In the Wikipedia Help page (Help:IPA for English) which serves to explain how WP uses its version of IPA symbols for representing pronunciations there is a large chart which at its bottom right-hand corner has a rather odd section. Superficially, the use of the dot ‘.’ to mark a syllable division is perfectly normal, and we use it in all polysyllabic words in the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary. WP gives an explanatory note which says
 
“Syllables are indicated sparingly, where necessary to avoid confusion, for example to break up sequences      of vowels (Moai) or consonant clusters which an English speaker might misread as a digraph (Vancouveria,   Windhoek).”

In other words, the dot helps the reader interpret the spelling in a way that avoids wrong interpretation of letter-sequences. The transcription of Moai is given a dot to indicate that there is a syllable division after ‘Mo’, and Windhoek has a dot apparently to stop the reader from interpreting ‘dh’ as a single consonant.
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But these examples only show a need for a syllable division when the word is seen in its spelling form. As soon as one looks at the IPA symbols, the possibility of confusion disappears. When Moai is transcribed as /məʊaɪ/ the pronunciation (assuming it is being read by an English speaker) is quite predictable without the need for a dot. I can’t see how ‘Windhoek’ and ‘Vancouveria’, which are transcribed /ˈvɪnt.hʊk/ and /væn.kuːˈvɪəriə/ in this work, could be pronounced any differently if the dot were removed. The most puzzling is the example of Mikey/Myki, where the writer transcribes the former as /maɪki/ while the latter is given a syllable-boundary dot thus: /maɪ.kiː/. I can’t see what purpose the dot serves, as the boundary is bound to occur in the same place in both words.

NOTE: I have now changed the box marked 'Syllabification', and hope that this has made it better. I can't decide whether to go through WP now to eradicate redundant syllable-boundary dots where they have been put in.

I remember how difficult it was, when I was writing the IPA Specimen article on RP for publication in JIPA, to find a speaker who could be widely accepted as an authentic and contemporary RP speaker. Wikipedia has its own problems in this area: in WP's Received Pronunciation article, they chose to include a section titled 'Notable Speakers'. The contents of this section reads as follows: 

John C. Wells, a notable British phonetician, has identified the following people as RP speakers:

     The British Royal Family
     David Cameron, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom
     Boris Johnson, Mayor of London
     Rowan Williams, Former Archbishop of Canterbury
     Rupert Everett,
     Chris Huhne, former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change
     Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury

Notice anything unusual about this list? Yes, they are all male apart from some members of the Royal Family. Some Wikipedian has suggested on the Talk Page that some female names might be added to the list, but as usual it is very hard to come up with the names of speakers who would be recognized by a bona fide phonetician to be RP speakers. The comment on the Talk page reads 'I think the idea of having a list of Notable Speakers of RP is good, and it is essential that every person listed there is referenced. I am unhappy that all those listed are referenced to John Wells, particularly as all seven individuals listed are male. Do any women speak RP apart from members of the British Royal Family?'  

A good question. Anyone who believes in RP is bound to answer 'yes'. But I bet you anything you like that nobody from the phonetics community will bother (or dare) to contribute any names, and will be happy to let this silly list stay as it is.

You probably know that I don't use the term RP in my own work, nor subscribe to its existence as a standard, so I am not a suitable person to propose candidates for the list!

​While reading around the topic of glottalization, I looked at the Wikipedia article on Yorkshire Dialect. For those not familiar with the Yorkshire accent, I should explain that there is a special type of assimilation, called Yorkshire Assimilation by John Wells, which results in a final voiced consonant becoming devoiced when followed by a voiceless consonant. Thus the /d/ at the end of ‘wide’ /waɪd/ becomes /t/ in ‘wide trousers’ as a result of the initial /t/ in the second word; as a result, in most of West Yorkshire you can’t hear a difference between ‘wide trousers’ and ‘white trousers’. Soon after moving to Yorkshire, I got a surprise when I heard a local man in a café in Bridlington order a crab sandwich. It sometimes sounds as if a final voiced plosive becomes either a glottal stop or a glottalized consonant, though I’m not sure about that. I’m pretty sure this process doesn’t apply in the case of final voiced fricatives, but occasionally I think I hear an example in an environment like ‘raise cash’, giving /reɪs kæʃ/.

In the WP article the description of this phenomenon is very brief, and refers only to Malcolm Petyt’s study and not to the Wells Accents of English (pp 366-7). It also cites as an example /æpsəluːtli/ for ‘absolutely’, which though certainly accurate doesn’t sound particularly Yorkshire to me.

Yesterday we went to see the disappointing film of Alan Bennett’s ‘The Lady in the Van’. The character of Bennett’s mother has a go at a West Yorkshire accent, but gets it wrong when she says ‘She smells like a bad dishcloth’ and pronounces ‘bad’ as /bæt/. This doesn’t fit the rule, of course. ‘Bad tea-towel’ would have been appropriate for pronouncing ‘bad’ as /bæt/.