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Dear Subscribers and Readers, 
 
We are now well into the academic year, when many linguistics students have 
undoubtedly been clicking away on their well-worn bookmark to Wikipedia to 
check out topics for their class assignments. And what a wealth of 
information there is for them to consult. Were you aware that there are 
already hundreds and hundreds of Wikipedia pages and articles, each with 
numerous links to other articles and subfields, for the field of 
linguistics alone! 
 
As you may recall, The LINGUIST List started a "Wikipedia Update Project" 
in mid-June in response to a pledge we had made to you to organize such an 
effort. We reasoned that those who might be in the best position to 
make any corrections and additions would be you, our community of 25,000 
scholars and readers that make up the readership of LINGUIST. A recent 
chronicler of the Wikipedia phenomenon has suggested that academics need to 
accept its open-based collaborative model and view further contributions to 
it as a unique form of community service scholarship: "We are in a position 
to contribute to the construction of individual articles in a uniquely 
positive way by taking the time to help clean up and provide balance to 
entries in our professional areas of interest" (Daniel Paul O'Donnell, If I 
were "You": How Academics Can Stop Worrying and Learn to Love "the 
Encyclopedia that Anyone Can Edit." The Heroic Age. Issue 10, May 2007; 
http://www.heroicage.org). 
 
We are more than half-way through the time we had set aside for this 
project, which is to the end of December 2007. While we have made some 
headway, we have frankly not received as great a response from volunteers 
as we had hoped for. In our last update call, we drew your attention to 
Wikipedia's own pages of article "stubs" in the subfields of morphology, 
phonetics, syntax, and, earlier, biographies of linguists. Would any of our 
readers be willing to check out such flagged stubs as, e.g. benefactive 
case, continuant, dependency grammar, and Ilse Lehiste, currently listed in 
those pages? 
 
The target of today's letter is sociolinguistics. Please consider the short 
list of stub articles under sociolinguistics that is appended to this 
message,noted with their Wikipedia URLs and a short explanation of what is 
needed. 
 
To edit any Wikipedia page, click on the link, “Edit this article,” located 
at the top of the screen. After you have typed in your changes and saved 
them, the new text will become immediately available to other online 
readers. Please keep in mind Wikipedia’s guidelines, found at: 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Five_pillars 
 
And please be sure to let us know of any editing activities you do on 
behalf of our Wikipedia Update Project. We will even help you post it to 
Wikipedia if you send us the text. 
 
In the meantime, we gratefully acknowledge the contributions of the 
following people who have provided these latest updates to linguistics 
articles: 
--Biolinguistics - addition by Anna-Maria Di Sciullo, University of Québec 
at Montréal 
--List of linguists - additions by Oliver Steven, SIL 
--R.M.R. Hall - created by Procrastinatrix 
--Yaghan language - updated by Jess Tauber, Oakland, NJ 
--Tamil language - updated by Sanford Steever and E. Annamalai 
--Rochelle Lieber - created by Patricia Irwin, New York University 
 
You are welcome to track the overall progress of our collective efforts at: 
 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Linguistlist 
 
As always, the LINGUIST List is grateful for your continued participation 
in the Wikipedia Update Project. We would be delighted to hear from you if 
you have any questions or points of discussion to share. Please contact us 
at: hannahlinguistlist.org, or roxanalinguistlist.org. 
 
Best regards, 
Roxana Ma Newman and Hannah Morales 
 
SOCIOLINGUISTIC STUBS 
Apparent-time hypothesis (incomplete--empty links: age graded variation, 
real-time): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apparent-time_hypothesis 
 
Code shifting (incomplete): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_shifting 
 
Decreolization (incomplete--empty link to Keith Whinnom): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decreolization 
 
Dialect levelling (incomplete): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialect_levelling 
 
Dialectology (incomplete--section on data collection methods): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dialectology 
 
Diaphone (incomplete): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaphone_%28linguistics%29 
 
Diaspora language (incomplete--references missing): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diaspora_language 
 
Jargon code (incomplete): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jargon_code 
 
Language convergence (incomplete): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_convergence 
 
Language merger (incomplete--references missing): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_merger 
 
Linguistic divergence (incomplete): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_divergence 
 
Mergant dialect (incomplete): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mergant_dialect 
 
Real-time hypothesis (article missing) 
 
Sociolect (incomplete): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sociolect 
 
Sound change (incomplete--references missing): 
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sound_change 
 
Variable vs variant (in sociolinguistics) (article missing) 
 
Variationist sociolinguistics (article missing)