Thesaurus talk:gigantic
Latest comment: 11 months ago by ExcarnateSojourner in topic RFM discussion: December 2020–December 2023
The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for moves, mergers and splits (permalink).
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I recently happened upon Thesaurus:gigantic and Thesaurus:large. They seem to generally serve the same purpose, though gigantic does describe a greater size than large. Does anyone have any objections to me merging them? I would keep whatever page gets the most views and transform the other into a redirect. Depending on the number, I might also replace all links that exist to one with links to the other. Best. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 19:32, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
- No objection, provided the distinction between large and gigantic is made clear somewhere. — SGconlaw (talk) 20:34, 25 December 2020 (UTC)
- I've discovered that there are an even larger number of similar thesaurus pages than the two I mentioned in my first post. These include WS:small and WS:tiny, WS:gigantic thing and WS:giant, as well as WS:ample and WS:big. Would it make sense to similarly merge the first two pairs as well include the third pair in the merger that I mentioned in my first post? Finally, would it make down to cut down WS:size so that it is only a directory to other thesaurus pages? —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 19:13, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
- I think it's fine to merge thesaurus pages that relate to the same part of speech, so long as the shades of meaning of the different words are made clear on the unified page. However, pages that relate to different parts of speech (e.g., gigantic (adjective) v. gigantic thing (noun)) should probably be kept separate – and if I read your post correctly you aren't suggesting such pages be merged. No objection either to most of the content in Thesaurus:size being moved to specific pages and the former being converted to a directory (though synonyms of the word size can be retained). — SGconlaw (talk) 15:08, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
- Sounds good. For the record, the way I am currently thinking of noting that there are shades of meaning is by putting a note at the top of the page stating something along the lines of "the implied extent that the object is larger than usual is different for each of these terms with some referring to even bigger sizes than others". Is this sufficient in your mind or would using dashes to separate different parts of the list as is sometimes done on thesaurus pages based on their implied size necessary? —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 20:52, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
- I'm concerned such a note won't be clear enough. It would probably be better to split the terms into completely different sections, with shorter notes (e.g., one section for big: "Sense: the weakest sense of great size"; and another for gigantic: "Sense: of very great size"). — SGconlaw (talk) 21:33, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
- Fair enough. I think I should be able to do that and still be able list antonyms in a meaningful way, specifically by doing a similar division between them based on the strength of their senses. For some of the terms I may not be able to accurately determine what section they should be in due to my unfamiliarity, but I'll do my best and shouldn't run into too much trouble. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 01:06, 1 January 2021 (UTC)
- I'm concerned such a note won't be clear enough. It would probably be better to split the terms into completely different sections, with shorter notes (e.g., one section for big: "Sense: the weakest sense of great size"; and another for gigantic: "Sense: of very great size"). — SGconlaw (talk) 21:33, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
- Sounds good. For the record, the way I am currently thinking of noting that there are shades of meaning is by putting a note at the top of the page stating something along the lines of "the implied extent that the object is larger than usual is different for each of these terms with some referring to even bigger sizes than others". Is this sufficient in your mind or would using dashes to separate different parts of the list as is sometimes done on thesaurus pages based on their implied size necessary? —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 20:52, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
- I think it's fine to merge thesaurus pages that relate to the same part of speech, so long as the shades of meaning of the different words are made clear on the unified page. However, pages that relate to different parts of speech (e.g., gigantic (adjective) v. gigantic thing (noun)) should probably be kept separate – and if I read your post correctly you aren't suggesting such pages be merged. No objection either to most of the content in Thesaurus:size being moved to specific pages and the former being converted to a directory (though synonyms of the word size can be retained). — SGconlaw (talk) 15:08, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
- I've discovered that there are an even larger number of similar thesaurus pages than the two I mentioned in my first post. These include WS:small and WS:tiny, WS:gigantic thing and WS:giant, as well as WS:ample and WS:big. Would it make sense to similarly merge the first two pairs as well include the third pair in the merger that I mentioned in my first post? Finally, would it make down to cut down WS:size so that it is only a directory to other thesaurus pages? —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 19:13, 28 December 2020 (UTC)
- Hah, separate pages for "large" vs "big" is particularly unnecessary; at least with gigantic vs large/big it's obvious what distinction someone was going for. I wouldn't necessarily consider "most page views" the deciding metric as far as where to put the page, since a majority of page views likely come from (a) which page our entries link to, and (b) which page has content, both of which would change if we update the page title and/or links. In this case, though, it seems that large not only gets the most pageviews (44 in the last 30 days, vs 18 for big, also more views in the last 90 days) but is also the more common word. - -sche (discuss) 20:24, 29 December 2020 (UTC)
- I agree with you that page views aren't as relevant for thesaurus pages. I think the content should be at the most generic or common synonym. With that, I think it would make sense to look at informal language rather than book corpa which tend to be more formal. I suspect big is more common in informal contexts, but have currently hit the rate limit for the english-corpa.org so cannot do the relevant research yet. When the month changes, I should be all good and I plan to follow the links here on which corpa cover informal English. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 20:52, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
- Okay, I did the searches in the "(personal) blog", "spoken", "interview", "non-academic", and overall "internet" genres of various BYU corpa (those at english-corpa.org) as well as in WorldLex-English in the "BlogFreqPm" (frequency in blogs, per million words) column. I decided to exclude television corpa because I couldn't identify a way to filter out scripted television and just focus on live television. I found big to be more common than larger in almost all cases. Given that, do you think that it would make sense to put the content at WS:big? Thanks and I hope you the best. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 20:05, 5 January 2021 (UTC)
- I agree with you that page views aren't as relevant for thesaurus pages. I think the content should be at the most generic or common synonym. With that, I think it would make sense to look at informal language rather than book corpa which tend to be more formal. I suspect big is more common in informal contexts, but have currently hit the rate limit for the english-corpa.org so cannot do the relevant research yet. When the month changes, I should be all good and I plan to follow the links here on which corpa cover informal English. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 20:52, 30 December 2020 (UTC)
- So far I've merged Thesaurus:small and Thesaurus:tiny as well as Thesaurus:gigantic thing and Thesaurus:giant. I think its going pretty well so far, though slowly. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 23:46, 11 January 2021 (UTC)
- Support original merge proposal. - excarnateSojourner (talk|contrib) 06:50, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
- @The Editor's Apprentice I've merged big and gigantic into large, following SGconlaw's advice to keep large and gigantic as separate sections. (I chose large mostly arbitrarily over big. If anyone prefers big I don't mind it being moved there.) All that remains is updating links. - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 08:05, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
- Thank you for completing the merger and finalizing the work I abandoned. —The Editor's Apprentice (talk) 18:58, 11 March 2022 (UTC)
Oppose Wikisaurus has long needed quality improvement. Looking at WS:large, for example, are hefty, tall, broad, long, and rotund really synonyms? Why are they in a pool of synonyms with the heading "Sense: of considerable or relatively great size or extent". A shotput ball is hefty without being large in normal use. I'd have thought that we would differentiate linear, areal, and volume spatial extent and mass/weight, as well as the various terms that are applied to nouns that don't actually have such properties, eg, problem, success. This proposed merger is probably a step backward and certainly a distraction from the underlying quality problem. DCDuring (talk) 14:52, 7 March 2022 (UTC)
- Good point. When you mention differentiating between linear, areal, and such, are you thinking separate pages? The pages I merged into Thesaurus:large did not have any of these distinctions, and now we have one page to split into linear, areal, etc. terms from, so I don't see how it is a step backward. - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 21:26, 9 March 2022 (UTC)
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- Although I agree with DCDuring's suggestions for improvement, I think they are outside the scope of this discussion, so I'm closing it. — excarnateSojourner (ta·co) 22:56, 11 December 2023 (UTC)