Template talk:rfquotek

Use of {{w}} within the template

As I noticed with the promenade article, the use of {{w}} within the template now breaks it as of this edit (which also breaks the template's preview on the page. Could someone take a look at this and fix or issue a mass cleanup if there are any more uses of {{w}} within the template? -Einstein95 (talk) 23:03, 8 August 2014 (UTC)

RFDO discussion: July–August 2014

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:rfquotek

This template asks whether we can find a quote by a particular author for a sense. For example, in free, there are two instances which display as:

(Can we [[:Category:Requests for quotations/{{{2}}}|find and add]] a quotation of {{{2}}} to this entry?)

The answer, for our purposes as a general dictionary, should be "who gives a crap if we can find an add a quotation of 'Burill' to this entry?" Frankly, I have no idea who this 'Burill' is in the first place (Wikipedia has a dozen or more people named 'Burrill'), and the usage of this template i Wiktionary tends to supply only a surname, with no other identifying information about the author whose quote is sought.

Our senses are not contingent on use by a particular author, and no one is ever going to bother to address the vast majority of these requests - there are over 11,000 sitting in definitions now. I presume that they are some kind of relic left over from importing definitions from some public domain source. If the template is deleted, a bot can do the job of removing all instances. bd2412 T 16:41, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

• I never saw the point of these requests. Delete. — Keφr 16:45, 24 July 2014 (UTC)
  • Based on discussion below, I withdraw my vote. However, I think we should change the template to something more self-explanatory. — Keφr 19:18, 24 July 2014 (UTC)
• Keep The templates, with the name of a work or author, give us a clue as to how to find a citation to support a definition, almost always one from Webster 1913. In some of these cases, the term is polysemous and the definitions use words with 19th or very early 20th century meanings that are not at all obvious to us now. Finding a citation to support a particular sense for a polysemous word is always tedious, verging on impossible. Any help we can get, in this case usually from the long-dead lexicographers at Merriam Webster, is useful. As to the utility of the terse name abbreviations, we have Wiktionary:Abbreviated Authorities in Webster, recently rediscovered and brought to our attention at WT:BP#Abbreviated Authorities in Webster. In the instance mentioned "Burrill" is one Alexander Mansfield Burrill (1807-1869), compiler of Law Dict., N. Y., 1859. DCDuring TALK 17:48, 24 July 2014 (UTC)
  • Do we really need 11,000+ "clues" nested into our definitions? Is anyone actually bothering to track these down and substitute the mysterious citation in question for the template? Are the citations proffered by "the long-dead lexicographers at Merriam Webster" any better than citations we can find with Google? bd2412 T 18:20, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

    As to the "mysterious" nature of the references, I have added a link to the Authorities table to the template's documentation. If we believe, as I do that Webster 1913 definitions give us a useful window into late 19th century usage, often substantially different from our own, we need all the help we can get to provide citations to make these older definitions defensible and intelligible for contemporary users. I am reasonably sure that a good number of the easier cases have been filled in and that what remain are the more refractory cases, for which the rediscovery of the Authorities table should be a help. Extracting the list of "authorities" which remain among the 11K transclusions, sorted by frequency, might enable us to put links to full-text online versions of the works most commonly referenced into the Authorities table, thereby speeding the process of eliminating these. We could even embed links to the table entry or to the online full-text work in {{rfquotek}}. DCDuring TALK 18:45, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

    • A good start to that would be having a bot spell out all the names in the entries themselves, for example changing all instances of (Can we [[:Category:Requests for quotations/{{{2}}}|find and add]] a quotation of {{{2}}} to this entry?) to (Can we [[:Category:Requests for quotations/{{{2}}}|find and add]] a quotation of {{{2}}} to this entry?). bd2412 T 19:14, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

      Or we could have the template expand those abbreviations. — Keφr 19:18, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

      With the number of them that are there, we'd be packing an awful lot of code into the template. Frankly, I think writing a bot to do the expansion in the definitions would be easier. It would be even better if we had a bot that could search the works of the named author and find sentences using the word at issue. bd2412 T 19:22, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

      A module? Looks feasible, maybe. Wiktionary:Abbreviated Authorities in Webster has about 180K bytes of markup; converting that to Lua might shrink it a bit. Plus, the module could generate links to sources where the quotations could be found. I would rather avoid relying on bots. — Keφr 19:49, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

      Yes, I think I will convert it to use the Module:Quotations framework. DTLHS (talk) 19:57, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

      Please keep the existing page at least until we have a fully functioning replacement.

      Also, I believe that a great number of these authorities abbreviations are completely unused. It would probably be more useful to have some kind of assistive tool to speed the addition of citations from the oft-cited "authorities" like Shakespeare, Milton, Chaucer, and Spenser than to cover the whole set of perhaps 3,000 authorities. Those authors have works that may be published in multiple volumes, which to me means that simple Google books searches for the word with the author's name will go far to help locate the citations. DCDuring TALK 20:29, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

      I have modified the template to subcategorize by author. DTLHS (talk) 20:35, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

      Thanks. That will be very useful once Special:WantedCategories is updated. Last update was July 22, 2014. DCDuring TALK 20:41, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

      One would get in some ways a more useful listing until Special:WantedCategories is updated by simply sorting into the original category by "authority" name. That way one would not have to look for each authority category. IOW, double categorization into both the top category and the subcategory would give us more to work with for now. DCDuring TALK 22:32, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Keep: yes, quite a few users, including anon IPs, do fill these in. Also, for rare and obsolete words, it really helps to know which authors have used them. Equinox ◑ 18:28, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

@Equinox Might this template be applied to more entries? DCDuring TALK 22:32, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Do you mean, will I continue to use it? Only rarely: the Webster 1913 remnants are multi-word phrases, not headwords (which almost never cite an author). I have once or twice used it for my own new entries, where I knew a good work to cite from, but couldn't be bothered to find it at the time, but I don't do this often. Equinox ◑ 22:37, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

• Keep: has proven useful in the past. Purplebackpack89 18:43, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Keep per DCDuring. This template seems to me to be even more useful than {{rfquote}}, because when used beneath obscure or obsolete senses, particularly of polysemous words, it clues us in to where to look for a citation, which is even more helpful than just asking for a citation like {{rfquote}} does. Regular users and even passersby are slowly fulfilling the requests; see e.g. Wiktionary:Tea room/2014/June#deperdits_-_found_the_Paley_quote. And note that before the template was created, the practice was to supply an empty citation, i.e. just the author's name in plaintext, like this, which was decidedly worse: as it is now, users know to (and sometimes do) fill in the quotations; as it was before, it sometimes took a mind reader to tell the situation apart from graffiti; see Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2011/October#Wonderfool_.28Rockpilot.29. - -sche (discuss) 19:10, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Keep especially per -sche, but also per Equinox. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:25, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

• A quick search for some author names after "Can we find and add a quotation of" yields:

Shakespeare 1,351

Milton 656

Chaucer 622

Spenser 618

Beaumont and Fletcher 156

Burrill 91

Donne 47

Marlowe 12

Looking at specific words, I would be hard-pressed to guess good collocations that assured me of finding appropriate citations for the senses involved. But, for example, adding "Milton" to the search for "pound|pounding|pounded" gave me a citation for pound#Etymology 2 (verb: "impound") on the first search page. DCDuring TALK 19:33, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Can a bot populate a page with formatted likely sentences intended for the most referenced authors? bd2412 T 19:54, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Incidentally, any cross-population we can do with Wikiquote would be great. bd2412 T 20:18, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Wikisource is probably a better resource for this. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:20, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

@BD2412 I don't understand the question. DCDuring TALK 20:29, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

I mean, can a bot create a page in project space and place on that page sentences from the work of the author identified containing the word identified. Can a bot see that strange has this template asking "Can we find and add a quotation of Nathaniel Hawthorne to this entry?", search the works of Hawthorne on Wikisource or wherever else we search, and place a bunch of Hawthorne sentence containing "strange" on that project space subpage? bd2412 T 21:59, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

That is a question I can't answer. If it were easy, I could see net value. DCDuring TALK 22:37, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

• Keep. Many solid points have been made in favor. -- · (talk) 22:56, 24 July 2014 (UTC)

Kept, though I will note that some enhancements are in order. — Keφr 14:15, 2 August 2014 (UTC)

Why is it called "rfquotek"?

Request for quote... something... what is the K? Equinox ◑ 17:56, 7 December 2018 (UTC)

I was wondering about that too. — SGconlaw (talk) 17:28, 28 April 2020 (UTC)