User talk:Herostratus

Hello, and welcome to Wiktionary!

If you have edited Wikipedia, you probably already know some basics, but Wiktionary does have a few conventions of its own. Please take a moment to learn our basics before jumping in.

First, all articles should be in our standard format, even if they are not yet complete. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with it. You can use one of our pre-defined article templates by typing the name of a non-existent article into the search box and hitting 'Go'.

Notice that article titles are case-sensitive and are not capitalized unless, like proper nouns, they are ordinarily capitalized (Poland or January). Also, take a moment to familiarize yourself with our criteria for inclusion, since Wiktionary is not an encyclopedia. Read our Transwiki process if you plan to work on importing information from Wikipedia. Don't go looking for a Village pump – we have a Beer parlour.

Finally, you can link Wikipedia pages, including your user page, using [[w:pagename]], {{wikipedia}}, or {{wikipediapar|pagename}}. Please do not create redirects to Wikipedia pages, though. They don't work.

We hope you enjoy editing Wiktionary and being a Wiktionarian. — Vildricianus 18:28, 7 July 2006 (UTC)

Transwiki

Reminder: it is not GFDL compliant to manually transwiki items that way. Please simply tag them with {{Copy to Wiktionary}} (or similar) and it will be imported, usually within 24 hours. --Connel MacKenzie 06:44, 26 May 2007 (UTC)

Westward Ho!

Hi. Thanks for looking at this. However, the phrases you have added — while totally worth mentioning in the etymology to explain the phrase — should not really have part-of-speech subentries of their own, since they are sum of parts. Look at ho, which covers this meaning. (To put it another way, if a town is called Brown Leaf, that still wouldn't justify the dictionary having an entry for "brown leaf: a leaf off a tree that is brown", since it's self-evident from the parts.) Capitalisation is also an issue, since the everyday phrase "westward ho" does not require the capitals or exclamation mark. So I am probably gonna cut this down a bit later and move your point into the etymology section instead. Equinox ◑ 10:44, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

User:Equinox, thank you! You guys certainly know better than I and I accept and defer to whatever you decide. If this was Wikipedia we would have seperate pages for "Westward Ho!" and "Westward ho", so I don't know if that's what we'd do here or how its handled. If there's be just one page here, maybe the best name was would be "westward ho".

I suppose tho that "self evident" is in the eye of the beholder. I'm not entirely convinced that a reader who is going to this page will already know that "westward ho!" means either "I proffer to go west" or "let's go west" (rather than, say, "look to the west" or "get lost" or "let us die bravely" (from go west, to die) or something. Particularly ESL readers who have run across it. If it is self-evident to them, then why are they accessing this page. See for instance have at, where knowing the meaning of "have" and "at" is not sufficient, etc.

Unless they are looking for the English town, which I'd guess most aren't, since 1) it's pretty obscure compared to John Wayne movies and such I'd guess, and 2) this is a dictionary why are they even looking for towns here, and 3) if they are looking for a proper noun, there are a lot of other such uses, see Westward Ho at Wikipedia and its not clear that the English town trumps them all put together.

But definitely you guys know, I'm a Wikipedia guy and just here to make a landing place for people accessing Westward Ho on that site. So I definitely defer to your judgement, totally, and thank you for the interest. (BTW and FWIW I've added a citations page which didn't exist when you wrote this.) Herostratus (talk) 11:17, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Wikipedia is a bit of an omnium-gatherum whereas we do focus on what are traditionally "words" to be found in a dictionary. Admittedly we have got a lot more place names than any paper dictionary; but I bet you'd be surprised not to find Paris in a printed dictionary, whereas you (hopefully) would be surprised to find a large list of films etc. Those are encyclopaedia material. It seems you pre-date me on here by a couple of years but haven't used it much. So I'll drop the welcome-Wikipedia-user thing again in case you are curious about these differences. cheers, Equinox ◑ 12:16, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Welcome to Wikipedia users

Hello, and welcome to Wiktionary!

If you have edited Wikipedia, you probably already know some basics, but Wiktionary does have a few conventions of its own. Please take a moment to learn our basics before jumping in.

First, all articles should be in our standard format, even if they are not yet complete. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with it. You can use one of our pre-defined article templates by typing the name of a non-existent article into the search box and hitting 'Go'. You can link Wikipedia pages, including your user page, using [[w:pagename]], {{pedia}}, or {{wikipedia}}.

Notice that article titles are case-sensitive and are not capitalized unless, like proper nouns, they are ordinarily capitalized (Poland or January). Also, take a moment to familiarize yourself with our criteria for inclusion, since Wiktionary is not an encyclopedia. Don't go looking for a Village pump – we have a Beer parlour. Note that while Wikipedia likes redirects, Wiktionary deletes most redirects (especially spelling variations), in favor of short entries. Please do not copy entries here from Wikipedia if they are in wikipedia:Category:Copy to Wiktionary; they are moved by bot, and will appear presently in the Transwiki: namespace.

A further major caveat is that a "Citation" on Wiktionary is synonymous with a "Quotation", we use these primary sources to construct dictionary definitions from evidence of the word being used. "References" (aka "Citations" on Wikipedia) are used predominantly for verifying Etymologies and usage notes, not the definitions themselves. This is partly to avoid copyright violation, and partly to ensure that we don't fall into the trap of adding "list words", or words that while often defined are never used in practice.

Note for experienced Wikipedians:

Wiktionary is run in a very different manner from Wikipedia and you will have a better experience if you do not assume the two are similar in culture. Please remember that despite your experience on Wikipedia, that experience may not always be applicable here. While you do not need to be an expert, or anything close to one, to contribute, please be as respectful of local policies and community practices as you can. Be aware that well-meaning Wikipedians have unfortunately found themselves blocked in the past for perceived disruption due to misunderstandings. To prevent a similar outcome, remember the maxim: be bold, but don't be reckless!

Having said that, we welcome Wikipedians, who have useful skills and experience to offer. The following are a couple of the most jarring differences between our projects that Wikipedians may want to learn up front, so things go smoothly for everyone. Changing policy pages on Wiktionary is very strongly discouraged. If you think something needs changing, please discuss it at the beer parlour, after which we may formally vote on the issue. You should also note that Wiktionary has very different user-space policies, we are here to build a dictionary and your user-page exists only to facilitate that. In particular we have voted to explicitly ban all userboxes with the exception of {{Babel}}; please do not create or use them.

We hope you enjoy editing Wiktionary and being a Wiktionarian.