WALS data in Science and Nature

[Martin Haspelmath]

It's really nice to see data from the World Atlas of Language Structures 
being used by quantitative historical linguists again in a prominent place:

Atkinson, Quentin D. 2011. Phonemic Diversity Supports a Serial Founder 
Effect Model of Language Expansion from Africa. /Science/ 332(6027). (15 
April, 2011). (http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346)

However, neither the Dunn et al. article published in Nature yesterday 
nor the Atkinson article published in Science today cite the authors 
from whose work they took their data in the articles themselves. They 
just say:

-- "Information on word order typology was derived partly from the World 
Atlas of Language Structure[s] database" (Dunn et al.)
-- "using data on vowel, consonant, and tone inventories taken from 504 
languages in the World Atlas of Language Structures" (Atkinson)

This goes against the WALS editors' explicit request on the first page 
of WALS Online (http://wals.info/):

"It is important to cite the specific chapter that you are taking your 
information from, not just the general work "WALS Online" (Haspelmath et 
al. 2008), unless you are citing data from more than 25 chapters 
simultaneously."

It is true that both articles list Matthew Dryer's and Ian Maddieson's 
WALS chapters in the supporting/supplementary materials, but this is not 
enough. Dryer and Maddieson spent decades assembling this information, 
so their names need to be mentioned prominently. (I should say that this 
problem has arisen quite a few times with other articles, also articles 
published much less prominently in linguistics journals. I am just using 
this opportunity to remind everyone of the way the WALS editors would 
like to see WALS data cited.)

I fear that if our colleagues don't respect the citation etiquette, then 
in the future people may be less willing to make the results of their 
efforts over many years freely available to everyone.

As typologists, we should see these prominent articles as an incentive 
to supply even more cross-linguistic information in a way that can be 
interpreted with sophisticated quantitative methods.

Greetings,
Martin Haspelmath


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