C.@cazabon@mindly.social
Random Wikipedia #criticism (rant?)...
One of the things that bugs me about (English) #Wikipedia is how aspects of it are controlled by, for lack of a better word, #pedants, without consideration of the actual #readers - without considering the purpose of an encyclopedia.
One example of this is how, when an article features aspects of another language or dialect - for instance, something from Old English, or Arabic - where the reader will not be familiar with how to pronounce something presented transliterated to a modern Latin/English alphabet, or with a word shown in a non-Latin script entirely.
It used to be common in reference works to give a simple #pronunciation key that was at least close to the correct pronunciation, but was easily understood by a normal literate reader. You know; the stuff that looked like "ED-joo-KAY-shun" or "SHEH-joo-ull" or whatever.
Well, that's not good enough for Wikipedia most of the time. Instead, they give the pronunciation in International #Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), so you get stuff like "æɪ" and "aʊ" and "/ɔː/".
These are absolutely more #accurate guides to how a word should sound. And they are absolutely, completely #useless and #uninformative to 99% of people reading the article.
You know who already knows and is completely comfortable reading #IPA?
#Linguists. Students of language.
You know, the people who already know how to #pronounce the words. The people who don't actually need it.
#FFS.
#pedant #unhelpful #rant