User:Marbehraglaim
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On this page I discuss some of the changes I have made to Wikipedia articles, and changes I possibly intend to make in the future. I'm talking about major changes, not minor modifications dealing with grammar and the like. Anyone who wishes to respond to any of this can do so on my talk page, or on the talk pages of the articles I modified.
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[edit] Parallelities
This little-known novel by Alan Dean Foster happens to be one of my favorite books. I found a page requesting that someone write an article describing this book (among many others), so I did just that.
[edit] Joe Lieberman
When I first read the article, it contained the following sentence: "Lieberman is noted for being an observant Jew, and attends an Orthodox synagogue, though he is careful not to describe himself as 'Orthodox,' and does not wear a yarmulke in public." I changed all this to simply "Lieberman is a religiously observant Jew."
I assume the original comment was based on a Larry King interview [1] in which Lieberman claimed to prefer calling himself "observant" rather than "Orthodox." This widely publicized comment was misunderstood by a number of people as suggesting that Lieberman didn't consider himself an Orthodox Jew. On the contrary, in a much less-quoted interview from just three days later, [2] Lieberman unhesitatingly began a sentence with the words "The fact that I'm Orthodox..."
As an Orthodox Jew myself, I know there is nothing out of the ordinary about an Orthodox Jew calling himself "observant" or feeling uncomfortable about the word "Orthodox." Historically, the term "Orthodox Jew" was not chosen by the Orthodox, but rather applied to them by the Reform. While the term stuck, and is still used in official capacity, many Orthodox Jews to this day avoid the term in common speech, preferring the Yiddish word frum, which more or less means "observant." Furthermore, Lieberman's choice not to wear a head-covering to his job has rabbinical sanction [3], though it's uncommon for Orthodox Jews nowadays to exercise this leniency.
This section on Lieberman's religion was part of a larger section dealing with his political views. The problem was that religion itself is not a political view, unless it can be related to his politics. With that in mind, I added the following sentence: "Lieberman has called for a 'constitutional place for faith in our public life.'" [4]
I also qualified the article's assertion about the perception of Lieberman as a political moderate (or worse, a Democrat in Name Only) by pointing out that he has consistently received a high rating from the Americans for Democratic Action and a low rating from the American Conservative Union. [5]
[edit] List of common phrases in various languages
This is a large--and very sloppy--article containing common phrases translated into numerous languages. I tried to improve the Hebrew section. I corrected a few outright errors, but I could not complete the request to translate the words into IPA, since I do not know IPA. I went back to the article recently, and somebody had screwed up the Hebrew section once again. I've now given up bothering about this article.
[edit] The Mother Tongue (book)
When I first read the article, it contained no more than one sentence describing the book: "The Mother Tongue...is a book by Bill Bryson which wittily compiles the history and origins of the English language and its various quirks." Following this terse description was a lengthy section detailing the book's alleged "factual errors."
I felt this was unfair, and that the book deserved a more detailed summary. I added the following sentences to the desription: "It discusses the Indo-European origins of English, the growing status of English as a global language, the complex etymology of English words, the dialects of English, spelling reform, prescriptive grammar, and more minor topics including swearing. Bryson's account is a popularization of the subject, designed to entertain as well as to inform, and the book is sprinkled with trivia and language lore." Later, I modified some of the so-called "errors," many of which were petty quibbles. (One of them actually accused Bryson of failing to heed the distinction between the present tense and a present tense!)
It's known that Bryson did make a few howlers--like accepting uncritically the old urban legend about Eskimo words for snow--but there are people out there who use these few flaws as an excuse to bash the book a lot more than it deserves. When I have more time, I intend to check up on some of the other criticisms that litter this article (many of which I'm convinced are excessive), and I would also like to expand the summary even further to make it look more in line with the article on Bryson's other book A Short History of Nearly Everything.
[edit] The Lorax
When I first came to this article, the plot summary of Dr. Seuss's book was absurd. It contained lines like the following: "his business was destroying the Truffula ecosystem, causing mass migrations of native fauna." The book is a fantasy children's book that contains no mention of ecosystems or migrations or fauna. It's true that the story is clearly an environmental fable, but a distinction needs to be drawn between the story's interpretation and its description. With that in mind, I wrote my own plot summary, and moved the original summary into a separate section titled "Interpretation." The only part of the original summary I incorporated into my own was the description of the Thneed as "an odd but versatile garment." (I like that.) I tried to keep the language in the new summary relatively simple and free of political jargon.
[edit] Nosson Slifkin
According to the original article, "The commonly believed reason [for the ban on Slifkin's books] is because of the evolutionary theory in his book however this is not true [6]. Many Haredi rabbis - including ones who took place in the ban - themselves have written books on the evolutionary theory."
Not only is this sentence grammatically sloppy, it is untrue, and contradicted by the source supposedly supporting it. In that source, Rabbi Slifkin notes that his two main controversial positions were (a) that the Sages were mistaken in scientific matters, and (b) that the world is billions of years old. Nowhere does he indicate that the former was more crucial a disagreement than the latter, and I've never heard anyone else indicate that, either.
So I changed the sentence to read, "The main reasons cited were Slifkin's claims that the Sages of the Talmud were mistaken in certain scientific matters, and that the universe is billions of years old." I eventually eliminated the second sentence, "Many Haredi rabbis - including ones who took place in the ban - themselves have written books on the evolutionary theory." That point, I felt, was adequately covered in the next paragraph when it noted that "Aish HaTorah [which, curiously, participated in the ban] has published its own materials reconciling Genesis with acceptance of an ancient universe."
Additionally, I changed the name of the article from "Natan Slifkin" to "Nosson Slifkin." From what I've seen, the latter spelling is far more often used, both by Slifkin and by others.
[edit] John Kerry
The original article claimed the following about Kerry's religious beliefs: "According to some of these [sic] who know him, Kerry is a religious man. A practicing Roman Catholic, he is said to carry a rosary, a prayer book, and a St. Christopher medal (the patron saint of travelers) when he campaigns. However, he supporties policies such as abortion, which is in opposition to Roman Catholic beliefs."
I changed this paragraph to read as follows: "According to those who know him, Kerry is a religious man.... However, he supports policies such as abortion rights, which the Catholic Church opposes." After discussing the change on the talk page, I changed the last part of the sentence yet again to read "...abortion rights, which some consider at odds with the views of the Catholic Church."
I was trying to make the language as neutral as possible. I didn't know whether the Catholic Church openly calls for making abortion illegal, even though they clearly oppose abortion on a moral and religious level. However, a few weeks later someone complained about my wording, so I did a little research, and discovered that the Church, in its Catechism, has indeed advocated a civil ban on abortions. [7] So I changed it back to my first version, "...which the Catholic Church opposes."
[edit] Yeshivish
This qualifies as one of the most ludicrous articles I have seen on Wikipedia. But I haven't been sure what to do with it. It's true that Orthodox Jews use the term "Yeshivish" a lot, both to describe a particular lifestyle, and also to describe the language of the people who follow that lifestyle. In Orthodox circles, the term is basically a synoynm to "black hatter," or non-Hasidic Orthodox Jews who are stricter in their observance than the Modern Orthodox.
The Yeshivish "language" is essentially Yinglish used to a particularly high degree and mixed with the jargon of Talmud study. But the article treats this speech form as though it were a separate dialect on its way to evolving into a new language, in the manner that Yiddish diverged from German hundreds of years ago. I added the following sentence to the article: "However, modern-day Jews are more integrated into Gentile society than they were in the past, and their speech is not likely to diverge as far from the standard languages as it once did."
There are a lot of spurious or questionable assertions in the article, not the least of which is a section on Yeshivish "grammar," which turns out to be nothing more than the tendency of Orthodox Jews in America to attach English plural endings to Hebrew words. (By that logic, one could argue that non-Jews speak "Yeshivish" whenever they say rabbis instead of rabbeim.)
