Notices by Amir E. Aharoni (aharoni@wikis.world)

@evan I started writing that article in 2009, when Wikipedia was already well-known, but much younger, and my experience with it was even smaller. Since then, at least one book Hebrew on the Internet was published, and it has a chapter about Wikipedia, for which the author, who happens to be a friend in real life, consulted with me :)

There were also numerous other academic articles about it.

Maybe I should do something more serious about it myself someday...

@evan "Vocalization of Modern Hebrew"

https://archive.org/details/encyclopediaofhe0003unse/page/946/mode/2up

(You should be able to "borrow" it from the Internet Archive.)

I also presented a talk about it at Wikimania 2014:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Et4bFmql7dw&t=493s

The other article I created today is about the "Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics", which I mentioned here in this microblog a few days ago:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Encyclopedia_of_Hebrew_Language_and_Linguistics

I am one of the 400 or so people who contributed an article to that encyclopedia, so there's a tiny COI there, but honestly, the publisher didn't even pay me (unless you count the discount coupon, which I never used), and they certainly didn't ask me to do PR for them. Besides, it was published more than ten years ago. It just kind of surprised me that there was no article about this rather important work.

@evan I don't disagree, as long as it actually tells something verifiable and not totally trivial. Although in some cases, a red link would perhaps be better. In this specific case, it's not just a matter of how deep or verifiable the article is, but a bit of responsibility towards the rest of the web: some websites, most notably ISO 639-3 own website, rely on the English Wikipedia to have *some* valid page for every ISO 639-3 language code. Just deleting it would break that unofficial promise.

@evan So far, I'm alive, not blocked and not desysopped, and the article is not speedily deleted. It is, however, marked with the "one source" issue template, which is a tad ugly, but totally correct.

And hey, I wanted to delete the redirect and another experienced user said that it's better to make a stub, so why would I argue.

(Also, there are articles about it in three other languages, but they don't add a lot of information.)

1: "Moldova Sign Language"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moldova_Sign_Language

I didn't really want to create it, actually. I don't know this language, and I know almost nothing about it. I created it because this name redirected to the article "Russian Sign Language", which have the (possibly) wrong impression that they are the same language. There are barely any sources about it, but the few that I did find say that this may *or may not* be true.

I wanted to just delete the redirect, but after a little discussion with a user who has been maintaining a huge number of articles about languages for many years, we agreed that it's better to write a stub than to have a red link.

I really hope that someone improves it, and more than it is a question of how good Wikipedia is, it's a question of how well is the deaf community in Moldova researched. Every deaf community deserves attention from researchers.

@skinnylatte There's an edition of Wikipedia in Min, and if I understand correctly, Teochew is supposed to be a part of the Min group. It's mostly written in the Latin alphabet. Does it look like your language?

https://zh-min-nan.wikipedia.org/

I'm watching "Extraordinary Attorney Woo" (because of course I do), and I got curious about the protagonist's fascination for palindromes like her own name Woo Young-woo (우영우) and the Seoul subway station Yeoksam Yeok (역삼역). The English @wikipedia doesn't have much to say about it, so I asked ChatGPT about this station naming pattern.

It told me about the subway station called "Sinyeoksam", and even showed me a useful sidebar about with info it, even though IT DOESN'T FUCKING EXIST.

@evan @datn Not familiar personally. It's a phone representative from a medical services company who reads questions from a script without pausing to consider that the script occasionally makes no sense.

Such things happen very often, and this instance was particularly amusing.

Somebody has just asked me if I received COVID-19 vaccine before the outbreak of COVID-19.

So I said that I didn't, because the COVID-19 vaccine didn't exist before the outbreak of COVID-19.

So they said: "oh, so you didn't receive the COVID-19 vaccine?"

And I said "no, I did receive it, but not before the COVID-19 outbreak. Because, you know, the COVID-19 vaccine didn't exist before the outbreak. I received it during the outbreak, like most other people."

"Oh, I see, you received it... during the COVID-19 outbreak. Mmm... OK."

This actually happened.

For well over twenty years, I've wondered whether the actors Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Richard Dreyfuss are related to the famous French soldier Alfred Dreyfus. Today, I finally checked Wikipedia.

Julia is related, Richard isn't.

@evan On Fediverse and elsewhere, chunks of up to 20-ish lines of LLM-generated code that you actually understood and carefully tested are okay. And there can be many such chunks. But if a chunk is longer than 20 lines, it's highly unlikely that anyone actually understood it and tested it. Whenever I hear people saying that they created "whole apps" or "whole websites" using LLMs, they usually later add "it was impressive initially, but didn't actually work".