Tim wrote:
Concluding factual inaccuracy or unreliability from
mere grammatical
imperfection is fallacious and prejudicial.
Well, it tells you *something* about the quality of the article. I'm
pretty sure that the Encyclopedia Britannica would be concerned if
one in five of its articles was riddled with grammatical errors.
Mark Richards wrote:
I don't think so, although, of course, the two
sometimes do go together. We have some contributors
for whom English is not their first language. Grammar
and spelling are an issue for them where facts are
not.
Someone who can't communicate well in English is more likely to
produce inadvertent errors of fact. As one rather humorous example of
this, years ago I knew a guy from Mexico with a thick accent who
declared that he wanted "world piss." It took a few minutes before
everyone figured out that he was actually saying he wanted "world
peace."
In the stub articles I mentioned, the grammatical flaws in one were
numerous but insufficient to prevent me from discerning the author's
intent. In the other article, one of the sentences was so poorly
written that I couldn't figure out the writer's meaning at all. When
that's the case, I think poor grammar and spelling do indeed call
"the facts" of the article into question.
The bottom line, though, is that an encyclopedia article shouldn't
have errors of grammar *or* fact. I know some respected university
scholars who have problems with spelling and grammar, but before
their writings get published, someone fixes those problems. An
article in the Wikipedia that has problems with spelling and grammar
clearly hasn't been through the level of review that goes into a
student's term paper, let alone an article for the Encyclopedia
Britannica.
I'm not saying that contributors should be banned from Wikipedia if
they have trouble with spelling and grammar. All I'm saying is that
Wikipedia hasn't yet figured out how to match Encyclopedia Britannica
with respect to the quality of its articles. Some individual articles
in the Wikipedia are undoubtedly superior in quality to corresponding
articles in the Britannica, but with the Britannica, *every article*
comes virtually guaranteed to be accurate and well-researched -- and
also correct in terms of spelling and grammar. That degree of
confidence doesn't exist across the board for the Wikipedia.
--Sheldon Rampton