User talk:DAVilla

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Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2010-12/Names of individuals

FYI, I have edited the vote. --Dan Polansky 20:11, 18 January 2011 (UTC)

Merging google

I have undone your merging of the two senses of "to google". The sense of searching specifically using Google is a distinct one, and should not be merged into a broader sense, as people often use "to google" in this specific sense. It is a bit like with "cat", which in one sense refers to a domestic cat, and in another, broader sense, refers to any animal of the family Felidae.

On another note, the sense "To search for (something) on the Internet using any comprehensive search engine" is as yet unattested. --Dan Polansky 10:47, 30 January 2011 (UTC)

splitting labels from links in context tags

Your input would be valuable at the GP. Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:03, 17 February 2011 (UTC)

Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:08, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Victoria's Secret

It seems that the entry you created falls foul of a passage of CFI that you wrote. How ironic. What did you mean when you wrote that section in CFI on company names? There's a disagreement between me and Ruakh as to what it means, nobody else seems to care enough to have pitched in with an idea. --Mglovesfun (talk) 16:07, 4 May 2011 (UTC)

I did not write the section on company names, I only whittled it down when parts had become irrelevant. It may have been Connel who added the passage, since he was most adamant about their exclusion.

There's definitely a problem when it comes to words that can be both brand names and company names, as I've stated once or twice before. A few of the examples at WT:BRAND are also company names. Victoria's Secret is easiest to define as a retail marketer, but sometimes the way it is used is as a substitute for the product, just like Mazda and Adidas.

This is one reason for the new vote I have created, to give more balanced treatment to any term with commercial interest. The other motivating factor is to simplify the rules, which have been criticized for their complexity. DAVilla 15:49, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

A question for you

Please see it here. --Daniel 23:40, 4 July 2011 (UTC)

add fuel to the fire

I'd value your opinion as to the value of the usage notes for idioms, for which this is an example. I believe that most idioms have a significant amount of variation. I'd like the usage notes to be useful, the main entries to be lemmatized, and the main/lemma entry to be findable with a large number of the plausible search terms a user might attempt. Though I have nothing against them, I'd like to minimize the need for alternative form and redirects. Including the terms used in common variations is intended to make the entry both informative and accessible from more searches. DCDuring TALK 18:32, 16 July 2011 (UTC)

"inflection of add and fire"

"determiners, possessives, and adjectives modifying fuel"

I don't think it's necessary to make this explicit, either by comment or in a list of alternative forms. If not to be left completely unacknowledged, this can be exemplified with quotation as samples of how the phrase may be modified.

"different determiners, possessives"

I don't think it's necessary to say this. The only alternative form that might be listed is add fuel to a fire. It captures the idea that fire can be indicated as any incidence instead of a specific incidence. But for add fuel to their fire etc. there is no change to the meaning of the component lemma form. I wouldn't even bother brainstorming these unless it's likely that someone would try to create a separate page, in which case a hard redirect is fine.

"and no determiner instead of the"

This is an important alternative form. It changes the meaning of fire from an instance to a collective noun. It's much easier to list than to explain, and it at least deserves a soft redirect if not its own page. As I alluded to in RFD, the distinction could change the meaning in theory, but this isn't evidenced in my brief searches.

"substitution of put and pour for add, usually with on for to"

Assuming these are in common use, they are important variations, enough such that they would each warrant a soft redirect. We don't know if someone is going to look up add fuel to the fire or pour fuel on the fire initially. A usage note is only informative if you first find the former. Otherwise the search engine is not going to try to interpret the usage note when it looks for hits.

All in all, I prefer the current method of not stating the obvious and, when significant, listing variations. It's clearer to people and machines alike. DAVilla 20:00, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the time to give this your consideration.

I certainly wouldn't do it if I thought it were all obvious. We have plenty of folks who use "set phrase" as if it applied to many kinds of idioms. This particular expression is close to being merely a metaphor, which is arguably why so much variability appears. The contrast with kick the bucket which allows no variation except inflection of the verb is the point.

I don't really tax my imagination on these: I search COCA, which supports searches for wildcards, forms of lemmas, and parts of speech.

There is little effort expended by anyone to add redirects, so, in the absence of an automated redirect generator, that seems like a straw man.

The presence of words (other than stopwords like "on", "to", "the") anywhere in the entry allows the search engine to find the entry and put it on a multiple-search results page. Try it.

The versions using the other verbs are "common" enough to appear in COCA and certainly attestable. For a common idiom that is so close to being a metaphor, there is a very large number of attestable forms of the metaphor-idiom, which add little to Wiktionary. DCDuring TALK 20:42, 18 July 2011 (UTC)

Adding hard redirects is not really relevant to the choice of method. I was just saying that not all the variations really need to be spelled out under the current setup, just the most significant ones. I said that because your usage notes go a lot further than a list of alternative forms normally would. It's fine to have just one lemma if there's only one needed, but having several does not mean that we're letting in the floodwater. We're still concentrated on that group of lemmas.

You're right about alternate searches if you know that the resulting add fuel to the fire is equivalent to what you're looking for. But what the server thankfully gets right in this case, the user may not. More troubling is that it would take reading through that long usage note to determine it's the right hit. Even knowing what all those grammatical terms mean, which I don't think is true of the average user, it took me a moment to parse those sentences.

I don't think soft redirects or a reasonable list of alternative forms subtract anything from Wiktionary. And I don't agree with your assessment of kick the bucket. I found relevant cites for “is kicking the bucket” and “kick the damn bucket”, although a usage note or mention in the literal sense line may be helpful to distinguish kick over the bucket. DAVilla 05:44, 19 July 2011 (UTC)

Reply

Hi DAVilla, I replied to you at the Beer Parlour, it would be appreciated if you could reply to me please. :-) -- PoliMaster ^talk/_spy 10:22, 20 July 2011 (UTC)

---

DAVilla would you please rephrase what you meant with your comments at the Beer Parlour, it was written very eloquently, that I couldn't understand it fully. :) -- PoliMaster ^talk/_spy 10:32, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

If I am further encouraged to edit BP it will be to retract what I've said. DAVilla 17:19, 21 July 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/2011-07/Categories of names

The vote Categories of names is going to end soon, after receiving contributions of only a few people. (it proposes a number of renamings, in this pattern: Category:en:Rivers to Category:English names of rivers)

It would benefit very much from your vote, even one of abstention.

I assume you would be interested in this subject, as I am sending this message to everyone who didn't vote yet, but participated in the discussion that introduced the vote, and/or in this poll, which received far more attention than the vote, and is closely related to the proposal in question.

Thank you. --Daniel 16:42, 4 August 2011 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/2011-10/Categories of names 3

Because you voted in Wiktionary:Votes/2011-07/Categories of names, I'm informing you of this new vote.​—msh210℠ (talk) 01:59, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Nouns and proper nouns

Hey, I've started a discussion in the Beer Parlor. I'd really like to know the community views on this. Any additional input would be great. Thanks. – Krun 14:04, 11 December 2011 (UTC)

hundred

Was the spelling in this quotation "for a good a hundered and fifty years" correct? If so, will you be creating a separate entry for hundered? --EncycloPetey (talk) 17:01, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Ack! DAVilla 18:20, 12 August 2012 (UTC)

Post

Regarding your post at [1] should for example devil be considered non-existent? Pass a Method (talk) 20:40, 22 September 2012 (UTC)

Categories

Would you consider using categories for your entries such as Category:English nouns for English nouns? Just saves other users from doing it. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:36, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

I've started to use the templates a little more, just now getting the plurals down without having to look them up. Sorry if I was too lazy to figure out the ? or if there were other lapses. DAVilla 20:45, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

Compound terms

Hello!

Some time ago, you wrote on my talk page that I have created several compound term entries. For the word algorithm, I plan to add the hyponyms of the word. Where should I ask for admission? --Sae1962 (talk) 12:18, 18 March 2013 (UTC)

Do you have any compound terms that would be red linked? I'm not sure if my examples are properly hyponyms, but hopefully they serve some illustration. Acceptable would be things like divide and conquer, while brute force algorithm would almost certainly be rejected. The latter is simply an algorithm that uses brute force. I'm less certain about dynamic programming, but I would add it since it's less offensive to list a term than to create a page. You should still use some discretion though, so thanks for asking. Let me know if there's anything more specific that would be helpful. DAVilla 02:04, 6 April 2013 (UTC)

momtrepreneur

"implicitly to earn extra income without joining the workforce". Is this both true and relevant. I mean, self-employment is being part of the workforce isn't it? Or is "without joining the workforce" in your opinion a part of the definition of entrepreneur anyway? Renard Migrant (talk) 12:42, 22 April 2015 (UTC)

I was trying to say without holding a traditional job, not just a 9 to 5 but even part time or what have you. It's my feeble attempt, please feel free to revise. DAVilla 20:34, 29 April 2015 (UTC)

How we will see unregistered users

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18:14, 4 January 2022 (UTC)

Suddha Sadhakam of Kumara Deva

Hey — I saw you made an edit to this Wikipedia page a while back (the Paramukta page).

Do you happen to have a copy of the book “Path of Pure Consciousness” by n murugesa mudaliar? 2600:387:15:1411:0:0:0:1 21:17, 25 August 2022 (UTC)

You mean the Wiktionary page paramukta? No, I own almost nothing in print. Citations I find are mostly thru Google Books. DAVilla 17:48, 26 August 2022 (UTC)

A letter on the front page

Hi, the front page currently lists all wiktionary projects in the format [autonym] ([English word]), even when the foreign names are in another script. However, there's a number of mistakes following the same pattern: Finnish has "Suomi", the Finnish word for Finland, instead of "suomi", the language. Swedish, French and Russian make the same mistake, as probably do a number of other ones. While I can see an argument made for intra-Latin consistency, Russian remains surprising. brittletheories (talk) 16:02, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

It seems Greek and Armenian make the same mistake while Georgian doesn't. A quick google search also seems to suggest that many or most European languages do not capitalise languages.

question regarding a red-linked entry

DAVilla,

Is there any special meaning or definition of the entry "the wheel" under the following list of derived terms?

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/wheel#Derived_terms

It was deleted way back when, but I'm not sure if it has any particular meaning, or maybe it is a jargon reference to something or someone? newfiles (talk) 07:27, 13 February 2024 (UTC)

The only meaning was in the sense of steering wheel. Original page creation was just an example sentence.

We do not add "the" to entry titles because a person would more likely look up and expect a definition at wheel. There are a lot of idioms listed there that could be cleaned up in this regard, too. DAVilla 19:50, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Sounds good, I'll go ahead and delete it from the list of derived terms then? newfiles (talk) 22:36, 14 February 2024 (UTC)

Done. Sorry, tried earlier but connectivity issues. DAVilla 01:28, 15 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you kindly. newfiles (talk) 07:50, 15 February 2024 (UTC)