User talk:DCDuring/2011 QIV

something for you?

While I don't wish to impose extra work on you, as you are a busy man, I would most appreciate your help on making the entry [[understandably]] better. You did something once adding tags categorising things as "manner adverbs" or "modal adverbs" or "degree adverbs" and other type of adverbs, and those entries looked really neat. Can you sprinkle some fancy dust on understandably too? --Rockpilot 00:23, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Thx --Rockpilot 22:49, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

bringing the heat?

does it qualify here? --Fkdc321 04:35, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

I don't know. I think that (deprecated template usage) heat might be used in other expressions. I am not as familiar with other expressions that use (deprecated template usage) lumber. DCDuring TALK 22:04, 2 October 2011 (UTC)

Bye

--Daniel 21:13, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

• He's not leaving. --Rockpilot 21:27, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

There are powerful motivations for me to stay, mostly personal. I can't stand to let the bastards win. DCDuring TALK 22:21, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

Let's hope the bastards put up a long and valiant fight, if only to keep you here and competing for the common good. --Rockpilot 22:27, 4 October 2011 (UTC)

This war looks tough. Are there many bastards yet? --Daniel 07:23, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

If necessary, I could side up with the bastards. But also with the good guys. I'm flexible like that--Rockpilot 07:59, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

Bastards tend to be the more dynamic characters whose actions really push the story arcs. — [Ric Laurent] — 12:47, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

Yes, everyone loves a good antihero. —Ruakh_TALK 14:49, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

I suggest setting up a club, called The Bastard Club. You in, Ruakh or Daniel.? I'm the boss, and Ric is already in by default. I'll get some others to recruit. I'm thinking matching costumes... --Rockpilot 14:55, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

I could enter the club, if I like the costumes. --Daniel 16:37, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

tell you what, you can design the costumes. Whatever it takes to get you in. --Rockpilot 22:11, 6 October 2011 (UTC)

Sounds fun. Just let me know next time bastardry happens, so I can help. --Daniel 16:49, 7 October 2011 (UTC)

Brand names

We had this discussion several times, so let us concentrate it in one place. To my understanding, "physical product" stands in contrast to "service" and to "information product". You may label this "literalism", but that I find not only unconvincing but rather disingenuous. If you really intend the phrase "physical product" to make no difference in WT:BRAND's "A brand name for a physical product should be included if it has entered the lexicon", you may create a vote that removes "for a physical product" from that piece of text. I have no intention to start such a vote, as I want WT:BRAND to be as weak as possible, and completely removed if possible. There are fair chances that you could succeed with such a vote, as there are many anti-brand people around in Wiktionary. But until such a vote passes, I do not see how you can ignore the "physical product" part and still claim to abide by WT:CFI. --Dan Polansky 14:57, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

Not here. DCDuring TALK 16:35, 12 October 2011 (UTC)

thingosol

You found the soil category eh? I'd been saving that one up! Equinox ◑ 20:52, 13 October 2011 (UTC)

I discovered the USDA classification in the course of looking up how to propagate w:Carpinus caroliniana, aka (deprecated template usage) musclewood. The WP article on one of the sols revealed the FAO classification system names. These are widely used, I hope. DCDuring TALK 21:39, 13 October 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) 01:56, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

template talk:en-adj

An update at the bottom might interest you.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:39, 18 October 2011 (UTC)

This is not a dictionary I would rely on.

No, nor me. And I don't think it ever will be, the whole premise behind a dictionary that anyone can edit with no paid staff seems flawed to me. I always say I edit Wiktionary for my own pleasure, and this is why. I don't think we have any realistic hope of rivalling the best printed and online dictionaries. Structurally, it can't work. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:00, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

The same applies to Wikipedia versus a traditional encyclopaedia, viz. it will be somewhat under-edited and amateurish and occasionally inaccurate. That hasn't stopped Wikipedia succeeding, primarily because the largest group of users (people who just want to check something, rather than write a researched paper on it) don't seem to care enormously about those things, and as long as it's free they will overlook certain inferior qualities. I think the best thing about Wikimedia projects is probably that they are free (in the sense of being reusable without expensive licensing), which suggests that if things do get particularly bad then some other group can always take the raw material and try to fix it up in a new project. I increasingly feel that it's necessary with ours. Equinox ◑ 23:59, 22 October 2011 (UTC)

But I also have the feeling that nobody wants to have to take a project and make it go apart from this mother ship. Simple, for example, seems to have been a lonely effort. This isn't too bad a group for the most part, though we have lost some folks I really liked and/or whose contributions and standards I respected. I've been a lot less obsessive about my involvement with Wiktionary lately. DCDuring TALK 00:39, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

For its age, I don't think Wikipedia is any worse than any other encyclopedia effort, nor Wiktionary worse than any dictionary. All such endeavors begin by being shackled to the predispositions of their authors and editors. In this case, it just happens that we can see the sausage being made. Look at what we've done, in less than a decade. In ten or twenty years, the whole thing will be world class. bd2412 T 01:34, 23 October 2011 (UTC)

I think the essential difference between Wikipedia and Wiktionary is one of expertise. Wikipedia has articles on every conceivable subject, for which there are many knowledgeable experts, and posts made there tend to be self-correcting (or in some cases may devolve into POV arguments, etc). Lexicography is an extremely complex and detailed enterprise to which professionals have devoted their entire careers. The editors of Oxford English Dictionary or the various Merriam-Webster publications, or American Heritage Dictionary all thoroughly research (independently from each other) every entry, and every detail of every entry. Here at Wiktionary amateurs who may think they know what a word might mean, or should mean, are free to post, regardless of how imprecise, garbled or misleading their definitions and examples may be.

In response to User:BD2412, Wikipedia is quite a good encyclopedia, overall. But to continue with "... nor Wiktionary worse than any dictionary. All such endeavors begin by being shackled to the predispositions of their authors and editors" is simply untrue. That last statement is certainly true of Wiktionary - but not at all of "real" dictionaries.

It's particularly difficult for even a very good Wiktionary editor to come up with entries that are concise, precise, and unambiguous, with complete possible meanings of words, and distinguishing them, without relying on (aka copying from) copyrighted dictionaries. I would hazard that very few, if any, editors here are sufficiently skilled in lexicographical research to be able to come up with entries rephrased in their own words that can meet those goals. In contrast, Wikipedia is descriptive and explanatory; and editors there are free to acknowledge fair-use quotations from any number of authoritative sources. A dictionary and an encyclopedia are entirely different animals in this respect. Milkunderwood 03:25, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

But you're talking only about the English-in-English part of Wiktionary. There are translation portions of this dictionary the rival and surpass the best translating dictionaries I've seen, and Wiktionary is still "in print". Just try to find a good English-Galician dictionary, because I haven't. Our Galician section is set to surpass the only in-print translating dictionary I know of, and the work is not simply copying from exisitng translating dictionaries. The one I have is wrong more than 10% of the time, and is vague about the translation another 20% of the time. It omits required diacritical marks, and has countless other problems. So, in comparing Wiktionary to the OED, AHD, or Webster's, you've missed another vast aspect of Wiktionary that isn't covered at all in those publications. --EncycloPetey 16:29, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

I would repeat my original qualifier, for its age. Wiktionary is relatively new, but is far more dynamic than any of its much older brick-and-mortar based competitors. bd2412 T 19:35, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

How good can a translating dictionary be if the full senses in the base language are not very good, especially not very complete? It is largely because Wiktionary is so hard to use as a monolingual dictionary that there is relatively little headway being made in improving it as such. Our vaunted coverage of contemporary terms is usually poorly worded. Our professionally worded senses are often dated or copyvios. If it were not for the definitions taken from Webster 1913 and, probably, various copyvios which we didn't detect, Wiktionary would be even less complete. DCDuring TALK 22:07, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

It can be better than 99% of the translating dictionaries out there, which do not contain any section defining the English word in English. The usual translating dictionary only converts one language's words to those of another, often without explaining the use of either word except in the grossest way possible with sense tags (and often not even that). My Galician-English dictionary translates xineta as "genet", which is fine only if I know what genet means. Otherwise, I have to go to another dictionary to look up (deprecated template usage) genet. Then, I'm confronted by the fact that English genet has two very different meanings and I have no idea which is meant. Wiktionary thus provides more because (1) we link to the English translation, and (2) we try to clarify the senses of a translation instead of simply providing a bare word. --EncycloPetey 04:40, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

Exactly the problem. That the other dictionaries limit themselves to perhaps the main senses of a word is adequate for a dictionary that does not pretend to the universal inclusiveness of Wiktionary. I suppose the weakness of the competiting translating dictionaries is a great advantage to Wiktionary allowing us to surpass them with ease, especially for "smaller" languages. I still wonder whether the effort to add translations for senses will be undone be the need to correct English senses.

Somewhat relatedly I have long wondered about:

1. the use of obsolete English words as one-word glosses in definitions of FL words.
2. the preference for one-word glosses when the English word used is highly polysemic.

-- DCDuring TALK 14:35, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

Your many ttbc's

Hi,

Once again, I consider this a very bad edit. This creates a lot of unnecessary work, which has been done before. As if, when you add a new sense to a word and all previous translations become invalid. This way no translations will ever be final and someone will starting casting doubt on previous work. The entry already had "father (informal, familiar)". --Anatoli ^{(обсудить)} 12:55, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

I am so sorry that it inconveniences you that we keep on changing English definitions to correct for the poor quality of so many of them. It seems intolerable that the errors in those definitions should be allowed undermine the credibility of translations by not being confirmed after significant changes.

This is going to continue to happen as long as we do not have a "certification" process for English definitions. The poor quality of the starting point for translation is apparently not readily detected by many contributors of translations, so they waste their time on doing translations that need to be redone.

I will certainly not stop adding {{ttbc}} under the same circumstances. I can't see any other way to mark the issue. If we had subcategories of translations to be checked so that those arising from sense splits were categorized as a subcategory treated differently from others perhaps the existing category would be used in a way more to your taste. DCDuring TALK 17:51, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

The English definition may have required fixing but not the translations. When people translate a word, especially as simple and straightforward as this one, they use the most common sense of it, why would they do otherwise? If I were you, not knowing these foreign languages, I would leave the translations in the first, most common sense but you haven't checked a single translation. So you doubt the meaning of the French papa or the German Vati? You have French and German in your Babel list. It's not about me and my taste but I feel sorry for my work as well because I added many translations myself. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить)} 22:46, 24 November 2011 (UTC)

When you are me, feel free to do it that way.

I don't trust my knowledge of register differences. Dad is used in different registers and with different senses. Would {{trreq}} be better for any new senses? DCDuring TALK 00:50, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

I was just recommending the way new senses or splitting a generic senses would work, in my opinion, provided the most common sense stays at the top. Yes, {{trreq}} is better for new senses or just no translation at all (copy from other senses if sure). I wouldn't add {{trreq}} for languages with few contributors. They would just sit there. If someone wants to add a translation for each sense, they can do so. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить)} 01:51, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

Chicago-style hot dog too encyclopedic

I'm still not getting why you consider CSHD to be too encyclopedic. It follows the same format as many food articles, describing what's in it. Therefore it's no more encyclopedic than any of them Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 20:43, 25 November 2011 (UTC)

you get that

Where did you wanna move this entry? ---> Tooironic 12:05, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

I'm not sure. [[I get that a lot]] is, I think, more common. Both of them seem like possibly meritorious phrasebook entries, but you know I don't think we have any credible phrasebook. Otherwise, they both seem SoP based on context and (deprecated template usage) get (sense just added). DCDuring TALK 15:40, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

IMO [[I get that a lot]] would also be a useful phrase to include. Do you support a phrasebook or not? I couldn't make out your position based on your previous comment. ---> Tooironic 23:30, 13 December 2011 (UTC)

I support a credible phrasebook, one that has some principles for determining what is in and what is out and that focuses on colloquial speech, not canonical sentences. A phrasebook is not a substitute for learning the basic grammar of a language. DCDuring TALK 00:08, 14 December 2011 (UTC)

two things about rock

Hi. I hope you're well.

The edits you recently made to [[rock]] caught my eye for two reasons:

• You removed the |lang=en from the {{homophones}} template (right after I'd added that parameter, though I assume you didn't realize that). The |lang=en categorizes the page in English terms with homophones, so is worth including. (If you think that that category is not worth having, then by all means bring it to RFDO. But so long as we have it, the template should be parametrized accordingly, don't you think?
• You removed {{rfgloss}} from a sense (also soon after I had added it, though, again, I assume you didn't know that). I don't know what sense(s) it refers to. If you do, please add that info. If you don't know (or don't add) the glosses, then why remove {{rfgloss}}?

Thanks for your attention.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:01, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

I am not fully aware of the current state of categories using lang=en. I know that they are counter-productive in the case of, for example, rfd, rfv, and rfc. I know that they are not used in an enormous number of cases. I really have never seen the point of having the English stuff appearing in its own category rather than the ubercategory, other than a fetish for lingual egalitarianism.

That said, I would have deferred to your judgement with respect to {{homophones}} had I looked at the author of the change.

OTOH, I thought {{rfgloss}} was supposed to be used for translation glosses and either {{rfdef}} to be used for definitions.

If current practice is not settled, then my arguments are that "gloss" has several drawbacks relative to "definition":

1. It is more elitist, jargony.
2. It presupposes that a non-gloss definition is not appropriate.
3. In its normal and even linguistic meaning there is a presumption that it is especially brief, possibly just a synonym, rather than a more self-contained definition. DCDuring TALK 20:19, 18 December 2011 (UTC)

And I thought rfgloss is when a word is present but which sense of it is unclear (as in a foreign word's definition as just "set" or, for that matter, an English word's definition as just "set"), and rfdef for missing definitions. But maybe not. Anyway, I've re-edited the entry; see if it's okay.​—msh210℠ (talk) 23:35, 18 December 2011 (UTC)