Template talk:bo-noun

RFD discussion: December 2023–March 2024

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

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Template:bo-noun

Template:bo-adj

Template:bo-adverb

Template:bo-numeral

Template:bo-phrase

Template:bo-post

Template:bo-pronoun

Template:bo-proper noun

Template:bo-interj

Template:bo-particle

Tibetan headword templates. All of these are completely pointless: they're just a wrapper for {{head}} which do absolutely nothing except remove almost all of the functionality. Worse than nothing. Theknightwho (talk) 23:06, 29 December 2023 (UTC)

Delete. @Benwing2 for the replacement. This, that and the other (talk) 04:32, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

@Theknightwho @This, that and the other Done. Benwing2 (talk) 05:49, 21 February 2024 (UTC)

So, I was just about to add in comparatives and superlatives for Tibetan adjectives to {{bo-adj}}, since in Tibetan, adjectives that follow the common form, for example མང་པོ (mang po, “many”), also form comparatives in predictable ways (e.g. མང་བ (mang ba, “more”) or མང་ང (mang nga, “more”)), and superlatives are all formed with the addition of the particle ཤོས (shos). It would be fairly trivial to implement this.

However, I just saw that now no there is no {{bo-adj}}…can we bring this back?

As for the others, they are probably not needed, although {{bo-pronoun}} could have been easily outfitted with a "desc" parameter like {{en-pronoun}} and served the same purpose.

Hermes Thrice Great (talk) 03:45, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

IMO you are welcome to reimplement {{bo-adj}} with comparatives and superlatives (although keep in mind if they are completely regularly formed by the addition of a comparison word before them, it might be superfluous to include this info in the headword). However I would wait for User:Theknightwho and User:This, that and the other to chime in. Benwing2 (talk) 03:54, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

No objection. It looks like comp/sup adjectives are formed by suffixing, and might even be somewhat regular, so this would be a good use case for a langusge specific template.

@Benwing2 have there ever been discussions about making {{head}} take care of all the language specific logic, so we don't need language specific templates whenever custom functionality is wanted? Or is that a total non-starter due to Lua memory issues? This, that and the other (talk) 07:56, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

@This, that and the other I don't think this is a non-starter. In fact, we have several modules (more like subsystems) that have language-specific information attached to them. The closest to what you're thinking of is probably the language-specific support in Module:form of, which supports additional per-language parameters to handle inflected forms of participles, comparative/superlative adjectives, etc. where the term on the pagename is an inflected form of a term that is itself an inflected form of a lemma. The additional parameter specifies the underlying lemma, e.g. on the Gothic participle form 𐌰𐍆𐌻𐌴𐍄𐌰𐌽𐌳𐌰 (aflētanda), we have the following:

1. {{infl of|got|𐌰𐍆𐌻𐌴𐍄𐌰𐌽𐌳𐍃||nom|m|s|prespart-of=𐌰𐍆𐌻𐌴𐍄𐌰𐌽}}

which displays as

1. nominative masculine singular of 𐌰𐍆𐌻𐌴𐍄𐌰𐌽𐌳𐍃 (aflētands), the present participle of 𐌰𐍆𐌻𐌴𐍄𐌰𐌽 (aflētan)

Potentially we could do something similar to add support for per-language and per-POS inflection parameters. The main issue here is that there's a great deal of language-specific logic associated with the headword modules of many languages, so if we were to try to create a general mechanism to support it all through {{head}} (and allow languages to turn off individual features, which IMO is also important), the result might be an incomprehensible monstrosity. Instead of that, I have considered implementing a general framework for creating headword modules, similar to the general framework we currently have in place for inflection modules in Module:inflection utilities. This would provide out-of-the-box features that are wanted or needed by most headword modules as well as additional features that could be enabled on a per-language basis, and the ability to fall back to custom logic for complex cases. We would still have per-language headword templates like we have now but it would help standardize the params of those templates and ensure that as much as possible the same functionality is available on all of them. It could also auto-generate most of the documentation of the headword templates implemented through it, which is a big problem currently. I wrote about 150 lines of such a framework when I started reworking the Persian headword module with the intention of having the reworked Persian headword module use the new framework, but I never finished either of them. Benwing2 (talk) 08:58, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

It would definitely be great to have a way that makes it really easy to develop headword modules/templates for new languages, so that new functionality can be easily implemented without losing the core parameters of {{head}} via a naive template-that-transcludes-{{head}} implementation.

As for centralising all headword templates into {{head}}, the different handling of the positional parameters would be an obstacle - not necessarily insurmountable, but editors who would need to switch from typing {{fr-noun|f}} to {{head|fr|noun|g=f}} would need to be convinced that there was some benefit to the change. This, that and the other (talk) 09:54, 4 March 2024 (UTC)

I'm not sure we want to force people to use {{head}} for all headword templates; even with the shortcuts I created some time back (so you can write {{h|fr|n|g=f}} instead of {{head|fr|noun|g=f}}, I think there's benefit to having language-specific templates for the more common cases that have significant functionality customized to the particular language. Benwing2 (talk) 00:26, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

@Benwing2 Customisation is good, but having what is effectively a headword API would be far better than the current solution, where >50% of headword templates are a net negative. A lot of editors seem to think having language-specific headword templates is important, even if they do nothing. Theknightwho (talk) 11:40, 5 March 2024 (UTC)

Yes. I don't think we're disagreeing on anything. Benwing2 (talk) 22:58, 5 March 2024 (UTC)