Template talk:mul-proper noun

Improvements needed and possible

This template is adequate for taxa above the level of genus.

For a genus, it would benefit from displaying the headword in italics and supporting gender, which is one of the possibly useful linguistic services we could provide for the taxonomic community.

For a species, headword italics and, possibly, gender might be nice. Species actually benefit from subst-ing as the headword components should be individually wikilinked.

For subgeneric trinomials (subgenus, subspecies, variety, section etc) everything relevant for species applies with the extra complication that 'subg.', 'subsp.', 'var.', and 'sect.' are customarily displayed without italics AFAICT.

Should all this be implemented in one template? Is Lua useful for this? Do we really want to have pages which incorporate 'subg.' et al or would we confine that to the inflection line or to alternative forms? DCDuring TALK 00:00, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Because of the deficiencies of this template for genera and lower taxa, I have been using {{head}}, using head=''[[{{subst:PAGENAME}}]]'' as an argument and inserting additional brackets manually for species names. I am also improving some cut-and-paste entry starters for different taxa, principally genus, species, and family, beginning to develop some external link templates to online databases for various classes of living things, eg, plants, birds, mammals, fish, etc. and have experimented with templates for hypernyms similar to those at wikispecies. DCDuring TALK 00:20, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

There are a lot of interesting points you raise, so I'll answer the chief ones individually.

• Italics for genus, species, and subspecies: yes, that should be default. With Lua, it is quite possible for species and subspecies automatically, but genera will still need to be marked as such. Perhaps we could have a parameter be called i (short for ital), so genera could include i=1.
• Gender to be marked: I don't know, I'm not sure that's our job. For now, I guess I would oppose it. Nowadays, many names are borrowed straight from languages like Mandarin, and are genderless; even in the old days of taxonomic Latin, genera like Didelphis were often treated as both masc and fem.
• Subg., subsp., et al.: No, these shouldn't be entries, and I suspect most Wiktionarians would agree. Subspecies are OK, because they are written as trinomials, but varieties or sections? That's hardly lexical IMO. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:26, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

I guess that "i=" would address the problems fully. Any failure would be soft. We could even detect when it was missing from the categories that all well-formatted taxon entries are in.

I would be happy to mark items that are known genderless "g=-", have multiple genders, or where gender is unknown after some research "g=?".

In some cases sections, varieties, etc correspond better to vernacular words than anything else. There is no English word that corresponds to Brassica oleracea.

DCDuring TALK 01:03, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Can you describe the italicisation rules? — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 01:08, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

@DCDuring: OK, I will add support for i=. Once I have, please test to ensure it works as intended. Your point re B. oleracea is apt, but I hold firm in my opinion on that point.

@Ungoliant: Genera and any taxonomic names that are lower are italicised. Everything else isn't. You know enough Lua to make the following task trivial: write a function that takes a string and outputs the number of spaces in it. With that, this whole job becomes a lot easier. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:25, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

This wikifies each part of the word, if it contains spaces.

function behead(word)
     local parts = {};
     local c1 = 1;
     for part in string.gmatch(word, "%S+") do
         parts[c1] = part;
         c1 = c1 + 1;
     end
     if (table.getn(parts) <= 1) then
         return "";
     end
     local s = "";
     for c1 = 1, table.getn(parts) do
         if (c1 > 1) then
             s = s .. " ";
         end
         s = s .. "{{l|mul|" .. parts[c1] .. "}}"
     end
     return s;
 end

There’s probably a better way to write this. Lua is rather different from the language I’m most familiar with. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 01:55, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

You seem to have overthought it and missed the point. The point wasn't to wikify each part; the point was to tell the template that if there are one or two spaces, the headword should be italicised. (And if there are more than two spaces, to fill a cleanup cat.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:23, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Well, actually it is quite handy to have each component wikified. The problem with doing so is that there are times when I embed templates within the inflection line template to accomplish specific objectives. I am not at all sure that it is not "overthinking it" and POV to say that three spaces is too many. I certainly don't agree. I never thought that templates etc were supposed to be control devices, except for formatting, rather than aids to contributors. But maybe I do need to be controlled by my betters. DCDuring TALK 03:26, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Look, there's no need to be sarcastic — do bear in mind that we are, at least in theory, working together. Yes, it is POV, but as I stated before it's my opinion, and in any case that would be something best decided in the BP. And yes, templates and categories are often used as "control devices"; it's a common practice at Wiktionary and people like CodeCat do it all the time to standardise entries. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:01, 5 July 2013 (UTC)

Strange inflection-line font lately

This has been presenting a serif font lately. It looks a bit ugly and it differs from every other inflection line that I see. Contrast this with {{taxoninfl}} which is has been satisfactory all along. I am reluctant to simply do a redirect, because some of the entries using this template are not taxonomic names and thus are not something I know enough about. DCDuring TALK 00:28, 5 September 2013 (UTC)