Harkonlucas

Data "is"

The consensus of a couple dictionaries and the article data here on WP is that singular "data" is typical of informal usage, but that technical/scientific usage prefers plural ("data are" as well as "data bases are"). Is there a reason NOT to follow standard usage in data maintenance? Jaeger5432 | Talk 18:14, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

More on Data "is"

As I see it, Data, in Data maintenance usually refers to the single piece or block of data being edited or maintained.

As well, Data in a true since, however the proper technical/scientific community want to classify it, is singular in my opinion, and refers to all the data accumulated by man throughout history as one, not many, entities. Thus one would not say "my data are tending to suggest" but "my data tends to suggest".

Let's not make things 'technical' sound obtuse and ridiculous, for the sake of such musings. Typical informal usage is, whether we like it or not, the foundation of the evolution of language.

Harkonlucas 17:15, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

No, the natural way to phrase it (for plural "data") is "my data tend to suggest" (or just "the data suggest"). "Data maintenance" sounds like a pretty technical sort of topic, so it seems proper to use the form preferred by the technical community at large. What's the reason for preferring informal usage in Wikipedia? If we can come up with a book or something about "data maintenance" (a good idea in any event) that prefers the singular, then I'll cheerfully change it myself - otherwise, I'm not sure why we should base the article on your opinion rather than the preferences of closely-related fields, even if it sounds "obtuse and ridiculous". The WP article data itself suggests that "[m]any (perhaps most) academic, scientific, and professional style guides (e.g., see page 43 of the World Health Organization Style Guide) request that authors treat data as a plural noun." Jaeger5432 | Talk 22:56, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

Data Maintenance, again

I did not delete the material from Data maintenance "erroneously". I may have been wrong to do so, but it was a deliberate action which I explained (pretty completely, I thought) in both the talk page and the change summary. If you disagree, I'd appreciate it if you explain why you think that this "Justin James McCorkle" and the three "examples" are worth keeping. There's no point in the two of us undoing each other's work without talking about it to reach an agreement - I can be awfully stubborn ;) -- Jaeger5432 | Talk 18:59, 21 August 2007 (UTC)

Okay, I finally tracked down the reason why you're putting "Justin James McCorkle" on stuff. Thing is, listing an editor's name inside the page does not make it a useful citation (since it's not an external work that you're pointing us to). In other words, it leaves "Data Maintenance" sounding a lot like original research. (I still can't track down actual sources for any of the three examples you added. Feel free to add them if they really exist.) If you're interested in taking credit for the text you contributed - well, at WP nobody "owns" what they contribute, it's a collective project. (See WP:Ownership for more on that.) So I took out your name from there and everywhere else I could find where you added it to, for the same reasoning throughout. (Obviously we all still get "credit" in the history/changelog for each page, and of course there's nothing wrong with your own website pointing to articles which reflect your efforts. :)) Jaeger5432 | Talk 19:07, 4 September 2007 (UTC)