User talk:Austronesier/Linguistic macrofamilies

Acceptance[edit]

"Labelling the acceptance with "promising", "controversial", "disputed", "rejected", "fringe" always needs a source."

This I think is going to cause problems. We have a plethora of people putting out macrofamily proposals which are simply ignored by the wider linguistics community, and "fringe" in particular is going to be next to impossible to find a straight cite that says that (believe me, I tried for Nostratic). One of the biggest issues in addressing these proposals I've found has been that a huge number of these proposals are generally just ignored on the irl equivalent of WP:BLUESKY. I doubt we'll find a great source calling Munda-Magyar-Māori out specifically, but it's clearly not a serious proposal at present. Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 21:52, 7 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Austronesier I've created a list of what labels are currently and where used on wikipedia here.

The full list is:

Proposed
Highly Controversial
Widely Rejected
Controversial
Hypothetical
Obsolete
Spurious
Fringe
Disputed
Generally Accepted
Dubious
Tentative
Defunct
Abandoned
Geographic / Cultural
No "acceptance" listed

Warrenᚋᚐᚊᚔ 05:58, 8 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]

@Warrenmck: I can see your point. Most scholars don't even want to waste time to engage with obvious rubbish, so there's a lot of stuff out there that has never been commented on by those who are competent to do so.

Luckily, we can throw most of that straight into the bin with the help of WP:UNDUE. There might a residue of meritless proposals that have got at least a few mentions by historical linguists (without further assessement), and which thus could pass WP criteria for a short mention (e.g. in a sentence listing existing proposals), but I wouldn't put too much energy into this question right now as it feels like creating a solution in search for a problem. I feel we can handle a lot of this by WP:ONUS (which allows for editorial judgement based on actual competence) and a tough stance by regulars (NB without ever going into the FTN-rhetoric that btw I find just as off-putting as you do). WP:ONUS is of course not going to work if we want to trim/scrap long-standing content, but then I am confident we can rely on WP:UNDUE.

Thanks for the synopsis in your page, this is very helpful. I can see a lot of inconsistencies there (from my subjective perspective) and also a lot of assessements that look to be based solely on personal judgement by individual WP editors. I think what have done in Uralo-Siberian is exactly the way to go: finding consensus with editorial judgement, but fully based on texts written by experts. –Austronesier (talk) 10:40, 9 May 2024 (UTC)[reply]