Talk:whooping-crane

Rfd discussion

The following information passed a request for deletion.

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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Definition given is "attributive form of whooping crane". msh210 made loads of similar "attributive form of XYZ" entries a few years ago. How do we feel about them? --Type56op9 (talk) 11:28, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

Some were deleted. See e.g. Talk:alpine-chough. I doubt most are even attestable, but I suppose it's an RFV issue; though I'd also argue that replacing spaces with hyphens in this way is a standard thing we don't need to document, like we don't include initial-capital-letter forms for use at the beginning of a sentence. Equinox ◑ 11:43, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

(Edit conflict) While I personally don't have a massive objection to them, I do wonder if it's a bit misleading. In Google books, I can find only a few sources that hyphenate "whooping crane" in compounds (although just enough to push us over the 3 citation mark). Practically every source uses it open, even when it's clearly attributive (as in the martial art school "whooping crane style"). These hyphenated forms are at best pedantic, and at worst totally unused. Smurrayinchester (talk) 11:55, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

What exactly would a martial art school teach? Creative camouflage? Decorative gunstock design? Would there be paint-by-numbers drill? DCDuring TALK 15:35, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

• If the hyphenated form is not present, our search engine takes a user to the page-not-found page and offers a list topped by the with-space form and any entries containing the with-space form in the headword, followed by the spelled-solid forms. If we cannot alter the behavior of the search engine to go directly to the list-topping forms, it might be nicer to have redirects between hyphenated and with-space forms, hard if possible, soft if necessary, instead of making users page past the New Entry Creator and click on what is most-likely sought. It is tedious to have to make alternate-form entries for one or the other for all the barely attestable vernacular names of living things, for example. DCDuring TALK 15:49, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

The main problem (aside from validity I mean) is they're listed as adjectives but listed as alternative forms of nouns. Msh210 when I asked him about this said that while they are nouns, they may appear to be adjectives to readers. So even the person who created them as adjectives thinks that they're nouns. Renard Migrant (talk) 16:51, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

I agree that "noun" is a better PoS, but separate hyphenated-form entries (or separate with-space entries if the hyphenated form in more common) seem to me to add next to nothing that is not accomplished by the alternative-form section.

The need for hyphens is not lexical; it is determined by context, orthographic fashion, taste, and habit. DCDuring TALK 17:00, 12 September 2014 (UTC)

As others have noted, the POS headers are wrong in apparently all of these entries. The strings that are attested should use Template:attributive of under a noun header. (If anyone thinks the strings are attested as adjectives, we can go to RFV to find out.) The strings that aren't attested, well, those should be sent to RFV and then, when they fail RFV, deleted. - -sche (discuss) 05:21, 15 September 2014 (UTC)

It might be nice to convert such items to redirects to the unhyphenated forms. It would discourage the needless re-creation of hyphenated form entries. DCDuring TALK 00:39, 19 September 2014 (UTC)

I'm aware my input isn't terribly useful but, we could go either way. Deletion seems fine as they're just typographical variants in the same way that House is a typographical variant of house used as the first word of a sentence. Or alternatively {{attributive form of}} looks fine also. I'd shade towards keeping and correcting over deletion, and of course unattestable ones should go, that goes without saying. Renard Migrant (talk) 11:29, 20 September 2014 (UTC)

• Keep; the hyphenated entry is attested and points to idiomatic whooping crane. alpine-chough failed RFV, not RFD; "alpine-chough" was shown not to exist. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:06, 21 September 2014 (UTC)

• RFD kept as no consensus for deletion (1 boldface keep, 1 non-boldface keep - Renard, "I'd shade towards keeping", 1 delete in the nominator, 1 non-boldface probably delete - DCDuring, "separate hyphenated-form entries [...] seem to me to add next to nothing to [...]", the rest I don't know). --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:36, 30 November 2014 (UTC)