have some guy reply with some unhinged comment. such odd behavior
> I wish there were some kind of effective defense mechanism in open society against activist superminorities. Pedants tilting at windmills shouldn't be able to alter the cultural landscape this easily. I am aware that their problem and my problem are privileged "first-world problems". The seeds of the open society carry the germ of this pathology, I guess.
Maybe the pathology is this kind of conservativism. I find lack of change - due to knee-jerk resistance and corrupt vested interest - causes far more problems than anything.
There is so much we could do - easy low-hanging fruit - where the only obstacle is (this kind of) conservativism.
I'm finding this entire comment section confusing and I genuinely want to understand what is so offensive about what this editor did. To me this does not look like a problem that requires a solution and I even appreciate the essay (I've always had a hard time understanding the usage of 'comprises').
...yet I'm seeing unironic comparisons to both 1984 and Nazi Germany, so ... what this person did is evil?
I don’t think anyone thinks this person is genuinely evil. I sense people are reacting against what they perceive as a busybody who has a disturbing compulsion to control something that isn’t even an issue.
Even though this person is a lone wolf, their actions feel disturbingly authoritarian. This level of compulsion and control is immensely off-putting to the average person. Anyone who puts this much effort into controlling information seems like someone worth confronting.
The editor is imposing a controversial viewpoint on tens of thousands of Wikipedia articles that is not supported by authority or consensus. Merriam-Webster, for example, disagrees with the editor [1].
It's not so different from if a Brit tried to change every instance of "color" to "colour", or an American changed every instance of "colour" to "color". It would be incredibly annoying, patronizing, and disrespectful.
Wikipedia is not a place for people to wage their private grammatical language wars, and so people are responding in a negative way because the editor is trying to impose their viewpoint by sheer force rather than respecting contributors who choose to use Merriam-Webster's 2nd definition of the word.
This leaves a bad taste in my mouth because of our history in Germany.
There was a bunch of institutes for the "Erhaltung der deutschen Sprache" which were all founded under the umbrella of a quasi-propaganda organization that officially was just a society/club. [1]
They created their own "purified" dictionary with a "clean language" that was trying to find replacements for foreign words, and strengthen the nationalistic awareness with all its perks.
It was so ridiculous and opinionated that they tried to even enforce the use of "Nagelindiewandschlageisen" instead of using the Swedish word hammer.
They burned all their stuff in the war, but it's somewhat folklore that they were heavily involved with Goebbels and his propaganda in WW2.
They got away with that during the Nuremberg trials so technically this is an accusation from my side.
Culturally I think this is the opposite of what cultures should embrace. Languages will always evolve, and you cannot prevent that.
As a side-note: Those were so puristic people that they even pissed off Adolf Hitler at some point, because they criticised him for using foreign words in his speeches.
We still have Türk Dil Kurumu (Institute of Turkish Language) in Turkey. In their website, their motto is declared as "Our Language is our Identity" (Dilimiz Kimliğimizdir). They proposed so many silly words, at one point people were coming up with fake translations attributed to them and others were believing in those, turning them to urban legends. One such legend is my favorite:
Which can be translated to English somewhat literally as "Bottom pushed, top smoking, multi-person-saddle, bringer and deliverer of people" (My best attempt, perhaps GPTs can do better).
However, the thing about them coming up with fake Turkish roots to foreign words (especially French) is totally true. One such example is "okul" (school) which comes from "l'école" but they long time argued that it came from the Turkish root "oku" which also means to study (among "read" and "send prayers"). There are thousands of "inventions" like these.
The weird trend was (still is!) our tendency as a nation to invent Turkish language roots in words from other languages, which once lead to ridiculous stuff like the Sun Language Theory [0].
IM(not so)HO: All language institutes should be left in the past, as they tend to ignore the organic properties of the languages they are supposed to protect.
I doubt it's been trained on that, here is what it told me:
> I'm sorry, but the phrase "Alttan ittirmeli üstten tüttürmeli çok oturgaçlı getirgeçli götürgeç" appears to be a nonsensical combination of Turkish words. It doesn't have a clear meaning or context.
Just because there was an incident involving an extremist group, does not make the whole thing wrong or incorrect.
As a counter example, High Arabic has been meticulously preserved, and Arab speakers take pride in that fact, regardless of the many spoken dialects that exist.
> ... find replacements for foreign words, and strengthen the nationalistic awareness with all its perks.
> They created their own "purified" dictionary ...
So, the "Erhaltung" effort was not to preserve existing usage, but to create a new vocabulary aligned with the group's ethno-nationalist agenda. Seems very different from TFA's agenda.
The issue with our digital library is that the search there is not indexed, and most old German texts are not searchable either [1]
You can search for "Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein" or "Atlas der deutschen Sprache" or similar, you'll find references to it but not the scanned books.
Welcome to the age of Digital Amnesia :'( [2]
Maybe the dossier about the burned books of WW2 is a good start to find things about it, but it's kinda hopeless without a search index. Alternatively there seems to be a lend-able copy in the library of Dresden [3] and [4]
I'm rereading Orwell's 1984 and this all seems a bit like Ministry of Truth and its whole newspeak ordeal (of course MT was a bit more absurd - they wanted to get rid of all ambiguity in language also).
The inspiration for Newspeak is Basic English, which is much like Esperanto but with English words (at least it's described as such — I'm not actually very familiar with Basic English myself). Constructed languages had some avid supporters back in the early 20th century, looking to make some constructed language the international language. Though I don't know much about Basic English, the unique looks of Newspeak definitely come, directly or indirectly, from Esperanto's ideas for keeping the vocabulary small and simple. To illustrate, in Esperanto the word for "good" is "bona", "bad" is "malbona" ("ungood"), and "to improve" is "plibonigi" ("to moregoodify").
The organization predates George Orwell by around 20 years... so I guess nope ;D
But I agree with the similarities of the Ministry of Truth, and what it wanted to achieve. The issues as I mentioned is that I don't think there's a universal truth to anything; and therefore eradicating wordings or forms of language that are "not good" is a very subjective perspective.
Wow, there’s a lot of unjustified negativity in this thread. The whole encyclopedia (and a whole bunch of the wider world of computing) is built out of this kind of hyper-focused nerding over details.
These changes don’t make your day worse. He’s not shoving it in our faces or claiming it’s going to save the world. We don’t know what’s going on in this editor’s life or what he “should” be doing with his time instead. Maybe simple routine work is his way of unwinding from the maddening pace and complexity of the rest of life. Good on him for feeling passionate about something and seeing it through.
We should be grateful there are people willing to do this kind of mundane janitorial work.
I wouldn't call this janitorial work. This seems to me to be less like someone cleaning a building than someone replacing every pencil in the building with a #2 pencil, because they believe that type of pencil is the correct type of pencil to use. They haven't made anything materially better, except by their own rigid definition of what the best pencil is--and maybe there are advantages of using a #2 pencil over a #3 pencil, but if you brought that pencil to work, there's a chance you brought that pencil because you prefer writing with it, and you wouldn't want someone, despite their best intentions, replacing your pencil with a 'better' one. Almost no one is going to look at the graphite and not be able to recognize words because it's a #3 pencil and not a #2 pencil.
In my opinion, this isn't what built Wikipedia, this is what made Wikipedia hostile to new contributors.
When someone goes around "correcting" everyone's language and writes a manifesto about it, that sure is shoving to me. It's not working towards a consensus by trying to convince, it's unilaterally imposing, and creating work for others to undo if they disagree. If that's not shoving, I don't know what is.
Since there isn't agreement on this actually being janitorial work (in the sense that they are not simply enforcing the Wikipedia styleguide), this is not some completely innocent activity.
No, this is in its essence very petty vandalism, an attempt to force his notion of grammar on the entirely of Wikipedia despite knowing this is forbidden. That this forcing is the intended goal is clear from their own description of the editing process, where they admit to never permanently recording articles with authors who do object to the edits. Instead they just record objectors for six months and then try sniping in the edit again in the hope that the author is not there to protect it anymore.
In "Reaction to the project" the author links to a "semi-vandalism" charge. You can read the discussion among Wikipedia editors there if you're interested (spoiler alert - most found it valuable and nobody thought it was vandalism).
This isn't useful nerding over details. It's more like that annoying person who goes around GitHub making pull requests to big projects with just some pointless wording tweaks in the documentation so they can claim to have contributed to the project on their resume.
> The whole encyclopedia is built out of this kind of hyper-focused nerding over details.
Absolutely not. It's built out of people writing useful and information articles, not pedantic editing over personal language bugbears.
> These changes don’t make your day worse.
It shows up in people's watchlists and potentially dozens or hundreds of people will need to verify this change; it introduces edit conflicts, it invalidates drafts people were still working on. It absolutely adds work for other editors, and that's fine even for smaller changes (I have many small changes myself) if it actually improves the article, but all of this amounts to little more than "I don't like it".
It's built of people nerding over articles and topics, and not language fascism. This person just has some kind of personal vendetta against a prepositional phrase that 99% of English speakers have no issue with at all. That's not very healthy for wikipedia or him. The funny thing is I -agree- with his take on usage, I just don't agree with him trying to lording it over all of wikipedia.
I love these one-person crusades against present reality. Words mean whatever a critical mass of people want them to mean. For example, the usage of the present tense here:
"Composed of" and "consists of" are better alternatives.
is incorrect. It should read:
Composed of" and "consists of" were better alternatives.
This thread is literally a clout ATM machine for a group comprised of pedants.
Allow me to quote you back to you. "It’s also not really serverless to begin with, because at the end of the day code is being executed on a physical device that many of us might call a “server” [1]
A critical mass of people have adopted the term serverless. Therefore, the term means whatever they want it to mean, right? No sense in swimming against the tide here, correct?
Yes, words mean what people want them to mean if we're willing to shrug our shoulders and accept the new usage or terminology. That doesn't mean it's never correct to fight against sloppy or non-standard usage in the hopes that it won't be considered standard.
That’s great example! That post is an unserious riff as a response to another post that meant to assert the correctness an individual’s personal definition of a term on what I found to be tenuous pedantic grounds.
I think in the case of "serverless" we still share a common understanding of what the term means, even if the term itself is misleading. This "comprised of" issue is different in that it can easily cause misunderstanding between archaic and modern users of the phrase, where meaning is inverted.
Semi-related, it always bothered me that we use the term "wireless" for something that still has wires (just not between the endpoints). Though I don't object, or have a better alternative, and I get the logic of calling it wireless.
The problem here is the ambiguity. Someone who uses the original meaning of comprise will interpret a sentence in the opposite way of someone using the new. "America comprises many states and territories" -> "Many states and territories are comprised of America" have the same meaning with the original definition. With the new definition, you'd have to invert both sentences.
This is called a Janus word because it can be it's own antonym. There are other Janus words, like "table" as in "to table a topic for discussion", which means opposite things in American vs British English. The author touches on the fact that that's a regional distinction, but there is no such regional distinction for comprise. Therefore it makes sense for a website like Wikipedia to pick a single form, and the original is still more widespread than the new.
Biweekly is not its own antonym but it means two completely different things (every other week and twice a week) which for me as rendered it useless since you cannot know which meaning is intended.
What I don't quite understand is the resistance. It's a fact that some people (and I mean readers, not the editors) don't like, understand, and/or accept the new meaning of this word, whether we like it or not. Whereas everyone should be agreeing that the alternatives are fine. So if you have an alternative everyone is fine with... it seems like a no-brainer to use it? When you have something that everyone is happy with, why insist on an alternative that some people hate?
There are a billion of us speaking the language. It's a little presumptuous to tell a billion people what to do and there should probably be some amount of default resistance.
While you could certainly argue that “words mean what people think they mean”, that is not a reason to use words in ways that are CURRENTLY considered wrong, especially not in a lexicon.
If you want to change the meaning of a word, that’s fine, and maybe in a few decades you will succeed, but until you get enough people on board you will only cause confusion.
The author means “composed of” and “consists of” are better phrases to use in general (i.e. according to style guides), not were better phrases exclusively for use on his Wikipedia project. We know this for sure because in the “Quotations” section the author says that he changes “comprised of” to “composed of” or “comprises” in quotations under certain circumstances. He is not wary of using “comprises”.
The author also indicates that this work is still ongoing and meant to be evergreen.
I'm pretty sure it's a joke: those were better alternatives but they're equally valid now and it's time for the author to let the language change and move on.
If words don't matter, then ignore the edits. People tend to copy what they see. If they see it written with the original definition, maybe that's what the hivemind will adopt. I don't see a problem with that and I don't see the point in attacking people that care. I'm sure you have things in your life you care about.
No, the point is words do matter, and they mean what people think they mean. Not people from 100 years ago from a prestige university who wrote a dictionary. Languages are fluid, they change and when they do change the present reality is the way the language is spoken.
How do we decide whether someone is using a word incorrectly, or if we should update our present reality?
Another question: are there places where accuracy and precision are more important than others? Would an encyclopedia be one of those places? I'll reveal my cards here: I believe so.
I am happy that you brought up accuracy _and_ precision!
Somewhat humorously I think a good chunk of the disagreements here come from people treating those concepts interchangeably. Attempts to apply mathematical reasoning to language and interpretation are doomed to fall into similar traps.
This thread is proof of the opposite, in fact. Since neither "composed of" nor "consists of" generate 300+ comment Hacker News threads, they are plainly better.
This definitely falls deep into the pedantry zone. Lots of modern English uſage was once wrong and has become normalized. The language doeſn't have an Académie calling the ſhots. It inevitably evolves, warts and all.
No one seems to understand Wikipedia operates as a system of lords and serfs, where a powerful few pull this crap all the time.
Most relevant example I can think of is when Mac OS X was renamed and stylized to "macOS" someone went and systematically did a find and replace all instances of "OS X" to macOS even in situations where it made absolutely no sense as the article was explicitly talking about prior versions. It was like rewriting history in real time.
Imagine if someone went into a library and started editing history books with a Sharpie to reflect future events.
I'll never understand people who are sticklers for 'correctly' using some corporation's trademarks. "Can you xerox a copy of that for me?""You know, our photocopy machine is made by HP and the Xerox corporation doesn't like when people genericize their..." Why the hell do they care on the corporations behalf? If you aren't being paid by that corp to care.. then why?
There are probably hundreds of articles that mention macOS. What are you suggesting that they do, edit them all individually by hand? That could take months. If more than half of the instances deserve to be updated, then replace all saves time. You can always check the diff and undo any damage.
That's not nearly as irresponsible and illegal as editing a weather map with a Sharpie to reflect a fictitious future natural disaster and cover up lying in a tweet.
>Whoever knowingly issues or publishes any counterfeit weather forecast or warning of weather conditions falsely representing such forecast or warning to have been issued or published by the Weather Bureau, United States Signal Service, or other branch of the Government service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ninety days, or both.
Moral, no. But they might influence e.g. textbooks and legal drafting. That ordinateur is not ordinary and l'informatique isn't always very Informative. Unless I am mistaken both English words coming in from the French?
Since the topic is “who defines English”, it’s useful to list our experiences with Académie Française.
- Seats can only be replaced at death, which explains the advanced age. I generally think old people have more experience than younger ones, but opinions vary, and youngism and modernism are a thing.
- The first woman in the Académie, in 1980, was Marguerite Yourcenar, and she probably was the most non-feminist woman they could choose.
- Recently they opposed the “français.e.s” style of writing, sticking to the classic “français(e)s” or “ladies and gentlemen” inclusive writing. It made an uproar because the first one is described as the only inclusive one by feminist organizations, who like to forget that we included women before they were born. So we reached a fun state where the government uses the feminist one, the Académie says it’s not French, all organizations that want to please women align with the government, but I assure you I never receive management-oriented document in feminist writing, I rarely receive resumes or cover letters in feminist style, nor would I accept them if I got them (political militantism doesn’t make a good employee, especially if they pretend including women is a new thing).
Any other fun story about the moral upstanding of the Académie Française would be interesting too.
Evolution isn't unidirectional. English reached what it is today not only through the influence of people using words with new meanings but also with the force of people mandating style, taste and opinion. You wouldn't use 'normalized' if it wasn't for Noah Webster calling the shots.
Moralising about caring about style is itself prescriptivism.
Sure, but why should people who can’t use the language properly () be an uncontested force in that evolution?
(
) If we can’t say that “comprised of” is objectively wrong, then what _can_ we say about English? Should we accept “bought” as a legitimate past tense of “bring”? Sometimes people are just making a habitual mistake. It happens to me, too.
If it became common usage, yes? If most people make "a habitual mistake", then by whose authority of it a mistake?
> Sure, but why should people who can’t use the language properly (*) be an uncontested force in that evolution?
How do you think English and all other modern languages formed? If some authority were able to stop people who can't use a language properly from evolving it, the people on the British isles would be speaking Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, etc. today, not English.
I accept his argument but it is tilting at windmills. Is it valid to engage in mass erasure of a historical record to suit outmoded ideas? The issue here is that an existing word has acquired a new usage and the old guard isn't happy with the change. There was once much grousing about youths failing to properly conjugate second person pronouns. Now it's anachronistic to use them.
> () If we can’t say that “comprised of” is objectively wrong, then what _can_ we say about English?
Well, a lot of things. You can't say "the baby seems drinking the milk." Even though it's perfectly comprehensible, every English speaker will agree that "the baby seems to be drinking the milk" is the correct way to express this. Avoiding "comprised of" is a "rule" where we can't identify any dialect where everyone agrees on it.
What about it is objectively wrong?
Semantics? There are plenty of words that contain 'of' in the definition, yet are used with of "Because of" being the primary example, and afaict is allowed on Wikipedia.
Grammar? "Possessed of" "descended from" etc. This is also very common.
> why should people who can’t use the language properly () be an uncontested force in that evolution?
For the same reason people with different opinions should still be allowed to vote.
Also it's not an uncontested force, you are free to vote for the "correct" use of the language by actively using it yourself in that way and trying to convince others. Just like everyone else.
In 200 years people might learn "should of" in school, just like we today call that one symbol "ampersand". And they will find some new word to complain about, just like probably every generation since at least middle english did because it was all the "correct" version of the language to them.
I'm curious if that's mainly specific to English. As an Arabic speaker, tremendous care and effort has been taken to preserve Fuṣḥā (formal/High) Arabic throughout the centuries. Language and conjugation that sounds wrong is often shunned or mocked, even though it may partially be spoken in day to day speech in certain contexts. However, the distinction is always there, and such language will not be accepted in official discourse, let alone avenues like poetry and literature.
I mean it's their time, if they want to do something useless but harmless, why not? Unless this is their first step in a grand scheme to halt the evolution of language, I don't see a problem here.
In patent claims, "comprising" and "consisting of" are different:
6,151,604 claim 1 is:
1. A data storage and retrieval system for a computer memory, comprising:
means for configuring said memory according to a logical table, said logical table including: ...
6,151,605 claim 1 is:
1. A method for allowing a software application to access a configuration file, said configuration file comprising data used by said software application, comprising the steps of:
providing a configuration processing library, said configuration processing library comprising ...
===================
You almost never use "consisting of" in writing claims.
A claim for an invention "comprising" A, B, and C also generally claims inventions that include other elements. Such claims are usually within the statuary categories of processes, machines, or articles of manufacture.
A claim for an invention "consisting of" A, B, and C, however, does not generally claim inventions that include other elements. Such claims are usually usually within the statutory category of "compositions of matter" which includes such things as useful drug or chemical mixtures.
Here's a link to the relevant U.S. Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) section:
Readit News
> I believe using "comprised of" is poor writing, because
> It's completely unnecessary. There are many other ways to say what the writer means by "comprised of". It adds nothing to the language.
That's true for many, many other words. In fact, most instances of definite and indefinite articles "add nothing to the language", since the actual information is in the noun. Just leave them out, right? "I go house."
> It's illogical for a word to mean two opposite things.
"To comprise" and "to be comprised of" contain the same word, but not in the same sense.
> The etymology of the word does not support "comprised of".
That's irrelevant to the current meaning of the word. This is called an "etymological fallacy"[1].
> It's new. Many current Wikipedia readers were taught to write at a time when not one respectable dictionary endorsed "comprised of" in any way. It was barely ever used before 1970.
Good luck reading Wikipedia, or any newspaper article, if you are uncomfortable with language coined during the past half-century. What exactly is that "Internet" thing people keep talking about? Note that "The Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionaries regard the form comprised of as standard English usage."[2]
The author could have just written "I don't like 'comprised of', and I'm going to impose my preference on everyone else, even though the term has been part of standard contemporary English for a long time."
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etymological_fallacy
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprised_of
I wonder if the editor read "1984" and straight up copied its ideas. In the novel, the totalitarian state of Oceania uses that exact same justification to promote the use of the Newspeak language:
> After all, what justification is there for a word which is simply the opposite of some other word? ... Take ‘good’, for instance. If you have a word like ‘good’, what need is there for a word like ‘bad’? ‘Ungood’ will do just as well—better, because it’s an exact opposite, which the other is not.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspeak
Maybe George Orwell copied the idea from Esperanto. For instance, "dark" in Esperanto is "notlight", and left is "notright".
A better source might be George Orwell's actual, explicit opinions on politics and the English language:
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...
Orwell certainly did not take an "anything goes" approach to language, which is essentially what you and others argue for, in the mistaken belief that you're somehow striking a blow at totalitarianism. From my perspective, your position is much closer to the Newspeak ethos than that of someone who actually cares about correct usage.
I love wikis and knowledge bases but this is exactly the kind of stuff that detracts.
On one case, who cares what this person does with their time.
On the other case, it wastes the attention of 90k authors who need to figure out whether they care and have their writing style overridden by a rando.
I think the correct way to do this is to appeal to a writing style that gets argued over (sometimes perpetually) and when settled then the 90k edits can be made. This edit would be an argument presented to change the style guide.
Since “comprised of” is proper usage I doubt it would be proscribed in the style guide.
In my org I used to waste minutes of having writings where people expressed preferences for “and” vs “&” or Oxford comma or whether data are plural and edited things back and forth. Then I just found a style guide and adopted it and ask that people not revert changes based on preferences that break the style guide.
On the other hand, if you're editing wikipedia and you expect your writing to not be subject to rando edits, you won't last long.
At least I, as a non-native speaker, find the edited sentences always easier to read. They simply make the text better.
As the entire point od Wikipedia is to make knowledge accessible with co-writing, I find it just wild that people would object to better language.
So who exactly is imposing their preference on the world: the one making the text easier to read, or the one objecting to the edits?
People can horribly misuse the phrase "comprised of". Bland articles that directly communicate the language can be more or less tasteful depending upon who is reading them. Almost assuredly sentences can be written without "comprised of" that are also definitely not bland.
But classifying something you find easier to read as better language for everyone doesn't make it immediately true for everyone.
Additionally, it's not about a person making text easier to read or not from one (or multiple peoples') perspectives -- this appears to be about someone going on a stylistic crusade en masse. Objecting to the edits being an act of 'imposing their preference on the world' feels similar to the political mirror-projection kind of argument that can happen.
I think there is interesting discussion to be had (is it better? are there good ways to use it? when/where/how? what is the ethicality of editing articles like this? is a disclaimer wiki entry enough? etc etc), and maybe we can focus on that.
I also wouldn't base your opinions of what makes for good English on the ramblings of one Wikipedian whose primary argument seems to be that they had to work hard to learn to use the word a particular way and so everyone else should for the rest of time.
Well, yes, but other words aren’t wrong and irritating to many readers. The point is that the usage in question has several disadvantages, but zero redeeming features.
> "To comprise" and "to be comprised of" contain the same word, but not in the same sense.
That’s not the point. “To shoot” and “to be shot” contain the same word, but mean opposite things, but that’s a well understood result of active vs passive voice, and nobody objects to that. However, imagine some people would start using “to be shot” to mean “to shoot”. So, they’d say “Peter was shot by Paul” to mean that Peter shot Paul, that is, Paul was shot by Peter. And then the dictionary would add that as a secondary meaning. Can’t you see how people might object to that?
First you dust the cake, then you dust the table.
The castle is impregnable.
And if you add more collocial words, wicked now is good, but also means bad. When a song is cool, you mean it's hot.
People tend to not object to that.
* When I hear "X comprises Y and Z," I think that the author is saying that X includes Y and Z as its key parts, but is not precluding the existence of other parts
* When I hear "X is comprised of Y and Z," I think Y and Z are the only parts of X
This might have originally been a misuse of the word "comprise" to mean "compose," but I feel like that's a pretty big distinction in meaning.
When it's your own house you're going to, you could argue the definite article wouldn't add anything, and the phrasal verb to go home drops it (ie. I'm going home), though adding an article is possible and changes the meaning (I'm going to the/a home, in the context of a home for the elderly or some such).
"I'm going house" contains less meaning than "I'm going to [a] house". Without the preposition, it could mean "I'm leaving [a] house" ("I'm going from house").
Deleted Comment
The author says this "The 9th district is comprised of all of Centerville" should be replaced by "The 9th district comprises all of Centerville"? That's it?
Is there some way to see what edits were made?
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
And to support your stance against that, I offer this:
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/57032/25-words-are-their...
They can take "cleave" from my cold, dead hands!
But in my language we only use the original positive meaning, so I was deeply confused by English using it for a long time.
Dead Comment
Auto-antonyms are actually quite common in English.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym
"My itinerary is comPOSED of four hotel stays."
or
"My itinerary coNSISTS of four hotel stays."
Much better.
I've never found this a convincing argument. Think of when you use a dictionary: it's because you want to understand a word that you don't understand in its context. If it didn't include all uses, the dictionary wouldn't help you. A dictionary a tool to help consume language.
If you want help to produce language, you refer to a style guide. The barrier for acceptability is much higher there.
By fixing a common mistake on a collaboratively edited encyclopedia? What are you even talking about? Do you have any idea what an editor does at the New York Times?
But it’s an accepted usage of the words.
I’m not exactly familiar with specific editorial duties, but it seems NYTimes editors allow “comprised of” [0] so they don’t seem to correct all occurrences of “comprised of” by changing text to “composed of.”
[0] https://www.google.com/search?q=%22comprised+of%22+site%3Any...
>The author could have just written "I don't like 'comprised of', and I'm going to impose my preference on everyone else, even though the term has been part of standard contemporary English for a long time."
But they are not imposing their preference. They are making an improvement that has a consensus and the edit is appreciated by the authors of the text and Wikipedia editors.
Look at the "Reaction to the project" and the barn star awards they got. People whose text was edited to remove "comprised of" thanked this person for their work. Only 1% of the time the edit was reverted. Their work is overwhelmingly viewed as a good thing for Wikipedia.
"As Polish speaker, I say leave out"?
For an example in the other direction, wikipedia should ban the word inflammable. Its original meaning, which some authors will definitely prefer (if they are pedants), is entirely the opposite meaning of the colloquial meaning. Should wikipedia pick a meaning for the word, which people are free to ignore, or just outright ban it? (except in etymology wikipedia, where it is an example of a word, rather than part of the explanatory grammar)
Did you read your own link? It explicitly calls out absolute neglect of the etymology as fallacious, as well.
Another point: the era of a human doing rote language cleanup is nearly over; surely an LLM can do better?
but also, i agree. i don't like it either. so i'm not sure the whole essay is necessary, but i appreciate the work this person is doing to remove the bad writing from wikipedia.
the ministry of truth is easier to write as minitrue, yeah.
Whenever I come across the word "utilize" in WP, I change it to "use" (with the edit comment "Don't utilize utilize"). Nobody's ever reverted me for that.
I think there is a proper use for the verb "utilize": it means "to render useful". But usually, it's just a substitute for "use" that sounds more erudite, or something. I think to utilize something is to take something that is useless, and turn it into something useful. That's not the same as using the thing.
In order to examine natural languages using the scientific method, linguists gather data (i.e. native speakers' spoken or written communication) and then analyze this (i.e. find predictive models of this data). Gathering data, then claiming the data is wrong is epistemologically unfounded. Languages simply are the way they are. This would be like gathering data from Hubble and then deciding photons are wrong because their behavior mismatch with Newtonian laws.
For instance, the word "biweekly" now means both "once every two weeks" and "twice per week". I don't mind usage of that word for those two meanings. Obviously, linguists can gather data and analyze how it's being used. They may conclude that one meaning was more favored 50 years ago and the other meaning is now.
But when I'm reading an encyclopedia, I'd prefer it to avoid this ambiguous word.
Some rate of language change has to be accepted, but it needn't be as fast as if we rejected all prescriptivism.
We each prescribe or refuse to prescribe language rules as we see fit, and thus the language evolves at some natural rate.
We do need some grammar/spelling pedantry.
What “bet”, “cap”, “rizz” and others used by the younger population isn’t wrong, it’s different and an evolution of certain terms.
I don’t study linguistics, but I can be sure there are terms we use today and take as normal-speak that were once the center of a younger generation’s slang vernacular.
An extreme example is the word retard. Years ago in normal speak you could say “After the EPA enacted stricter emissions regulations, this initially retarded the development of sports cars until new technology was implemented” other obvious examples are the medical angle of the word.
Today, you could use the word in such a way, it’s technically correct, however you’ll most likely get some odd looks.
Most uses of it today are either in specific comedic circles, or derogatorily towards another person/thing/animal etc
Good usage improves clarity. This is why editors have style guides.
For instance, I was once CC'd on an email thread at work where a senior leader made an obvious typo in reference to some Thing and everybody else on the thread blindly parroted it. This "alternate" usage was established and used systematically in the local context, but it led to a significant decline in general clarity and interpretability, and it was also not durable beyond the context of that thread. It was a mistake, simple as that.
"Comprised of" is probably past the threshold at this point, much like "rate of speed" and "how <thing> looks like" and so on and so forth. But—and I know this is shocking to some people—"correct" use of language does have significant advantages for communicating clearly, especially in writing. Prescriptivism and descriptivism both have their adherents because neither is right or wrong in the naive absolutist sense—balance is key.
seriously tho if descriptivists had the courage of their convictions they would just stop capitalizing, there's no reason to
Not necessarily true. There are authoritative guides on English (e.g. the Webster dictionary) that grammar is measured up against. In fact, the main reason we have standardized spelling instead of people just writing what seemed right is because people actively tried to enforce a right and wrong way of spelling.
Language changes. Words frequently develop the opposite meaning of what they originally had—opposites seem to be semantically closer and more prone to switching than completely unrelated words. When a word changes meaning, it is not wrong to use it in the new way, and at some point it even becomes wrong to use it in the original way: if you used "terrific" to mean "inspiring terror", you would confuse most of your audience!
In this particular case what I find funny is that the author acknowledges that this semantic shift has been going on for hundreds of years and all that was holding it back was the language purists. According to their own account, when the purists fell out of favor in the 60s it was like a dam burst.
The "incorrect" usage recently overtook the correct one in published books:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+o...
If you write a patent, statement of work, product specification, or contract with the wrong word out of ignorance, you only have yourself to blame
My favourite examples, because it also emphasizes some kind of ambiguity in the concept itself, are the english words "host", "hosting", "hospitality", "hostile", "hostage", with roots in the latin "hostis" (enemy), and the indo-european "ghosti" (guest, stranger).
And I'm all for "language evolves" - but there's always going to be a time when you correct people. If you have a kid who calls the ambulance the "ambliance" (common one for kids where I'm from) you don't just shrug and say "language evolves", you try to teach them the correct way to speak, spell and write.
I don't know where the line is - what should be corrected and what should be absorbed in to English - but I feel like "comprised of" should be corrected.
Gardens also grow. But if you don't maintain your garden, they ahem literally become weeded, cough figuratively speaking.
That makes as much sense as saying that "ne... pas" in French is a double negative and therefore "simply wrong" to use as a straight negative.
No -- language isn't math, and English and other languages are chock-full of inconsistencies and seemingly "illogical" things. Language ultimately rests on convention, on real life usage -- not logic. Arguing that a common usage is illogical is fighting against the tide.
It's absurd that English speakers are so tolerant of incorrect usage. It's partly the pedagogic principle that "All shall have prizes" at the school sports day; but it's significant that if you try to correct incorrect usage, you get referred to literary figures such as poets and playwrights that used some term incorrectly, as if people like (e.g.) Pepys are authorities.
I'd be the last person to say you're wrong. Matters of grammar and usage ultimately boil down to does it feel right and current usage. As is usual with these things, other people have different feelings about it. That's what dialect is I think.
"The teachers were unable to utilize the new computers" means something different from "The teachers were unable to use the new computers"
This post comprises good points.
This post consists of good points.
> 2: Compose, constitute
> //… a misconception as to what comprises a literary generation. — William Styron
> //… about 8 percent of our military forces are comprised of women. — Jimmy Carter
When X comprises Y, then Y constitutes X.
Or to use passive: X is made up of Y, X is comprised of Y. Y are encompassed by X.
"Is comprised of" is a totally cromulent use and I would claim it is more logical and more easily understood than the "X comprises Y" usage.
I've never heard of that usage for utilize in my life. In a cursory search, I see that the definition of utilize is "to make use of", which to me sounds the same as "use".
Think about
“I walk to work.”
and
“I walk in order to work.”
Close, but not quite the same.
Not all heroes wear capes. I also chafe at that misuse so I'm glad to read of your efforts.
In every other respect, "use" is indeed better.
I think you mean "leverage".
No, that doesn't work.
You could, however, say "Gaul is comprised of three parts".
https://www.englishclub.com/vocabulary/cw-comprise-comprised...
See also 'Due to the fact' -> 'because'
Thank you so much for this. I do it to. Same with "incentivize" -> "incent
stop the madness!
Acronyms are confusing.
But some people also say AC -acronyms confuse.
I thought of a byzantine WordPress site with editing history or something as well, for a moment, despite the context.
Wait, WP for Wikipedia isn't even an acronym, just an abbreviation!
If you read this far, sorry for wasting your time.
I'm still learning :high_five:
Wickedly Pernicious.
Wikipedia is nothing but a superminority making the website their playground, though[0]. If you get rid of the superminority, the website literally couldn't function. The inner workings of Wikipedia are actually a fascinating rabbit hole to fall into, but the takeaway is that this behaviour seems to be ingrained into human nature. Basically, the majority consume, a minority produces, and a minority of the minority produces a lot. You can see this in any participatory system as well, not just Wikipedia.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_Wikipedians_...
They produce a whole lot of edits. They don't actually contribute an especially large amount of content, which is the thing with real value.
The content is mostly written by subject matter experts that contribute large blocks of useful text to just a few articles each.
We're talking about totally different minorities here.
Yes, a tiny proportion of Wikipedia users create a vast portion of the content. But that doesn't mean their views are minority views.
If those, say, 1% of users who are contributors, still map roughly to the same distribution of gender, race, nationality, political leanings, etc. as the group of all users, then there's no superminority issue. If they set policy according to their own discussion and voting, we wouldn't expect that to be substantially different from a larger group.
The problem is with superminority views -- if you asked 100 randomly selected users of Wikipedia whether all instances of "is comprised of" should be replaced with "comprises", probably only a tiny minority would agree. This is a superminority viewpoint, which is the whole reason why this story is generating so much discussion.
A superminority viewpoint imposing its beliefs is a problem. While a small group of editors that is merely numerically a "superminority" is in no way a problem, unless they turn out to be substantially unrepresentative of the larger population in their views.
It's more like the minority of the minority does a lot of spellchecking and editing, but it seems, much more plausibly, that a group much larger than a minority does the bulk of writing.
Any discussion of Wikipidia on HN is incomplete without a reference to Aaron Swartz's analysis of how Wikipedia is written:
"[He] concluded that the bulk of its content came from tens of thousands of occasional contributors, or "outsiders," each of whom made few other contributions to the site, while a core group of 500 to 1,000 regular editors tended to correct spelling and other formatting errors.He said: "The formatters aid the contributors, not the other way around." [1]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz#Wikipedia
Reality is that their rules are only for you. They dont judge their own edits with same standards. If edits were anonymized tons od admins would get banned.
Dead Comment
Maybe we need a defense mechanism against bike-shedding, no matter what color bikeshed one prefers?
Not in the slightest. Categorically, he's using prescriptive arguments, which are bunk. Language evolves, people can use it however they want.
Of course it's not perfectly unbiased, and anal super-pedants do make it intolerable to try to contribute. That said, they do at least make an effort to stick to the facts.
I'm not sure about "much more than any other media outlet" but for mainstream non-controversial topics it's probably pretty accurate. It may not be comprehensible for anyone who isn't already an expert, it's maybe pretty thin if the person/subject isn't part of the modern tech and hobbyist zeitgeist, but it's probably not a bad starting point especially if it has a lot of good cites.
The editor here is arguably correct in that the usage he's changing is incorrect.
You may find it pedantic (and I might agree), but that doesn't mean it's wrong. Does tilting at this particular windmill make Wikipedia worse? I would say it makes it better, even if in a very small way.
Even if you don't care about the incorrect usage, I find his argument that some uses are there just to make the prose sound more "intelligent" -- at the expense of clarity and ease of reading -- to be valid enough. I would much rather read "The residents are former New Yorkers" instead of "The population is comprised of former New Yorkers". The latter is unnecessarily complex for a sentence like that.
I'm sure someone can find a completely separate example of this sort of editing that actually is harmful. But the solution to that isn't "ban all edits of this sort".
I actually kind of admire these folks that do stuff like this. These sorts of obsessions are interesting artifacts of the internet’s cultural landscape.
There is one editor, BrownHairedGirl, who tags articles with “bare links” (note she does not actually change those links very often), and gets into battles about categories that has driven off dozens of users (if not more). They are the most toxic editor on Wikipedia but have amassed a group of followers who are of the same ilk - people who do nothing but poke at minor parts of Wikipedia but contribute nothing of significance - and will remove anyone who gets on their bad side.
Wikipedia is said to have hit “maintenance phase”. That’s ridiculous, there is a lot more to be writing about. Basically these people are killing the project. It’s a complete tragedy.
Edit: here’s an example of the vicious and petty actions they make - they created a category “Abusive, mean, petty Wikipedians” for people who use a particular category that is never filled in on their user pages. This has been there since 2017. We have one user who calls themselves the “category police” who is currently arguing such a divisive and abusive labeling of editors is quite acceptable. The irony is strong in that one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Abusive,_mean,_petty_...
I don’t think there can be a system to balance this without harming the wider system simply because these people make up the bulk of the work being done, and enforcement systems usually cause much of the same sort of power centralization, but often worse.
Of course not all of the work by these powerusers is useful but I can’t imagine a system that only blocks the bad work without harming the highly productive ‘good’ people who are trying to be more representative of the public. Plus stereotypically making the rules/processes is the easy part, because people are motivated at the start to fix things, but after it’s in place the actual hard work of enforcing it and doing it right is often neglected… or these same small groups of “powerusers” will also end up running the moderation and use it to explicitly control things even more.
Although those risks/issues has rarely stopped people from trying in the past.
Articles are often heavily censored or simply biased.
Maybe the whole internet is?
But I find myself relying on Wikipedia less and less. I think chat searches are probably the final nail in the coffin for me directly access it.
The refrain of the left "what's the big deal, why do you care" is exactly the sort of lazy dismissal that makes people end up resting on their laurels and believing that "one small change" doesn't matter.
We need to get better at pushing back at the first small sign of nonsense, and not let things get really bad before people start to care. Ironically, this wikipedia edit is pretty much the most benign current example of a minority controlling a narrative because nobody cares enough to push back. See all the insane modern language policing.
I'll be using comprised of more frequently. I was already a satisfied user, but now I'll continue with glee.
Language changes and evolves to serve the purpose of communication. It doesn't care about rules or usage.
The battle here pedant vs “comprised of”. What’s the cultural importance?
Language drifts. The rate of that drift is of no particular importance and that seems to be all that’s at stake here.
2. Encourage the author to do something that effects more positive sentiment with their time, even if it’s “wrong.” It could be this behavior is compulsive and author has problems controlling it. At least try to steer that energy, and just do not engage in fighting it.
I am happy there are people willing to do the work for free and that Wikipedia is now better. Hopefully he corrects more errors in the future so I am less likely to pick up incorrect language in the future when I read the articles. Sounds like the right solution you are looking for to me.
Being a grammar nazi is one thing, but editing quotes to match a language that stopped evolving in the 1970s definitely oversteps the bound between quirky and actively harmful.
I'd even argue, in the vein of a sibling comment, that willing to label the activist superminorities that run things as mentally ill is very important. They're usually obsessive/perfectionist and workaholics, yet we're supposed to commend them and follow in their lead.
Maybe the pathology is this kind of conservativism. I find lack of change - due to knee-jerk resistance and corrupt vested interest - causes far more problems than anything.
There is so much we could do - easy low-hanging fruit - where the only obstacle is (this kind of) conservativism.
...yet I'm seeing unironic comparisons to both 1984 and Nazi Germany, so ... what this person did is evil?
Can someone please help me understand this?
Even though this person is a lone wolf, their actions feel disturbingly authoritarian. This level of compulsion and control is immensely off-putting to the average person. Anyone who puts this much effort into controlling information seems like someone worth confronting.
It's not so different from if a Brit tried to change every instance of "color" to "colour", or an American changed every instance of "colour" to "color". It would be incredibly annoying, patronizing, and disrespectful.
Wikipedia is not a place for people to wage their private grammatical language wars, and so people are responding in a negative way because the editor is trying to impose their viewpoint by sheer force rather than respecting contributors who choose to use Merriam-Webster's 2nd definition of the word.
[1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/comprise
There was a bunch of institutes for the "Erhaltung der deutschen Sprache" which were all founded under the umbrella of a quasi-propaganda organization that officially was just a society/club. [1]
They created their own "purified" dictionary with a "clean language" that was trying to find replacements for foreign words, and strengthen the nationalistic awareness with all its perks.
It was so ridiculous and opinionated that they tried to even enforce the use of "Nagelindiewandschlageisen" instead of using the Swedish word hammer.
They burned all their stuff in the war, but it's somewhat folklore that they were heavily involved with Goebbels and his propaganda in WW2.
They got away with that during the Nuremberg trials so technically this is an accusation from my side.
Culturally I think this is the opposite of what cultures should embrace. Languages will always evolve, and you cannot prevent that.
As a side-note: Those were so puristic people that they even pissed off Adolf Hitler at some point, because they criticised him for using foreign words in his speeches.
[1] https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allgemeiner_Deutscher_Sprach...
Turkish word: Tren (Train)
Supposedly proposed translation: Alttan ittirmeli üstten tüttürmeli çok oturgaçlı getirgeçli götürgeç
Which can be translated to English somewhat literally as "Bottom pushed, top smoking, multi-person-saddle, bringer and deliverer of people" (My best attempt, perhaps GPTs can do better).
However, the thing about them coming up with fake Turkish roots to foreign words (especially French) is totally true. One such example is "okul" (school) which comes from "l'école" but they long time argued that it came from the Turkish root "oku" which also means to study (among "read" and "send prayers"). There are thousands of "inventions" like these.
The weird trend was (still is!) our tendency as a nation to invent Turkish language roots in words from other languages, which once lead to ridiculous stuff like the Sun Language Theory [0].
IM(not so)HO: All language institutes should be left in the past, as they tend to ignore the organic properties of the languages they are supposed to protect.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Language_Theory
I doubt it's been trained on that, here is what it told me:
> I'm sorry, but the phrase "Alttan ittirmeli üstten tüttürmeli çok oturgaçlı getirgeçli götürgeç" appears to be a nonsensical combination of Turkish words. It doesn't have a clear meaning or context.
As a counter example, High Arabic has been meticulously preserved, and Arab speakers take pride in that fact, regardless of the many spoken dialects that exist.
Deleted Comment
> They created their own "purified" dictionary ...
So, the "Erhaltung" effort was not to preserve existing usage, but to create a new vocabulary aligned with the group's ethno-nationalist agenda. Seems very different from TFA's agenda.
You can search for "Allgemeiner Deutscher Sprachverein" or "Atlas der deutschen Sprache" or similar, you'll find references to it but not the scanned books.
Welcome to the age of Digital Amnesia :'( [2]
Maybe the dossier about the burned books of WW2 is a good start to find things about it, but it's kinda hopeless without a search index. Alternatively there seems to be a lend-able copy in the library of Dresden [3] and [4]
[1] https://www.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdZxI3nFVJs
[3] https://ausstellungen.deutsche-digitale-bibliothek.de/verbra...
[4] https://katalog.slub-dresden.de/id/0-130149888
I wonder if this was maybe Orwell inspiration?
But I agree with the similarities of the Ministry of Truth, and what it wanted to achieve. The issues as I mentioned is that I don't think there's a universal truth to anything; and therefore eradicating wordings or forms of language that are "not good" is a very subjective perspective.
These changes don’t make your day worse. He’s not shoving it in our faces or claiming it’s going to save the world. We don’t know what’s going on in this editor’s life or what he “should” be doing with his time instead. Maybe simple routine work is his way of unwinding from the maddening pace and complexity of the rest of life. Good on him for feeling passionate about something and seeing it through.
We should be grateful there are people willing to do this kind of mundane janitorial work.
In my opinion, this isn't what built Wikipedia, this is what made Wikipedia hostile to new contributors.
"Comprise" and "compose" are two different words with different meanings, and people often use the former when they ought to use the latter.
But he is?
When someone goes around "correcting" everyone's language and writes a manifesto about it, that sure is shoving to me. It's not working towards a consensus by trying to convince, it's unilaterally imposing, and creating work for others to undo if they disagree. If that's not shoving, I don't know what is.
No, this is in its essence very petty vandalism, an attempt to force his notion of grammar on the entirely of Wikipedia despite knowing this is forbidden. That this forcing is the intended goal is clear from their own description of the editing process, where they admit to never permanently recording articles with authors who do object to the edits. Instead they just record objectors for six months and then try sniping in the edit again in the hope that the author is not there to protect it anymore.
Absolutely not. It's built out of people writing useful and information articles, not pedantic editing over personal language bugbears.
> These changes don’t make your day worse.
It shows up in people's watchlists and potentially dozens or hundreds of people will need to verify this change; it introduces edit conflicts, it invalidates drafts people were still working on. It absolutely adds work for other editors, and that's fine even for smaller changes (I have many small changes myself) if it actually improves the article, but all of this amounts to little more than "I don't like it".
Deleted Comment
"Composed of" and "consists of" are better alternatives.
is incorrect. It should read:
Composed of" and "consists of" were better alternatives.
This thread is literally a clout ATM machine for a group comprised of pedants.
A critical mass of people have adopted the term serverless. Therefore, the term means whatever they want it to mean, right? No sense in swimming against the tide here, correct?
Yes, words mean what people want them to mean if we're willing to shrug our shoulders and accept the new usage or terminology. That doesn't mean it's never correct to fight against sloppy or non-standard usage in the hopes that it won't be considered standard.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35811741&p=2#35812073
Deleted Comment
This is called a Janus word because it can be it's own antonym. There are other Janus words, like "table" as in "to table a topic for discussion", which means opposite things in American vs British English. The author touches on the fact that that's a regional distinction, but there is no such regional distinction for comprise. Therefore it makes sense for a website like Wikipedia to pick a single form, and the original is still more widespread than the new.
I'm not so sure. Google ngrams has the new usage recently taking over in published books[0], and those usually learn conservative in their usage.
[0] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=%22comprised+o... (this works because ~no one uses comprise in the passive voice in the old meaning)
The best way to deal with this issue is to have body that slows down language changes, then normalise them based on logic and history, something like the https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Spanish_Academy.
Can't see why anyone would be annoyed.
If you want to change the meaning of a word, that’s fine, and maybe in a few decades you will succeed, but until you get enough people on board you will only cause confusion.
The author means “composed of” and “consists of” are better phrases to use in general (i.e. according to style guides), not were better phrases exclusively for use on his Wikipedia project. We know this for sure because in the “Quotations” section the author says that he changes “comprised of” to “composed of” or “comprises” in quotations under certain circumstances. He is not wary of using “comprises”.
The author also indicates that this work is still ongoing and meant to be evergreen.
Yes this is true for natural language, but we don't want Wikipedia to have natural language. We want Wikipedia to have clear and concise language.
French for example, is different. They have council with official authority over the language.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acad%C3%A9mie_Fran%C3%A7aise
That's most high-level Wikipedia editors in a nutshell.
Another question: are there places where accuracy and precision are more important than others? Would an encyclopedia be one of those places? I'll reveal my cards here: I believe so.
Somewhat humorously I think a good chunk of the disagreements here come from people treating those concepts interchangeably. Attempts to apply mathematical reasoning to language and interpretation are doomed to fall into similar traps.
You can submit your thoughts here!
https://www.apstylebook.com/ask_the_editors#submit_tab
Dead Comment
Most relevant example I can think of is when Mac OS X was renamed and stylized to "macOS" someone went and systematically did a find and replace all instances of "OS X" to macOS even in situations where it made absolutely no sense as the article was explicitly talking about prior versions. It was like rewriting history in real time.
Imagine if someone went into a library and started editing history books with a Sharpie to reflect future events.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/sep/04/trump-hurrican...
>Altering official government weather forecasts is against the law.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2074
>18 U.S. Code § 2074 - False weather reports
>Whoever knowingly issues or publishes any counterfeit weather forecast or warning of weather conditions falsely representing such forecast or warning to have been issued or published by the Weather Bureau, United States Signal Service, or other branch of the Government service, shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ninety days, or both.
>(June 25, 1948, ch. 645, 62 Stat. 795; Pub. L. 103–322, title XXXIII, § 330016(1)(G), Sept. 13, 1994, 108 Stat. 2147.)
> Wikipedia does not have a policy or guideline on whether "comprised of" is welcome in the encyclopedia.
This is nothing less but one person trying to punch way above their weight in shaping the English language.
Eg the French have one, but that doesn't mean they have any moral authority.
- Seats can only be replaced at death, which explains the advanced age. I generally think old people have more experience than younger ones, but opinions vary, and youngism and modernism are a thing.
- The first woman in the Académie, in 1980, was Marguerite Yourcenar, and she probably was the most non-feminist woman they could choose.
- Recently they opposed the “français.e.s” style of writing, sticking to the classic “français(e)s” or “ladies and gentlemen” inclusive writing. It made an uproar because the first one is described as the only inclusive one by feminist organizations, who like to forget that we included women before they were born. So we reached a fun state where the government uses the feminist one, the Académie says it’s not French, all organizations that want to please women align with the government, but I assure you I never receive management-oriented document in feminist writing, I rarely receive resumes or cover letters in feminist style, nor would I accept them if I got them (political militantism doesn’t make a good employee, especially if they pretend including women is a new thing).
Any other fun story about the moral upstanding of the Académie Française would be interesting too.
Moralising about caring about style is itself prescriptivism.
(
) If we can’t say that “comprised of” is objectively wrong, then what _can_ we say about English? Should we accept “bought” as a legitimate past tense of “bring”? Sometimes people are just making a habitual mistake. It happens to me, too.> Sure, but why should people who can’t use the language properly (*) be an uncontested force in that evolution?
How do you think English and all other modern languages formed? If some authority were able to stop people who can't use a language properly from evolving it, the people on the British isles would be speaking Old Norse, Anglo-Saxon, Latin, etc. today, not English.
I haven't read John McWhorter's "Words on the Move", but he addresses this question there, and this review has a summary:
https://byfaithweunderstand.com/2017/06/15/review-john-mcwho...
- Isolated cases of 'incorrect' usage can be considered 'incorrect'.
- Widespread usage that's different would be better described as a shift in language.
Well, a lot of things. You can't say "the baby seems drinking the milk." Even though it's perfectly comprehensible, every English speaker will agree that "the baby seems to be drinking the milk" is the correct way to express this. Avoiding "comprised of" is a "rule" where we can't identify any dialect where everyone agrees on it.
For the same reason people with different opinions should still be allowed to vote. Also it's not an uncontested force, you are free to vote for the "correct" use of the language by actively using it yourself in that way and trying to convince others. Just like everyone else.
In 200 years people might learn "should of" in school, just like we today call that one symbol "ampersand". And they will find some new word to complain about, just like probably every generation since at least middle english did because it was all the "correct" version of the language to them.
- fuck -> fuck
- duck -> fuck
Note: I do like ducks but they’re generally less common than fucks.
Get back to me when you can type the traditional ct ligature. ;D
In patent claims, "comprising" and "consisting of" are different:
6,151,604 claim 1 is:
1. A data storage and retrieval system for a computer memory, comprising:
means for configuring said memory according to a logical table, said logical table including: ...
6,151,605 claim 1 is:
1. A method for allowing a software application to access a configuration file, said configuration file comprising data used by said software application, comprising the steps of:
providing a configuration processing library, said configuration processing library comprising ...
===================
You almost never use "consisting of" in writing claims.
https://patentfile.org/patent-writing-tip-comprises-vs-consi...
A claim for an invention "comprising" A, B, and C also generally claims inventions that include other elements. Such claims are usually within the statuary categories of processes, machines, or articles of manufacture.
A claim for an invention "consisting of" A, B, and C, however, does not generally claim inventions that include other elements. Such claims are usually usually within the statutory category of "compositions of matter" which includes such things as useful drug or chemical mixtures.
Here's a link to the relevant U.S. Manual of Patent Examining Procedure (MPEP) section:
https://mpep.uspto.gov/RDMS/MPEP/e8r9#/current/d0e200824.htm...
I did notice she singled out "comprising of" for abuse, which it definitely deserves. In a claim you write "comprising" or "comprised of."