Talk:file sharing

From rfd

Like many other terms under recent discussion, this is not idiomatic. One is merly a copy which is unauthorized, the other is the sharing of files and thus no more need to be defined than red car. A dictionary is for words (acutally lexemes), these are concepts. — Hippietrail 02:13, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't care about unauthorized copy, but file sharing is also (two million+ times in Google) spelled filesharing and thus I'd keep it under "ambiguity as to whether it should be written as a single word". —Muke Tever 23:10, 7 October 2005 (UTC)

unauthorized copy is not much more than the sum of its parts - I'm not bothered about it either way. I have wikified file sharing, linked to -pedia, and removed the RfD tag. Keep. SemperBlotto 07:29, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

Please don't remove rfd tags until the discussions have clearly ended. "Filesharing" as a single word certainly doesn't ring true to me. It would even bring out my inner prescriptivist! But I can't think of any English speaking people who would write it that way. In fact it reminded me of the international English so common on the internet where I often find terms like informations, infos, songtext, etc. But 2 million, granted, is a massive number of hits, even you think about the term being used this way in titles, URLs, etc. Again, Google is our friend. Doing a plain Google search I get 2,480,000 hits. Breakdown of the first page: term only used in link, English, Dutch, English, English, Dutch, URL, German, URL, German.

Let's try restricting the language: Dutch - 138,000; German - 2,420,000; English - still 1,860,000 - which doesn't really add up... But again looking through the first page there are mostly URLs, email addresses, "FileSharing", pages which don't use the term but are linked via it from elsewhere. Of the remainder a brief look at a sample shows that only a smaller portion of these use the term in a regular English sentence, a small enough proportion that I can comfortably expect them to be misspelings in international English.

This is a very popular concept and the usual or only way of mentioning it, but it is not a lexeme. — Hippietrail 14:16, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

• Try googling "filesharing service" [1]. These don't look like international misspellings to me (although they do look wrong). Kappa 14:56, 8 October 2005 (UTC)

The single-word spelling of "filesharing" is actually quite a lot older than either of these two hazy "senses" we list. On Usenet it is used as early as 1985 in regard to NFS, and thence to other kinds of LAN networking. I'm surprised that it gets 32,300 hits on Usenet for English only. I'm also surprised that most of the hits are still in the personal network sense (AppleTalk, Ethernet, etc) which seems quite different to what is found on the World Wide Web where most of the talk seems to be about the craze began by Napster. It's looking more like a word but it still seems incorrect to me. I wouldn't like to suggest people to use the 1-word spelling in an essay to be marked by a teacher. But I would like to hear the opinions of some of our other big/old/important/regular contributors. — Hippietrail 00:32, 9 October 2005 (UTC)

My votes: Keep and keep. --Connel MacKenzie 03:19, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

Hi Connel, please belive that I don't want to be facetious, but I wonder if you could give us some example phrases that you feel either are not idiomatic or do not need entries. I'm just trying to get a feel for how people think on this important dictionary-making issue. — Hippietrail 15:38, 10 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't know how I missed this comment earlier. Why do you want to beat around the bush? Why not just start a vote, and announce it in BP? Last time I checked, what is deleted and what is kept is not up to me alone. --Connel MacKenzie 04:46, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

I don't think I'm beating around the bush at all. I'm saying what I feel. I am amazed that so few people have so far voiced their opinions. I want to get a feel for what people think Wiktionary should be. Should we follow the long tradition of Oxford, Webster, and many others, or should we follow the recent example of Wordnet - generally your only source of citations when defending the inclusion of transparent phrases.

I'm also disappointed to see that you chose to give no examples. This is likely to given some the impression that you would embrace every phrase, and reject none, no matter how obvious. — Hippietrail 15:47, 11 October 2005 (UTC)

Such an impression would be inaccurate. I did not supply examples for several reasons: 1) your question is too open ended, 2) the community's opinion matters far more than mine, 3) new catch-phrase nouns (such as unauthorized copy) are time-sensitive catch phrases. Any examples I give could later become what I consider valid (given at least a year, or in this case much longer) to assert themselves as common terminology with subtle connotations or specific meaning, as these do. Oh, and I suppose 4) that conversation is (and belongs on) WT:BP#Experiment format for translating dictionary entries for non idiomatic phrases. --Connel MacKenzie 04:19, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

The only reason why I added unauthorized copy was because I thought that copyright infringement was a central part of the term, but that wasn't implied exactly in the term. Others, however, might think that it is implied or that copyright isn't necessarily part of the term. file sharing I think speaks for itself. Citizen Premier 03:43, 12 October 2005 (UTC)

Delete unauthorized copy because I don't believe it's a set phrase. My mind had to consider the different forms of a "copy" before it settled on an idea (several actually) that made sense. Keep file sharing because it is a set phrase and treated as a single concept. When I hear "file sharing" my mind doesn't decompose the phrase into its parts to rationalize what it means. Rather, it triggers an immediate reaction, conjuring up images of networks, security settings and the like. Davilla 13:09, 20 October 2005 (UTC)

Delete and Delete. I agree with hippietrail. These things don't need to be defined any more than 'red car' or 'broadcast television'. They are both clearly the sum of their parts. A "file sharing application" is an application that shares files. The fact that some people are intimately familiar with many different types of applications that share files doesn't make the phrase into something more than the sum of it's parts. — Fudoreaper 04:41, 23 October 2005 (UTC)

Delete unauthorized copy, but Keep file sharing - Παρατηρητής 11:39, 1 January 2006 (UTC)

• "unauthorized copy" deleted; "file sharing" kept since the much broader use in computerese is not clear from what might be thought by a simple exchange of dead tree office files, or of tasks that might be shared in job-shared employment. Eclecticology 08:30, 13 January 2006 (UTC)

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