Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2017 February 17

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February 17

Wheel war

So I know what this means on Wikipedia, but I thought that in real life, it came from monster truck battles. As in the trucks would drive over ordinary cars as they raced. The encyclopedia article doesn't mention that at all and only talks about Unix admins fighting. Have I completely made up the bit about monster trucks? --87.21.189.167 (talk) 09:58, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Quite possibly. I can find nothing about the concept in any searches. --Jayron32 18:28, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

A "big wheel" is an old term for someone who runs things. If two of those come into conflict, that could be labeled a "wheel war". At least that's what I've always assumed that term means here. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Baseball Bugs (talk • contribs) 18:32, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

(edit conflict) Wheel war says the term as used among Wikipedia admins arose in the Unix community in Standford before 1983, in reference to the Unix use of "wheel" to refer to privileged users. Monster truck says that these trucks were first made in the late 1970's, so it's entirely possible that whoever started using the phrase at Stanford was picking up an existing phrase. There are no instances of the phrase in either the COCA or COHA corpora; and of the eight instances in GloWbE and the NOW corpora, four seem to be about the trucks you are talking about, and the other four are figurative uses referring to commercial or market competition involving other kinds of wheel (bikes, and Ferris wheels). --ColinFine (talk) 18:36, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

If there was any pop-culture influence on the naming of the "wheel" bit, I'm guessing it might be The Who's first recorded song "I'm the Face" (1964), which had nothing to do with monster trucks... AnonMoos (talk) 03:26, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

On newspapers.com, the term "big wheel" is used at least in the 1850s, apparently referring to the drive wheels of steam locomotives and the like. The term "wheel war" I saw in a 1922 paper about problems with bicyclists. ←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 20:50, 18 February 2017 (UTC)

Traditional vs simplified Chinese?

Is this edit correct? [1] It changes 创新无止境 to 創新無止境 and 贾续福 to 賈續福.

It looks to me like this changes simplified Chinese to traditional, but I could be way off. If so, I think that would be incorrect in an article about a mainland company. Kendall-K1 (talk) 13:25, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Yes, these are changes from simplified to traditional. But I don't think the general approach on Wikipedia is to restrict simplified to mainland subject matter and vice versa - in any case Lenovo operates all around the world, not just in mainland China. I think it would be appropriate to use both here if there's room, but a gratuitous change from simplified to traditional as such is wrong. --165.225.80.115 (talk) 17:30, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Macrofamily

how many and what are language Macrofamily in the world?--2001:B07:6463:31EE:C914:BDEE:35E0:EC5E (talk) 17:29, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

That's highly dependent on the validity of such things as mass language comparison which are controversial among scholars (more accepted among some in related fields than among linguists themselves). AnonMoos (talk) 18:15, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

Also see Lumpers and splitters which discusses some of the controversies in general with language classification schemes. --Jayron32 18:26, 17 February 2017 (UTC)

A macrofamily (as I understand it) is a grouping that includes more than one generally accepted family, so it's controversial by definition; and some of them overlap (and thus conflict). —Tamfang (talk) 06:40, 20 February 2017 (UTC)