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One Man's Quest To Rid Wikipedia of Exactly One Grammatical Mistake
An anonymous reader writes with this Fascinating profile of one particular Wikipedia editor Giraffedata (a 51-year-old software engineer named Bryan Henderson), who has spent the last seven years correcting only the incorrect use of "comprised of" on Wikipedia. Using a code to crawl for uses of "comprised of" throughout all of Wiki's articles, he'll then go in and manually correct them (for example, using "consists of" or "composed of") and has made over 47,000 edits to date.
This twitter account is similar: Correcting users on Twitter who type "sneak peak" with "sneak peek", we have "Stealth Mountain". https://twitter.com/stealthmountain
Not sure either of these qualify as 'news', but what the hell, it's a slow news day anyways.
Wow, that's exactly the opposite of this comment above. And every dictionary I can find says they're synonyms.
Tic-Tac-Toe, Global Thermonuclear War, and relationships all have the same winning move.
No, it's sort of the inverse of composed:
* My team comprises X, Y, and Z
* My team that is composed of X, Y, and Z (or, awkwardly, X, Y, and Z compose my team).
If it were UML, the arrow would go the other way.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The best argument I've ever heard against it is, "Well, it saves a few drops of ink on the printed page."
And yet you place the period inside the quotation marks. Foolish American!
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Apples and oranges.
Tolerating people with vices falls under a different category than tolerating grammar blunders.
Some things in languages are subject to change, yes. Random example: "all things considered" versus "all things considering". While the latter is considered as being incorrect, it is actually correct in some cases, when, let's say, you weigh components of an equation while building your own conclusion. "All things considered" technically refers to your train of thought ending before you draw a conclusion (implying you have enough time to do so), while "all things considering" means that the situation is ongoing and based on current set of events you decide to take *this* course of action.
Language is everchanging, yes, but some of its components need to be represented correctly to eliminate inconsistencies, especially where said inconsistencies might give a totally different meaning to what's being said, effectively corrupting conveyed information. Another reason is more of a personal perception: whoever consistently makes blatant mistakes is much more likely to not respect both themselves and the audience. Shortly put, they're less likely to be trusted by me, not in the "I won't lend you money" sense, but in the "it's riskier to do business with you" sense.
I don't care if the person next to whom I party is less literate but I do care if I am supposed to do business with them. Just today I cut a small deal with a company which sent me an e-mail telling me they extended their offer until 31st of February. This mistake meant (to me) they're prone to overlooking shit. If one can't properly verify a 3 row e-mail, how am I supposed to trust them to properly verify 100K lines of code?
So yes, shortly put it's about self esteem, attention to details and how prepared one is to care about details, learn proper ways of doing things and not mess up because "hey, it happens".
Disclaimer: English is not my native language.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)