Template talk:en-suffix

RFDO discussion: May–October 2015

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/Others (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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Template:en-suffix

This template doesn't do anything beyond {{head|en|suffix}}. It also has a rather big shortcoming: it doesn't show inflected forms of the suffix. A noun-forming suffix has its own plural, which can be irregular in any way that any noun derived from it can be. For this reason, the regular part-of-speech templates now accept a suff=1 parameter, which causes the entry to be categorised as a suffix. So for example for -osis, you would have {{en-noun|suff=1|-oses}}, and for -y there would be {{en-adj|suff=1|-ier}}.

This is probably even more important for languages that have more inflected forms, so we may want to examine them as well. —CodeCat 22:12, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Can you do this for {{head}}? --WikiTiki89 22:23, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

There isn't really much point for {{head}} because you can just change the category parameter. —CodeCat 22:25, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

But then it would easy to just add |suff={{{suff|}}} to any template that is implemented in terms of {{head}}. --WikiTiki89 22:30, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

How it's done now is not much harder, see {{et-noun}}. —CodeCat 22:38, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

I would consider {{#if:{{{suff|}}}|suffixes|nouns}}|cat2={{#if:{{{suff|}}}|noun-forming suffixes}} to be much harder than suff={{{suff|}}}. --WikiTiki89 22:41, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

Maybe so, but we should be able to assume a higher level of skill from those editing templates (as opposed to entries). And it's definitely within the capabilities of anyone writing headword-line templates. —CodeCat 22:44, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

It's not so much about skill as it is about ease, quality, and uniformity (as with all code-reuse). If we make it as simple as suff={{{suff|}}}, then it would be difficult to mess it up and we would also be sure that all templates that use this will function the same way. And if we (hypothetically) decide to change category names from "X-forming suffixes" to "suffixes that form X", we would only need to change it in one place. --WikiTiki89 23:07, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

What makes me hesitate here is that we'd end up with two very different ways of accomplishing the same thing; one with the old way and one with the new way. Essentially what you've done is to add a more specific tool that is unlikely to be known or understood by many users, to perform the same function as a much more widely understood tool. This leads to less uniformity as editors will be confused over which method to use, not more. There should be one, and preferably only one obvious way to do it. —CodeCat 23:18, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

If we were to go by that logic, we would just do '''-um''' (''plural'' '''[[-a#English|-a]]''')[[Category:English lemmas]][[Category:English suffixes]][[Category:English noun-forming suffixes]][[Category:English countable nouns]] rather than the totally non-obvious {{en-noun|-a|suff=1}}. There is always going to be more than one way to do things. The best strategy is to have shortcuts for anything that is done often enough. And this particular thing should probably be a feature of almost every headword-line template in existence. --WikiTiki89 23:31, 19 May 2015 (UTC)

• Keep: Here we go again deleting widely-used templates and needlessly merging them into other templates. There's not really any harm in having two templates that do the same thing; while merging or renaming templates creates piles and piles of bot work and confuses editors. Purplebackpack89 02:23, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
  • You haven't actually given a rationale for keeping. Furthermore, two templates that do the same thing is confusing to editors, and merging and renaming templates is very easy to do with a bot. —CodeCat 10:47, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
    • I gave a rationale against deletion, namely that merging or deleting it would cause too many problems. RfD/O isn't like RfD; whether or not a template like this is kept or merged is wholly subjective and there are few, if any, governing policies. And, no it isn't, really: you just pick one of them (probably the one you first started using when the time arose) and continue using it. Purplebackpack89 13:43, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
      • Precedents say keep: I nominated {{fr-adv}}, {{fr-verb-form}} and {{fr-adj-form}} for deletion on the basis they're redundant to head, and all three got kept. It's a recent precedent and I see no reason why the community would change its mind just a couple of weeks later. Renard Migrant (talk) 21:05, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
• Keep this template, currently used in more than 500 mainspace pages, to make old revisions legible. The only action that can be contemplated is deprecation. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:31, 20 June 2015 (UTC)

Kept. No consensus to delete.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:41, 9 October 2015 (UTC)