Well, the user introduced himself and seems knowledgeable, according
to someone I consider a veteran Wikipedian. Would a simple explanation
on the talk page and a regular call to editors to clean up the user's
bad English in his contributions be enough? If it's cleaned up, no one
can complain about it.
Unfortunately, a lot of people jump to conclusions. I guess the best
thing you can do is educate them using posts like this one.
-- Mgm
On 4/19/05, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote:
[[Japanese nationalism]] is very much in the news;
anyone looking there now
will see a fairly comprehensive article, which is constantly being added to,
and would give a fair idea of why there is still an issue in East Asia.
A dozen days ago there was not much there (nothing pre-1945). A great deal
has been added by an anon, who has introduced himself ([[User
talk:Asbestos]]), and clearly has a wide background in this area. His
English is bad (he appears to be a Spanish-spaeker from Uruguay) and always
needs work.
My point is that I have had a devil of a job with this material, in the face
of some very blinkered attitudes from others:
*"It's machine translation".
No it isn't - too many typos for that.
*"It's incomprehensible".
No it isn't.
*"It's vandalism".
No it isn't. (That was from someone who has had an account for four days,
and who has already been given a barnstar. Please!)
*Reverts with no explanation.
This is bad behaviour, and likely to offend a good contributor.
I find this all reflects very badly on the culture of the English Wikipedia.
Few seem to have the time to puzzle out badly-expressed contributions. To
extend the coverage to parts others find hard to reach we are going to ned,
not Heineken beer, but help from the widest possible range of editors.
Charles
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