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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:<br>
<br>
<div class="csl-bib-body" style="line-height: 1.35; padding-left:
2em; text-indent: -2em;">
<div class="csl-entry">Atkinson, Quentin D. 2011. Phonemic
Diversity Supports a Serial Founder Effect Model of Language
Expansion from Africa. <i>Science</i> 332(6027). (15 April,
2011). (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346">http://www.sciencemag.org/content/332/6027/346</a>)<br>
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<br>
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:<br>
<br>
– "Information on word order typology was derived partly from the
World Atlas of Language Structure[s] database" (Dunn et al.)<br>
– "using data on vowel, consonant, and tone inventories taken from
504 languages in the World Atlas of Language Structures" (Atkinson)<br>
<br>
This goes against the WALS editors' explicit request on the first
page of WALS Online (<a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://wals.info/">http://wals.info/</a>):<br>
<br>
"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."<br>
<br>
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.)<br>
<br>
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. <br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Greetings,<br>
Martin Haspelmath<br>
<br>
<br>
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