Like everyone else, I use Wikipedia all the time to find out about things; and it has a huge amount of incredibly valuable information. However, whenever I look at a page on a topic that I know something about, I generally find the material disappointing (or worse).
The view of most of my fellow academics is, "The material is seriously flawed, so we must avoid it." But my attitude is, "The material is seriously flawed, so we should fix it."
This past week, while I was in Hong Kong, I have been trying to fix the Wikipedia page on Hong Kong English, particularly the section on Segments. Initially, this section was a jumble of stuff on vowels and consonants, sometimes repetitive, much of it simply wrong, and little of it substantiated by suitable references to established research. It was as if various people had overheard snatches of conversation, like the pronunciation of house keeping in my previous post, and they thought "Wow, that's interesting", so they went and put it into the Wikipedia page. And then you get a jumble of complete rubbish.
Anyway, I have now fixed it, mostly totally rewriting it, using a clear structure from consonants to vowels, and providing suitable references throughout. Though I say it myself, I think the revised version is better. Not perfect by any means, but better.
People complain that they change something, and then someone goes and undoes their change. But my experience is that, if everything is properly referenced, nobody will touch it. So far one person has corrected a mismatched quote, but that is all. Let's see how long the rest of it remains intact. I hope that people will continue to contribute to it, but only using properly researched material and not based on haphazard anecdotal data. (And I wish they would indicate who they are — I seem to be the only person who signs my changes using my real name.)
The rest of the article other than the section on Segments is still a real mess (apart from the section on Status, which I added). In particular, the section on Intonation is simply awful. First, it has nothing to do with intonation. Second, it consists of random anecdotal material, almost none of which is supported by references. Third, allophonic transcription is placed within phonemic slashes (e.g. /ˈkʰapʰɛt̚/), which is simply wrong. Allophonic material must be within phonetic square brackets '[]', not phonemic slashes '//'.
If I have the time and energy, I will try to fix it; I'll probably just rewrite it completely. We'll see.
