This message was sent to Glen Gordon at his blog called Paleoglot on about Nov. 2, 2008. I haven't figured out how to link to it yet, so I have just put a copy of the message up here. It describes yet another breakdown on the Proto-Indo-European religion page at Wikipedia. In this case the Wikipedia administrators have mangled the PIEr page supposedly because they thought it was plagiarizing Carlos Quiles' book. It's difficult to believe they could have been so stupid. Actually Carlos Quiles plagiarized the first half of his book off of Wikipedia, paragraph by paragraph, whether the GNU license makes that legal or not. The rest of his book is nonsense in which he is trying to invent a new language for all Europeans to learn. I'm sure they'll go for that.

I was googling Carlos Quiles (a name you will remember) and I wandered into your blog.

omigod, an actual linguist. I hope to read more of your site, I might actually enjoy it, having slogged through reams o' dreck on the net and elsewhere.

Anyway, I thought you might think this was funny. I've been rewriting a page on Wikipedia (a name you will remember) called Proto-Indo-European religion and they've shut down the actual page ("they" being Dieter Bigot Bachmann) rather than let anyone who knows anything about PIE or religion post anything on it, so I'm posting the PIEr page on other pages on Wikipedia now. They are not handling this well. In the meantime netkooks are vandalizing the page with gibberish about a cosmic thunderer.

Be that as it may, I check the PIEr page periodically to see if anyone has anything useful to add to it, and lo and behold, someone (possibly posting as "Limeton") put a note on there that the Wik page was violating copyright by quoting from Carlos Quiles without crediting him. So Mr. Limeton very helpfully went through the PIEr page and footnoted every sentence that was also found in Mr. Quiles' book which is on the internet in all its glory, and is available for sale through Amazon. The link to Mr. Quiles's chapter on PIE religion is linked from the PIEr page, but it's too complicated for me to carry the link in here (I'm sure you're dying to read it). Anyway Mr. Limeton apparently failed to notice that Mr. Quiles had lifted his chapter on PIEr bodily off of the wikipedia page, probably before the summer of 2007, which is when I dumped the Fantalov reduction (a fringe theory that sat on the PIEr page for months). Mr. Quiles' book wasn't copyrighted until 2007, whereas the PIEr page had been up in substantially the same form for several years (I'm too lazy to check). So now the PIEr page has millions of little footnotes documenting every sentence or half sentence which remains on the wik site and is also found in Mr. Quiles' book. How helpful! In the meantime anyone who suspects that Mr. Quiles may have violated copyright, if not the most miminal standards of scholarship, need not worry, because he has solved that problem by printing the entire GNU license at the end of his book. I was actually looking for references (ha, ha!).

So how many assholes does it take to screw up a wikipedia page? Quite a few, apparently!