Talk:traue keiner Statistik, die du nicht selbst gefälscht hast

Isn't this commonly attributed to Goebbels? --78.50.252.93 20:53, 14 September 2016 (UTC)

RFD discussion: January 2018–July 2020

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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traue keiner Statistik, die du nicht selbst gefälscht hast

I don't think that belongs in a dictionary. --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 16:56, 19 January 2018 (UTC)

Why not? It's used proverbially, ain't it? If the reason shall be, that it's SOP-ish or self-explaining, then as a dog returns to his vomit, so a fool repeats his folly, better safe than sorry should have to be deleted too. -84.161.42.65 00:23, 27 January 2018 (UTC)

While I object to those phrases, too, I don't see a clear dividing line. There's still the phrase book appendix, subject to opposition, too. I have a suspicion that negative tone is responsible for the request, partially. 109.41.0.199 05:31, 13 May 2018 (UTC)

No. It just doesn't seem proverbial to me. Per utramque cavernam 00:02, 18 December 2018 (UTC)

Keep. — Mnemosientje (t · c) 16:28, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Keep. I looked at google books:"traue keiner Statistik, die du nicht selbst gefälscht hast" to see prevalence. The OP does not refer to WT:CFI. Then we learn that it does not seem proverbial, but proverbiality is not analyzed in any way. The statement is not literal, to say the least, with a considerable frequency, and reasonably short; its not being proverb, if actual, is unobvious. --Dan Polansky (talk) 20:39, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

I'll try to explain what I have in mind: to me, proverbs are inherited units of popular wisdom; they're short and concise, they use simple words, they're old, they express universal truths (as such they often have proverbial equivalents in other languages), they don't make use of irony.

The item we're concerned with has a certain "gnomic" feel to it, yes. But I think it is too recent; it uses the word "statistic" (that's not a complex word, but I wouldn't expect everybody to see straightaway what it is about); it looks more like the words of a wisecrack than the genuine product of conventional wisdom. And does it have proverbial equivalents in other languages? All in all, it doesn't look like what I (and others, I'm sure) am used to identify/recognise as a proverb. Per utramque cavernam 22:07, 19 December 2018 (UTC)

@Dan Polansky Per utramque cavernam 11:19, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for the analysis. Can you point me to the part of WT:CFI that you think this item fails? --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:34, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

The very first: "A term need not be limited to a single word in the usual sense. Any of these are also acceptable: Compounds; Idioms; Proverbs; Abbreviations, acronyms, and initialisms; Prefixes and suffixes; Characters used in ideographic or phonetic writing". traue keiner Statistik, die du nicht selbst gefälscht hast is neither a word, nor a compound, nor an idiom, nor an abbreviation of some sort, nor an affix, nor a character... Nor, in my view and as I was saying above, a proverb. Per utramque cavernam 11:45, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

That item does not purport to list a complete taxonomy of what a term is. In any case, I would argue that the discussed phrase is something like an idiom. Some German sources refer to the item as "Spruch", one source even as "Sprichwort", as per google books:"traue keiner Statistik, die du nicht selbst gefälscht hast". As an aside, fact-free and research-free opinions are the cheapest goods in the world: everyone has plenty of them and everyone is glad to share them (I am not the author, nor is it exactly true). --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:56, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

"That item does not purport to list a complete taxonomy of what a term is.": what is it meant to do then? Is it merely indicative? What other kind of items could we include? Why don't we mention them there? Per utramque cavernam 14:25, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

It plays the role of "including but not restricted to". It makes it explicit that something is not to be narrowly construed, in this case the notion of "term". There was a vote to make the list more extensive, aiming at completeness, and that vote failed. --Dan Polansky (talk) 15:18, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Two obvious examples are infixes and circumfixes. --RichardW57 (talk) 15:35, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Indeed. Per utramque cavernam 15:45, 20 December 2018 (UTC)

Delete. HeliosX (talk) 17:31, 28 December 2019 (UTC)

Kept: no consensus to delete. PUC – 11:48, 2 July 2020 (UTC)