User talk:Nlmartisius

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-- Wikinews Welcome (talk) 20:30, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Modifying the transcript

Hello. Thank you for improving the synthesis/writeup of the article, they feel more accurate, yes. However, I noticed you were changing the transcript.

The problem with that is we stick with how things were said. Any new things that we want to add (or if the reporter reaches out to the interviewee and it was later clarified -- basically anything that happened after the interview -- that must put inside square brackets. Anything that you would like to omit, replace the words with "[...]".

For example:

1. "So we wanted to apply this method ZooMS [Zooarchæology by Mass Spectrometry] to look at the — well, to study the collagen in the bone, to then assess what animal these bones came from."
   1. "So we wanted to apply this method ZooMS [Zooarchæology by Mass Spectrometry] to [analyse] the collagen in the bone, to then assess what animal these bones came from."
2. "The initial purpose, really, was just to find out what animals the bone — I was studying..."
   1. "The initial purpose, really, was just to find out what animals the bone [tools came from] — I was studying"
3. "a little more difficult studying bone tools because bone tools are transformed"
   1. "a little more difficult [...] because bone tools are transformed".

It is for editorial reasons. I hope that is okay with you.
•–• 21:42, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Okay, I understand this now. Sorry for any issues. Nlmartisius (talk) 22:23, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

As I understand, you would like to make some changes for the better flow of the article, right? (@Blood Red Sandman, Pi zero: any suggestions for how we can handle this situation?). Once we agree for an acceptable form, we can lift the protection of the page.
•–• 22:26, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Yes, if it is possible I would like to make some changes so the article flows better. Using [] and ... is possible. This way I won't be able to entirely change the transcript. Nlmartisius (talk) 22:38, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

I'll lift the semi-protection, so you'll have edit access again. --Pi zero (talk) 22:43, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Thanks!Nlmartisius (talk) 22:46, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Also, please see this discussion.
•–• 21:46, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Interview transcript

Hi. There may have been a bit of a misunderstanding about the status of the transcript. It's a record of what was said, so there's only limited flexibility for us to alter it. (See acagastya's remark, above.) --Pi zero (talk) 21:55, 10 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi again.

I see you've made quite extensive edits, there. I figure in review of the article I'll strike a balance. I'm looking obviously to do something you're comfortable with (as you can imagine, our guidelines on "OR" —original reporting— emphasize the importance of leaving behind interviewees who perceive themselves to have been treated fairly). But then, besides little technical details of our editorial conventions which presumably won't be a problem, we on Wikinews are also reporting to a general audience (no, I'm not talking about "dumbing down" anything — we expect our general readership to be intelligent in general though not necessarily knowing specific facts), and part of what we're communicating for the reader is something of the character of an interviewee, which is useful information for appreciating where the interviewee is coming from. This isn't, after all, an academic journal in which dry presentation of the facts is the goal; our readership would also want to know what sort of person is involved. Hopefully I can manage both at the same time; my ability to track the academic side of your interests in all this should be aided by (though this rarely appears as a direct advantage on Wikinews) my having a science doctorate myself. --Pi zero (talk) 10:45, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Hi, thank you for the explanation. What you've said makes sense, but at the same time, I wonder if the idiosyncrasies of my speech can get distracting. Truthfully, I wish I had looked into the Wikinews policies beforehand. I would have been much more careful with my word choice and how I answered the questions. I believe I made three main types of edits, I understand if you'll want to undo some of these:

1. I removed some of my idiosyncrasies such as "like", "I mean", "Yeah", "right?". When I read these, I cringe. I have never seen my words transcribed before. From now on, I will likely be much more aware of the way I speak.
2. Sometimes during speech, I will start a sentence but then realize that I should clarify something or interject with an anecdote, and then it might take awhile before I actually finished the sentence I originally started. I found this quite confusing while I was reading, so I made edits for clarity.
3. There were a couple instances where I didn't quite say what I had intended to say, maybe I missed a word or neglected to explain something entirely. In these cases, I added a few words for clarity.

Thanks for your work on this. Nlmartisius (talk) 16:32, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

A couple of thoughts.

• People are mostly not aware of how messy spoken language is, with lots of false starts, and "um"s or the like ("er", "eh", or any number of other such syllables depending on native language and regional usage); I'm aware because I've some side interest in linguistics (I read, and highly recommend, Language Log, and I dabble myself in conlanging though I'm aware that's just not everyone's dish of tea). Because informal comments are so messy, we have some discretion to clean them up, and in this case we hesitated over how much to do; in my first pass through the transcript, which is maybe 75% completed iirc, I was mostly checking for things like words that had been mistranscribed, with very little cleanup, but I do mean to do another pass through it, hopefully a lot less time-consuming than the first. I think I fully appreciate your reaction to seeing how you talk, and I wondered how much to clean it up — almost all the "um"s were filtered out; as you saw, I've been thinking about filtering most of the "like"s; and as for the false-start sentences, well, some I'd already toned down, and, yes, more might be a good idea since there were so many left. But there is a cheerful, enthusiastic tone to this interview that would also be a shame to lose through over-polishing. I'm reminded of a remark about Alonzo Church, that he spoke in complete paragraphs. (Some advice I heard a few years ago, from iirc a professor about how to give brown-bag physics lectures: you can't possibly convey all the technical intricacies of your research topic in the small time available, they said, so don't try; instead, tell why your topic is exciting. If you can do that, interested grad students can approach you after the lecture to ask about the technical stuff.)
• I'll have to give some further thought to what we can do in the way of clarifications, probably considering them on a case-by-case basis. We are on the one hand giving a journalistic account of what happened in an interview, and on the other hand we're informing people about the topic of the interview and certainly don't want to fail in that mission either.

--Pi zero (talk) 17:39, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

I fully appreciate what you're doing here. I look forward to seeing how it comes together. Nlmartisius (talk) 19:19, 11 June 2020 (UTC)

Many thanks for helping with original reporting this year. Happy New Year. --Gryllida (talk) 20:52, 1 January 2021 (UTC)