Talk:English language/GA4

GA Reassessment

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The grammar section has several paragraphs that go unsourced, including lots of relatively technical statements that are not evident to the lay reader. These have been marked with citation needed tags. 2b. of the GA criteria requires statements that are likely to be challenged to have a citation. The current citation needed tags should be addressed for this article to keep its GA status.--Megaman en m (talk) 12:52, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

• It is reasonable to assume that people who read the English Wikipedia have a basic understanding of English. The tags placed seem to not make that assumption, instead presuming that readers of English do not know how to read English. Some examples of the tags applied to the article:
  • "Orthographically the possessive -s is separated from the noun root with an apostrophe.[citation needed]" What speaker of English believes you do not write the possessive with an apostrophe-s? Are the examples which follow it not correct English?
  • "Prepositional phrases (PP) are phrases composed of a preposition and one or more nouns, e.g. with the dog, for my friend, to school, in England.[citation needed]" Any 10 year old should be able to tell you what a preposition and noun are, and the combination of them is obvious to any speaker of the language.
  • "[Prepositional phrases] are used to describe movement, place, and other relations between different entities, but they also have many syntactic uses such as introducing complement clauses and oblique arguments of verbs.[citation needed] For example, in the phrase I gave it to him, the preposition to marks the recipient, or Indirect Object of the verb to give." If you can understand the sentence "I gave it to him" you can immediately verify this claim yourself.
  • "The function of adverbs is to modify the action or event described by the verb by providing additional information about the manner in which it occurs.[citation needed] " This is literally the definition of an adverb. If you know what an adverb is (which you should if you've made it past 5th grade) this is not a controversial claim.
  • "Many adverbs are derived from adjectives by appending the suffix -ly, but not all, and many speakers tend to omit the suffix in the most commonly used adverbs.[citation needed] For example, in the phrase the woman walked quickly the adverb quickly derived from the adjective quick describes the woman's way of walking. Some commonly used adjectives have irregular adverbial forms, such as good which has the adverbial form well." The challenged claim is immediately verified by the examples in the next sentence.
  • "An exception is found in sentences where one of the constituents is a pronoun, in which case it is doubly marked, both by word order and by case inflection, where the subject pronoun precedes the verb and takes the subjective case form, and the object pronoun follows the verb and takes the objective case form.[citation needed]" These terms are explained earlier in the article in the section on pronouns and an example is immediately given.

This article is not written for a 2 year old; it assumes the reader is a reasonably intelligent speaker of English who has read the preceding sections of the article. The section is in line with the Wikipedia:Scientific citation guidelines which is linked from the GA criterion you cite: in sections or articles that present well-known and uncontroversial information – information that is readily available in most common and obvious books on the subject – it is acceptable to give an inline citation for one or two authoritative sources (and possibly a more accessible source, if one is available) in such a way as to indicate that these sources can be checked to verify statements for which no other in-line citation is provided. The reader is provided with a comprehensive grammar of English from 2002 at the beginning of the section and at various times throughout. Examples that are understandable by any speaker of English are provided to explain and verify the phenomena under discussion. If you seriously believe that we need a citation to prove to English speakers that "dog's" is possessive and "dogs" is plural, I would recommend you do the work yourself rather than WP:TAGBOMBING the article and threatening it with delisting. I suggest that this review be closed without action. Wug·a·po·des​ 19:22, 21 September 2019 (UTC)

The citation style for language articles has never been clear to me, it seems that most statements about the grammar do not need a source. The thing is that native speakers don't actually know the grammar of their language explicitly, so it's not fair to assume that everyone is familiar with linguistic terms. Then you also have people who speak English as a sencond language, who are even more disadvantaged. I merely wanted to point out that I think some of these unsourced statements are not self-evident to laypeople and would therefore require a source. I'll try to defend my reasoning for tagging these:

• This could fall under the "so obvious everyone knows it category", but the part about the noun being a root isn't immediately obvious.
• The concept of preposition phrases (or phrases in general, in the technical syntactic sense) is not something a ten-year-old is going to understand. As this is a scientific term, I would expect a source for its definition, not just "common sense".
• If you can find me a ten-year-old that understands what "introducing complement clauses and oblique arguments of verbs" means, hats off to you. These are technical examples that laypeople won't intuitively understand (or understand at all). You said that the example sentence that is given is enough to act as proof, but doesn't that count as original research? This is where I don't understand the rules for sourcing grammar in language articles.
• Adverbs are a pain to define and there isn't a universal definition for them (not even in English, as far as I'm aware). As the concise encyclopedia of grammatical terms says: "The familiarity of the term 'adverb' is deceptive, for the class of adverbs does not have a homogeneous membership and sometimes words seem to be assigned to the class of adverbs for no better reason than that they do not fit any other class." So when Wikipedia gives a specific definition, I would like to know where it came from.
• Again, I see the use of examples instead of citations as original research (or cherry picking). I'm not saying it's wrong, but stating that "many speakers tend to omit the suffix in the most commonly used adverbs" is a statistical statement that isn't easily verifiable.
• Same line of reasoning as above.

My goal was not to "threaten" delisting, but to make sure that the GA requirements are being met. I could make the changes myself, but as a volunteer, I'm under no obligation to spend a few hours finding sources for all these exact statements; I just wanted to let any dedicated people working on this article that I think it could be better. As for the scientific citation guidelines you linked, I see most GA and FA articles with in-line citations for each technical statement. I'm not sure how the reader is supposed to know which one of the several dozens of sources they're supposed to check for each unsourced technical statement. Isn't that the whole point of in-line citations to begin with, to let the reader know exactly where the information came from?--Megaman en m (talk) 20:51, 22 September 2019 (UTC)

• I second Wugapodes' motion to close without action. Your disagreements about editorial use of examples is a content issue not an issue related to GA criteria, the article is sufficiently well cited for GA and perhaps even FA. The use of examples like these is is allowed, and indeed the only sensible way to illustrate articles about grammar. It is not necessary to cite that the moon is not made of green cheese, and besides it doesn't seem you have even looked at the articles that are in fact cited for the paragraphs with the statements you claim are uncited, I contend that if you were to look at the source given for the paragraph (usually at the end) you would in most cases find explicit (or at least implicit) support also for the claims you consider "uncited". ·maunus · snunɐɯ· 10:35, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
  • I would check the source at the end of the paragraph, but most of the statements I tagged don't have one. So I tried my luck with the first source in the following paragraph, but I still couldn't find a citation for these statements. Also, my problem does not lie with the examples, but with the unsourced technical explanations. Only a linguist could possibly consider statements like "prepositions can introduce complement clauses and oblique arguments of verbs" to be commonsense statements that do not need sources (incidentally, I did find a source for this statement). But since Wikipedia is not written for language professionals, so I do want a source that the sky is blue.--Megaman en m (talk) 11:34, 30 September 2019 (UTC)
    • I will close this reassessment in two weeks; any improvements would be appreciated.--Megaman en m (talk) 12:57, 2 October 2019 (UTC)
      • After two weeks of inactivity and no improvements to the sourcing (other than the single one I added), I am going to close the reassessment and delist this article.--Megaman en m (talk) 13:19, 16 October 2019 (UTC)

• • • • • @Megaman en m: This is still showing up as being open. Do you need a hand to close it. AIRcorn (talk) 05:16, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
          • Thanks for bringing this up. I thought I finished this reassessement a while again, apparently it was reopened. I see that most of the sourcing problems have been fixed in meantime, so I will close the reassessment again and keep the GA status.--Megaman en m (talk) 10:55, 1 December 2019 (UTC)
            • I didn't realise that. Oh well, alls well that ends well I guess. Thanks for the reassessment. AIRcorn (talk) 18:00, 1 December 2019 (UTC)