Word/quotation of the moment:

It is now generally accepted that the megaliths that make up Stonehenge were moved by human effort.

Previous:

For the first time in her life, death knew what it felt like to have a dog in her lap.

Anybody who says you only have yourself to blame is just not very good at blaming other people.

When poppies pull themselves up from their roots
and start out, one after the other, toward the sunset –
don't follow them.

And the dough-headed took their acid fermentation for a soul, the stabbing of meat for history, the means of postponing their decay for civilization.

The Church says that the Earth is Flat,
but I know that it is Round,
for I have seen its Shadow on the Moon,
and I have more Faith in a Shadow than in the Church.

In the early years of the study there were more than 200 speakers of the dialect, including one parrot.

Mikebrown is unusually eccentric and not very bright. [...] Astronomers have not noticed any outbursts by Mikebrown.

Ecce Mono

Keep Redskins White!

"homosapiens are people, too!!"

a sprig of spaghetti

"I've always had a horror of husbands-in-law."

awkwardnessful

anti–zombie-fungus fungus

"Only an evil person would eat baby soup." (said in all sincerity)

Regarding the same-sex marriage map for Europe:

While I have mixed thoughts on removing other countries so the map only shows European countries, if we are only showing European countries, Kazakhstan is a European country, specifically, a transcontinental country in Europe and Asia. Note that Kazakhstan is listed as a European country on the LGBT rights in Europe page and the page for Europe. Would you mind adding Kazakhstan to the map?

Thanks,

-TenorTwelve (talk) 09:22, 26 September 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Kwami. I came across a user using ethnologue extensively (Re here) and seem to recall a discussion about whether it was a reliable source or not. Any ideas? --regentspark (comment) 23:28, 1 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hey @RegentsPark: I would discourage over-reliance on Ethn. I wrote a bit about it here, and that's been up for several years now (a decade, maybe?), so it doesn't seem that others disagree.

I wouldn't use Ethn. at all for classification, as even they don't know where half their classifications come from. Any time the Ethn. classification occurs in the body of a WP article, I'd delete it, unless there's some controversy or s.t. that makes it notable. If you want a quick and easy general source for classification, use Glottolog (though specialists may disagree on specific points). I'd be careful with Ethn. population figures too, as my essay details, though I'm a hypocrite in that I generally use Ethn. without much thought simply because it's so much easier that trying to find and evaluate a bunch of other sources -- especially when people are cherry-picking sources to inflate the figure. If you want to be professional about it, I'd take a look at the source Ethn. got the figure from. Sometimes you'll see surprises. If they don't give a source, you should be cautious. And although Glottolog doesn't give population estimates, they do provide a lot of sources, some of which will have estimates (though often dated, of course).

For details such as dialects, social standing, whether a name in pejorative, etc., Ethn. really isn't reliable. (Neither is Glottolog for dialects: their dialect stuff (any names in italics) is simply a mirror for MultiTree, which is an undergrad student project and generally a horrible source.) Or maybe I should say, Ethnologue is a mix of very reliable information with completely spurious claims, and it's hard to tell the difference. Often someone will write in to Ethn. with a comment, and Ethn. will add it to the entry, but you have no way of knowing who said it, how accurate they were, or even if they later changed their mind. If you know about some obscure language, look it up in Ethn., and you will likely find a number of errors, sometimes quite egregious ones. But if you're curious about a claim you can't confirm, write in to SIL and ask. They'll often have a record in their DB.

It's easy to criticize Ethn., but it wasn't intended to be a linguistic reference in the first place. It was just a rough in-house guide to which peoples needed bible translations. Thus it wasn't terribly important to get all the details exactly right, and sometimes the original writers filled in the blanks just by guessing. What's shameful is that linguists relied on it for so long because they had nothing better, which is ridiculous. It's hard to take linguistics seriously as a science when something like the LSA couldn't be bothered to put together a comprehensive list of the languages that form the basis of their field. So every time I get annoyed with some error in Ethn., I gotta remind myself it's not their fault the linguistic community is so feckless. — kwami (talk) 00:00, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks Kwami. This, and the essay, are very useful. --regentspark (comment) 01:01, 2 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @Kwamikagami: I have updated all the Indian languages figures as per Ethnologue 2019 source kindly correct it if I have done any wrong. Changes made Hindi, Bengali language, Tamil language, Kashmiri language, Marathi language, Punjabi language, Gujarati language, Telugu language, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia language, Nepali language. Also ensure that you don't remove the L2 speakers data as it would help people understand the native speakers and second language speakers.Thanks--Caseasauria (talk) 07:06, 3 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. Ethn. doesn't match their source for Hindi. I don't know if that's a typo if they're going of s.t. else, but I rv'd it as unconfirmed. — kwami (talk) 07:19, 3 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, could you revert the move you did in that article? It is controversial and needs a consensus first. Open a move request in the talk page please. Also what's that () at the end?--SharabSalam (talk) 05:45, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

It's not controversial. The Arabs, Jews, Chaldeans and Ethiopians are not a single ethnicity. — kwami (talk) 06:03, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Okay can you at least remove the (). It seems like if you made a typo?. I am not sure but what does () mean?--SharabSalam (talk) 08:45, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, that was an error. I've put in a request to fix it. It should be done soon. — kwami (talk) 21:03, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Your recent work on Finnic people created a disambiguation page. As a result, we now have a problem at Template:Ethnic groups in Europe. Could you please fix that link to the disambiguation page, as I assume that you know what group of Finns to point to. The Banner talk 09:10, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Sure. Sorry I didn't get to it last night.

Going through it today, a lot of links to "Finnic peoples" were intended for the Volga Finns or others, not the Baltic. — kwami (talk) 21:04, 7 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

resonances are not arithmetically exact fractions of other planets' orbits; they librate around a specific fraction and, over time, average out that fraction. Serendi^podous 13:18, 13 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Hello, your redirect from Finnic peoples to Baltic Finns was without consensus on the talk page. This has been discussed previously in length on the talk page of the article. There were specific reasons why the article was called Finnic peoples, not Baltic Finns. If you think "Baltic Finns" are a subgroup of "Finnic peoples", not a synonym, then please provide reliable academic references for that. Blomsterhagens (talk) 20:37, 13 October 2019 (UTC)[reply]