There have been quite a few newspaper and online articles recently reporting that Wikipedia’s‘s growth rate is slowing. These have taken a pretty alarmist approach. One of the articles linked to above is headlined, ‘Is Wikipedia a slow death?’. Another hypothesises that an increase in ‘editorial control’ over entries may be putting people off.
Powerchex, a pre-employment screening company, has informed the world (via the Guardian) that under-21s ‘told 29% more lies on job applications this year than last’.
Leaving aside potential conflicts of interests arising from companies who sell services conducting research into the extent of need for those services, this headline sounds a bit odd. That’s because it is.
Let’s do the linguistics first. ’29% more lies’ is a phrase made up of an adverbial phrase (’29%’), and adjectival/determining phrase (‘more’) and a noun phrase (‘lies’). The whole phrase is the object of the transitive verb ‘told’. (We’ll ignore ‘on job applications this year than last’ for now.)
Clearly today is a bad day for the public understanding of simple numbers.
Could the author(s) of this article (headline: ‘I don’t: number of ‘gay weddings’ plummets’) please look up the term ‘backlog’.
Not that you need look far, since despite the headline the reason is given by Peter Tatchell halfway through the article.
‘After civil partnerships were legislated there was a huge surge of couples who had been together for decades who suddenly wished to take advantage of the legal recognition.’
The Guardian has been getting itself into a muddle over its reporting of the Sats results.
At 11.49 this morning it published a version of its story to the RSS feed on its website which contained the following lines:
Of the 600,000 pupils who took the tests, 72% did not reach level 4, compared to 71% last year. This means they cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide in their heads, or write extended sentences using commas.
An hour or so later, when I checked the website itself, this had been amended (my emphasis):