The Dangers of Open Content

gihan_ripper writes "Recently released open movie Elephants Dream found itself in hot water with Catalonians after accidentally using an offensive word instead of 'Català' in the subtitle menu. The cause? Designer Matt Ebb had used Wikipedia to look up the Catalan word for Catalan on a day when the entry had been vandalized. He writes about this experience on the Elephant Dream blog. We may have scoffed at John Seigenthaler over his criticisms of Wikipedia, but it gives us pause for thought when we to heavily on Wikipedia."

Dangers of international content?

I understand the dangers from using wikipedia (and like so many slashdotters have said, for serious work, use it as a starting point, not a source.)

However, this is more about the troubles with doing international work - its hard to understand the sensitivities & languages of multiple (over 30!) cultures. Companies as large as Microsoft [com.com] have made mistakes [theregister.co.uk] like this before, withlout using open content.

a version of Windows XP aimed at Latin American markets asked users to select their gender between "not specified," "male" or "bitch."

As the (google cache) blog author says: [64.233.183.104]

I also hope everyone can see the humour of it, it's a successful prankster joke we should just laugh about and then move on shrugging it off.

*shrug* - not that big a deal, and an internationalisation, not open content problem.

Re:Dangers of international content?

>>I'd go out on a limb and say that any open project can quite easily rustle up competent (and sometimes truly expert) help for any language or localization issue.

I don't think this is an issue. I mean, Elephant's Dream sucked in English and even properly translated would have issues. I think that, if rather than the dialog in the flick they said profane words... it would have been much more watchable.

Proves we could do CGI... and we should figure out scriptwriting.

Re:Dangers of international content?

Why would I trust it as a starting point if I can't trust it as a source?

You shouldn't trust any single source.

Wikipedia is a useful starting point as it will contain pointers (or at least useful search terms) to begin looking for other items to reference. It's no different to any other encyclopedia in that respect.

Surely you don't use a single soruce for information for an important project?

Re:Dangers of international content?

Surely you don't use a single soruce for information for an important project?

I routinely do. But then the source in question is unimpeachable and has stood the test of time and criticism. In fact, in the real world it's very common to rely on single sources, handbooks, references, etc...
 
When writing a program, you don't look up the meaning of a command in three sources do you? When wiring a house, you don't check three different copies of the electrical code. When working on your car, all you need is your Chilton's. Examples abound of routine daily use of single sources.

Re:Dangers of international content?

When writing a program, you don't look up the meaning of a command in three sources do you?

Regularly. And only then do I get a complete description, if not find an error in one.

When wiring a house, you don't check three different copies of the electrical code.

If one, even. Really, if there were multiple versions (not copies) released at the same time, of course I would look at all of them.

When working on your car, all you need is your Chilton's.

And that's exactly why my interior door panel on my old 1993 Grand Am held on for dear life by three screws. Sure it was my fault for not being gentle; but the factory shop manual, I discovered, had a full blown illustration and much more detailed procedure. Chiltons and Haynes both throw five models over ten years into one book, making it useless for anything but drivetrain work. They may as well cut the interior and body work out of their manuals entirely, along with much of the electrical and vacuum system stuff.

Again, if Pontiac made several publications with varying but similar information, I'd want all of them, and I did own both the Haynes and Chiltons manuals, occasionally referring to all of them.

The point is, you really can't trust any source of information unless you've personally witnessed the accuracy of the information (i.e. it's your research, etc.) Information comes from imperfect humans, and you simply can't trust that 100% (if 10% in some cases). That's fundamental, not practical; if it turns out most of the info you research is accurate enough for your needs, which happens most of the time, you'll be okay for the most part.

Wikipedia is ultimately more helpful than it is harmful, but if you choose to use it for a single source of information where it's critical that the information be accurate, you HAVE to double check the info at least, if not simply use it to acquire other sources. Reason: There's no blaming Wikipedia and holding them responsible for your embarassing and possibly consequential mistake in your work.

Re:Dangers of international content?

Did you know that Britannicaresponded to less than half of the mistakes picked up by Nature? And to date Britannica has not fixed any of them? (Wikipedia fixed every last one) And that, of the ones they did respond to, a number of Britannica's responses were laughable. One nature reviewer said that a particular Britannica article on a particular plant genus could apply to any of 10 other genesus. Britannica's response - "It's OK, because we're not an encyclopedia of botany and don't claim to be". In other words, "it's not a bug, it's feature"

Wikipedia grammar?

when we to heavily on Wikipedia

Nuff said.

Re:Wikipedia grammar?

Bad luck, you visited Slashdot the day it was vandalised.

Oops.

I find this funny that it's right on the heels of the new release of Blender article. I believe the saying goes:

If you have an open mind, people will throw a lot of garbage into it.

Slashdot is good for something

We appear to have slashdotted the blog. Can we have more of these articles please?

And to stay remotely on topic - don't publish ANYTHING that you've obtained from ANYWHERE as a single source bit of information. Research. Research and re search again.

well...

it doesn't seem like this is too bad a problem... still, it does show you I guess that Wikipedia can't always be trusted and maybe shouldn't be in a professional setting. Of course it might show that it is important to double check any source because nothing is infallible

All this really does

is show the importance of checking multiple sources, especially when you are relying on it for something important! However, I believe that Wikipedia is already looking at a stable version, in which a stable and unstable branch of the project are maintained with the unstable changes merged in reguarly. This would remove problems like this one, for the most part anyway.

Is Wikipedia really wrong on this?

I ask because oddly the Catalan Wikipedia uses "català," and the English Wikipedia uses "català" on the sidebar to direct you to the Catalan equivalent of an article. I can't access the article because it's Slashdotted. Is it really wrong, and why?

Native speakers needed

I have always believed that when you need something translated into a language you need to have a native speaker at least review what you have done. So many companies have screwed this up to the point that things like japanese/english is a standing joke.

If you are going to devote so much effort to producing a product (closed or open source), then why the hell do you piss around with half arsed guesses as to how to translate text?

On the other hand I did have an interesting time with a russian girl once. We were using a dictionary to converse by pointing at words and reading off our native langueages. The trouble was that I missed the context of "to like" which in the sense she was using it had elements of "to love". End result was that it cost me 8 hours, a bottle of champagne, chocolates and a taxi ride home for her ;-)

Fact-checking and Wikipedia

Frankly, Mr. Ebb should have known better. As a copy editor at what may be the most prestigious college paper [dailytexanonline.com] in the U.S., I can attest to Wikipedia's occasional (though not pervasive) errors. Because of these, I have a standing policy of referring to Wikipedia only for corroboration, not confirmation. Anyone who fact-checks - for a living or otherwise - should already have in mind things like source bias, credibility, etc.

is open content the real problem?

I'm catalan. And I can say that lately there's been a lot of hatred against our nation pushed by some spanish political parties (Yet I don't to turn this into a political discussion). This problem appeared because of a vandalized entry in wikipedia, but could also have appeared if a person had modified the film or written it wrong from the start, so the problem here is not the reliance on open content, but the reliance on people's goodness, which in the open [content, source, ...] is mostly there, but can be displaced by some feelings, most of them learnt and fueled since childhood. But the same thing's been happening throughout the history. Surely if you looked on recognized encyclopedias some time ago, a lot of entries about slaves would be unaccpetable by today standards. The same happens over conquered soil after a war, when the losers become the vermin that had to be erradicated and the winners the saviors of the people (and usually end up being as bad as those they overthrew). And many other examples could be given. So the problem here is the open content or close-minded people?

WikiMapia and the potential for spying/stalking

I pondered a similar question when it came to marking schools on WikiMapia - Does the benefits to students/moms being able to pinpoint their child's school for their own mapping purposes justify the risk in pointing out these locations to potential paedos and other child predators?

I decided to take solace in the fact anyone that serious would have already mapped it themselves rather than depend on an open-source map ganked from Google in the first place.

De-vandalized

Just for your info, guys: I just visited the article and removed the offensive terms, also leaving a small explanative note about the term itself just in case someone hears it again knows what it is all about.

A_10_es: si et plau, dóna-li una ullada quan puguis, a veure si m'he deixat alguna cosa. Gràcies.
[A_10_es: please, give it an eyeball when you have a moment, to see if I forgot something. Thank you.]

That was a sample of Catalan language; will somebody give me a +1=Informative? ;-)

Re:De-vandalized

Just for your info, guys: I just visited the article and removed the offensive terms, also leaving a small explanative note about the term itself just in case someone hears it again knows what it is all about.

You edited a version from April 7th and therefore you overwrote all the edits people have made over the last three months. You also managed to miss about 10 stray "Polacos" scattered through your old starting version of the article. The article was reverted and had no "Polacos" at all, but it now seems to have been reverted to your version again.
I hope you will have a long and happy relationship with Wikipedia, and get an account there

Proofreading?

Isn't this more of a case study of not proofreading the final product rather than relying on an unreliable source? The list of names could have been emailed to all the translators first before finalizing the DVD.

Joeri and thousands of screaming fans here were rightfully pestering me to get it done as fast as possible,

I think I found the real problem.

Obligatory comment

lol Pwned! :P

Been there, done that...

I do a fair bit of international coding. Problem is, I am not fluent in many of the languages I am building software. When putting together my language bundles, I always have someone do a quick walkthrough of the application who knows the language and context. You cannot count on software to give you a proper translation. Last year I was building some portlets for a French company. I added navigation and hit the fish to translate some of the finishing touches. I added a 'back' button - only to find the word I used was a person's back (not return to the previous step) in my i18n resource bundle.

How do they say - nothing is as permanent as that which was deemed temporary? Not uncommon for stuff like this to not get checked by QA.

Stability==delay

It would be much better if there would be agreed stable version for each Wikipedia entry, that would be marked as consensus over last three months - most of the vandalities are only occasional, so that stable version would be free of disturbance.

Amateur mistake.

By now, everyone knows that research on spelling, regional colloquialisms, and obscure information is best (and most accurately) satisfied by a visit to MySpace. After all, it's the busiest destination on the web now, and millions of people can't be wrong.

danger of careless people

This is no different than reading something anywhere and then quoting it as fact. The only difference is that wikipedia is not static, and so the errors can change from minute to minute. Therefore this is not a problem with open content, but a problem with dynamic open content.

All of this can be easily solved by fact checking before the distribution of a static content.

I do understand the problem. I can be careless. But when I am I do not blame my carelessness on someone else.

Vandalism isn't just one day

Remember that the Seigenthaler article was tehre for weeks and months. So forget the idea that it's just that people might come across the article on the minute or hour that it had a vandalized version.

For example, the FSLN [wikipedia.org] article has an introduction, and then begins "The FSLN was formally organised in 1961 by recent KGB recruits Carlos Fonseca Amador, Tomás Borge Martínez and Silvio Mayorga." The rest of the article goes on in that sort of tone. I don't know how many people in the world think the main purpose of the FSLN was to establish a satellite of the USSR "two days driving time from Harlingen, Texas", but obviously that is what is considered in this article. Most educated, professional people (at least those outside the US anyhow) in the world would consider this article laughable, and certainly not encylopedic. Microsoft and Encarta, or Encyclopedia Britannica, are not exactly FSLN boosters, but their articles are not silly like this.

This is just one example of many. There is a response that "anyone can edit" and that anyone can just go in and fix it, but that is simply not true. Anyone who edits this article would be descended on by one or more people who believe that, to quote from the article "During the following three years the KGB handpicked several dozen Sandinistas for intelligence and sabotage operation in the United States. In 1966, this KGB-controlled Sandinista sabotage and intelligence group was sent to the U.S.-Mexican border" (you see, the FSLN had nothing to do with conditions in Nicaragua, since the world revolves around the U.S.). So one would waste time on a stalemate for weeks, and ultimately, the admins and ArbCom would back those people up. Once upon a time there were admins or experienced users who would have helped someone tackle this page, but they have been driven off. Jimbo Wales political sympathies have been stated in the past (he ran the Ayn Rand list for years, to give you a clue), and the one appointee to the ArbCom (who he appointed twice, since he couldn't get elected) seemed to be picked only because he edits with a Zionist point of view, he's editing the Lebanon pages currently. Editors with a different political point of view are driven off. The Wikipedia partisans say on Wikipedia there are only "trolls" and "good users" or whatever, but this is more their almost cult-like Manicheanism then reality. The "Criticism of Wikipedia" page forbids links to pages critical of Wikipedia like Wikipedia Review. If Wikipedia is so "open", why do Arbitration Committee members zealously defend the "Criticism of Wikipedia" page from links to a forum of people critical of Wikipedia? Like many others, I have given up on Wikipedia. Unlike most people who grew tired of Wikipedia's nonsense, I continue to edit on alternative wiki encyclopedias. I also post to Wikipedia Review as well.

Part of the issue is the name

The name ending in -pedia has the inherent danger of legitimizing the content therein.

If wikipedia was to be renamed "Jimmy's Big Bumper Box of Trivia, Factoids, Lies, Rants, Memes and Cock and Bull Stories" (or something more serious, perhaps)it might give more of an accurate picture of the integrity of some of the data.

Out of curiosity does anyone have a figure for the number of wikipedia pages that have a panel questioning the veracity of the data, or neutrality of the same? It seems to be about one in every 2 or 3 that I visit. I don't know whether this is a quality of submission issue or a overzealotry of moderation issue, or (most likely) a bit of both.

I regularly use and do enjoy wikipedia as a source for trivial information, but I am concerned that people take it far too seriously as a source for important data. I guess most folks on /. have been to University and can be discerning over data, but most people in the World haven't been there and they might be more inclined to trust information that just looks correct.

People trust encyclopedias, if the name was changed this might be less of an issue.

Scoff at Seigenthaler?

Why scoff at Seigenthaler? I met the man a few months ago, and we discussed his history with Wikipedia. He was very level-headed and reasonable about the whole thing. He acknowledged it's an interesting social experiment, but was very worried for what it can do to the reputations of good people if taken seriously as an information source.

It's worth noting that Seigenthaler DID eventually track down the malicious poster. Seigenthaler's an adamant free-speech advocate (and a head-honcho muckety-muck at the First Amendment Center), with an extreme distaste for libel and slander laws - he'd rather see lies and mischaracterizations flushed out through the marketplace of ideas. So he didn't sue, but he did go on TV and demand an apology from the malicious poster. That seems like a reasonable thing to me; the poster embarrassed Seigenthaler through his lies, and Seigenthaler embarrassed the poster through a demand for truth.

Seigenthaler also told me that when the poster's boss threatened to fire the poster, Seigenthaler called and asked the boss not to; he said the matter was settled was the truth was on the record.

He said the incident pushed and strained his belief in the marketplace of ideas, and that he was awfully tempted to go ahead with a libel suit. I'm glad ultimately he stayed true to his core values.

Authors and Authority

The problem is not "open content", Wikipedia, or vandals. The problem is people who rely on a single unaccountable source for any knowledge. That is a recipe for failure.

This has also been the problem with "authoritative" sources, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, NY Times or White House Spokesman. Those sources are highly managed, consciously or unconsciously, so they don't usually go as obviously haywire. Instead they mislead to usually workable misconceptions. In the service of the writer/speaker or the organization that produces/publishes them.

Now that the world is finally filling with lots of smalltime publishers, as publishing has become so cheap, easy and scaleable, we're all seeing the limits of sources. So we all must learn what the past publishers learn: power of the press belongs to people with presses, and power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. The only way to handle the corruption is to match power against power, cross-reference information from independent (of each other) sources.

Wikipedia will be even better when it includes an independent "fact checking" feature, like automated Google/Yahoo/MSN searching of citations. Until then, its superior power to managed press is just raw power that requires users to do that for ourselves.

Quickie Mart

Why aren't changes highlighted, or otherwise made glowing neon fucking {INSERT COLO[U]R HERE} for the first X days after the change is made ?

apologize, repair, move on

Seriously, you got caught in some asshole's juvenile prank. Defacing a public resource (wikipedia) to reflect an immature joke at the expense of the next person to use that resource.

    So apologise, repair the mistake, and move on. Just because some jerk doesn't understand the usefullness of an open source public resource doesn't change the utility of that resource. And anyone who is 'offended' by the prank needs to understand this. This is like sueing the streetcar company for racism because some pissant spray-painted a racist remark on a streetcar. The correct response is to find the person responsible if possible, and if not, then to teach your own children why civilized people don't do such things.

Use more than one source

"... it gives us pause for thought when we to heavily on Wikipedia."

  If someone uses only one source for their information they deserve what they get!

  The fact the page was vandalized on one day doesn't mean Wikipedia is inferior either, it would have been corrected. One error doesn't mean the end of the World.

Be more careful

An interesting tidbit: Not that I'm trying to place blame here, but if Mr. Ebb had been really careful, he would've noticed an inconsistency in the defaced Wikipedia page: The correct term, "Català", had been replaced with "Polaco" (whatever that means). However, if you look at the "in other languages" box at the left hand side, you'll notice that the cross-reference to the catalan Wikipedia site still points to the correct term, "Català".

From what I've seen, Wikipedia vandalism is almost always very blatant. And even in more subtle cases like this one, you can find evidence of the defacement even when you don't know much about the subject matter to begin with.

Unfortunately, when consulting Wikipedia you *have* to be alert and watch for this sort of thing. That doesn't make it any less of an invaluable resource however. Plus, as others have pointed out, it's generally a mistake to rely on any single source exclusively... although I'll admit that in the case of a quick lookup for a translation like this one, it's hard to sustain that kind of diligence.

Oh no! Don't rely on it!

When I use a dictionary, I use it as a source, not a starting point. Most peoples' use of encyclopaedias is as a reference, not a starting point. I agree that senior or college students writing theses or essays would be well advised to look further than one encyclopaedia entry, but for the vast majority of uses, most people want to go to one place and find the answer, AND THAT'S WHAT ENCYCLOPAEDIAS WERE DESIGNED FOR!

Alas, I see Wikipaedia as the strange case of the mediocre being the enemy of the good. It (and the 'net in general) is killing off the other mass-market compilations of information, and the quality will never be as good, for fundamentally structural reasons.

great design for *starting* an encyclopedia

This is a good example of a more general problem with WP, which is that the design was optimized for getting an encyclopedia off the ground initially, not for maintaining it in the long-term. It's analogous to an internet startup company that kludges up their software real quick using Visual Basic code, lots of gotos, and no comments; what they care about is getting it working initially, so they can make their IPO.

A lot of people don't realize that WP's design emerged after an initial period of uncertainty and experimentation over what model to use. There were alternative models, like Nupedia's [wikipedia.org], but they failed mainly because they were too cumbersome for new writers to get involved in.

My experience as a WP editor over the last few years has been that in the early stages, both the number and quality of the articles improved rapidly, but that within the last year or so, there have started to be severe quality problems. In the early stages, the problems came from not having enough users. For instance, the early versions of the article on astrology were ridiculously credulous, and when I tried to make it more balanced, I couldn't make any progress, because there were only roughly three of us working on the article, and the other two were true believers. I gave up on the article, but when I came back and looked at it again in a couple of years, the problem had been pretty well corrected, presumably because the continuing influx of new users made it impossible for a couple of fanatical true believers to continue using the article to push their POV.

But recently, there's the opposite problem. There are so many people editing WP that it's become virtually impossible to keep a good article good. It's an interesting exercise to look at an article that became a featured article, say, a year ago, and compare its quality then with its quality now. In most cases, you'll find that it's gotten worse because of lots of random, uncoordinated edits by people who may have a POV to push, or who may just not be very knowledgeable.

WP's design is an exteme design, going about as far as it's possible to go toward openness and ease of use. I don't think that design is working at this stage in WP's evolution, which is why I've mostly stopped editing on WP.

Well, how about...

... factorizing the review process and the data creation process? Why do we always set up projects in a singular manner instead of using the internet's capabilities to the max? Let the data be provided by individuals. And sign their data snippets by some official WikiPedia key through the online WikiPedia site. That way, other (review) authorities could enter easily and the user could have the choice among them.

It's all about choice, isn't it? Well, with WikiPedia, it actually isn't. CHANGE THAT! Support secondary projects! Don't be so selfish.

Wikipedia is too open

Wikipedia is too open. I think it would discourage the vandalism a bit more if it first required logging in as a registered username to make changes. And maybe in addition to that some kind of moderation system could apply to changes made to controversial articles. And a new idea to add would be "rebuttal articles", different than a talk/discussion article, parallels each controversial article where differing points of view can be placed with less limitations.

It's totally worthless.

Between the trolls [www.gnaa.us], complete loons [timecube.com], insane geological theories [nealadams.com], loons [stormfront.org] engaging in revisionist history, bad biological science [jesus-is-savior.com], and racists [kkk.com]. Clearly because some parts of the internet are bad, the entire thing is totally worthless. But if you say this sort of thing, you get shouted down by people who've drunk Tim Berners-Lee's kool-aid. Clearly the logical course of action is to spend my time loudly complaining about how awful the Internet is, how anyone posting content to the web is wasting their time, and how only a web-cultist would claim that even though the web is flawed that there is any value to it.

No different than any other encylopedia

The simple answer is, there is not perfect source. Wikipedia has probably more information than an other and probably growing faster than all the others combined. There are bound to be mistakes made. In addition, since it is open, it allows for all sorts of manipulation (watch the USA politician's stuff over the next 4 months; the shear amount of lies and purposeful deletions on both sides will be astounding). But overall, it is worth have some amount of garbage for access to useful info. But anybody who uses this as a single source is a fool. It should be combined with something like several search engines and even then do not trust it (try looking up the northern border of India or even Israel; It will depend on who is being asked).

Professionalism

Professionals use professional translation services. 'Nuff said.

growing pains

this is the fundamental problem with wikipedia -- and it's unfixable.

as it remained cultish and unknown, this was not a problem, both from the random vandalisation and trust of unfamiliar users standpoints. now, there are multiple issues as people think of it as the equivalent of britannica.

another is this -- it is very difficult, in certain circumstances, for objectivity to survive. i, for example, work in politics. information about a candidate for office in my city is erroneous and biased intentionally. however, i lack the clout within wikipedia to have my corrections upheld by editors -- the candidate's opponent's supporters are merciless about arguing and re-subjectifying the content. there's no recourse.

we've developed a new AOL (new users not understanding the internet and causing and experiencing challenges) -- from the standpoint that wikipedia has grown to the point that users don't know it's not perfect and can be harmful, and there are going to be a number of growing pains as a result.

Other Catalan resources

Leaving aside the general issue of Wikipedia accuracy, Wikipedia isn't the best source of linguistic information, something for which there are specialized resources. In the case of Catalan, there is DACCO (Diccionari Anglès-Català de Codi Obert) [catalandictionary.org], an open source bilingual dictionary project. DACCO allows users to contribute, but via a more controlled process than just letting anybody edit. This approach, of starting with a few experts, having them admit others whom they recognize as responsible and having expertise, and allowing others to make suggestions but not actually edit, may well be the best way to combine openness with accuracy.

For those who know Catalan, the Gran Diccionari de la Llengua Catalana [grec.net] is available on-line.

Why not use your translators?

So he had subject matter experts that were already helping him but he ignored them in favour of using Wikipedia? This sounds more like a breakdown in his process than a problem with Wikipedia. Why didn't he shoot out an email to all of the translators telling them what he was doing and asking for them to email him how the language is written in their own language? At the very least why didn't he email his self-researched list out to all of the translators for review before finalizing things?

Too

but it gives us pause for thought when we to heavily on Wikipedia."

It also gives us pause for thought when we to heavily rely on spell checkers.

5334

This is a little bit like the situation you get with kids and pocket calculators. Eg,

ME: What's 99 - 34?
Boy in Class: 5334?

What I mean to say is that with some knowledge of languages you should be able to guess that the word "Palaco" is never going to be Catalan for 'Catalan'. I mean it's obvious if you think about it isn't it. I would have least checked a second cource if I'd seen that.

Bwa?

Is Wikipedia the definitive source for advice concerning law, or should you seek a lawyer?

Is Wikipedia the definitive source for translations, or should you seek a translator?

Come on people, it's not rocket science! There's no excuse for this, and trying to blame wikipedia is ridiculous, because that's not where you should go, especially for something considered professional.

I18N project?

Is there some project collecting translations for typical words or phrases in programs? Combined with a decent API this could save a lot of work. Such a project would start with the usual suspects like the "Open..." in the File | Open menu item in Spanish and could include more obscure terms like "quantization coefficient" in Swahili if someone cares to translate that.

Whatever other words or phrases a particular project requires its authors will have to translate themselves.

It depends on what editors think is "good enough"

It depends what editors think is 'good enough' for their audience.

I wouldn't trust ANY encyclopedia beyond perhaps its use as a rough outline for further research.

Generally, despite being open to vandalism, I would generally trust Wikipedia more than lets say U.S. Television Network news, cable or broadcast, which feed error to the masses everyday.

There are different levels of feedback and revision flavoring all sources, for a variety of logistic reasons. There are different styles of error, commission and omission, based on these logistics.

My wife is Polish, you insensitive clod!

Apparently, the perjorative word which got used instead of the real word for Catalan actually signifies someone of Polish descent. Something like calling someone a "Polack" in some areas of the US used to be when I was a kid.

How hypocritical is it that people of Catalan culture would consider the name of another culture as "offensive"? Maybe the author who made the mistake should, instead of apologising, replace the word in question with the Catalan word for "BIGOT".

Re:That "offensive" again....

Yea, totally. I mean, what are humans anyway, besides bald monkeys? And what are bald monkeys? Just a bunch of skin, muscles and intestines wrapped around a skeleton full of blood and crap and other offensive smelling and tasting substances. And what are skin, muscles and intestines wrapped around a skeleton full of blood and crap and other offensive smelling and tasting substances? Just a bunch of protons, neutrons and electrons put together. Not only that, but those protons, neutrons and electrons have only two desires: consume and multiply. What a bunch of parasites!

So, lay off that stupid blame game and grow up you nasty sacks of blood and crap and start consuming and multiplying like you're suppose to!

Re:That "offensive" again....

Or, as a friend likes to say when some tells him they're offended by something:

"Why do you choose to be offended?"

Re:That "offensive" again....

Your question was, What is an "offensive" word/concept? But your subsequent argument focused solely on why a word isn't intrinsically offensive. What you failed to address is the fact that words are the manifestation of an idea or an action or something. "Nazi" and "nigger" are just words. But if someone were to call me either of those, I would take offense at the word. Not because my upbringing has trained me to have a Pavlovian response to the phonemes, but because the ideas being expressed by the speaker are counter to my ethical and/or moral framework.