Why is Wikipedia in Ancient Greek and Simple French still rejected in spite of both having a strong support base?

The Wikimedia Language committee clamped down on “dead” languages and artificial languages quite ferociously, after an initial laissez-faire period. Because initially you could set up a Wikipedia in any language you liked, Latin, Old English, Gothic, and Old Church Slavonic got in. Because the Wikimedia Language Committee clamped down, Ancient Greek got rejected even though the proposal for it was far advanced.

Requests for new languages/Wikipedia Ancient Greek

This discussion was created before the implementation of the Language proposal policy, and it is incompatible with the policy. Please open a new proposal in the format this page has been converted to (see the instructions). Do not copy discussion wholesale, although you are free to link to it or summarise it (feel free to copy your own comments over). — {admin} Pathoschild 20:12, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Same goes for Ido and Volapük and Lojban, which got in before (Esperanto would be hard to argue against), and Toki Pona or Klingon, which didn’t make it. Klingon being a pop culture conlang, it attracted disproporionate negative attention, including Wales personally wielding the axe against it:

History of the Klingon Wikipedia

In August 2005, Jimbo Wales made a decision to lock the Klingon Wiki permanently. While Jimbo has never publicly stated his exact rationale for closing the wiki, the maturation of Wikipedia and its sister projects as a whole into a vital worldwide resource meant that there was little incentive to keep a niche language that was not intended to be seriously used. Other constructed languages such as the Toki Pona language were closed at about the same time (although the Toki Pona Wikipedia, like the Klingon Wikipedia, was ultimately hosted at Wikia due to the presence of a strong community).

In fact, the Klingon letter r was removed from the Wikipedia logo in 2010, replaced by a Ge’ez character.

Old logo; Klingon <r> top right.

New logo

Answered 2017-04-29 · Upvoted by

Lyonel Perabo, B.A. in History. M.A in related field (Folkloristics)

… An explanation

Mills Baker’s answer to Why should designers work at Quora?

Product Design Manager at Quora (2016-present)

If you’re working on an unsolved problem that depends heavily on design, you’ll structure your organization and roles to empower design. This is as true at Quora today as it’s been historically at Apple, with some key distinctions relating to the types of products we make. For us, empowerment means a few things specifically:

  • Design reports to the CEO, not to a non-design product executive
  • Design is deeply involved in both company and product / team strategy
  • Design at Quora is optimized for speed and autonomy, so we can learn extremely rapidly and can’t be blocked by the necessity for endless consensus building; thus designers at Quora code
  • Functional groups at Quora take one another seriously: designers aren’t handed “product ideas” and told to draw UIs for them
  • We work to make design ever-faster and easier, building new abstractions that simplify work in the product (on both native and mobile)

Designers at Quora can conceive of ideas, build them in the product, test them in our Analysis Framework on millions of users live, and can ship to production at their speed.

Designers Will Code by David Cole on Emesis

Director of Design at Quora

The fact that these components all stay current with live data automates a lot the engineering work. If a designer is making a form that submits an answer to a question, the existing list of answers will show the submission as soon as it’s posted, without anyone writing new code telling it to update. This means that changes on the interaction or visual level usually require no engineering support whatsoever. And because we run constant deployment, and designers can push to production, a Quora designer can make changes and see them live on the site in minutes.

Are you happy with Quora’s decision to remove the “followed by X, Y, Z, and N other people you follow” from people’s profiles?

I am happy for one reason only:

I called it. Two months ago:

Nick Nicholas’ answer to What’s the next useful and perfectly good feature that Quora is going to do away with?

Wild speculation:

*touch wood* Blogs.

[…]

The current trend though, is away from social media functionality, and has been deemphasising your followers. So:

Less Wild speculation:

In the display of your followers, or the mouseover display of a user: the followers you have in common.

It’s the last piece of the puzzle: MVW badges and TW quills have already been taken away from the former.

EDIT: Yes, Quora has put the mutual followers field back.

For now.

How can Quora deal with false reports?

By having human beings review reports before acting on them.

Human beings that are prepared to evaluate the context of a report.

Not going to happen of course.

Absent dealing with any false reports at the first tier of moderation, we are left with using Appeal, escalating to a second tier of moderation. (There clearly is one, since sanctions do get rescinded.)

See: [My italics]

Tatiana Estévez’s answer to If one sees a clear BNBR contravention by one Quora user on another (but is not personally involved) should one report it?

Expecting complete strangers to understand when telling someone to ‘f-off’ is an insult or friendly banter doesn’t make sense on a site as big as this. Expecting moderators to read a long thread and try to judge the tone is not reasonable, judging sarcasm online is notoriously difficult without context.

Marc Bodnick’s answer to Will Quora Moderation explain why a particular user was banned?

  • Our moderation process emphasizes rule-based decisions that are fair and consistent. Every moderation decision on the site must be based on an existing policy. All we care about are policies; we don’t make decisions based on the substantive nature of the content that a user has published.

And for claims of false reporting, see:

In your opinion, do most people who think they are too smart to get arrested end up getting away with their crimes?

I will instead volunteer Lt. Columbo’s opinion. From the pilot episode.

You’re probably right. He sounds just too clever for us. What I mean is, you know, cops, we’re not the brightest guys in the world. Of course, we got one thing going for us: we’re professionals. I mean, you take our friend here, the murderer. He’s very smart, but he’s an amateur. I mean, he’s got just one time to learn. Just one. And with us, well, with us, it’s – it’s a business. You see, we do this a hundred times a year. I’ll tell ya, Doc. That’s a lot of practice. Prescription: Murder (TV Movie 1968)

(They hadn’t quite worked out the lack of grooming in the pilot episode.)

Is Quora, like high school, a popularity contest?

I see an answer here from 2010. Plus ça change, plus ça reste la même chose.

Yes. In fact, recent UX changes—suppressing upvote counts in the feed, suppressing visibility of Most Viewed Writer—are (presumably) an attempt to mitigate this.

Yes, people upvote answers by very popular Quora users, regardless of whether they are any good or not. Yes, people upvote answers that show up from popular users in their feed, without scrutinising whether someone else came up with a better answer. Yes, there is a widespread perception of cliquishness and high school behaviour among Quora writers—and if you google, you’ll see that perception was in place among writers about Quora in tech journals, as far back as 2010 and 2011, even before the Quill.

*shrug* Like I say. Quora, seven years on, is making a stab at mitigating that.

What is said at Greek funerals?

Constantinos Kalampokis’ answer to What is said at Greek funerals? covers everything that happens at a funeral; but I’m assuming the question is particularly after what the condolence formula is.

Both Greek and Turkish are notorious in linguistics for having a formulaic expression for just about every occasion; it’s part of good social behaviour that you’re expected to come up with the right formula for the right occasion. Hence the proverbial expression for someone tactless: Πάρ’ τονα στο γάμο σου να σου πει «και του χρόνου», “Take this guy to your wedding, and he’ll wish you ‘Many Happy Returns!’”

In funerals, the formulaic expression is ζωή σε λόγου σας “life to you” (where λόγου σας “your word” is an old circumlocution for “you”, cf. “your lordship”). https://www.translatum.gr/forum/… offers the alternatives ζωή σε σας “life to you”, and να ζήσετε/ζείτε να τον/τη θυμάστε “may you live/keep living, so that you can keep remembering him/her” (i.e. may his/her memory survive in you).

Τα συλλυπητήριά μου “my condolences” is a more formal, stiff expression; I doubt you’d use it with friends. Κουράγιο “(have) courage!” is also heard, to acknowledge the hardship of family members.

I have a lot of time for the expression Να είναι ελαφρύ το χώμα που θα τον σκεπάσει “may the soil that covers him be light”. But that’s not used at funerals, it’s a valediction typically used for famous people.

What is the origin of the scientific name of the apple tree “malus”?

This has been answered already, I’ll just answer it more anecdotally.

Indo-European has two words for apple, that show up in different daughter branches:

  • *h₂ébōl shows up in Germanic (… apple), Celtic, Balto-Slavic, and probably Hittite šam(a)lu- ‘apple tree’
  • *méh₂lom shows up in Greek (Doric mālon, Attic mēlon), Latin (mālum), Albanian (mollë), and Hittite maḫla ‘apple’

This has been a puzzle for Indo-Europeanists.

  • Some Indo-Europeanists have assumed the genuine Indo-European word was *h₂ébōl, and *méh₂lom was a pre-Greek loanword.
  • Some Indo-Europeanists have assumed that Indo-European had split up into northern and southern dialects, and dialects are allowed to have different words for the same thing—without one word being necessarily more Indo-European than the other.
  • This was news to me: Proto-Indo-European phonology – Wikipedia says that some Indo-Europeanists have tried to unify the two forms as *h₂eml-:
    • *h₂eml- > *h₂ebl- > *h₂ébōl
    • *h₂eml- > *meh₂l- > *méh₂lom
  • EDIT: And add the speculation by Guus Kroonen in On the origin of Greek μῆλον, Latin mālum, Albanian mollë and Hittite šam(a)lu- ‘apple’ that *méh₂lom, which he reconstructs as *smh₂l, is related to proto-Kartvelian (as in Georgian) *msxal- ‘pear’.

So much for apple. What’s the story with mălus ‘evil’?

As others have pointed out, the vowel in malus is short; so whatever it’s derived from, it’s not going to be derived from *méh₂lom (where the laryngeal h₂ serves to lengthen the preceding vowel).

malus – Wiktionary

From Proto-Italic, related to Oscan mallom and mallud (“bad”). Originally associated with Ancient Greek μέλας (mélas, “black, dark”), but support for this is waning. Perhaps from the same Proto-Indo-European root as Avestan [math]unicode{x10B28}unicode{x10B00}unicode{x10B0C}unicode{x10B2D}unicode{x10B0C}unicode{x10B0C}unicode{x10B00}[/math] (mairiia, “treacherous”).

Which means… we don’t know. All we do know is, it is indeed a coincidence. Although yes, it’s a coincidence mediaeval theologians have had a field day with. In fact, it’s likely the reason why Westerners assume the forbidden fruit was an apple: Forbidden fruit. De ligno autem scientiae boni et mali “of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil/apples”. Jewish tradition instead pointed to the fig, the grape, or wheat.