User talk:Ruakh/2012

January 2012

Template categorization

I'm not sure how, but this edit of yours removed the categorization from the accompanying template. There might be other affected templates from about the same time. --EncycloPetey 22:22, 16 January 2012 (UTC)

Oops, human error, sorry. Thanks for letting me know; I've fixed it now. It looks like it was the only affected template, fortunately. —Ruakh 00:29, 17 January 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much

Hi there Ruakh! Just wanted to say thanks very much for your helpful explanations at Wiktionary:Requests for verification. I apologize if I've gotten a bit confused at times, but I'm doing my best to learn more and more about how to contribute to Wiktionary. :) Thanks again, -- Cirt (talk) 19:27, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

You're very welcome, and your apology is completely unnecessary. :-)   —Ruakh 20:22, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

Heh, okay thanks, that's very reassuring! ;) -- Cirt (talk) 20:25, 30 January 2012 (UTC)

February 2012

Xenu help

Ruakh, thanks very much, for the help at Xenu. ;) Much appreciated, -- Cirt (talk) 03:47, 1 February 2012 (UTC)

he-4 and he-3

Is it what you want to have both he-4 and he-3 on your user page? As it makes no sense to me. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:23, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

en-4 is defined as "This user speaks English at a near-native level", and en-3 as "This user is able to contribute with an advanced level of English" (emphases mine). he-4 and he-3 are defined analogously; they're direct translations of the English definitions, just with עברית ("Hebrew") substituted for "English". I speak Hebrew at a near-native level, because I grew up speaking both Hebrew and English at home, but I'm not really able to contribute at a near-native level, because I'm not very literate. (I can read prayers and whatnot, since they're written with vowels, but it takes me ages to get through normal books, since they're written without. I actually read French much better than Hebrew; and I can't write Hebrew almost at all, because I never know how anything is spelled.)
Maybe I should pick either he-4 or he-3 to avoid confusion, but, eh, I don't think it's a big deal. :-)
—Ruakh 18:17, 13 February 2012 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Grease pit#Subpage problem

The above-linked-to conversation has taken a turn deeper into areas of what I take to be your expertise, and I'd appreciate your revisiting it.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:37, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:26, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

Template:term

So did something break? --Yair rand 02:26, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Not so far as I know; I'm just opposed to that change. If we want to start doing away with the langprefix B.S. — and I'm all for that — then the sensible thing would be to remove it from {{Xyzy}}, rather than to create a {{Xyzy no langprefix}} to be used in 99% of cases. —Ruakh 02:58, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Removing it from {{Xyzy}} isn't as easy as it sounds though. It would require moving all the language templates to the main namespace, and that is sure to break things badly. -- Liliana • 03:03, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

I disagree with both steps of your reasoning. It seems like those two disagreements should cancel out, and I should reach the same conclusion as you, but somehow it doesn't seem to work out that way . . . —Ruakh 03:41, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

Oh well. I should get back to taking my indefinite wikibreak, I guess. -- Liliana • 03:55, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

This issue needs some more GP/BP discussion, I think. --Yair rand 03:58, 16 February 2012 (UTC)

CFI and independence

FYI I have touched Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2012-02/Independence by using section heading "independence"; you may want to revert me. See also my comment on the talk page of the vote. --Dan Polansky 08:16, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I've replied there. —Ruakh 12:40, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Very bible

That citation you added for adjective Bible is pretty obviously a one-off use. I can come up with sentences like "He was very Larry King," "a group of bands that were very activist in spirit," or "Most of the coverage is very horse race." I notice the quote you've used also have "very business." You don't take "business" to be an adjective, do you? --Brett 12:57, 17 February 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I think you're right. I originally found three cites for "very Bible" (you can find the links on the talk-page). I added one of them. Then I was going to add the second, but when I went to do so, I found that it was far too similar to the first one — also contrasting "very, very" with "very business, sort of Bible" and "sort of business, very Bible" — for them to be truly independent. And when I went to add the third, I started by tracking down the original quoted source, and found that that source seems to have been misquoted: the original seems to have "a very Bibleman", but its quoter parsed it as "a very Bible man". I'm not certain that the quoter was wrong, but still, that's no basis for a cite. So at this point I no longer think that "very Bible" is well enough attested to justify treating "Bible" as an adjective (absent other evidence). —Ruakh 14:01, 18 February 2012 (UTC)

ENG-BUL dictionary

Yes, I made a dictionary for the Babylon platform, http://www.babylon.com/free-dictionaries/reference/dictionaries-thesauri/Two-way-Eng-Bul-Dictionary/36657.html

Greetings, Willy Obretenov

— This unsigned comment was added by 93.152.183.46 (talk) at 16:45, 20 February 2012 (UTC).

הורה

(deprecated template usage) Parent has multiple noun meanings, so I added {{gloss|mother or father}} to (deprecated template usage) הורה's definition "parent". I didn't like that, though, as (deprecated template usage) הורה never means "mother" (AFAIK). I've tried to fix it, but hope you can improve it (further). Thanks, in anticipation.​—msh210℠ (talk) 00:28, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

What about "כל הורה"? I would pronounce that as kól-horé and take it to mean "every parent", i.e., "every mother or father". Do you disagree? —Ruakh 01:21, 24 February 2012 (UTC)

I don't. Good point. Thanks. So {{gloss|mother or father}} might be best. It still seems odd to me.​—msh210℠ (talk) 09:36, 26 February 2012 (UTC)

March 2012

Template:SUP edit

Thanks for your edit. That fixed the line-spacing problem with the line above the superscript text, but has caused a line-spacing problem with the line below the superscript text (which it now shares with {{SUB}}). Do you know of any way of solving that one, too? — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 18:41, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

That's bizarre. I have some vague thoughts, but no concrete suggestions. If I come up with any, I'll let you know. —Ruakh 19:09, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. If you do work out a solution, please notify me and others at Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2012-02/Handling of superscript and subscript letters#Templates for superscribing and subscribing, which, I assume, is what prompted you to tweak {{SUP}} in the first place. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:30, 3 March 2012 (UTC)

templates

Re. this, is there a discussion somewhere? kwami (talk) 04:47, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

I don't know. Probably there are many. There's no single authoritative one that I'd point to and say, "This is the discussion where we all agreed to live and let live, at least when it comes to citations templates." —Ruakh 05:35, 4 March 2012 (UTC)

Filter

put at User:Ruakh/filter, please delete it when able. — billinghurst sDrewth 14:11, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Deleted, thanks. Admins can see it at Special:Undelete/User:Ruakh/filter?timestamp=20120306140948. —Ruakh 14:56, 6 March 2012 (UTC)

Help deleting some redirects

All the redirects listed under {{poscatboiler}} are not needed anymore and need to be deleted. Do you know of an easy way to delete them all? —CodeCat 18:16, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

What should the deletion-messages say? —Ruakh 18:35, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

I think there is a standard message for deleting redirects that were left behind by moves: Bad redirection/residual from move —CodeCat 18:49, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Right you are.  Done, by adding this JavaScript to User:Ruakh/common.js:

// For every link at [[Template:poscatboiler]] that points to a redirect-page,
// change it to point, instead, to the deletion-page for that redirect:
addOnloadHook
( function ()
  { if(mediaWiki.config.get('wgPageName') != 'Template:poscatboiler')
      return;
    jQuery('div.allpagesredirect > a').each
    ( function()
      { if(! /[/]Template:poscatboiler[/][^?]+$/.test(this.href))
          return;
        this.href = this.href + '?action=delete';
        $(this).addClass('new');
        this.appendChild(document.createTextNode('?action=delete'));
      }
    );
  }
);
 
// If we're at a deletion-page named [[Template:poscatboiler/...]], then set
// the deletion-message and auto-click:
addOnloadHook
( function ()
  { if(! /^Template:poscatboiler[/]/.test(mediaWiki.config.get('wgPageName')))
      return;
    if(mediaWiki.config.get('wgAction') != 'delete')
      return;
    var wpReason = document.getElementById('wpReason');
    wpReason.value =
      'Bad [[Wiktionary:Redirections|redirection]]/residual from move: ' +
      wpReason.value.replace(/\]\].*/, ']]');
    document.getElementById('wpConfirmB').click();
  }
);

and middle-clicking on the links. (Actually, it might have been easier to use the MediaWiki API — I already have most of the code for that, from when I created the PatrollingEnhancements Gadget — but this wasn't bad.)

—Ruakh 19:10, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Thank you! That saves me a lot of work! —CodeCat 19:22, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome! :-)   —Ruakh 20:19, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

Wow, useful script. I'm about to try and adapt it to delete the bad inflected forms of rimarkigi. - -sche (discuss) 19:34, 14 March 2012 (UTC)

todah rabah

Hi Ran. Could you add the Hebrew etymon and pronunciation of todah rabah, please? Thanks. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 02:54, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

I've added the Hebrew. I don't know about the pronunciation; in Hebrew it's /to'da ra'ba/, but I've heard Americans say something closer to /'to.da 'ra.ba/, and I'm not sure which should be considered the correct pronunciation in English (or if both should). For that matter, I'm not sure if this phrase is sufficiently nativized for it to make sense to give any English pronunciation at all. —Ruakh 06:32, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

OK; I've therefore removed the Pronunciation section. Thanks for your help. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 06:49, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Is this one OK? — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 17:50, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I think so. Thanks. :-)   —Ruakh 18:57, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

Thank you, too. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 21:36, 18 March 2012 (UTC)

נטל המס

Hi, do you know the vowelization on נטל המס (current redlink; w:)? Does it use (deprecated template usage) נֵטֶל (nétel)?​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:50, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

It must, but I'll check tonight to be sure. —Ruakh 19:59, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. If so, then (deprecated template usage) נֵטֶל can have an "onus, (figurative) burden" sense added to it (which is why I asked).​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:16, 19 March 2012 (UTC)

Even-Shoshan doesn't list this compound specifically, but he does have a Modern "by extension" sense of ómes, ma'amasá, sével, listing a Bialik quotation with nétel ham'tsuká and an example sentence with tákhat nétel ha'avodá. He also lists the compound nétel-hahokhakhá (Modern, legal), which I take to be in this sense (and also nétel negdí (Modern), which I do not take to be in this sense, though it doesn't seem to meet the CFI either way). And he doesn't list any other non-verbs with this spelling, so I don't have any alternative interpretation to yours. —Ruakh 01:16, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Many thanks. I've added an "onus" sense to (deprecated template usage) נֵטֶל based on the above. I don't know what nétel negdí is supposed to mean.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:59, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Even-Shoshan defines it as masá b'tsurát mishkólet shematsmidím l'katséhu shél manóf k'déi l'azén otó; so, "counterweight". But I can't find any evidence of use, so for our purposes, I don't think it really matters much what Even-Shoshan says it means. (The best-attested term for "counterweight" seems to be משקל נגד; and I find that Even-Shoshan does list that term as well, under néged, with some differences of definition. I gather that mishkál néged can be hung from one side of the lever, while a nétel negdí cannot — or could not, if it were a real phrase with different restrictions on its use than "only in dictionaries".) —Ruakh 12:44, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Ah, thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:51, 20 March 2012 (UTC)

Ditidaht

Thank you for those changes to the Ditidaht page! I will (try to) remember to use those techniques in the future. BenjaminBarrett12 (talk) 19:03, 29 March 2012 (UTC)

April 2012

lol

I see lots of other users use similar rhetoric, I hardly find it appropriate to have one set of rules for some editors and another for the rest and you could simply have redacted or collapsed it.Lucifer (talk) 21:22, 3 April 2012 (UTC)

• whatchutalkinbout?Lucifer (talk) 03:17, 6 April 2012 (UTC)
• Why did you delete pussyman?Lucifer (talk) 03:24, 6 April 2012 (UTC)

thanks (patrolling script)

Whatever anyone else says about it, I find your patrolling enhancements script (the blue Ms and red Ds) very useful, and the dropdown box of deletion reasons only makes it more useful — now I don't have to go to the regular &action=delete page when I want to supply a standard deletion reason. Thanks for your work on the gadget! Together with Lupin's popups, it makes patrolling feasible. - -sche (discuss) 05:26, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

I like all of it except that the deletion reason box shows up unbidden at the bottom of watchlist page. I have turned off the Lupin popups, which seems to have eliminated the problem. DCDuring TALK 15:34, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

The delete-reason box only shows up when there are unpatrolled new pages. That shouldn't happen very often on your watchlist, since you're probably not watching too many nonexistent pages. When it does happen, you can just patrol the new page and refresh. But, I see you've commented at the script's talk-page; let's continue this there. —Ruakh 19:46, 8 April 2012 (UTC)

Brand names vote

Do you think you could properly implement Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2012-02/Brand_names_and_physical_product_2 in CFI, especially by replacing "product" with "brand" in the first list item, and by adding the missing "or service" several times to the body text of the WT:BRAND section? (I am asking you, as I trust you; Daniel Carrero has made a failed attempt at implementing the vote.) --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:47, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

 Done —Ruakh 20:16, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Bot request

שלום רוח, may I ask you for a bot run at the Wiktionary? I would need small edits in ~400 articles, quite simple automatic working following a list that I will provide. I'll discuss the details when you answer. תודה -- sarang♥사랑 06:09, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

You can certainly ask, but I can't agree to it without knowing what it is. :-/   —Ruakh 14:24, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

As you may see it depends Chinese (לא עברית). It is an insert of a short string, always at the very beginning of each article, as I did it e.g. at "一" and "Index:Chinese radical/一" with {{Commonsrad|1}}. I would pass you a list of the ~210 characters (as "一") with the corresponding numbers (as "1"). You just tell me what format this list should be, e.g. 一 1, next line 丨 2, 丶 3 and so up to the line 龠 214; I can provide such a list into your bot talk page. I made it manually in some three or four articles, but it is a bit boring to do it another 420 times. I believe that is typical bot work. I would enjoy if your bot might do it. -- sarang♥사랑 15:24, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

See Wiktionary talk:About Sinitic languages#{{Commonsrad}}. —Ruakh 15:42, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

I answered it, and added an explanation to the {{Commonsrad}} documentation. -- sarang♥사랑 18:11, 11 April 2012 (UTC)

Template:grc-cite

Thanks for the improvements. I was considering the possibility of eventually reworking this template to work similarly to {{context}}. As Ancient Greek has a finitish set of authors and works, I think it would be feasible to write subtemplates for all/most of them, so that simply inputting {{grc-cite|Homer|Iliad|3.50}} would produce 7th, 8th century BC, Homer, Iliad, 3.50 (accessing {{grc-cite-Homer}} and {{grc-cite-Homer-Iliad}}. Since Robert is no longer with us, and you seem to be among the more knowledgeable editors about this template, I thought I'd see if you had any thoughts, worries, premonitions and like about such a venture. Many thanks. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 23:36, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

Such a thing could certainly be done, but I wonder if it would make more sense to call {{grc-cite-Homer-Iliad}} directly from entries? I mean, the reason for {{context}}'s complex network of interlinked templates is that it needs to combine many templates in one; we want {{US|rare}} rather than {{US}} {{rare}} because we want (US, rare) rather than (US) (rare), so every template needs to be able to call every other template. It doesn't seem like {{grc-cite}} would benefit from that sort of complexity, would it? —Ruakh 23:46, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

I suspect that {{grc-cite}} would never need to become quite as monstrous as {{context}}. I guess when I made the comparison, I was thinking that the template could check for prewritten templates and, if extant, utilize them, and if not, simply output the raw text, like {{context}} does. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 23:57, 14 April 2012 (UTC)

I gathered that, but is {{grc-cite|Homer|Iliad|3.50}} really preferable to {{grc-cite-Homer-Iliad|3.50}}? If the answer's "yes, it's preferable", then it can certainly be implemented, and I can help with that; it just surprises me, is all. {{grc-cite-Homer-Iliad|3.50}} is much simpler and more maintainable, so I wouldn't want to use {{grc-cite|Homer|Iliad|3.50}} unless it's actively preferable. —Ruakh 00:03, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

I think it would be. It would allow the subtemps to be created at leisure. {{grc-cite|Homer|Iliad|3.50}} still works before {{grc-cite-Homer-Iliad}} is created. That way editors don't have to keep track of which authors are special and which aren't. While the list of Ancient Greek authors and works is finite, it is certainly not small enough to write templates for the lot in a short period of time. Additionally, while more complex, I wonder if it might be more scalable. If the Wikipedia link for w:Aristophanes changes, we only have to change {{grc-cite-Aristophanes}} and not {{grc-cite-Aristophanes-The Birds}}, {{grc-cite-Aristophanes-Lysistrata}}, etc. A lot of the authors have a variety of different names (transliteration of the Greek, Latin, Old Latin, etc.), and I suspect there will be some back and forth. Presumably it wouldn't be that hard to have {{grc-cite|Homer|Iliad|3.50}} call {{grc-cite-Homer|Iliad|3.50}}, which would call {{grc-cite-Homer-Iliad|3.50}}, would it? -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 00:21, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

O.K., so I have to take a step back and say that part of your original idea actually cannot reasonably be implemented, so far as I know: sorry, I didn't notice before that you want the 3.50 to get parsed into Γ plus 50. The gamma is doable with only a little bit of ugliness (&#{{#expr:trunc(3.50)+912}}; is Γ, which is Γ), but I can't think of a good way to get the 50. (Wikipedia has a whole family of horrifying templates that do shocking things to extract a substring from a string, but they're pure evil, and I refuse to start down that path!)

But for the rest of it — probably what we would want to do is, put all the formatting stuff into a helper template {{grc-cite/format}}, which would basically look exactly like {{grc-cite}} does now. Then {{grc-cite}} might be {{ {{#ifexist:Template:grc-cite/{{{1|-}}}|grc-cite/{{{1}}}|grc-cite/format}}|{{{1|}}}|{{{2|}}}|{{{3|}}}|{{{4|}}}|{{{5|}}}|year={{{year|}}}|notes={{{notes|}}} }} (so that it calls e.g. {{grc-cite/Homer}} if it exists and {{grc-cite/format}} directly otherwise); {{grc-cite/Homer}} might be {{ {{#ifexist:Template:grc-cite/Homer/{{{2|-}}}|grc-cite/Homer/{{{2}}}|grc-cite/format}}|[[w:Homer|]]|{{{2|}}}|{{{3|}}}|{{{4|}}}|{{{5|}}}|year={{{year|}}}|notes={{{notes|}}} }} (so that it calls e.g. {{grc-cite/Homer/Iliad}} if it exists and {{grc-cite/format}} directly otherwise); and {{grc-cite/Homer/Iliad}} might be {{grc-format|{{{1|}}}|[[w:Iliad|]]|{{#if:{{{3|}}}|&#{{#expr:trunc({{{3}}})+912}};|{{{3}}}]]}}|{{{4|}}}|{{{5|}}}|year=[[w:Homer#Period|7th, 8th century BC]]|notes={{{notes|}}} }}. (That's not the only way to do it, and certainly a lot of the details are debatable, but it's the general approach that comes to mind.)

—Ruakh 23:42, 16 April 2012 (UTC)

Yes, those are essentially all the same conclusions I came to myself, even if I never really figured out {{context}}. I realized that our templates probably couldn't extract substrings, though I didn't realize the 'pedia had some which did. If you advise against them, I'll take your word for it. In any case, there are workarounds for that. We could do {{grc-cite|Homer|Iliad|3|50}}. This, of course, introduces some problems. Different works have different chapter/verse arrangements, typically ranging from one to three hierarchical sets of numbers/letters. So, either the citations would have to be named (cit1, cit2, cit3), or they'd have to be last. I almost wonder if it might be best to make them last. So.....you'd have {{grc-cite|Homer|Iliad|3|50|text=κδφξλσκδξφλκσξδκξφσ|trans=foobarfoobar|tr=kdpfkslskdksphlksksdkksphs|transauth=StodgyBritishGuy|transyear=1863}}. There's probably a few other optional fields we might need. In any case, as you can see from the first quote at ἔλαιον (élaion), there is the potential for a lot of stuff after the reference. Some of it (like the information about the translator and his work) absolutely has to be optional, as some of our translations will be done by us, like those done at θεῖον (theîon). Perhaps the rest of the stuff is ideal, but we can't really expect it all the time. The point of all that being that it's probably not a bad idea to have everything after the reference numbers be named, both because they will be produced somewhat haphazardly, and because if you're adding it, the amount of work it takes to name the parameters is relatively irrelevent. We could then have a few different helper templates which convert various numbers and letters to other numbers and letters. So, {{grc-cite-Homer-Iliad}} could do [[s:el:Ιλιάς/{{grc-cite-numtoGrek|{{{1}}}}}#{{{2}}}|[[{{{1}}}.{{{2}}}]]. What do you think? -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 00:14, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

That makes sense to me. —Ruakh 04:18, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

On a somewhat tangential note, I also realized why it would be wicked helpful to take parameters instead of separate template calls. The LSJ, along with other grc lexicons, tends to abbreviate all of its citations (and the abbreviations are all in Latin), so we could have {{grc-cite}} do the expansion of those abbreviations for us. For example, you could do {{grc-cite|Ar.|Av.}} and it would produce the same results as {{grc-cite|Aristophanes|The Birds}}. That would make my life a whole lot easier. No, seriously, an assload easier. I've been compiling a list of the abbreviations, what they expand to in Latin, and then what that means in English. It's incredibly tedious. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 00:28, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

I don't follow. You seem to be suggesting that {{grc-cite-Ar.-Av.}} be a redirect to {{grc-cite-Aristophanes-The_Birds}}; but that could be done, and would have the same consequences, with either approach. (Well, I suppose the parameters approach would just require {{grc-cite-Ar.}} to redirect to {{grc-cite-Aristophanes}}, and {{grc-cite-Aristophanes-Av.}} to {{grc-cite-Aristophanes-The_Birds}}, such that the latter could theoretically cover more combinations of abbreviated and unabbreviated names without needing as many templates, but in practice I find it hard to imagine that the difference would be significant. I mean, how many different abbreviations are there for "Aristophanes"?) —Ruakh 04:18, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Oh yeah. I'm not quite sure why I was thinking the direct call approach couldn't handle that. Perhaps I was just too busy giggling to myself at the thought of not having to look up all that stuff over and over again. I still think the parameter approach is better, for the reasons listed previously. Anyways, thanks so much for your input on this. I'll start working on it, hopefully within the next few days. Would you mind looking at it and critiquing when I get it operational? -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 13:03, 17 April 2012 (UTC)

Ok, so it's all up and running. I've taken it to the Grease pit for comment. I hope you won't take it as an insult to your technical skills, but I thought it'd be prudent to get a few sets of eyes on it, and, if I might take the liberty of patting myself on the back, I think the template's cool enough that it might be useful to add it to the collective Wiktionary meme pool. Rest assured, I would still very much like to have your eyeballs on it, if you have the time. Thanks. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 01:28, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Certainly I don't take it as an insult; I frequently take technical thoughts there myself. —Ruakh 01:37, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Replace function

Hello. In order to lower the number of exceptions to the Slovene conjugational templates, I wanted to create a template which would make use of a replace function to accomplish that. After I figured out that the string functions are not installed here, I started copying templates from Wikipedia to make a workaround template work, but in the end it didn't. And only then did I realize that Wiktionary decided against these templates a little more than a year ago, for reasons still not quite clear to me. So, I have a question, is there any other way I could get certain elements in a string replaced by a function? Also, what do I do with the templates I created, should I just leave them alone until they get deleted? Thank you. bead-v 13:59, 15 April 2012 (UTC) — This unsigned comment was added by Bead-v (talk • contribs).

Re: "So, I have a question, is there any other way I could get certain elements in a string replaced by a function?": Not really. You should simply design the template not to require that.

Re: "Also, what do I do with the templates I created, should I just leave them alone until they get deleted?": I've deleted the string-templates now, thanks. As for the Slovene conjugation templates — if you want them to be deleted, you can list them at Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/Others.

—Ruakh 17:38, 15 April 2012 (UTC)

National prefixes

US certainly is. British may be considered a simple adjective, but the fact is that it and Spanish are used far more often in "Franco-"/"Sino-" prefixing situations than "Anglo-" and certainly "Hispano-". LlywelynII (talk) 14:49, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

Sorry. Apparently wasn't signed in. Here's my handle. LlywelynII (talk) 14:49, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

This would be good to mention in the introductory text ("Most of these prefixes are rare; for example, one normally writes of Spanish-American relations rather than Hispano-American relations"), but it doesn't justify adding non-prefixes to a table of prefixes. (And by "US certainly is" do you mean to assert that "US" is a prefix? If so — what makes you think so?) —Ruakh 14:54, 19 April 2012 (UTC)

May 2012

Welcome back

Glad you're back. I hope you had a good time. New Zealand? DCDuring TALK 00:24, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! I did. :-)   And — Israel. (New Zealand was just the one time, because my parents were on sabbatical there that semester. I loved it, but it's very likely that I'll never go back. Israel, on the other hand, I visit every few years, because I have so many family members and friends there.) —Ruakh 00:36, 9 May 2012 (UTC)

!

Despite our past kerfuffles (or however the fuck you spell that since firefox is yelling at me about it) the fact that you're learning about Persian excites me. Let me know if you'd like advice. If you don't I'll be angry. :P — [Ric Laurent] — 03:17, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

Just remembered that I once worked on this, which is relevant to the "zabân-e fârsi" thing. User:Dick Laurent/Appendix:Persian ezâfe — [Ric Laurent] — 11:31, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

I would definitely welcome any advice. :-)   And thanks for the link! —Ruakh 18:14, 16 May 2012 (UTC)

RfD discussion

Thank you for the apology. Astral (talk) 01:38, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

JavaScript help

Hi, if you have time and inclination, I'd appreciate some JS help. If not, I certainly understand. [[User:Msh210/format.js]] is an AutoFormat-like script loaded when editing pages. It works fine, but one line in it does not do anything (or yield an error in Firefox's error console) even when it seemingly should. That line is

txt=txt.replace(/^==([a-zA-Z ]+)==\n*((?:(?:(?:={3,})?[^=].*)?\n)*)(\#+ *\{\{context\|)([^\}\=]+)\}\}/gm,

function($0,$1,$2,$3,$4){return "=="+$1+"==\n"+$2+$3+($1=="English"?"":"lang={"+"{subst:langrev|"+$1+"}}|")+$4+"}}"});

Here, txt is the content of the textarea (wiki source of the page). The purpose of this code is to add lang={{subst:langrev|French}}| in any context tag in a French section, and the same, m.m., for other languages. Any idea on what might be wrong with the code, please?​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:06, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Works for me. You might want to give a specific case of where it doesn't work. --Yair rand (talk) 21:15, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

It works for me as well, so I've just looked through it for things that seem like they might affect some pages and not others. I see a bunch of little things, but I'm sure that most of them are explicit decisions that you made for simplicity's sake and are completely aware of. The only thing I see that seems unintentional is, it will only touch one problematic context-tag within a given language section, because the regex will match only one time for a given language header. (Specifically, it will only touch the last problematic context-tag, because it will have greedily read past all the others.) To fix that, you could write something like:

txt =
  txt.replace
  ( /^==([a-zA-Z ]+)==\n+(?:(?:===|[^=]).*\n+)*/gm,
    function(section, langname)
    { if(langname == 'English')
        return section;
      return '' +
        section.replace
        ( /^(#+ *[{][{]context)([|][^=}]+[}][}])/gm,
          '$1|lang={\{subst:langrev|' + langname + '}\}$2'
        );
    }
  );

But it seems like you would have noticed if it had fixed even one context-tag, because that would have shown up in the diff, right? So it's probably not the problem you encountered . . .
—Ruakh 22:18, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you (both) very much for your help. Oddly, I just tried it again (on [[clicher]], by adding {{context|aviation|lang=und}}) and it worked fine. Thanks, too, Ruakh, for the suggestion on how to combine multiple fixes into one edit (without which it should fix one, "Show changes", fix another, rinse, and repeat). I'll replace my script with yours and keep an eye on its nonactivation.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:03, 18 May 2012 (UTC)

Citations:Dionysiokolax

Hi. You added {{rfdate}} to my quote. Do you want the date of the original German (1886), the English translation (1973), the revised edition of the latter (1990), or all of them? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 01:32, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

The text there obviously isn't the 1886 German. Is it the 1973 English, or the 1990 English? —Ruakh 02:09, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

I don't have a copy of the pre-revision text, so I don't know whether the part I've quoted was the same in the 1973 version. Should I therefore date it 1990? Or perhaps 1973–90? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 23:03, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Well, to start with, you gave a specific page number, so you should add whatever other information (year, publisher, ISBN, etc.) matches that page number. But as for the bold year at the start of the metadata — probably something like "1973 or 1990" would be safest? —Ruakh 02:46, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Is there a prescribed style guide? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 10:04, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Quotations. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 10:10, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

I've edited as best I can the metadata to conform to that policy; is what I've done OK? WT:"#Between the definitions seemed to suggest that the later date should come after the publisher's name, rather than at the beginning. I've also added the aphorism number, since you guys seem to like a lot of detail. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 12:02, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! Re: "the later date should come after the publisher's name": More or less. The date of the quotation goes in bold at the beginning of the metadata. The date of the specific publishing/printing/quoting/whatnot goes after the publisher's name, except that it can be omitted if it's the same as the date of the quotation. Naturally that means that the date after the publisher's name, if present, will always be later than the date in bold at the beginning of the metadata, but that's a result of the rule, not the rule itself. (I've edited the citations page to show you what I mean.) Anyway — thanks again! —Ruakh 14:08, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Understood (I think). If I obtain a copy of the pre-revision 1973 text, and I find that it is the same as the 1990 text, should I then change the quotation's metadata to conform with the publication information of the earlier version? I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 16:40, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Eh, not a big deal. If you find that the text is in fact in the 1973 edition, then you can change "1973 or 1990" to just "1973", but I don't think it's particularly important to change the rest of the metadata (since it's accurate even as-is). —Ruakh 22:07, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

OK. I ask because WT:"#Which date to use states "Preferably the work is a first edition, but otherwise the date of the edition should be placed in the edition section." (my emphasis). I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 11:24, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I agree with that. But it's not a huge deal. —Ruakh 13:20, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the clarifications. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 14:28, 27 May 2012 (UTC)

sondeli

Hi, Can you please explain me the reason for removing English word "Sondeli"? - Raman Subba Rao Metikurke ರಾ ಸು ಮೇಟಿಕುರ್ಕೆ (talk) 15:33, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

"English"? It's true that the header at the top was ==English==, but the entry was a copy and paste of the Kannada entry: it belonged to a Kannada category, its interwiki was to a Kannada word, it referred to a reference that said it was a Kannada word. Do you believe this to be an English word? If so, feel free to create an English entry, but it has to be an actual English entry, not just a Kannada entry with the header changed. —Ruakh 15:35, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Sondeli is an English word derived from Kannada language. I had created a page for this word more than two years back and someone has changed it to Kananda pronounced as Sundili - Raman Subba Rao Metikurke ರಾ ಸು ಮೇಟಿಕುರ್ಕೆ (talk) 15:43, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Ah, I see what happened. O.K., I'll take care of it. Thanks. —Ruakh 15:48, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much for the changes.

- Raman Subba Rao Metikurke ರಾ ಸು ಮೇಟಿಕುರ್ಕೆ (talk) 16:06, 26 May 2012 (UTC)

User:Mahmudmasri

I noticed this edit, which looks wrong, but I'm not up to speed myself on WT Hebrew practices, so I thought I would bring it to your attention (if you're already subscribed to the page, sorry for the extra clutter). Chuck Entz (talk) 23:48, 28 May 2012 (UTC)

Thank you! I've cleaned it up now. —Ruakh 00:00, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

June 2012

Revert

I particularly diagree with these two edits [1], [2]. Do you mind self-reverting? 78.144.245.127 06:23, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

I do mind, sorry.

Regarding [[haram]]: Pass a Method (talk • contribs) removed the text of a valid quotation without offering any justification. (I believe (s)he simply disagreed with the quotation on political grounds, but since (s)he didn't offer an explanation, I can't know for sure.) As for the definition text — I think "not lawful" captures the term's meaning better than "sinful". English works that both use and explain the term generally explain it as "forbidden" or "prohibited" or "not lawful". (Probably the best definition would include "sinful" as well, but not as the first word.)

Regarding [[heterosexuals]]: We don't include synonyms on "form-of" entries. (And if we did, we'd want to include all synonyms, not just Pass a Method (talk • contribs)'s beloved hetero that (s)he's been adding everywhere.)

—Ruakh 13:03, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

I have no political motivations. You can check out my profile of the same name on wikipedia where i am in relatively good standing. I edit only for fun. Im also good at finding references, therefore i will find it easy to prove my edits from google scholar or books. 78.144.245.127 21:07, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

I implied a question before; let me now pose it explicitly: Why do you feel that I should delete the text of the quotation at [[haram]]? (As I wrote before, you removed that text without explanation, and this lack of explanation was part of what led me to think your motivations were political. If, as you say, my inference was wrong, then you can help dispel it by offering such an explanation now.) —Ruakh 21:26, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

ה

Nice work.​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:43, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

:-)   —Ruakh 13:04, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

By the way — so, silent ה sometimes becomes א. In particular, ל״ה hif'íl verbs will generally have a Talmudic-Hebrew-or-later action noun with an א in the last position; hence הוֹדָאָה (hoda'á), הַרְשָׁאָה (harsha'á), השוואה \ הַשְׁוָאָה (hashva'á), and so on. (They'll also generally have a Talmudic-Hebrew-or-later action noun with a י in the last position; הוֹדָיָה (hodayá), הַרְשָׁיָה (harshayá), and השווייה \ הַשְׁוָיָה (hashvayá) are all attested, though of these three only hodayá is really a serious competitor to the א version.) Now, my impression is that this is strictly a post-Biblical-Hebrew thing — that Biblical Hebrew never inserts a א — and it makes some sense to me that this would first show up in Talmudic Hebrew, which is also when (for example) the variants קָרוּי (karúi) and שָׁנאוּי (sanúi) of קָרוּא (karú) and שָׁנוּא (sanú) are first attested, which makes me think that final א had fallen silent (due presumably to Aramaic influence) and thereby blurred the line between ל״א and ל״ה — but I don't really know. And my impressions of Biblical Hebrew are not worth very much. :-P   Do you happen to know? —Ruakh 15:16, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

I don't happen to, no; sorry. And I can't think of any hif'il ל״ה action nouns in Tanach, so that I might look up their spellings. (At least in Chumash, action nouns altogether are very rare, or so is my impression.)

On a completely unrelated note, this is going on today; you may be interested.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:28, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! —Ruakh 18:08, 3 June 2012 (UTC)

Ruth 1:20 has an instance (in מָרָא) of what I assume is a ה turning into an א, though I don't know. I seem vaguely to recall ק־ר־א used in Tanach where ק־ר־ה might be expected, but am not sure of that and certainly don't know where; perhaps when I'm less tired I'll think of where it might be or how to search for it. (In my reply above I was under the impression you were looking for hif'il ל״ה action nouns with א in Tanach; now I'm under the impression you're looking for any א for ה in Tanach, and am answering accordingly.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:54, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Found one! (Sleep is definitely a Good Thing™.) See Jer. 13:22, וְכִי תֹאמְרִי בִּלְבָבֵךְ מַדּוּעַ קְרָאֻנִי אֵלֶּה, which Malbim explains (according to Wikisource) as "את תחשב שהדבר הזה מקרה והרעה באה לך ע״י מקרי העולם, ותשאל מדוע קראך מקרים אלה […]";‎ מצודת ציון (also according to s:) explains the word likewise. The JPS has "befallen"; KJV, "come […] upon", ASV and ESV, "come upon"; Young's "met".​—msh210℠ (talk) 14:33, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

Perfect, thank you! :-D   —Ruakh 14:48, 4 June 2012 (UTC)

And an earlier example is in II Sam. 1:6.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:30, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

אידיאל

Hi. How sure are you of the kamatz in the conswv? I know שֻׁלְחָן's conswv is שֻׁלְחַן and בָּקָר's is בְּקַר, for example.​—msh210℠ (talk) 04:48, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Not very sure; Even-Shoshan doesn't list construct forms for this word. Because of examples like yours, I thought it might be patákh, so I Googled both אִידֵאָל and אִידֵאַל looked for construct examples. The latter gets exactly two hits, both in the construct; the former requires more effort, since of course it has all the indefinite hits, but nonetheless you can find אִידֵאָל הַיֹּפִי,‎ אִידֵאָל אֵיכוּת,‎ אִידֵאָל הַחֶבְרָה,‎ אִידֵאָל הַ"שָּׁלוֹם בְּיָמֵינוּ". Also, the Akadémya says that vowels are preserved in the inflected forms of loanwords; admittedly, it says this in the context of discussing sh'vá, so its immediate point is that the plural of salát is salatim and not *s'latím, but its phrasing of the statement sounds pretty general to me. —Ruakh 12:26, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Sounds good. Thanks for the legwork.​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:04, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

stomacher

Purely random curiosity, but I'd be very curious to know what the original Hebrew word translated in the 1611 quotation is... Ƿidsiþ 08:30, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

It's פְּתִיגִיל (p'tigíl). Its derivation and precise meaning are unclear. If you Google "פְּתִיגִיל", you'll find a bunch of theories. :-P   —Ruakh 12:36, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks muchly. I've added it to the entry, via the ever-handy {{transterm}}. Ƿidsiþ 12:44, 8 June 2012 (UTC)

סדר

I tried to create a Hebrew entry, even though my Hebrew is awful and I can't even figure out where all the vowels are on my Hebrew keyboard. Could you please clean it up? Sorry and thanks --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:52, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Will do (tonight). —Ruakh 12:18, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

Thankee --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 15:47, 12 June 2012 (UTC)

clarification

FWIW, iIn your first 2 comments to the enemy combatant thread you did write the following statements.

• The Bush Administration used the term enemy combatant in reference to such people precisely because it was claiming that they were enemy combatants in sense #1.
• Smurrayinchester's analysis is correct, and his analogy is apt; that order's definition does not demonstrate that a new sense of "enemy combatant" exists.
• that still wouldn't mean that the term "enemy combatant" had a new and distinct sense.

It is true -- you didn't use the exact phrase "functionally equivalent" -- but I think I fairly paraphrased the surface meaning of these statements when I said you argued the two definitions were functionally equivalent. Listen, we all make mistakes. This discussion has proven remarkably unpleasant, so I am likely not to return here, but if we interact again it may be my turn to make a mistake. Geo Swan (talk) 08:01, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

I think the equivalence described in those statements is the exact opposite of "functional equivalence". But whatever. I've left that discussion, and I don't want to continue it here. —Ruakh 11:37, 13 June 2012 (UTC)

• Okay, it is your position that saying the two definitions were used in the "same sense" is different from saying the two definitions are "functionally equivalent" -- and you do not want to explain yourself any further. Geo Swan (talk) 13:45, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

• It's my position that I am done trying to understand your comments, so you needn't bother writing them here. Stick to the main discussion, where there may be editors who do understand you (or at least, who are still trying to). —Ruakh 13:56, 14 June 2012 (UTC)

Social

I want to propose changing the wording of social conservative from "Judeo-Christian" to "Abrahamist" based on the following argument. Firstly, other Abrahamic religions also place emphasis on social conservatism such as Baha'i, Islam, Druze. Secondly, because social conservative is a political concept, i believe the more politically sounding variant of "Abrahamism" is more appropriate. However, i'm also okay with "Abrahamic". Do you have any thoughts on this? Pass a Method (talk) 10:10, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm definitely opposed to "Abrahamist". As for "Abrahamic" — maybe raise this at Wiktionary:Tea room? My instinct is that we should actually go the other way, and change "Judeo-Christian" to just "Christian" (since American Jews have traditionally been socially liberal, and although recently there have started to be more socially conservative Jews, I don't think that any reading of Jewish values has been a factor in the development of the social-conservative movement), I'd be interested to hear what other people think. —Ruakh 10:21, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

How about just "religious values"? The views of socially conservative Christians tend to be diametrically opposed to the teachings of Christianity anyway. —Angr 16:18, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

Template:my-roman

Hi, I only today noticed WT:Requests for cleanup#Template:my-roman. Please take a look at the template now and let me know if you're content with the changes, and removed the RFC tag if you are. Thanks! —Angr 16:13, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

(deprecated template usage) Jared

Hey Ruakh, could you fix the Hebrew in the etymology here? It's written only in Latin script. 50 Xylophone Players talk 23:19, 18 June 2012 (UTC)

bureaucracy

Any interest? (See [[user talk:msh210#Nomination for Bureaucrat]].)​—msh210℠ (talk) 01:10, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Well, you know what to do. Please accept at Wiktionary:Votes/bc-2012-06/User:Ruakh for bureaucrat. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:38, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Just wanted to add that I've co-nominated you for the position because I was originally planning on doing the nomination, but since Metaknowledge did the nomination, I felt it only right to do the co-nomination since I showed the interest in the idea in the first place :) Hope you accept! Razorflame 06:09, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Vote passes, you are now a Bureaucrat. —Stephen ^(Talk) 08:15, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Thank you! —Ruakh 13:41, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Congrats. Sorry, I forgot to vote. DCDuring TALK 14:25, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

congénitale

Could you double-check my work here. I want to make sure it is right. I'm about 95% sure it is correct, but again, I want to make sure. Thanks, Razorflame 02:56, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, looks like I need more work in my French before contributing into it any further :) I will do that before making any further pages :) Razorflame 03:07, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Minimizing the damage of categorizing templates

Am I more or less correct that, if documentation is incorporated onto the main page of a template by {{documentation}}, then changes to the documentation page do not add to the queue for pages that transclude the template. Thus, changes to the documentation page can be made freely.

So when I categorize a template, especially if it is multiply transcluded, I should add a "nul" documentation page that includes the desired category.

What should the content of a "nul" documentation page be? How about:

This template needs proper documentation. 
It should be added to PAGENAME/documentation.

Should there also be a category, something like Category:Templates without documentation subpages?

I would continue to attempt to place the templates into more specific categories, using the approach documented at {{documentation}}. DCDuring TALK 16:34, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Re: first paragraph: Yes, that's more or less correct. To make it completely correct, I'd add the restriction that the template must use <onlyinclude> or <noinclude> to control which part of itself is transcluded, and the {{documentation}} must be outside the transcluded part.

Re: adding a "null" documentation page: I'd say so, yes.

Re: the content of a "null" documentation page: Currently, if {{documentation}} finds that there's no documentation-page for a template, it adds the template to Category:Templates requiring documentation, and displays this message:

This template needs documentation and categorisation. Please create the documentation page.

The "create the documentation page" link uses {{documentation/preload}} (q.v.) as a preload-template. So I think this question has already been resolved, unless you're dissatisfied with that preload-template.

Re: Category:Templates without documentation subpages: I'm a bit confused. From the rest of this comment, you seem to mean that "null" documentation pages should add this category; but that name makes it sound like the template doesn't have any documentation page at all. But regardless . . . I think that the aforementioned Category:Templates requiring documentation could definitely be extended a bit to include templates that have documentation-subpages but don't have real documentation.

—Ruakh 17:34, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

I just didn't realize the functionality of {{documentation}} with respect to missing documentation subpages. I'd be perfectly happy to add that category instead of the one I made up, unless you see some objection. Would it not be better if the message I added was visibly different from that added by {{documentation}} as you have it above? DCDuring TALK 19:05, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Re: "Would it not be better if the message I added was visibly different from that added by {{documentation}} as you have it above?": Sorry, I think we must be talking at cross-purposes. You asked what the content of a "null" documentation subpage should be, and what I'm saying is, we already have a model for that: {{documentation/preload}}. I mentioned the message added by {{documentation}} solely to point out the existence of, and explain the significance of, {{documentation/preload}}. —Ruakh 19:38, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Oh, but it might be worth changing {{documentation/preload}} to initially transclude some sort of {{docstub}} template. That would give some sort of message like you describe, including a link to edit the doc-page, and would add the appropriate category. —Ruakh 19:54, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Should any of this broader matter be brought to WT:BP or WT:GP? DCDuring TALK 19:05, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Sure, why not? —Ruakh 19:38, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

• I think I have just discovered a fly in the ointment, not too serious, but annoying. To speed my editing I had been alternating between putting in first the documentation page, then {{documentation}}. Occasionally I noted that the category did not show the template, though the template showed the category. (I recall similar symptoms being reported about some Icelandic reference templates.) I made my changes to some of the "context n" group in decreasing number order. I just noticed that every other of those templates did not appear in the category. I them made an edit to the template page, inserting a space, which did the trick. The end result, then is that a template that is never changed may not appear in the category to which it has been assigned on the documentation subpage. Is that what you would have expected? Does it make sense? Am I misinterpreting something? DCDuring TALK 06:07, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

• No, it doesn't make sense, but yes, it's what I expected. :-/   See e.g. Wiktionary:Grease pit#Strange lag of sorts. Sorry, I probably should have mentioned it, but it seemed like MediaWiki's actual intended features were complicated enough without getting into subtle bugs. And I thought I had an idea for how to fix it after-the-fact: I figured we could edit {{documentation}}, which would trigger updates on the template-pages that include {{documentation}}, and thereby get them into their categories. Unfortunately, I discovered last night that that does not work . . . we can prevent the problem in the future, though, by modifying {{documentation}} to unconditionally include the documentation-page. (We can use <span style="display:none">...</span> to hide the redlink when the template doesn't exist.) —Ruakh 13:09, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

  Please let me know when you think we have worked enough of the kinks out so that we were in a position to make some kind of proposal. On the nul documentation/category page I include, I have added: 1., some comments to help especially newer templateers get the documentation and other material into the right places with respect to the inclusion tags and, 2., an exhortation to provide real documentation. I'm sure you've seen what I had been inserting. Any other changes you'd recommend? DCDuring TALK 14:09, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

beer parlor

Thank you for fixing my post in the Beer parlour, first post and already making a mess, not a good start... (Fedso (talk) 21:01, 27 June 2012 (UTC))

No worries. :-)   —Ruakh 21:02, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Template:documentation

1. If we are ever to launch a major effort to improve the documentation of the templates that are used, then wouldn't it be necessary to move documentation from the template page to the documentation page and insert {{documentation}} to avoid server overload from repeated editorial changes?
2. I am creating a list at User:DCDuring/UncategorizedTemplates/not to be categorized of what seem to be widely transcluded templates. As I understand it, widespread transclusion is a sufficient condition to suggest that a change in the template would cause a heavy load on servers.
   1. What constitutes sufficient transclusion to be a "heavy" load? 50/500/5,000 transclusions?
   2. What other indications are there that would suggest that a given template might cause a heavy server load?
   3. Who would you suggest as both willing and able to sift through the list at User:DCDuring/UncategorizedTemplates to identify the templates that should not be changed too quickly?

I hope these stuff doesn't seem too tedious. I'm not even sure whom else to ask. DCDuring TALK 14:30, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

1. Yes, absolutely.
2. Agreed.
   1. I don't know. The more, the worse. I think that for anything over, say, 1000 transclusions, we should be extra careful when editing (since it's no longer so cheap to fix a typo), and for anything over, say, 5000 transclusions, we shouldn't make changes without discussing them, and should make an effort to combine multiple changes into a single edit. But those are really just wild guesses. (And it's cumulative: if I'm editing ten templates one right after the other, then the main consideration is the total number of all of their transclusions added together.)
   2. None. I mean, some pages are "heavier" than others (I imagine that the servers die a little inside every time they discover they have to re-generate water!), but overall I think the presence of a template on such "heavy" pages is likely to correlate pretty well with the presence of a template on more pages. I doubt this is worth thinking about or trying to measure.
   3. No clue. What kind of sifting did you have in mind?

On the other side, I should add that CodeCat commented a few weeks back, "I don't understand why having a long job queue for a short time is bad. The job queue exists in the first place to spread the load, for exactly these kinds of situations", and she does have a point. The only consequence that I can 100% guarantee will result from editing a widely transcluded template is that other edits to other templates will take a while to take effect. That said, I've noticed that when you edit a very widely transcluded template, there's some delay between you hit "Save page" and when it actually saves — for the really really used-everywhere templates it will often just time out on the browser's end — so I know that the very act of populating the job queue must be intensive to begin with.

—Ruakh 14:52, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for bearing with me on this.

re: 3. How about inserting in the talk page for "widely transcluded templates" without {{documentation}} a suggestion that "<noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>" or superior equivalent be included at the next edit to the template and that any user documentation included be moved to the documentation page. Is there a more insistent way of communicating this?

Do changes to a template that are entirely in "noinclude" even generate changes in pages in which the template is transcluded? If so, then it would be without bad consequence to insert {{documentation}} so encapsulated for all pages that lack it.

Is there a way to give certain maintenance-type or bot-generated changes or changes-by-transclusion a lower priority on the queue so the impact on manual editors is less serious? Is that what the job queue does itself? DCDuring TALK 15:36, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Re: talk-page: We can try it. I don't know of a good way to add a more insistent message to certain specific pages without editing those pages, no. That said, I think we could use JavaScript to add such a message to any template without {{documentation}} (whether or not the template is "widely transcluded".)

My experience leads me to believe that visiting a template's edit-page and clicking "Save page" will add all of its transclusions to the job queue, even if you make no changes at all.

There is no way to prioritize the job queue, no. However, note that the job queue only applies to changes-by-transclusion; edits directly to a page do not go through the job queue.

—Ruakh 15:52, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

• How is it that a change in the documentation subpage which is transcluded onto the main template page by {{documentation}} does not get added to the job queue? Does only transclusion from the main template page matter? Is there something special about the documentation subpage? DCDuring TALK 01:32, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

• It's because the proper use of <noinclude> or <onlyinclude> means that the documentation subpage is transcluded on a very small number of pages — see e.g. Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:headtempboiler:suffix/doc — and when you update it, only those pages have to get re-generated. (By contrast, see Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:pt-conj/doWork, which lists every page that includes {{pt-conj}}, because all of those pages do include {{pt-conj/doWork}} indirectly.) Does that make sense? —Ruakh 01:41, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

• So the material so bracketed is transcluded, but any templates contained therein are not evaluated in the transclusion process. I just wanted to make sure that the key assumption I was making was correct. All this makes me wonder about the wisdom of having so much common code transcluded as it is so universally in this kind of an environment. So that would suggest a need to test the post-edit version of a widely transcluded template in the wild, but on a small, but visible subset of entries. I assume on cannot jump the queue for testing? It also should mean that there is good reason not to use a template, especially a complex one, when the benefit is small. DCDuring TALK 02:34, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

• Re: "I assume on cannot jump the queue for testing?": You can't get an edit to a template to bypass the queue, but you can cause a specific page to be regenerated immediately by making a "null edit" (click the edit tab and click "Save page" without actually making any changes: it won't show up in the revision history, but it will cause the page to be regenerated). —Ruakh 02:43, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

• So that's why some results seem so fast despite the queue. Thanks. DCDuring TALK 03:08, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Is there a place I can go to find a measure of the queue for en.wikt and for the total queue that we participate in (other wiktionaries?, other projects?)? Is there a Mediawiki page that documents the queue? DCDuring TALK 03:12, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

I believe that each wiki has a completely separate job queue. For general documentation about the job queue, see mw:Manual:Job queue. For the specific number of pages in the en.wikt job queue at any given time, visit http://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php?action=query&meta=siteinfo&siprop=statistics and refresh a few times. (From what I understand, the number you see there will depend on which server you happen to hit; refreshing a few times will likely show you the job-queue-lengths on multiple different servers, for a better picture.) As you can see there, the en.wikt job queue is typically within spitting distance of "empty", so you shouldn't usually see much delay in seeing a template-edit take effect unless it has a lot of transclusions or someone has recently edited a template that has a lot of transclusions. —Ruakh 03:19, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

‘publically’ is not an alternative Form.

¶ Greetings. Your Classification of ‘publically’ as an alternative Form is considerably controversial since it has a significantly different Suffix included : -al. I think that it should be treated as a Synonym instead. If you possess any Objections, please let me know. Shalom. --Æ&Œ (talk) 14:46, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

What do you mean, it's "considerably controversial"? I've never heard of any controversy. They're definitely two spellings of the same word. I don't know anyone who says publical. —Ruakh 14:55, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

¶ I brought this up to Martin Gardner in an e‐mail. The Suffixes are different, synonymous, but different. It is like saying that ‘uncorrect’ is an alternative Spelling of ‘incorrect’. publical is not standard but it does exist on Google Books. --Æ&Œ (talk) 15:01, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

I don't know what Martin Gardner has to do with anything. And I think this is more like saying that "donut" is an alternative spelling of "doughnut", even though "do" and "dough" are different. —Ruakh 15:13, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Uh…‘donut’ is not a Combination of do with nut, is it ? I think that is a Type of Contraction : as, tho’. ‘publically’ came after ‘publicly’, so it cannot be a Contraction.

Y’know, if you would rather not talk about this, I can shut up. That is usually what (some) People want from me, I sense. --Æ&Œ (talk) 15:23, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm surprised that you cite a source that specifically identifies publically as a variant of publicly, explains that both are part of a class of words ending in <-ically>, and proposes that publically does not come from publical.
I'm not opposed to the conversation, but I don't really get where you're coming from. I'm still hung up on "considerably controversial", actually. Can you point to some evidence of the controversy? (Or, wait, did you just mean that you disagreed with it? Because if so, then that's not really what "controversial" means, but at least your comment would make more sense that way.)
—Ruakh 15:31, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

¶ I confess that it appears that I have misused the Term ‘controversial’ there, but it seems controversial right now. Anyway, here is a Source that lists it as a Synonym. I am not attempting to signify that ‘publicly’ is directly related to ‘‐ically’ (I believe that publicly is simply public with ‐ly & publically is public with ‐ally), but surely you can agree that ‘‐ly’ & ‘‐ally’ are Synonymous, yes ? Although are they alternative Spellings of eachother ? I personally think not since the Suffixes are different. Is that clear, sir ? What do you believe ? --Æ&Œ (talk) 15:46, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

(Sorry for the delay in replying; I didn't notice this comment until now.) Most of your comment is not very clear to me, sorry, but let me address the parts I think I do understand:

• I don't know how I would characterize -ly and -ally; I guess "synonym" is fine.
• WolframAlpha also thinks that gaol and jail are synonyms, so it doesn't draw this distinction very well. (For color it does identify colour as the "British spelling", and vice versa, but it doesn't seem to have a good general concept of "alternative form".)
• Just because two suffixes are distinct, that doesn't mean that words using them can't be alternative forms. Aluminum and aluminium, for example, are clearly alternative forms, whether or not -um and -ium are.

—Ruakh 20:09, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I am not certain what I am saying that appears to be so unclear to you. As far as I can tell, -um and -ium are closely related enough that they are alternative Forms. -al is not related to -ic, is it ? Since this Conversation appears not to be making any Progress, I can request various Opinions in the so‐called ‘Tea Room’ instead, if I may have your Permission. --Æ&Œ (talk) 18:29, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Re: "I am not certain what I am saying that appears to be so unclear to you": I don't understand your statement that "I am not attempting to signify that ‘publicly’ is directly related to ‘‐ically’", and I don't understand this sequence of statements/questions: "surely you can agree that ‘‐ly’ & ‘‐ally’ are Synonymous, yes ? Although are they alternative Spellings of eachother ? I personally think not since the Suffixes are different." It might help if you tried to write in Standard English; your odd blend of intentional archaisms, Modern colloquialisms, and non-native grammar is difficult to understand. (Take the word "signify", for example. It's not used that way. Is it an archaism that I'm not familiar with? Is it a false cognate with your native language?) (Though I see now that your user-page claims that English is your native language. Is that really true? I find it very surprising.)

Re: "-al is not related to -ic, is it ?": Even if it were, that wouldn't really be relevant. The point is that "-icly" and "-ically" are alternative forms — same meaning, same pronunciation, same word — even though one contains an "-al" that the other lacks.

Re: Tea room: by all means.

—Ruakh 18:42, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, do you believe that ‐ally as well as ‐ly are synonyms, or are they alternative Forms ? Yes or no ? I do not understand what you are talking about. What archaisms ? What ‘Modern colloquialisms’ ? Did I hallucinate the third definition of ‘signify’ here ? I have been attempting to moderate the tone of my writings for months now, and these continual vague complaints are not helping me ; they are only frustrating. Do I need to write like an idiot to get the point across ? --Æ&Œ (talk) 18:57, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

If it helps, here are three ways in which this last comment of yours was not Standard English:

• The clause "-ally as well as -ly are synonyms" is not grammatical. There are times when "as well as" can substitute for "and"; this is not one of them.
• We do not capitalize "Forms". (Though I notice that that's the only word you arbitrarily capitalized in this comment, so I guess you're moving away from that archaism?)
• We do not put a space before a question mark.
• The question "Yes or no?" cannot be used to demand an answer to an A-or-B question, except in the specific case that A is an affirmative clause and B is its negation. (Think about it: what would it mean if I replied "yes"?)

To answer some of your questions:

• Re: "What ‘Modern colloquialisms’ ?": The use of "although" in "Although are they alternative Spellings of eachother ?" is colloquial at best.
• Re: "Did I hallucinate the third definition of ‘signify’ here ?": No, but I think you've misunderstood it. Shakespeare's use ("a tale […] signifying nothing") is Standard; your use ("I am not attempting to signify that […] ") is not.
• Re: "Do I need to write like an idiot to get the point across ?": I don't know, but you need to do something differently. If you know any easy-to-understand idiots, then sure, you might try writing like them, and seeing if it helps.

—Ruakh 19:17, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, despite my frustration, I must say that I thank you for being clear and direct this time. I still have some comments:

• I am not certain why as well as cannot be utilized as a synonym there, unless you are saying that it is simply not common in that fashion.
• I stopped capitalising nouns because it was irritating you (a habit which I have not broken as a whole; it does not exactly irritate some people).
• I believe that inserting spaces before punctuation marks is still acceptable to a degree, some friends I have do it, but I shall stop using that habit because it annoys you.
• I noticed that logic mistake, but it was too late to fix it. However, an answer can be extended for clarification.
• I shall stop saying ‘although’ to you.
• ‘signify’ is utilized to explain the term ‘mean’ here. Am I still misunderstanding them, or do the definitions require reformations?

I’ll just shut up since I annoy you so much. --Æ&Œ (talk) 19:42, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

• Re: "as well as": As [[as well as]] explains, it means "and in addition". "-ally as well as -ly are synonyms" would mean "-ally is a synonym, as is -ly". (Also, I think "X as well as Y" should have the same verb agreement as "X" alone, but that's a lesser point.)
• Re: noun capitalization, spaces before punctuation marks: I admit that I find them slightly annoying, but the real problem is that they're archaisms, so when you use a wrong word (as you so often do), I left trying to figure out if the wrong word is actually just an archaism.
• Re: logic error: Fair enough. The other problem with that question, of course, is that I'd already answered it, when I wrote "I don't know how I would characterize -ly and -ally; I guess 'synonym' is fine." If that's not satisfactory, then you won't be satisfied, sorry.
• Re: "although": Why? Are you unwilling to use it the way the Standard English uses it?
• Re: "signify": I think the definitions are fine (and "reformations" is another archaism!). I can't speak to whether you're misunderstanding them. Just because a word X is used to explain a word Y, that doesn't mean that X and Y are interchangeable. And your sentence wouldn't be much better with "mean" instead of "signify", anyway: "I am not attempting to mean that […] " is not English. If I understand what it's supposed to mean, the English translation of it would be "I don't mean that […] ".

I wouldn't say that you "annoy me so much", and I'm sorry if I've given you that impression. I have difficulty understanding you, and that makes for frustrating conversations (on both our parts), but if your reason for leaving the conversation is that you think I'm annoyed with you, then you shouldn't.

—Ruakh 22:36, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

July 2012

Thanks for the sample

I've started working it. When I have at least one hundred entries analyzed, I'll run it by you. Who here has a statistical, quantitative head who might like this kind of thing? DCDuring TALK 00:51, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

I'm actually still not clear on what "this kind of thing" is, exactly. That's why I didn't answer your question "Are there other ways of getting some statistics about entries in English (or any other language)?", nor any of the questions in that paragraph: I have no idea what kind of statistics you're looking for. :-/   But if I can just answer "Who here has a statistical, quantitative head […]  ?" instead of "Who here […] might like this kind of thing?" — I believe Msh210 (talk • contribs) works in the statistical/quantitative area. —Ruakh 01:11, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

One interesting way of looking at dictionaries is to look at the overlaps in their coverage, both in total and for any class of items. Apparently MW3 and Wiktionary have about the same number of English entries +/- 10%. My preliminary results suggest that more than half of wiktionary's entries are not in MWOnline. That might mean that they have more than 100,000 entries that wiktionary does not. Wouldn't we want to know more about what they have that we don't? I don't know how to get a random sample of their entries, but I can get a random sample from MW3. Also the sample can give a profile of the mix of wiktionary's entries in terms of presence or absence of templates, categories, and other elements, the number of senses, formatting quality, recency of last edit, etc. Some of these things might need to be confirmed by other means, but a small sample can be more intensively analyzed to generate more hypotheses.

I'll try msh210. DCDuring TALK 03:01, 5 July 2012 (UTC)

Template:reference-journal

Why did you make a change to this template without putting the category (and {{documentation subpage}} so the subpage categorizes) on the documentation page and {{documentation}} on the main template page? I have been doing that kind of thing to avoid unnecessary edits of the transcluded template. Is that a waste of time or should it, or something like, it be standard practice? DCDuring TALK 17:22, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

I didn't notice the lack of {{documentation}} — sorry, I'm not as attuned to that as you are — and also, I didn't realize that that template had as many transclusions as it does. —Ruakh 17:47, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

But, as you said, < 1,000 really isn't that bad. But repeatedly, .... I certainly wasn't scolding you.

About the "/script" template pages, as they all work the same, wouldn't the easiest thing be to make up one true documentation page and use a template like {{documentation subpage}} (which merely categorizes and shows a banner only on the doc page) to additionally transclude the true documentation page on every instance of the appropriate type of subpage? Even if this was initially only applied to "/script" pages with fewer than 100 transclusions, wouldn't it dramatically reduce the number of uncategorized template pages, albeit at the cost of making one "/script/doc" page for every "/script" page so treated. DCDuring TALK 18:39, 12 July 2012 (UTC)

Brevity is the soul of not getting cut off in the middle.

diff​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:50, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed that. :-)   —Ruakh 16:51, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

RE: Copyvio situation

Hello,

Not to be a bother here, but are you going to finish dealing with the MacMillan copyvio situation? 98.125.2.195 06:21, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

I think I dealt with most of the non-tricky cases . . . I'm not sure how to handle cases like [[al desko]], where the original copyvio was in place for a long time, with a lot of contributors making major improvements to the entry during that time. :-/   —Ruakh 15:36, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

Correction: Actually, it turns out there are still a bunch of non-tricky ones left. I just got hung up on a few tricky ones. I'll keep going. —Ruakh 16:58, 15 July 2012 (UTC)

py-to-ipa

Although I don't speak Mandarin, these pronunciations doesn't look correct for me. There are only consonants in them. Why there are no vowels and tones? [3] [4] Maro 15:47, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I agree. —Ruakh 15:50, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

So what now? Maro 16:10, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I have no idea. —Ruakh 16:56, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

• I just fixed the 汉语 page based on the IPA I tracked down in an old edit. {{py-to-ipa}} in its current state appears to be quite broken, barfing up several screen lines worth of code and producing no useful IPA even when substed.

One idea that occurs to me (after only a moment's thought, so take it with a grain of salt) would be to rework the template to just take a series of individual chars, thereby obviating the need for {{str index}}. However, this would require that someone (maybe even a bot) go through and add bars between each of the parameter letters in calls to {{py-to-ipa}}. -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 21:50, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Edit war on נפגש

First of all, I would like to ask that you check the new conjugation table. If there is an error, edit the template (Template:he-conj-nif'al-dagesh-kal) instead of removing it from the page.

Secondly, (regarding the translation of the example) you were right that I did not read the page I linked to. I assumed it covered what I was talking about but it turns out the page was poorly written itself. Dangling prepositions are common in English speech but are still incorrect in formal English grammar. The problem with dangling prepositions is that in this case ("What time are we meeting at tomorrow?") it is not visually clear in written text whether at is referring to What or to tomorrow (if this were spoken language, prosody would clear everything up nicely and there would be no problem). The phrase at tomorrow, however does not make any sense and the readers that read it that way will have to read the sentence twice to understand it. Saying "At what time are we meeting tomorrow?" removes this ambiguity and also happens to be a grammatically correct and actually a very common way to say this, unlike what you seem to think. I don't think it is worth putting this up for a vote or anything so if you still disagree with me, how about we change the example?

--WikiTiki89 (talk) 13:11, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Re: conjugation table: It's ugly and poorly-constructed (which is not your fault: you followed an ugly and poorly-constructed model), but it seems to be mostly correct. The only actual error is the missing dot in the masculine singular present tense.

Re: "dangling" (i.e. stranded) prepositions: They are absolutely correct in all forms of English, whereas pied-piped prepositions are usually awkward, as in this case. As you say, the phrase "at tomorrow" does not make any sense; therefore, it's not a problem. But if you prefer, we can simply drop the preposition, and write "What time shall we meet tomorrow?" (Or "What time are we meeting tomorrow?", or "What time tomorrow shall we meet?" — there are other options.)

—Ruakh 15:05, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

Re: conjugation table: I fixed it. For some reason nikkud was disabled for the last root letter in the masculine singular present in the template I copied from.

Re: dangling prepositions: I wish there was some sort of published standard to look this up in. From what I learned in my high school's intensive English program, dangling prepositions are grammatically incorrect in formal writing, even though they are accepted in informal speech and writing (where they seem to have become the rule rather than the exception). I still don't understand what your problem is with "At what time..." but we can settle on just omitting the at.

--WikiTiki89 (talk) 16:26, 19 July 2012 (UTC)

reanalysis

You have used (deprecated template usage) reanalysis in a few etymologies that I have noticed. Do you use it in any specific linguistic sense (eg, from generative grammar) or more generally. At [[bang to rights]] I have added a kind of conjectural etymology which asserts that users reinterpreted somewhat unfamiliar terms into more familiar ones twice. As I wrote it, having just added [[to rights]], which is even in MWOnline, I couldn't think of reanalysis. Is what I assert in those etymologies what you and others would call reanalysis? DCDuring TALK 02:52, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

"Reanalysis" is sometimes used pretty generally, but its core meaning is — it's when speakers learn an expression correctly, but infer a different underlying structure from the one that actually produced it. Usually reanalysis becomes detectable when it triggers some later change, or allows some different syntax, that wouldn't have made sense with the original structure; for example, the backformation of pea from pease demonstrates that the /-z/ of pease was reanalyzed as the plural inflection ending /-z/. In the case of banged to rights, the reanalysis is detectable even without a later change, because although it's used and pronounced the same way, the spelling is different. (See the archived RFV discussion on the talk-page for my thoughts from four years ago.)

I don't understand Etymology 1 at all — not just the etymology, but the definition, either. The quotation doesn't seem to support our def, and I can't follow the trail of thought in the etymology.

For Etymology 2 (the verb), I do think reanalysis took place, but not exactly the one described in the etymology. At least, I don't know about those specific senses of bang. But it may be academic, because I don't think the verb actually meets the CFI. In the RFV discussion I said we should keep the verb, but I now think that we shouldn't have.

—Ruakh 15:30, 21 July 2012 (UTC)

I realized I had a resource: Crystal's Dictionary of Phonetics and Linguistics, which provides two senses of reanalysis, one Chomskyan and one closer to what you describe and I had inferred.

I was just trying to make some sense of what we had. This had gone through RfV and I didn't want to re-open it. Collins, the only OneLook dictionary that defines this, defines it as "caught red-handed", which has certainly is not transparent for most English speakers in the US. (deprecated template usage) bang is replaceable in various uses with dead, right, bam, smack, completely. (deprecated template usage) to rights means "properly" or "into order". If someone says "The copper had me bang to rights", I think the original meaning was SoP: "He had me completely properly (with respect to my guilt and evidence thereof)." Probably frequent use on television has largely squeezed out more general application of the phrase, but:

Maybe an improvement would be to use {{&lit}} with a few citations as the above of the SoP usage. DCDuring TALK 15:04, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Congrats and Question

Congatulations on being bureaucrat! Also, I've been wondering: Why does your user page have both he-3 and he-4 userboxes? --EncycloPetey (talk) 22:59, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! And — the xx-4 Babel-boxes talk about speaking (e.g. "This user speaks English at a near-native level"), whereas the xx-3 Babel-boxes talk about level of contribution (e.g. "This user is able to contribute with an advanced level of English"). Although I grew up speaking both Hebrew and English at home, I never became fully literate in Hebrew. (Bibles and prayerbooks and so on are all written with vowels; true literacy in Hebrew requires reading text without vowels. I've gotten a lot better at that in the past decade or so, but I'm still nowhere near native-level literacy.) —Ruakh 23:38, 22 July 2012 (UTC)

How many times have you been asked that? Methinks you need a FAQ list.​—msh210℠ (talk) 03:59, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Or I could just choose one level and remove the other . . . —Ruakh 12:13, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Congrats. Sorry I missed the vote. DCDuring TALK 04:20, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. No worries. :-)   —Ruakh 12:13, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Congrats, and please add yourself to WT:B. Thanks --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:56, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

 Done, thanks. —Ruakh 12:13, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

"children" and "boys" in he-IL

I second the congratulations above. I'm confident you'll use the tools wisely. Until you reveal yourself as another WF sockpuppet.

It seems to me that "children" in modern, colloquial Hebrew is ילדים while "boys" is בנים. But my modern, colloquial Hebrew is, of course, not very good, so: Is that correct? If not, ignore the rest of this message.

IMO that should be a usage note at both lemma forms' entries and at both plural forms' entries: what do you think?​—msh210℠ (talk) 03:56, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Re: "It seems to me that 'children' in modern, colloquial Hebrew is ילדים while 'boys' is בנים": Yup, that sounds about right. (I'm not sure that all the nuances line up exactly perfectly, but it's close.)   Re: usage notes: O.K. —Ruakh 12:12, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:16, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Guide on abbreviation

Hello. I want to add to 일#Abbreviation that 일 is an abbreviation for 일요일 (hanja 日曜日) . Is there a style guide for this? Thank you. --PuzzletChung (talk) 01:09, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

You can indicate it by using the {{abbreviation of}} template, either as an etymology or as a definition. —Ruakh 01:13, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeghern Rollback

There are two sections called "Noun". The first section "Noun" gives the impression that it reflects general, modern usage. This is inaccurate because of the inclusion of definition 2. in that section. Defintion 2. does not belong there, but under "Old Armenian", which it already is. Therefore, there should be an indication that the first section "Noun" pertains to Modern Armenian. This can be either with a heading, as such, or in parenthesis, but it is a distinction that needs to be made. Please let me know your thoughts. Diranakir (talk) 21:08, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

"(archaic)" is a good solution, Ruakh. Diranakir (talk) 22:32, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

User:Rukhabot

Umm, huh? How come it doesn't have a bot flag? I even saw that you got approved for one via a past vote. o.O User: PalkiaX50 ^{talk to meh} 02:14, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

It does have a bot flag . . . I must have to do something special to get edits actually marked as bot edits. Thanks for the note; I didn't realize the edits weren't showing up right. I've killed the bot for now, until I figure that out. Thanks again. —Ruakh 02:21, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

O.K., fixed now: turns out I needed to include bot=1 in the action=edit request. —Ruakh 02:24, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Reverts at first class and second class

When reverting at second class and first class, you said to ping you if I had a problem with it. Well, I have a problem with it (enough of a problem to undo it back to my edits). We already had tenderfoot and Eagle Scout, so I completed the set by creating Life Scout, and Star Scout (definitions which have been marked as patrolled), and added definitions at first class and second class (FYI, it is second class, not second-class, for the rank). These usages are easily verifiable, and not SOP. Would you rather I moved the definitions to First Class/Second Class, or to First Class Scout/Second Class Scout? That’d be consistent with Eagle, but inconsistent with tenderfoot. Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 17:10, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

They're listed under ===Adjective===, but the definitions sound like proper nouns. They also make it sound likely to be SOP, and they include a great deal of encyclopedic-sounding information. And note that we're not a glossary of Boy Scouts of America. —Ruakh 17:21, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

I fixed the Proper Noun issue, but I don't exactly see how they're SOP. If they were SOP, First Class would be the highest rank, which it hasn't been in 100 years, and all context of what the badges mean would be lost. Furthermore, if we delete those two, we'd have to delete all of them...this probably is one of those cases where they're either all notable or all not Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 18:03, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Y'know, every time you use the term "notable", you make it just a little bit clearer how little interest you have in Wiktionary. —Ruakh 18:07, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, what I mean is, if you delete one, you'll probably have to delete all of them. Star and Eagle, especially, because the logo for those two are a star and an eagle. Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 18:12, 28 July 2012 (UTC)

Actually, that doesn't follow; Eagle Scout has entered the common vocabulary as an attested term in and of itself:

• 2011, Louis Ferrante, Mob Rules: What the Mafia Can Teach the Legitimate Businessman, p. 76:

  Massino wasn't an Eagle Scout doing an old man favors; he was positioning himself for a grab at the crown when the old man croaked.

As with all terms, this is the basis for its ability to be included here. Cheers! bd2412 T 18:46, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Interlingua

I have reverted your correction to the Swadesh list of Romance Languages. Interlingua is a "constructed language" (like, Esperanto) and, hence, does not belong in this list. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua . Is there a Swadesh for constructed languages?Mwidunn (talk) 01:33, 29 July 2012 (UTC)mwidunn

Wiktionary:Grease pit#Interwiki bots not working

Hi,

Please note that I replied to your note there, belatedly. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить)} 23:05, 30 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I've replied there. —Ruakh 01:53, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

niggerling

it's still a type of nigger as racists would use the term, people that use the term nigger are not referring to people of African Ancestry, they are referring to a stereotype of African Americans in the United States and or Canada.Lucifer (talk) 00:21, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

That may well be true; it's a matter of active debate among linguists whether a racial epithet such as nigger is denotatively different from black person (especially intensionally, but even extensionally: a sentence such as "Oprah Winfrey isn't a nigger, she's just black" might acceptable to some speakers). Nonetheless, I don't see any need for our def to use such an epithet. —Ruakh 01:57, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Isn't that censorship? Other definitions use the abusive term too. Also nigger is used hisotrically in reference to Native Americans and people that are stupid as well, niggerling simply does not mean a person of black african ancestry exclusively is my point, how can we better present that?Lucifer (talk) 02:35, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

First, demonstrate it. Then we can figure out how to present it. —Ruakh 02:50, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

A bit of JS help

Can you please verify that the following code (borrowed from you, mostly) is correct, and explain any errors to me? I want every verb that links to [[-im]] to get this text replacement to use {{tpi-verb}}.

addOnloadHook
( function ()
  { if(mediaWiki.config.get('wgPageName') == 'Special:WhatLinksHere/-im')
      $('ul#mw-whatlinkshere-list a').each
      ( function ()
        { if(this.href.indexOf('/wiki/') > -1)
            this.href += '?action=edit';
        }
      );
    else if(document.location.href.indexOf('action=edit') > -1)
    { var wpTextbox1 = document.getElementById('wpTextbox1');
      if(wpTextbox1.value.indexOf('\n{{head|tpi|verb') > -1)
      { wpTextbox1.value =
          wpTextbox1.value.replace(/\n{{head[|]tpi[|]verb}}/g, '\n#* {{tpi-verb[|]t}}');
        document.getElementById('wpSummary').value =
          '/*Tok Pisin*/ converting {{head|tpi|verb}} to {{tpi-verb}}';
        document.getElementById('wpSave').click();
      }
    }
  }
);

Thanks so much in advance! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 15:34, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

The only things that jump out at me are:

• Inside a regular expression, | denotes alternation. If you want to denote an actual pipe character, you need to quote it with a backslash: \|. Alternatively, you can wrap it in a character class, taking advantage of the fact that most special characters lose their specialness inside a character class: [|]. (I like the latter, myself: I find it's often more readable.)
• {{temp}} doesn't work inside an edit summary; you should just write /*Tok Pisin*/ converting {{head|tpi|verb}} to {{tpi-verb}}, or perhaps /*Tok Pisin*/ converting {{head|tpi|verb}} to {{[[Template:tpi-verb|tpi-verb]]}}.
• It presumes that {{head|tpi|verb|...}} always has additional arguments after the verb. Is that a valid assumption? It somehow strikes me as unlikely.

—Ruakh 15:52, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

I think things would also go wrong if an entry contains {{head|tpi|verb form}} or some other part of speech beginning with 'verb' (not that that is likely). In that case, the 'if' will succeed, but then the regular expression will fail. —CodeCat 16:05, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Ah, I see! Thanks you for pointing out those mistakes, Ruakh. @CodeCat: That won't happen, so it's not a problem. If you two think it's fine now, I guess I'll run it. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:09, 31 July 2012 (UTC)

Note: I created User:Metaknowledge/Rollback edit summary, and intend to make it a vote in the near future. Comments and edits welcome. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 00:05, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

August 2012

Script that modifies the 'new section' button

Hi! Do you think you could make a script that modifies the 'new section' button at the top of discussion pages? The script should change which page the new section is actually added to, based on the current month and year. So, if the script is somehow 'transcluded' on Wiktionary:Asdf, and the current month is August 2012, then the button should create a new section on the page Wiktionary:Asdf/2012/August. Hopefully the script should work for any page, but if it only works for one page that's ok too as long as it's easy to copy and adapt the script for another page. Would you be able to make something like that? Thank you! —CodeCat 11:38, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

 Done. Note that you may need to hard-refresh http://bits.wikimedia.org/en.wiktionary.org/load.php?debug=false&lang=en&modules=site&only=scripts&skin=vector&* in order to see the change. (And, feel free to wrap the wikitext part in a template. For the moment, I just plopped it in Wiktionary:Grease pit/header.) —Ruakh 12:43, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you! How does it work? Does it only work if there is an id="new-section-redirect" on the page? It seems rather redundant to have an extra button like that, most people will probably prefer to use the + sign as they always have. Could the div be left empty or hidden, so that it triggers the script without changing the page content? —CodeCat 13:43, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

You're welcome! Re: extra button: I figured that (1) the link is useful anyway; (2) the new-section-link won't actually work for people until they get the updated JavaScript; (3) the new-section-link won't work for people on mobile devices, people without JavaScript, etc.; and (4) this is the simplest way to have the server determine the current month and year to put in the link (since if we tried to use the client-side month and year we'd get problems for people in different time-zones, people using different calendars, people who have their system clock set wrong, etc.). But there's nothing in the script that checks to determine the visibility status of the div, as long as it has the right id; so, style="display:none" would not affect the script. —Ruakh 14:09, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

It's really a shame there is no server-side scripting to do this kind of thing. But I have an idea that might work for both situations. Have the script hide the div (optionally, perhaps depending on something within the div) when it is successful. That way, the link will appear by default, but will be hidden to those who don't need it. —CodeCat 16:22, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I thought of that, but see point #1. —Ruakh 17:39, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

People might want to use this on their talk pages, but might not like having to be forced to have a button. On the other hand, if they make the div hidden, then people without scripts can't use their talk page. So an option to hide it somehow when the script runs would be nice. —CodeCat 18:30, 1 August 2012 (UTC)

More dump analysis

Sorry to be constantly pestering you with these. I noticed that SemperBlottoBot (talk • contribs) had some old errors in Latin entries that its owner did not seem to have fully cleaned up. I was wondering if you could generate a list at User:Metaknowledge/Latin problems (if possible, sorted by problem). The problems are:

• Any use of {{inflection of|quux|foo|bar|c|foobar|lang=la}} where the metasyntactic variables are any strings (Latin has no common gender)
• Any use of {{inflection of|quux|foo|bar|m|p|lang=la}} where the headword line is '''quuxorum''' (i.e. the first argument of {{inflection of}} is identical to the part of the bolded headword that precedes orum)
• Any ==Latin== entries with titles that include the following characters: ā ē ī ō ū Ā Ē Ī Ō Ū ĭ

If any of this is unclear, I will be glad to explain. Thank you so much/Permultas gratias tibi ago! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:27, 3 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you once again! For an example of the -orum problem, see this diff: [5]. Compare the macra in the headword with the present condition of the entry (after I fixed it): desertorum. It's theoretically possible that all examples of this problem were fixed, but given the massive quantity of entries with the other problems, I find it unlikely. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:47, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

No version of [[desertorum]] has ever matched your description. For one thing, the headword line has never had the form '''...'''; it's always been {{la-part-form|...}}. For another, the first argument of {{inflection of}} has always been desertus, and the displayed headword has never been dēsertorum has never been desertusorum: originally it was dēsertorum (yes macron, no us), and now it's dēsertōrum. —Ruakh 13:59, 4 August 2012 (UTC) corrected 18:33, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

OK. That was my mistake. I was trying to explain the problem, but I obviously messed up. I still don't understand what you're saying when you claim that "the displayed headword has never been dēsertorum: originally it was dēsertorum" (those two look the same to me). I'm just trying to get every instance of dēsertorum as the headword to become dēsertōrum. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:53, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Re: "I still don't understand what you're saying when you claim […] ": Sorry, copy-and-paste-o. I've corrected the claim. —Ruakh 18:33, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, yes, that was my error. A refined request would be:

• Any use of {{inflection of|foo|quuxus|bar|m|p|lang=la}} where the headword line is {{la-part-form|quuxorum}} (i.e. the part of second argument of {{inflection of}} that precedes us is identical to the part of the bolded headword that precedes orum)

How's that? --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:51, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks so much! All this digging has revealed more errors. I would like to add to the list:

• Any Latin entry which has a pagename that ends in the string ibus but has {{inflection of|foo|bar|baz|f|s|lang=la}}
• Any Latin entry which has a pagename that ends in the string ibus but does not include the string abl anywhere within the ==Latin== section of the page
• Any Latin entry which has a pagename that ends in the string tote but has {{conjugation of|foo|bar|2|p|pres|act|imp|lang=la}}

(If you ever get annoyed about all this, I am open to learning how to do it myself, although I'll be going on semi-holiday soon.) Thank you! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 21:09, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

 Done, but re: "I am open to learning how to do it myself": I was, in fact, about to suggest that. —Ruakh 22:42, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you. I will try, but don't be surprised if I have to ask for help (if you have any beginner's help pages to suggest, I would be glad to read them first). --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:58, 4 August 2012 (UTC)

I will be very happy to help. Tell me — what programming languages are you comfortable with? —Ruakh 00:52, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Therein lieth the problem. I am weak in JavaScript, and that's all I really know besides HTML tags and wiki markup, which don't really count for anything. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:48, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Ah. Well, in that case I recommend you learn another language. I'm a big fan of Perl, personally — especially for analyzing database dumps. (I use a lot of different languages for different things, but I never use anything besides Perl for the database-dump stuff.) —Ruakh 13:40, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Easier said than done, but I will see what I can do. I really think that in the short term, I just need a lot more practice with object-oriented programming. I also have an instinct to want to learn everything (I can clearly see how knowing Python, C, and PHP would improve my life), but I still believe that I can work to a reasonable goal. Thank you for all your support (and the Perl code!). --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 14:42, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

If your goal is analyzing XML dumps, then OOP is not going to be of use. And I don't recommend C or PHP — PHP because it's a terrible language with no redeeming qualities and will make you a bad programmer^[6][7][8] (and I hereby promise not to help you learn to analyze XML dumps if you try to do it in PHP), C because it's a very difficult one. (If you want to be a serious programmer, I think you should learn C sooner or later. It'll make you smarter, and it'll give you a deeper understanding of other languages. But I think it's a bad idea to jump into it when you still describe yourself as "weak" in the only language you know. Becoming truly productive should be a higher priority, and in this day and age, C won't help with that.) Python is fine; I never use it, because I like Perl better and they're basically equivalent, but I won't try to dissuade you from it. —Ruakh 15:04, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Haha. If PHP is so evil, why did the MediaWiki devs force us to use it? ($wgThingamabobbers come up a lot.) Also, wouldn't C be helpful just by dint of being a predecessor to many ideas (including C++, of course)? It's great to hear your evaluations, though.
I must clarify that I have a lot of goals, and some are definitely OOP-dependent. But Perl dump analysis - well, that would be fantastic in its own right. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 15:31, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

Re: PHP: There are a number of major web-sites and web-platforms (Digg, Facebook, YouTube, WordPress, MediaWiki) that were originally written in PHP; some have managed to get free of it — in whole or in part — while others haven't. Of the ones that haven't, some have managed to make do, others haven't. (WordPress, in particular, is pretty terrible.) It's nontrivial, once you have a working site, to migrate to a different language, no matter how bad your choice of original language was.

Re: C: Knowing C might make it easier to learn other languages, but the reverse is true as well: I learned C relatively quickly, when I did, because I already knew C++ and Perl (and various other languages). I'd already picked up a lot of the important things, so I could focus on the fairly few things that were new to me. The thing is, writing C code takes several times longer than writing equivalent (or superior) code in a newer language like Perl, so a year's experience writing C programs amounts, in a sense, to a few months' experience if you'd been using Perl. Becoming productive, getting a lot of practice, learning to write well — learning C can help with those, but not nearly as much as they can help with learning C.

—Ruakh 16:26, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

I see. Flexibility is difficult for sites and programs, and therefore necessary for programmers. I may never be very productive, and my syntax may remain messy or spaghettied, but as long as I get a lot of practice and learn from it, I will consider it well worth the effort. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:15, 5 August 2012 (UTC)

zoöid misunderstanding (78.146.60.217)

Ah, I see, my bad. I had come to this via spermatozoid so was thinking along those lines. You are correct and it should be /ˈzəʊɔɪd/, I don't know why you didn't simply correct it though rather than delete the section. My edit was probably re-added by an automated restore system when the WM servers came back up, it was certainly not me.

In my edit to dacryocystitis I have not given any syllable breaks, I have only indicated primary and secondary stress. Although I know the IPA and am a native English speaker, I am not an expert on morphology so in general I will not supply syllable breaks, I am happy for others to add them however.

Daco-Romanian refers to Romania in the context of the Roman region Dacia, which is pronounced with an 's'. In fact the term should probably really be "Dacio-Romanian", but hey. Again, I am happy to be corrected, but it's easier to modify something that's already there when you find you disagree with it than it is to create all the content from scratch, so even if I am only 95% accurate it's better than not contributing anything at all.

— This unsigned comment was added by Flet (talk • contribs) at 21:56, 7 August 2012 (UTC).

Hi, thanks for creating an account.

Re: correcting vs. reverting: I'm not great at IPA for English. I'd rather remove information that I know is wrong than "correct" it in a way that still might be wrong.

Re: dacryocystitis: stress marks imply syllable breaks (they precede the stressed syllable), so what that really means is that you didn't supply any syllable breaks other than those implied by the stress marks. Which would be fine, except that the syllable breaks implied by the stress marks were certainly wrong. I don't know if dacryocystitis is dacryocy-stitis or dacryocys-titis (I suspect the former), but it's certainly not dacryocyst-itis.

Re: Daco-Romanian: I know what it means, and I know that "Dacia" has /s/, but I still find it hard to believe that "Daco-" has /s/. It happens pretty often in English that, of two related terms with <c>, one will have /s/ and the other /k/; hence, for example, "-ic" /ɪk/ (as in electric) vs. "-icity" /ɪ.sɪ.ti/ (as electricity), "indicate" vs. "indices", and so on. (In Latin this was a phonological alternation; in English it occurs only in terms that come from or via Latin, plus terms formed by analogy with said.) By contrast, it's exceedingly rare that <co> has /s/ rather than /k/; in fact, I can't think of a single example.

—Ruakh 22:12, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Well, the c in Dacia is generally pronounced as /ʃ/, at least in my dialect (General American). But Ruakh is right overall. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:51, 7 August 2012 (UTC)

Actually, yeah, me, too, due to yod-coalescence or something like it, but Flet marked his pronunciation as UK, so I was willing to roll with it. Probably I should have said that I accepted that "Dacia" has /s/, rather than that I knew it. —Ruakh 00:03, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Re: dacryocystitis: the morphology is dacry-o-cyst-itis, as it is an inflammation (itis) involving a cyst (cf bronch-itis, mening-itis, conjunctiv-itis). So the 's' and 't' are both part of the preceding syllable rather than the following, no? (Flet (talk) 06:03, 8 August 2012 (UTC))

No; syllable breaks don't follow morpheme boundaries. Not too many dictionaries have dacryocystitis, but you can easily look up bronchitis or meningitis and see that their syllable-breaks are not where your theory would put them. (You may be thinking of hyphenation rules; dacryocystitis could be split across a line-break just before the -itis, but that doesn't mean there's a syllable break there.) —Ruakh 06:22, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

I got a lovely case for you: dedifferentiation. Would love to hear your thoughts on syllable boundaries in the last 3 syllables! (Flet (talk) 16:11, 9 August 2012 (UTC))

I'd assume -ti-a-tion, no? —Ruakh 16:47, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

I mean there is no consonant to put the stress mark before. (Flet (talk) 14:17, 10 August 2012 (UTC))

No consonant is needed. The stress mark goes at the syllable boundary, right before the stressed syllable. If the syllable boundary is between two vowels, then the stress mark goes between two vowels. —Ruakh 17:08, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Also, is there not a way in which you can mark a particular section of content as "unsure", "needs review", or something along those lines? (Flet (talk) 06:12, 8 August 2012 (UTC))

Hmm. I don't know. For non-English content, I often use {{attention}} to attract the attention of an editor who speaks a specific language, but it seems strange to use {{attention|en}}, since, I mean, all of our editors speak English. But Category:English terms needing attention (which {{attention|en}}) does exist, and isn't empty, so I guess that is an option? —Ruakh 06:22, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

User:Equinox

Wow! That would be at least the third time he has fooled me. Look at the immense volume of legitimate contributions. I think he was drinking. I wonder if alcohol was involved on the other occasions as well. DCDuring TALK 12:34, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

A few editors have e-mailed me, and a few have commented at the Beer parlour, to say that they don't think he's WF. (But no one has objected to the desysopping, of course.) —Ruakh 12:37, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

It is the edit summary to the deletion of the main page that makes me wonder. DCDuring TALK 12:46, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

. . . and now WF himself has e-mailed me in a way that implies he's not Equinox. (Not that that means anything . . .) —Ruakh 13:09, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

@DCDuring: Well, most of the volume is done by some automated script. Granted that, his manual contributions are also good quality as a rule. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:32, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

@Meta: How he does it doesn't bother me as long as there are no copyvios (not likely because the source seems to be Webster).

@Ruakh: The timing has to make you more, not less suspicious, unless you've been in regular correspondence. Anyway, on the internet nobody knows you're a dog, so we are not likely to come to any final resolution on matters of identity. DCDuring TALK 23:18, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Not regular correspondence, no, but we've e-mailed back and forth a few times. The timing doesn't affect my level of suspicion, because there was no attempt to make it sound like a coincidence; WF was clearly aware of what had just happened, and was e-mailing about it. —Ruakh 23:28, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Heh. WF e-mailed me in congratulation! Yes I was being a drunken idiot but we all need a bit of catharsis. L and the community attitude towards him make me insane. Deleting the main page (which is actually pretty harmless because someone can restore it as a click) seemed like a good gesture of contempt. And I agree I am probably too unstable to be an admin, although I have been a good spam-zapper. Meta: I only started the Webster 1913 project in late 2011, and was creating thousands of original entries for 2 to 3 years prior to that. Equinox ◑ 23:12, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Do know I'll always back you up on any matters, whatever happens. -- Liliana • 23:41, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

Glad you're back, WF or whatever your name is. DCDuring TALK 23:59, 9 August 2012 (UTC)

I have to say, it's pretty awesome that our regular mainpage-deleters around here seem like such decent people :) --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:52, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Revert messages

I quite like the new revert message, but I noticed that when I revert it still shows the old message. Is this a per-user setting? And if so, do you think it should be made the default for all users? —CodeCat 18:17, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

See Wiktionary:Beer parlour#Help:Reverting#When to and MediaWiki:Revertpage. There's a site-wide default revert-message, MediaWiki:Revertpage, and Msh210 (talk • contribs) did modify it briefly, but then it became clear that the change was controversial, so he rolled it back pending a consensual decision. Unfortunately, there's no real way for an individual user to specify a different personal default, but if a rollback-link's query-string has a summary=... parameter, then the ... supersedes MediaWiki:Revertpage; so, I added some JavaScript to User:Ruakh/common.js that searches the page for rollback-links and adds that parameter. You're welcome to copy that script, though my custom summary might be a bit too long-winded: see #Brevity is the soul of not getting cut off in the middle. Update added at 19:03, 8 August 2012 (UTC): I've now shortened my custom summary slightly, enough so that that example wouldn't have been cut off.

I do think that we should modify the site-wide default. Metaknowledge (talk • contribs) has put together a draft proposal on that — see User:Metaknowledge/Rollback edit summary — but I'm not sure whether and when (s)he plans to move forward with it.

—Ruakh 18:57, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

If Metaknowledge doesn't plan to start the vote, I think I might... —CodeCat 20:19, 8 August 2012 (UTC)

Can't clean up my watchlist

On a few consecutive recent occasions, I have been unable to clean up my watchlist (nearly 25,000 items) using either method I know of (raw or "view and edit" on top of watchlist page). I get a Wikimedia error page with the following message:

PHP fatal error in /usr/local/apache/common-local/php-1.20wmf9/includes/Html.php line 147:

Allowed memory size of 134217728 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 11095038 bytes)

What do you advise, besides not letting that happen? (Although I could use some information about the limits that cause this.) Is there a way for someone else to selectively reduce it in size so I could finish the clean-up myself? For example, removing all user, citation, template, and appendix space items, + those beginning with characters not in the basic ASCII set? Can I get a list of my watchlist items and somehow mass-clean it out myself. I'd like to preserve the English-language principal namespace portion, at least. DCDuring TALK 18:03, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

It should be possible using the API. I'll put together some JavaScript for you. —Ruakh 18:17, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. The prospect of going through "my contributions" to find a thousand or more items to unwatch, even limited to the namespaces above, is daunting. As a practical matter, the problem didn't arise at 20K, though loading was slow. DCDuring TALK 18:27, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

O.K. . . . copy User:Ruakh/common.js?oldid=17385720 to Special:MyPage/common.js, then visit Special:TrimWatchList. (When you get there, you'll see "No such special page"; that's fine. It's not a real special-page, it's just a hook for the script.) And . . . just let it sit. For a long time. I don't see anything in the API that lets you unwatch multiple pages at a time, so it'll just do one after another, for ages and ages. (If you get any error-messages, though, let me know.) —Ruakh 20:14, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. It didn't take too long, but I still have 23,612 items, which still seems to exceed whatever the limit is. I'd often done that kind of cleaning myself, so I'm not too surprised that it didn't find much.

How about doing the same to everything that begins with a capital letter, everything that has a non-ascii or capital character in it or with "-"? Or entries ending in "ed" and "ing"? If it is not possible, would crush the servers, or just take a long time, let me know.

I've been trying to go back to my oldest contributions to find things to unwatch as well. What a pain. Maybe I should just stop worrying about this kind of unmaintainability and just unwatch what annoys me one at a time. DCDuring TALK 20:51, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Re: everything that begins with a capital letter: change the line if(unwatchRange(watchtoken, 0, '\u00A0')) to if(unwatchRange(watchtoken, 0, 'A', '[')).   Re: other things: not feasible with this approach. If you're willing to install Perl, I can give you something better. (But not till next week. I'm ten minutes away from leaving for the weekend.) —Ruakh 21:15, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Perl would be cool. Thanks for what you've done. Enjoy the weekend. DCDuring TALK 21:22, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

FWIW, my watchlist contained 20,710 items until I removed several hundred of them just a moment ago. So, the point at which a watchlist becomes un-editable seems to be somewhere between 20,710 and 23,612. - -sche (discuss) 01:47, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

I was able to successfully edit the list at 21,372 and also at a higher level (200 more?) that I did not record. DCDuring TALK 03:47, 11 August 2012 (UTC)

Think yourself lucky. SemperBlottoBot has over 163,000 items in its watchlist (I didn't realize it was adding every term it created). Absolutely impossible to clean it up. SemperBlotto (talk) 20:58, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

I would bet it would be possible to use the approach Ruakh took with JS to do it. It might take hours, but not a day and probably not very many hours, to run. It probably mostly involves removing the selectivity elements of what he did for me. DCDuring TALK 21:26, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

• That did the trick. I've removed some other cruft so I have some margin. I would like to see what Perl can do. It's been on my list of tools to get familiar with for a long time. DCDuring TALK 23:31, 10 August 2012 (UTC)

Live

Regarding this quote, live life to the fullest, shouldn't it be preceded by "you only live once, so" ? Pass a Method (talk) 01:22, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't understand the question. Are you proposing a change to the entry? —Ruakh 01:24, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

No, im saying we could move the article title to a new name. Pass a Method (talk) 13:55, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

Oh. Then — no, I don't think so. See google books:"want to live life to the fullest", "lived life to the fullest", etc. —Ruakh 13:58, 13 August 2012 (UTC)

모르는 것이 약이다

What is your reason for this immediate revert? [9] --KYPark (talk) 04:05, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

There was something clearly wrong with the edit; it looks like you accidentally subst'd a template that's not designed for it? I mean, just look at the diff of the headword-line, you'll see what I mean. —Ruakh 04:32, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

If it is definitely prohibited to apply {{subst}} to {{ko-pos}}, (though the subst'd page could be better transcluded), then you should better have reverted only that part than the whole so that {{subst:ko-pos|proverb}} be reverted to {{ko-pos|proverb}}, as usual, so that the added information possibly of great value could be reserved. Then, the reason would have been almost needless to say. --KYPark (talk) 05:48, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

I think it was a good, value-adding edit by KYPark and it should be restored, fixing any issues, if they exist. I would romanise 약 (yak) as "yak" and 식자 (sikja) as "sikja" but otherwise it was a great edit. Technically it's not difficult to get any version from the edit history. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить)} 06:11, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Bad undo

Why would you undo my audio clips of words that have the "merry, Mary, marry" merger in some dialects? My dialect DOES NOT have that merger, thus I put that audio clip there for that reason. Please do not undo edits made for that purpose in the future. Thanks. Tharthan (talk) 16:55, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

In addition, you undid my edits involving words with the "-urry, -erry" merger. Please refrain from removing audio clips that demonstrate different dialectal pronunciations. Tharthan (talk) 16:58, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Ah... I see that you live in Colorado. I'm not sure if you know this, but Colorado has the two aforementioned mergers, thus you had absolutely NO legitimate authority undoing my edits. If I see my edits undone again, I'll mark your undoings as vandalism. Again, please refrain from undoing things that you have no business doing. Oh, err... may YHWH be with ye, by the way. Tharthan (talk) 17:08, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Don't make threats. Ruakh has the authority, and it is his business, because that's how it works around here. Just wait for Ruakh to get back, or provide a link to the changes that were made so others can judge. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:20, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Unfortunately, the changes I had made aren't really questionable, as there was nothing that I added that couldn't be verified by simple research on the two mergers that they relate to. Tharthan (talk) 17:26, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

First of all, let me put this in no uncertain terms: My religion is off the table. If you intended your sign-off to be offensive, then you succeeded. (If you did not intend your sign-off to be offensive, then I'll thank you to remove it.)

Secondly, I actually live in Ohio, not Colorado — I lived in Colorado five years ago, for less than a year — but regardless, yes, I have the merry-Mary-marry merger. That's not the point. If you wanted to add non-merged pronunciations, I would have been fine with that. But you decided to demote the merged pronunciations from "(US)" to "(US) [accents with 'Mary, marry, merry' merger]", and add the unmerged pronunciations as "(US)", even though the merged pronunciations are actually used by most of the U.S. This seems like blatant POV-pushing.

Thirdly, I think you misunderstand the merry-Murray merger. I do not have that merger; neither to most Americans. Your edits actually related to the hurry-furry merger, promoting the use of /ʌ/ rather than the more-widespread /ɝ/. The result was POV-pushing in the same vein as above: promoting a minority pronunciation that you prefer.

—Ruakh 17:52, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Note: you've now reverted my rollbacks twice, so I'm blocking you temporarily. Unfortunately, that means you can't comment here, either; feel free to comment on your talk-page or via e-mail, and I'll copy your comments here. (Alternatively, if you'll agree to stop revert-warring, I can unblock you so we can discuss more conveniently.) —Ruakh 17:55, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Regarding -sche's version: I think there's still something wrong here. My understanding is that essentially all Americans pronounce "merry", "very", "ferry", etc., approximately the same way; phonetically speaking, speakers who have the merry-Mary-marry merger pronounce all three words the way the unmerged speakers pronounce "merry". No? —Ruakh 19:25, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

That is not the case in New England. We are one of the few areas of the U.S. that doesn't have this merger. In fact, there were a few people who came from Pennsylvania who were mocked with "You pronounce merry and marry the same? That's odd." in a high school earlier this year. Also, speakers who have the merger pronounce the three words like unmerged speakers would pronounce "Mary"; merry has the "e" sound of "bet." Tharthan (talk) 19:33, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Sorry, I don't see what your first sentence is referring to, and I don't understand what your second and third sentences are getting at. I would think that you simply misunderstood my comment, except that your last sentence does make sense as a reply, so I'm just left confused. —Ruakh 20:03, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

I was saying that it is not true that all areas of the United States pronounce "merry, Mary, and marry" the same way, as New England does not. My final sentence was saying that the merged pronunciation uses the same vowel as "Mary" does in an unmerged speaker's dialect, and that an unmerged "merry" has the "e" of "bet." Tharthan (talk) 20:08, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Re: "it is not true that all areas of the United States pronounce 'merry, Mary, and marry' the same way": Well, obviously. No one was suggesting such a thing. You must have misunderstood some comment. —Ruakh 20:10, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

"My understanding is that essentially all Americans pronounce "merry", "very", "ferry", etc., approximately the same way; phonetically speaking..."

If you didn't intend that to mean "all areas of the United States pronounce 'merry, Mary, and marry' the same way", what did you intend that to mean? Tharthan (talk) 20:13, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

I intended that to mean that speakers with and without the merger pronounce "merry" approximately the same way, and likewise "very", "ferry", etc. (all of which, according to their entries, have /ɛ/ in unmerged dialects). That is — the way that you pronounce "merry" is the same as the way I pronounce "merry". Where you and I differ is in words like "Mary" (which I pronounce like "merry", and you do not) and in words like "marry" (ditto). —Ruakh 20:22, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Well... it's possible that you have only a partial merger, because:

• UNMERGED:
  • MERRY- /mɛri/
  • MARY- /mɛəri/
  • MARRY- /mærri/
• PARTIAL MERGER (FOUND IN PARTS OF NEW YORK; POSSIBLY OTHER AREAS?):
  • MERRY- /mɛri/
  • MARY- /mɛəri/
  • MARRY- /mɛəri/
• FULL MERGER (QUITE WIDESPREAD [IN THE U.S.] OUTSIDE OF NEW ENGLAND):
  • MERRY- /mɛəri/
  • MARY- /mɛəri/
  • MARRY- /mɛəri/

Which one are you? Tharthan (talk) 20:29, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure I'm any of those; I pronounce all three identically (i.e. a full merger), but I believe I pronounce them all with [ɛ], not [ɛə]. At least, the pronunciation you added to [[ferry]] sounds perfectly normal to me.   Also, I'd appreciate it if you could indent your comments properly. It helps to keep the discussion organized, so it's clear who's responding to what. —Ruakh 20:57, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Oh, sorry about the indent issue. I actually was unsure of how to indent using MediaWiki.

Well, I certainly had never heard of them all being pronounced with an /ɛ/! Then again, this merger is complicated in its own right, and only those that do not have the merger can differentiate fully, I suppose.

Anyway, while the "hurry, furry" merger issue is now dealt with, I still would prefer the "most dialects" thing to be removed from the pages involving the "merry, Mary, marry" merger. Maybe just "dialects without [wikipedia link] merry, Mary, marry merger [wikipedia link]" and "dialects with [wikipedia link] merry, Mary, marry merger [wikipedia link]"? Tharthan (talk) 21:11, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

I would support tagging both the merged and the unmerged pronunciations; that's consistent with our general practice of tagging (for example) both US and UK, rather than choosing one as default. —Ruakh 21:21, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Well, wouldn't tagging them with "dialects without [wikipedia link] merry, Mary, marry merger [wikipedia link]" and "dialects with [wikipedia link] merry, Mary, marry merger [wikipedia link]" be doing that? If that's what you meant, than I agree as well. Tharthan (talk) 21:28, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, exactly: I was agreeing with the core of your last suggestion, though not necessarily with the exact wording/presentation. —Ruakh 21:41, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Alright than. Problem solved. Tharthan (talk) 22:08, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Also, as I recommended on -sche's talk page: I like what you did with the "see the "Hurry-furry" merger", but I would prefer if you marked the "merry, Mary, marry" merger pages with "see the "merry, Mary, marry" merger" instead of slightItalic text POV-ish "most dialects", "New England" and such. — This unsigned comment was added by Tharthan (talk • contribs) at 19:42, 14 August 2012 (UTC).

@Ruakh (comment of 19:25, 14 August 2012): it's hard to say. WP suggests that the merged pronunciation of the three words is with /ɛ/ (which is the vowel of "merry" in unmerged speech, and of "met"), but I've always heard the words merged with the sound of "mare" that WP says "Mary" has (which [[mare]] gives as /ɛ(ə)/). :/ Shall we turn to the Tea Room for help? - -sche (discuss) 19:57, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

@-sche You are correct. When someone has the merger, they pronounce the words with the "a" of mare. The reason this could be confusing for one to comprehend, is because it can be difficult for one with the merger to tell the difference. Tharthan (talk) 20:00, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

EDIT: Typo. Sorry. Tharthan (talk) 20:01, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

And now for something completely different.

I notice that on Rukhabot's user page, you state that the "bet" in Rukhabot's name should be read as a v.

Now, forgive me if I am incorrect (as I know only biblical Hebrew; being a Catholic who uses mixtures of the Tanakh & Dead Sea Scrolls for my Old Testament, and a Hebrew translation for the New Testament) but isn't "bet" only a "v" in Modern Hebrew: and even then, only when it doesn't have a dagesh (בּ)? I'd thought that bet and waw only obtained those values because of influence from neighbouring Indo-European languages, which is why languages like Ge'ez and Arabic don't have them. Tharthan (talk) 22:29, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

I guess I don't know exactly what you mean by the terms "biblical Hebrew" and "Modern Hebrew", but an awareness of a distinction between [b] and [v] is apparent from the Masoretic Text: for example, the first word of the Bible is בְּרֵאשִׁית, where the only purpose of the dagésh is to indicate the non-spirantization.

It's true that Ge'ez and Arabic don't have the b ~ v alternation, but Aramaic, which is much more closely related, does. I could well believe that Hebrew acquired the alternation from Aramaic, but the "neighbouring Indo-European languages" explanation seems quite weak: do any Indo-European languages even have such an alternation?

—Ruakh 22:46, 14 August 2012 (UTC)

Well, Modern Greek, Spanish (where "b" and "v" are pronounced the same way) and Neapolitan have had their "b"'s shift to "v"'s.

Not to mention most ancient loanwords from Biblical Hebrew contained a "b" sound, like "Abraham" and "Baal." Tharthan (talk) 00:07, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Modern Greek doesn't have such an alternation, and I don't think there's any evidence that any historical form of Greek did, either. (In order to explain the synchronic alternation in Hebrew, you'd need to posit influence from another language with synchronic alternation, not a language where one sound diachronically became the other.) Spanish is a valid example, but it obviously didn't develop that alternation until too late to be the source of the alternation in Aramaic, so actually it's better evidence for the plausibility of such an alternation arising independently. I don't know anything about Neapolitan, but Wikipedia says it has distinct /b/ and /v/ phonemes, so I'm not sure what you're referring to?

Loanwords that came via Greek and Latin naturally have /b/, because Greek didn't have a /v/ sound. Greek loanwords can tell us some interesting things about changes between spoken Ancient Hebrew and the Masoretic Text — for example, the common CiCC- word-formation pattern in the Masoretic Text (rivká, zilpá, mispár, migdál, etc.) is not borne out by proper names in the Septuagint — but they're obviously limited by Greek itself. Greek simply didn't have a lot of the consonants of Ancient Hebrew (especially sibilants and "gutturals").

If you're interested in this subject, I recommend Joel Hoffman's In the Beginning: A Short History of the Hebrew Language.

—Ruakh 01:14, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the book recommendation. I'll check it out when I get the chance.

I do have to say, though, that Modern Greek's β /viːtə/ certainly was a /bɛ̂ːta/ in Ancient Greek, thus why the Cyrillic В [ve] and Б [be] descend from it. Tharthan (talk) 15:09, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Re: "Modern Greek's β /viːtə/ certainly was a /bɛ̂ːta/ in Ancient Greek": Yes, I know. I think you must not have understood my comment. Unfortunately, I really can't think of any better way to re-explain, so I guess I'll just leave it at that. :-/   —Ruakh 15:12, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Well... alright.

Anyway, I hope we can all work together to make Wiktionary even better than it is currently; common folk using it as their primary dictionary, it winning awards etc. That'd be quite nice.

Plus, Wiktionary seems to be trolled and vandalised less than Wikipedia is, so we have that going for us =D Tharthan (talk) 17:46, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

You only believe that we get trolled less because you don't patrol anons... I bet that we have more trolls per active editor than Wikipedia does. But I share your hopes all the same. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:10, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

term/onym/l

Thanks for improving my edits. I'm afraid that I might have forgotten your advice the next time I'll edit. The documentation is clear enough ("Use {{l}} instead in lists or heads to avoid italicizing"). --129.125.102.126 22:07, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

STOP

and get a flood flag. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:56, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Or just give yourself the bot flag, since obviously the flood flag isn't working. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:56, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

Make Rukhabot a rollbacker and log in as Rukhabot, lol. Mglovesfun (talk) 00:08, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Darn it, I didn't see these comments until just now. I'm sorry. (Why didn't the flood-flag work? I don't get what happened. Maybe it doesn't apply to rollbacks?) —Ruakh 01:25, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

No idea. Please check RecentChanges next time to make sure you did it right, anyway. I thought blocking you for short periods of time would help, but to no avail (except it temporarily enabled normal patrolling). --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:57, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

Will do. (Re: blocking: I wrote a script to perform the rollbacks, so I didn't see the blocks, sorry.) —Ruakh 02:11, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

I know that, I just thought that you might be checking back to revel in its glory now and then, and notice that it was taking suspicious breaks. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:12, 16 August 2012 (UTC)

salutations

This is surely an interjection, per hello #1. See for example [10]. The definition probably needs some work though. Interplanet Janet (talk) 09:50, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Depends on the definition of interjection. One dictionary I know has a definition which would exclude hello, salutations, and many others. "Interjection" is often used to include utterances that do not involve any specific expression of emotion. Conversely, many, many words could be used to expression an emotion in some circumstances. DCDuring TALK 10:43, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Feel free to cite and provide a definition of interjection that works for you in this application. DCDuring TALK 11:11, 17 August 2012 (UTC)

Interwikis!

Wow, I'm just looking at all of your bot's interwiki contributions... the volume of them shows how badly en.Wikt needed an interwiki bot. Thanks for running one! - -sche (discuss) 09:24, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes, thank you for your bot. Does it also do category interwikis? Those have always been a big mess... —CodeCat 10:20, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

@CodeCat: Nope, sorry. Category interwikis are a very different animal. For that, a bot would either need to examine the map of existing interwikis between projects, as Wikipedia ones do (for example, if it detects that an English category has an interwiki-link to a French category which has an interwiki-link to a Dutch category, then it can add the remaining interwiki-links to fully connect those three categories to each other), or else have very specific knowledge and tasks (for example, if it knows that Category:[lang-name in English] archaic terms corresponds to fr:Catégorie:Termes archaïques en [lang-name in French], and it knows all the language-names in English and French, then it can add interwiki-links to fully connect those sets of categories between English and French), or else some combination of these (for example, it might detect that Category:[lang-name in English] archaic terms corresponds to fr:Catégorie:Termes archaïques en [lang-name in French] on the basis of existing interwiki-links). Currently, all of our category-interwiki-bots take the first approach, and so far as I know there's no real need for me to jump in and join them; I'm not sure that would be good use of my bot-time. The second approach might be worth a try, if I can handle the technical side and other people are willing to "feed" the bot with specific facts/tasks. —Ruakh 14:50, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

By the way, if it's not clear from the above, the fundamental difference between interwiki-links in our entries and interwiki-links in our other namespaces is that the latter does require some human intervention; a bot can't, in the general case, auto-detect that two pages correspond to each other. —Ruakh 15:53, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

Regarding categories, I believe only MalafayaBot does this. Which isn't a bad thing per se, as multiple bots could lead to unintended edit wars. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:50, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

@-sche: Yeah, there were several hundred thousand entries needing interwiki updates. Now I've got it down to about ten thousand . . . except that I've been skipping all the entries where the only change is to add a link to the Malagasy Wiktionary. There are a few hundred thousand of those. :-/   —Ruakh 14:50, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

Now I'm curious: why skip making interwiki links to mg.Wikt? Because of the number of edits making those links would entail? Or is mg.Wikt known to bot-create mostly contentless stubs or something bad like that? - -sche (discuss) 20:04, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

Huge numbers of bot-created entries, including a lot of "form of" entries where the lemmata are redlinks. Plus, in the past they had huge numbers of bot-created entries that eventually turned out to be copyvios, so then they had to bot-delete them, and I think that about 2–3% of Rukhabot's recent edits over the past few weeks have been to remove those interwikis. I think that we should respect other Wiktionaries' decisions, so I wouldn't support a policy of not linking to them — note that I'm only skipping pages where the only change is to add a link to them, but when there's another link to add or remove at the same time, I do add the link to them — but I just see them as a low priority, especially since I imagine that a relatively low proportion of readers benefit from the link. Once I'm caught up with other interwikis — which should be quite soon now — I think I'll work on Malagasy interwikis from our Malagasy entries, since those seem comparatively likely to be useful. Or maybe I'll even download their XML dump, and find their Malagasy entries, which is probably an even-more-useful starting-point. —Ruakh 02:13, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

Maro's edit on the Grease Pit

Do you know how to display a notice above the edit window when someone tries to edit a page? I've seen it done on Wikipedia before but I don't know how it's done. It would be good to show a warning in case someone ends up editing the main GP page by accident. —CodeCat 10:17, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

Yes; we can create MediaWiki:editnotice-4-Grease pit (which appears above the edit window whenever anyone edits either Wiktionary:Grease pit or any of its subpages — "4" being the namespace-number for the project ("Wiktionary:") namespace) with something like this:

{{#ifeq:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|Wiktionary:Grease pit|WARNING: You are currently viewing a warning-message that Ruakh wrote in the hopes that someone else would make it better. That bettering has not happened. Oh, by the way, see [[Wiktionary:Grease pit/{{CURRENTYEAR}}/{{CURRENTMONTHNAME}}]].}}

(I actually mentioned this possibility at Wiktionary:Grease pit/2012/August#Trial for monthly subpages, but at the time I was assuming we would need JavaScript to detect the current page-name. It didn't occur to me till just now to test if edit-notices support {{PAGENAME}} and parser-functions and so on, which, as it turns out, they do.)
—Ruakh 14:15, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

By the way, you can use uselang=qqx to see what messages (MediaWiki:-pages) are on a page. See, for example, http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Grease_pit?action=edit&uselang=qqx. —Ruakh 14:52, 18 August 2012 (UTC)

template talk:feminine of#Link to language section

Nothing urgent, but you're good at templates, so your eyes on this would be most helpful if/when you have a chance. Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:58, 19 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:44, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Redirecting the context templates

At the GP I suggested doing this as a first step towards the reworking of {{context}} that you are working on. Do you think this is this a good idea? And if so is it feasible? —CodeCat 15:31, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

I don't think that's a good idea, no. The key to reworking {{context}} better is to make it non-pseudo-recursive, which means that even if we keep e.g. Template:medicine around, we won't want the future Template:context/medicine to look anything like the present Template:medicine.

It seems to me that the best sequence of steps, for the transition, is this:

1. Create Template:context/medicine and Template:context/now and so on in the form that the new version of Template:context will need (which is not the same as the form that the current version needs).
2. Change Template:context to the new, non-recursive, subtemplate-using version.
3. Change Template:medicine and so on to be wrappers for Template:context/medicine and so on, and eventually, hopefully, delete them.

This sequence of steps has two key downsides:

• Changing Template:context before changing Template:medicine means that even the new version of Template:context will, initially, need to support the case that it's called with label=... and topcat=... and so on (since that's how {{medicine}} and so on currently work).
• All of the above has to happen pretty quickly. I don't think we can just create Template:context/medicine and Template:context/now and so on and just leave them for a long time in the hopes that no one will need to make any changes to context-templates.

but I can't think of any sequence of steps that doesn't either share those downsides or have even worse ones.

—Ruakh 17:31, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

My idea was to move {{medicine}} to {{context/medicine}}, but leave a redirect. That shouldn't create any problems, should it? —CodeCat 18:09, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Re: first sentence: Yes, I understand that. When I said "I don't think that's a good idea, no", that's the idea that I was referring to. —Ruakh 18:41, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

explicit

I'm not sure where I could get hold of a scan of an original manuscript, but there are loads of examples of explicit in Old French text. Pretty much all of these: s:fr:Auteur:Rutebeuf use it. Mglovesfun (talk) 19:33, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

I'm not RFV-ing it or anything, I just wanted you (or another editor with knowledge of Old French) to take a quick look. If you don't think there's a problem, then please just remove the tag. :-)   —Ruakh 19:58, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Actually, the 'noun' bit is questionable, as I don't think it's ever used in a sentence (but it might be!) it's perhaps an interjection, loaned from Latin meaning 'the end' (fr:explicit covers this very nicely). Mglovesfun (talk) 20:09, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

poput

Hi. I noticed that you commented that you said that 'someone such as yourself' and 'someone, such as yourself' are *not* synonymous.. I am not into this nuance between the two. Would you please care to explain so I can fix the entry appropriately. TIA. --BiblbroX дискашн 19:55, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi, good question. The distinction is very subtle, but very important; see w:Restrictiveness for the general idea.

The general difference is that "such as yourself" can be either restrictive or non-restrictive. "Someone such as yourself" means "someone who belongs to the same natural class as you" (restrictive), whereas "someone, such as yourself" means "someone, anyone, a person — oh, hey, look, you're a person!"

In some cases, only one version is possible. "Someone such as yourself wouldn't have heard of it" is a perfectly sensible sentence; it presupposes that the audience belongs to some natural class of people, and it makes a claim about members of that class. By contrast, "someone, such as yourself, wouldn't have heard of it" is gibberish; it makes as much sense as saying "someone wouldn't have heard of it."

In other cases, both versions are possible, but mean different things. "I need someone, such as yourself, to help with the inventory" means "I need someone to help with the inventory; you'll do", whereas "I need someone such as yourself to help with the inventory" means "I need you, or someone similar to you, to help with the inventory."

In yet other cases, both versions are roughly equivalent, except that some reworking may be needed. For example, "Someone such as yourself, who has never lived in the Midwest, wouldn't have heard of it" uses "such as yourself" restrictively, and "who has never lived in the Midwest" nonrestrictively to clarify what the restriction meant, whereas "Someone who has never lived in the Midwest, such as yourself, wouldn't have heard of it" does the reverse; but both mean roughly the same thing.

—Ruakh 20:19, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Thank you very much. "Netko poput mene" would have never expected such a comprehensive and helpful response. I am very zahvalan for it. And have corrected the entry accordingly. --BiblbroX дискашн 10:44, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

{{l}}

{{term}}, when the sc= parameter is given, directly uses the script template without invoking {{Xyzy}}. {{l}}, on the other hand, doesn't; it always iterates through Xyzy every time it's used. Is there a reason for this discrepancy? -- Liliana • 20:07, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

I think both should use {{Xyzy}}. Failing that, {{term}} should at least have {{#if:{{{sc|}}}|{{{sc}}}|Xyzy}} rather than {{{sc|Xyzy}}}, since the current version doesn't allow another template to have something like {{term|...|lang={{{lang|}}}|sc={{{sc|}}}}}. —Ruakh 20:23, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

In an ideal world, everything would use {{Xyzy}}. In our non-ideal world, however, it causes heavy slowdown on pages like water, and I've been using {{term|word|sc=Latn}} to help speed up the page a bit. This would turn completely ineffective if the template iterated through Xyzy anyway. I'd been hoping to use the same "hack" for the countless uses of {{l}}. -- Liliana • 20:30, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

I was wondering why it is that {{l}}, {{term}}, and {{t}} (and others?) don't default to Latn for, say, English. Lang=en (or blank) must be the most common, so I would have thought that such a default would significantly reduce the number of iterations of using {{Xyzy}}.

If it cannot be made into a default, what is the value of having English derived terms wrapped in {{l}} rather than having bare links? It would seem we could eliminate many uses of {{Xyzy}} that way. Or is it only the first call using a given lang= that is expensive? DCDuring TALK 20:54, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

I think that {{Xyzy}} is a bit silly, especially when any template could easily figure out the script itself through {{langscript}}, or by looking in the /script subtemplate of the provided code. {{l}} is rarely if ever called with no language code anyway. —CodeCat 21:45, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Is {{Xyzy}} silly because we have {{langscript}}? Or is {{langscript}} silly because we have {{Xyzy}}? —Ruakh 22:03, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

They are both silly, but we can fairly easily get rid of {{Xyzy}}, whereas getting rid of {{langscript}} would break a lot of things. —CodeCat 22:12, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

On the other hand, {{Xyzy}} is well-designed, and has important features that {{langscript}} lacks. —Ruakh 22:31, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Well-designed? It goes through {{langprefix}} every time it's used, even when it's not actually needed, which creates a huge overhead. One solution would've been {{Xyzy no langprefix}}, but you just removed that. -- Liliana • 12:33, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Ah, true, the existence of {{langprefix}} is a serious design problem. The solution, however, is to eliminate it, not to create a new {{Xyzy no langprefix}} that circumvents it. (After all, if we could safely switch templates to use {{Xyzy no langprefix}} instead of {{Xyzy}}, then we could just-as-safely change {{Xyzy}} not to use {{langprefix}}, and obviously that would be better.) —Ruakh 13:15, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

הזיע

I accidentally came across a discussion you had about the root of הזיע. I looked up the word on morfix and it gave two different variants: הֵזִיעַ and הִזִּיעַ. I wonder if the two variants could have come from different roots? The hezía variant reminds me of words like הֵבִיא (heví), which has the root ב־ו־א, but it doesn't seem that *ז־ו־ע means anything. The only related words I could find were יֶזַע (“sweat”) (obviously related), זָע (“to move, shift”) (which could potentially be the pa'al form of *ז־ו־ע), and זִיעַ (“flutter, tremor”) (which doesn't seem related but could be). What do you think?

Also, should I add הֵזִיעַ as a variant or as a synonym of הִזִּיעַ?

--WikiTiki89 (talk) 12:11, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

*consults dictionaries* None of my dictionaries includes הֵזִיעַ as a variant of, or synonym for, הִזִּיעַ, though Even-Shoshan does include an unrelated הֵזִיעַ from the same root as the זָע that you mention. (Good find!) So, while on the face of it it seems reasonable to me that the root related to the noun זיעה \ זֵעָה (ze'á) would be ז־י־ע, and therefore that the hif'íl verb would be הֵזִיעַ, I nonetheless have to conclude that the use of הֵזִיעַ instead of הִזִּיעַ is what a prescriptivist would call "wrong". This error is not unique to this verb; for example, people also say /heˈkir/ for הִכִּיר, and that one is certainly "wrong". So, it should probably be mentioned in a usage note, but I don't know if it needs anything more than that. —Ruakh 12:58, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

I found some examples of הֵזִיעַ (hezía) here but my Hebrew isn't good enough to figure out what it means from context. --WikiTiki89 (talk) 13:46, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Ew, gross. That is in the relevant sense. The first instance of the character-sequence הֵזִיעַ on that page (as found by Ctrl+F in Firefox) is in a sentence that means roughly, "We have already explained that sweat is not a drink; even [if someone] drank ritually impure drinks and [then he] sweat, his sweat is ritually pure." So, yeah, assuming that Mechon Mamre has this right, it's pretty compelling evidence that this form was valid in the form of Medieval Hebrew that the Mishneh Torah is in. Y'know, it occurs to me — I should check Even-Shoshan's citations for הִזִּיעַ, to see if any of them actually use הֵזִיעַ. It's possible. But if so, then Even-Shoshan clearly doesn't consider הֵזִיעַ to be correct in Modern Hebrew; and I don't know whether the "wrong" Modern use is a survival of the Rambam's use, or whether it's an independent innovation. If it weren't for the existence of forms like /heˈkir/, it would be a no-brainer that it's a survival, but as it is, I really don't know. —Ruakh 14:22, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Oh, hey, look, Chabad has a translation of the Mishneh Torah. They translate that sentence as "We already explained that sweat is not placed in the halachic category of liquids. Even if a person drank impure liquids and excreted them by sweating, his sweat is pure" [link]. —Ruakh 14:29, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Another thing I noticed is that it refers to sweat as זִיעָה (zi'á) rather than זֵיעָה (ze'á). I don't know if this is relevant to which verb it is related to. --WikiTiki89 (talk) 15:01, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I noticed that, too; I don't think it's relevant to the verb question. (Though I believe that should be "rather than זֵעָה": if I'm not mistaken, that yúd is only in the k'tív malé spelling.) —Ruakh 15:06, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Allophones and phonemic transcripts

Following our previous conversation, I got to thinking about allophones in all the Wiktionary transcripts and it occurs to me that a really huge number, if not the majority, of pronunciation entries of polysyllabic words may be wrong.

Let's take for example debate, according to the standard this would be transcribed phonemically as /dɪˈbeɪt/. But the first [ɪ] is merely an allophone of [iː] - it just so happens that as it's on an unstressed syllable you never hear it as [iː] unless someone forces the stress: [ˈdiːbeɪt]. There are thousands of words that have been transcribed using [ɪ] and [ə] where they are simply unstressed allophones of another vowel. In many cases even a native speaker may be hard pressed to find what the underlying phoneme of a particular unstressed vowel allophone actually is, since they may well never have heard it.

(Flet (talk) 10:36, 22 August 2012 (UTC))

Here's an example of a minimal pair: "to belittle" (/tə.bɪˈlɪtəl/) and "to be little" (/tə.biːˈlɪtəl/). When pronounced within a phrase and not as individual words, the unstressed phoneme is the only thing that distinguishes the two phrases. --WikiTiki89 (talk) 11:34, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Except that it is perfectly possible to stress the first syllable of belittle e.g. ['tuː 'biːˈlɪtəɫ] (as if explaining to a child). My point is that the stressed form must be considered to be the primary form in a purely phonemic transcript. (Flet (talk) 12:11, 22 August 2012 (UTC))

I'm not convinced of that. People do interestingly spelling-influenced things in hyperarticulated speech. —Ruakh 12:12, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Also, even if you can say belittle with /biː-/, you cannot say be little with /bɪ-/, so there would have to be some other kind of difference. I agree with Ruakh that articulated pronunciations are often influenced by spelling. --WikiTiki89 (talk) 12:20, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

I agree with Ruakh that this is probably a spelling pronunciation. become can be traced all the way back to Old English becuman, and has cognates in Dutch and German too. Those cognates, though, have further weakened the prefix to /bə/, and this happened already in the middle ages. It's doubtful that the English word didn't go the same route, considering that other unstressed vowels became /ə/ in Middle English too. —CodeCat 16:07, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Bot edit: interwiki

Hi, Ruakh.

Why did your bot choose that specific position for the et interwiki: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Norg%C3%A4n&diff=17187618&oldid=15628866 ? It seems somewhat misplaced. Thanks, Malafaya (talk) 16:40, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi, Malafaya.

At the time, it was not clear to me what the correct order for interwikis was (we had contradictory documentation), so the bot added them in ASCIIbetical order by prefix, but would not reorder existing interwikis. In the edit that you link to, this means that et: was added before fi:.

Thanks to your comment at the GP "order of interwikis" discussion, I was able to adopt the same order that other bots use, and I've updated documentation in a few places. The bot now does reorder existing interwikis to conform to the order you specified; see, for example plata?diff=17611877.

—Ruakh 17:39, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

OK. I noticed it after my bot "warned" me about the relocation of the et interwiki on that same article, after you bot's edit. Thanks for your reply. Malafaya (talk) 18:02, 22 August 2012 (UTC)

Update: I've now set Rukhabot to the task of sorting interwikis in the 18,196 entries that, as of the last database dump, didn't need any interwikis to be added or removed, but did need sorting. That should be done in a day or two. (After that, it'll go back to what it was doing before.) —Ruakh 02:44, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the update. Malafaya (talk) 18:15, 24 August 2012 (UTC)

whole cloth vs. "out of whole cloth"

Hi Ruakh. You reverted my changes in what looks like a semi-automatic way, without any explanation. I undid the revert because the change was intentional -- the former definition of whole cloth as a "fabrication" or "lie" doesn't capture the reality, which is not the "whole cloth" itself has this meaning but that the expression "out of whole cloth" (or "made/manufactured out of whole cloth") has the idiomatic meaning "with no basis in truth". So if someone says "that story was manufactured out of whole cloth", it means "that story had no basis in truth". It does *NOT* mean "that story was manufactured out of a fabrication", which is what the previous definition implies, and which doesn't make much sense. If you have an objection, I have no problem with this, but you need to explain it on the talk page. Benwing (talk) 07:13, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi! (butting in:) The reason for having the definition at "whole cloth" is that the phrase isn't limited to "out of whole cloth", one can also say "I can't make it up whole cloth" or even (check Google Books) "a whole cloth lie", etc. Hence it's "whole cloth" that's idiomatic, not "out of whole cloth". - -sche (discuss) 07:24, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

I agree that the definition should be on [[whole cloth]] and not on [[out of whole cloth]], however, I agree with Benwing that the definition as it is now is wrong ("whole cloth" ≠ "fabrication") and needs to be carefully revised. I'm stuck as to how to define it without including the out of or any similar preposition. --WikiTiki89 (talk) 08:01, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

Good point. How's this for an idea / a starting point? PS this should probably be moved (or archived later) to Talk:whole cloth. - -sche (discuss) 08:10, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

That's actually pretty good, although I would say that it's not non-gloss. --WikiTiki89 (talk) 08:21, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

To clarify, I only reverted your change to [[out of whole cloth]] after Metaknowledge (talk • contribs) had already reverted your change to [[whole cloth]]: it seemed that they were a neither-or-both thing. But I did agree with Metaknowledge (talk • contribs)'s rollback, because what you removed from [[whole cloth]] included several examples of "from whole cloth" and one (old-fashioned) example of "out of the whole cloth". I did notice that the definitions at [[whole cloth]] needed work, but it was clear that removal is not the work they needed! —Ruakh 12:18, 23 August 2012 (UTC)

On qualifiers

Hi Ruakh! I agree with you that qualifiers should go after the term, but the translation editor itself adds it that way. Pikolas (talk) 16:42, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Oh, darn it. Thanks for the note. I guess I'll have to figure out how to fix that . . . —Ruakh 16:50, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

US pronunciations

Why do you keep removing the US pronunciations I'm adding? —britannic124 (talk) 17:36, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

I certainly don't have a policy of removing U.S. pronunciations. Presumably you're adding wrong pronunciations, or adding them wrongly, or something. (If you give a specific diff, I can give you a more useful answer.) —Ruakh 18:03, 27 August 2012 (UTC)

Bot status for GanimalBot

Hi Ruakh

Could you give GanimalBot the bot status.The vote ended yesterday.-tnxGeorge^Animal. 15:08, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

 Done. —Ruakh 17:09, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks.Best regards.--George^Animal. 17:10, 30 August 2012 (UTC)

Hi

Could my Bot add interwikilinks, too?George^Animal. 18:27, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

We already have a bunch of bots adding interwikis. Kurdish inflected forms are probably a much better use of your time. —Ruakh 18:30, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

September 2012

A single revision

In turn, "I don't think Ruakh's linguistic decisions are credible."

Do you know him or his works well?--Dixtosa 15:58, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

See w:Japhetic theory. By the way, your signature seems to be broken; it doesn't contain a link to your user-page. You can fix it at Special:Preferences. —Ruakh 16:04, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Man it was just a joke :D. No, seriously in Soviet era people were really trying to avoid political repression in even such a way, you know, you cannot work when coal is waiting for you in Siberia :D.

Note that the theory denies historical linguistics but at the same time Marr uses the methods of historical linguistics, therefore his theory was the way to be untouchable.

reBTW, "Treat signature as wikitext (without an automatic link)". I did not invent this. I do not break any rule.--Dixtosa 18:27, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

The purpose of the "Treat signature as wikitext" option is to let users customize their signatures, providing their own link. My signature, for example, is —[[User: Ruakh |Ruakh]]{{SUBST:#ifeq:{{SUBST:FULLPAGENAME}}|User talk:Ruakh||<sub ><small ><i >[[User talk: Ruakh |TALK]]</i ></small ></sub >}}, which generates —Ruakh on this page and —Ruakh_TALK elsewhere. Obviously it would be a mess if MediaWiki tried to wrap that whole thing in [[User:Ruakh|...]].

You are breaking a rule; as explained at Wiktionary:Signatures, your signature "must link prominently to your userpage and/or your talkpage."

—Ruakh 18:56, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Quasi

You are right : that is why I thought of deleting "literary" as well, but actually I am was not quite sure of its use. I have just checked on the "Trésor de la langue française informatisé" : it is mentioned as "Vieilli, fam., ou région. (notamment Ouest et Centre) ou littér."

Vieilli = dated ; Fam. = colloquial (that was my first impression) ; Région. = regionalism (I do not find the appropriate template for this one) ; Littér. = literary

--Fsojic (talk) 16:18, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Our closest analogue to régional is dialectal ({{dialectal}}). So, should we go with {{context|dated|colloquial|or|dialectal|lang=fr}}? By the way, this may subjective, but I think a much better interface to le TLFi is this one. —Ruakh 16:35, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Huh? We do have {{regional}}. -- Liliana • 18:39, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Oh, whoops, thanks. :-)   —Ruakh 18:50, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

может быть

Hi,

The entry looks alright at the first glance, thanks for the cleanup. Was there something I missed? --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:06, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't know Russian — I tried to learn some Russian last year, but I didn't get very far in it — so my main reason for tagging was simply that I was making a lot of changes to an entry in a language I don't speak, and I wanted someone who does know Russian to make sure I wasn't being stupid. Secondarily, I was surprised by the distinction being drawn between "interjection" and "adverb", because even the examples under the interjection looked like adverbs to me. But if you think the entry is fine, then please, just de-tag it. Thank you for taking a look. :-)   —Ruakh 23:21, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

You're right. I didn't see the actual comment in the tag. Fixed now. Feel free to ask if you see anything suspicious. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:36, 2 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks! —Ruakh 00:21, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

talking head

Why? Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 04:28, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

Because I don't think it's accurate: the term may occasionally refer to radio pundits, but it originally and especially refers to television pundits. —Ruakh 04:42, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

Well, why didn't you say that in your edit summary? Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 05:04, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

 Done. —Ruakh 05:14, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

mjw: formatting

Hi! Just wanted to thank you for fixing up my formatting for mjw - I'm a bit of a newbie on wiktionary and have been almost entirely dormant on wikipedia since 2006 or so, so I'm a bit out-of-touch. I've created and have been using that basic template for all the Egyptian words I've added so far - is there anything else about it which is less than ideal? Furius (talk) 06:57, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

Because WikiHiero generates enormous output in table format, I think it'll be tough to make any Ancient Egyptian entries not "less than ideal". It'll take some experimentation, and probably input from other editors, to make the best of it. Let me think about this for a bit, and learn a bit about how Egyptian lexicography works, and I'll get back to you. —Ruakh 14:50, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

Oh, and — thanks for asking. :-)   —Ruakh 14:50, 3 September 2012 (UTC)

O.K., so, I'm trying to figure this out. At [[mjw]], the headword is given only in hieroglyphics, not in transliteration. Likewise the alternative form (or are there two alternative forms? it's kind of split, I'm not sure why), which also means that there can be no link to the alternative form. However, the inflected forms (one of which, of course, is the headword again) and the derived term are all given only in transliteration, not in hieroglyphics. Is this all intentional? If so — why the discrepancy? —Ruakh 15:52, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Excellent! This is the sort of feedback I was hoping for! There is no good reason for the transliteration not to be in the headword - I'll put them in from now on. The alternative forms are alternative written forms - they are all transliterated the same, so I saw no point to include the transliteration for each (mjw has only a few alternative forms - m3j is more typical in this regard). But I suppose that including the transliterations below would make the nature of the variation apparent and make it easier to tell that there are two alternative forms - So I'll include transliterations for them from now on. The derived term is given only in transliteration because that I just listed the wikilink (and the hieroglyphs refuse to share a line with latin characters, so including the hieroglyphs there takes up a lot of space, and looked messy to my eyes). As for the inflected terms, they really do need to be listed in transliteration - hieroglyphs are extremely variable with regards to indicating inflection. Possible representations of the dual of mjw, for example include the following:

mjwwj	mjwwj	mjwwj	mjwwj	mjwwj	mjwwj

And that's not close to exhaustive! (The hieroglyphic representation at far left are identical to the singular, to boot). So, I don't think it is practical to provide the hieroglyphs in the inflection box. Furius (talk) 01:06, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

I don't have anything very coherent yet, but some stray thoughts:

• I've discovered that if you wrap <hiero> with other things in a <div>, they can sit next to each other. It's only when <hiero> is at "top level", so to speak, that it insists on being on its own line. So some of the formatting mess could perhaps be handled, hackishly, by changing {{head|egy|...}} to <div>{{head|egy|...}}</div>.
• If the alternative forms have the same transliteration as the headword, and we're filing everything by transliteration, then what makes one version the "headword" and the others "alternative forms"? (I mean, usually we give a separate entry for every alternative form, pointing to one main entry, but that approach doesn't seem applicable here. It doesn't seem like there's any benefit to making such a distinction.)
• Might it make sense to just transliterations exclusively, or almost exclusively, and just put the various hieroglyphic versions of a headword in right-floating boxes (like the photograph and Wikipedia-link at [[cow#English]], or like the stroke-order graphic at [[母#Translingual]])? Presentation– and formatting-wise, I think that would be cleanest. In scholarly journals, when they mention Egyptian words, do they give transliterations, hieroglyphics, or both, or what?

—Ruakh 01:27, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

I shall try playing with the <div></div>s. The alternative forms are perceptively rarer - I have a few Egyptian dictionaries, and I've yet to encounter disagreement on which form ought to be the "headword". Many of the variations seem to be about allowing the hieroglyphs to fit when writing in different directions (i.e. when writing top-to-bottom vs left-to-right) and the rest are related to conflicts between literary and colloquial Egyptian. This means that one does encounter them quite regularly, even when reading the basic texts. While the clutter is annoying, and entering them all is a both, I think it is important that wiktionary lists the major variations.

On your other point, older articles sometimes have just the transliteration (I think because hieroglyphs were difficult to print - Faulkner's dictionary, for example, is entirely handwritten). Now an article would probably provide both - transliteration alone is difficult to read, because of the sheer number of synonyms (3bw gives some indication of the number of different words can have identical transliterations), and because the transliteration cannot indicate the determinative used with the word (the final character of the word which provides semantic information). Almost all published texts are written in hieroglyphs (the major exception being publication of recovered correspondence, which is often in w:demotic) - so anyone looking a word up in the dictionary is going to be looking for the hieroglyphs (in a way that they might well not be for, e.g., cuneiform texts).

More generally, I feel like I ought to mention that we could have the pages' namespaces be hieroglyphs, and there are a few such articles on wiktionary (e.g. 𓍿𓊃𓅓𓃡). For a number of reasons I don't think they are good: they're harder to search for, they tend to display as boxes even for people who have fairly comprehensive unicode sets, the main font is quite fiddly and difficult to read, and unicode is incapable of stacking the characters, which means that they look very unnatural.

Furius (talk) 03:50, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

Can you check my translation of a quote on אולם?

Here's the diff. I took a few liberties, but the main thing that killed me was כסידרם. I could not figure out exactly what it means so I just guessed. --WikiTiki89 (talk) 15:16, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

כסידרם is כְּסִדְרָם, i.e. כְּ־ (k'-, “like, as”) + סֵדֶר־ (séder-, “order of-”) + ־◌ ָם (-ám, “them”). So, a too-literal translation might be “like their order”. I leave it to you to figure out how to translate it idiomatically . . . —Ruakh 15:49, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Some help with Javascript

Hi, could you help me with something? How do I strip an initial - from a string if there is one, but leave the string unchanged otherwise? —CodeCat 17:39, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

You can write

s = s.replace(/^-/, '');

or

if(s.length > 0 && s.charAt(0) == '-') s = s.substr(1);

—Ruakh 17:42, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

Ok that works. Thank you! (Maybe there should be a babel box for JS too. You deserve a 3 at least!) —CodeCat 00:10, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

Scripting

That is true, I didn't think of that. Maybe there should be a separate JS page too. I wonder if 'Scribunto' is the best name to use though. Is that how people will call it, or will they prefer 'Lua' (I would)? Maybe too early to tell... —CodeCat 23:50, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

I've been calling it "Lua", and I expect to continue doing so, but I felt a bit silly changing WT:LUA to be a redirect to WT:Lua. :-P   —Ruakh 23:54, 4 September 2012 (UTC)

learning Perl

I'm finally trying to learn Perl so I can make my own WT:TODO lists. I downloaded Strawberry Perl and enwiktionary-20120831-pages-articles.xml. I took the script you wrote here and updated it to look at the .xml file I have rather than the one you had, and I changed \[\[w:[^|\]]*\]\] to (st|ᵫ|fi|fl|ff|ffi|ffl|〃|ₐ|ₓ|¹|²|‱) (because I'm curious how many, and which, entries use those characters). À la this, I also added

 \
  > specialcharacters.txt

to the end, which I assume(!) means it will save, to a text file called that, the list of pages that use those characters. (Cargo cult programming? lol.) But: when I try to run the .pl file, the prompt tells me Warning: Use of "-d" without parentheses is ambiguous at ... line 1 and Unterminated <> operator. I specified the full path to the file, bzip2 -d < C:\strawberry\enwiktionary-20120831-pages-articles.xml.bz2 \, but it still wanted parentheses. And I took the < out of line 1, but then it worried about Backslash found where operator expected and also declared that Use of "-w" without parentheses in ambiguous and it aborted execution.

Now, I'm sure I'm making one of the most rookie oversights/mistakes there is — and if you're a true programmer, you'll probably tell me it's that I'm using Strawberry Perl rather than Perl for Mac or Linux ;) — but could you enlighten me as to what I'm missing regarding parentheses? I've been reading http://learn.perl.org, but I'm finding it hard to search the site for "-d", "(", "/", etc, for obvious reasons (Google doesn't handle those characters well). PS, is it feasible to have the list note, next to each pagename, which special characters are used in the page? - -sche (discuss) 01:55, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

If I understand you correctly, it sounds like you took the command that I posted, made your changes, saved it in a file named foo.pl, and tried to run it as a Perl script? In that case, the problem is that the command that I posted is actually a Bash command. It invokes Perl — the whole red-colored block in single-quotes is a Perl program passed as a command-line argument to perl -e (see the perlrun manual page) — but it itself is not a Perl program. Do you see what I mean?

Do you have IO::Uncompress::Bunzip2? Like, if you run the command perl -MIO::Uncompress::Bunzip2 -e "", does it give you an error message saying that you don't have it? If so, or if you can install it from CPAN, then I can post an adjusted version of Wiktionary talk:Todo/Translations templates outside translations sections that is pure Perl. Alternatively, if you can find some other way to decompress the dump so it's no longer *.xml.bz2 but merely *.xml, that might be easier. Either way, just let me know, and I'll post an adjusted version accordingly.

—Ruakh 02:12, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

I did indeed save your text as a .pl file and invoke it from Perl's command line/prompt. Well, that explains that part of my problem, haha. :)

When I run the command perl -MIO::Uncompress::Bunzip2 -e "", it does nothing (no error message).

I have unzipped the .bz2 file. In fact, I initially tried running the .pl on the unzipped .xml file, and only tried running it on the .xml.bz2 file when I noticed your script was directed at a .bz2 file and thought I'd see if the reason things weren't working was that the script was written to do things to a .bz2 file rather than to an .xml file. So I have both zipped (.xml.bz2) and unzipped (.xml) copies of the dump on hand. - -sche (discuss) 02:46, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Thank you! :) I adapted your script to make a list of entries with st ff fi fl ffi ffl ƈ in them, and took care of all of them, and now I've adapted it to make Wiktionary:Todo/Entries containing obsolete IPA characters. - -sche (discuss) 19:48, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

Congratulations! :-D   —Ruakh 19:57, 7 September 2012 (UTC)

My first attempt at scribbling

I wrote {{nl-conj-wk}} as a Lua module on the test wiki: https://test2.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:Nl-conj . I realise there is still a lot of code duplication and some things may not be as nice as they should be, but it's a start. I used {{PAGENAME}} for the sake of convenience, and I didn't write {{nl-conj-table}} yet because that's mostly just wikitext anyway, I'm not sure if that really warrants scribbling just yet. I also noticed that any errors occurring within a statement will have the last line of that statement as the line on which the error occurred, so that means you can't debug long statements easily and so I split up the return statement (which was originally just all of the text in one long statement). What do you think of it as a first try? —CodeCat 15:12, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Your function outputs a bunch of template-call wikitext — {{nl-conj-table|...}}, {{l|nl|...}}, and so on. To be honest, I think the {{l|nl|...}} part is not a good design decision — much better to create a local function that outputs exactly the right HTML — but more importantly, unless I'm missing something, this doesn't work at all. I just tested by creating a function that returns "{{!}}" (see test2wiki:Template:!), and the result was “{{!}}”, not “|”. Scribunto modules have to generate "final" wikitext, the same sort of wikitext you'd get after all parser-functions and templates have been evaluated. Do you see what I mean? —Ruakh 18:09, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

So the output can't contain any templates or magic words at all? That seems rather limiting. But I think there is still a function to do another 'pass' over the code, so we could use that here as a stopgap measure until all templates have been converted to Lua. Or at least the ones we want to convert; there's probably not much point in converting something like {{trans-bottom}} anytime soon. In any case, I decided not to write my own version of {{l}} because we presumably want to have a single common module for that, instead of having everyone write their own custom and slightly different versions. I'd rather get it right the first time and build from the bottom up. The problem is that it's all interconnected; the only widely-used templates I can think of that don't depend on any others in any way are the code templates. And we don't know how to solve those, yet. —CodeCat 18:16, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

You don't need to write your own version of {{l}}, because {{nl-conj-wk}} doesn't need most of what {{l}} offers: it doesn't need to look up the language-code to determine the right language-name, it doesn't need to bother finding and using a script template; it doesn't need to support gender, transliteration, and so on; and if I'm not mistaken, it doesn't even need to support the case that the link-target differs from the displayed text. So if I'm not mistaken, a simple function that takes an argument target and returns '<span lang="nl">[[' .. target .. '#Dutch|' .. target .. ']]</span>' will fully suffice. —Ruakh 19:04, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Even that seems like something we'd like to put in a common library, though, because there are other templates/modules that need such simple links. Why reinvent the wheel when everyone can use the same wheel? :) —CodeCat 19:37, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Assembling a wikilink is not "reinventing the wheel". This is a wiki. Someone who's not comfortable constructing a wikilink should not be editing Scribunto modules, either. (Personally, I feel more comfortable constructing a wikilink than finding the common library function, determining what arguments it takes in what order, "requiring" the module that contains it, calling the function, and hoping that everyone reading the code already knows about the common library function. Especially since it's a fair bet that there will actually be several slightly-varying common library functions that I'll have to choose from: Do I want {{l}}? Or {{onym}}? Or {{term}}? Or {{Latn}}?) —Ruakh 20:25, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

It has nothing to do with being comfortable. It's more a matter or reducing code duplication and increasing consistency. I would like it if there wasn't a single 'do-everything' kind of template like {{l}} but that it be split up into smaller parts. After all, it really does three jobs in one: include the script template with the appropriate styling, generate the link, and include auxiliary information. It only actually differs from {{term}} in the first point. So in my view, those three tasks should each be separate functions, which can then be combined as editors see fit. If you only want the link, then you just call the linking function (or create a link). If you want the language template/styling, you call that. If you want the extra information, you call that too. A single function to generate only the link might be overboard, but I only meant it to show the point that a function should do one thing unambiguously and without duplication, and do it well. —CodeCat 20:37, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

Trust me: a single function within the nl-conj-wk module that handles '<span lang="nl">[[' .. target .. '#Dutch|' .. target .. ']]</span>' will not end up with more code duplication and inconsistency than including a common library and calling two separate functions from it, one to handle '[[' .. target .. '#' .. langname .. '|' .. display .. ']]' and one to handle '<span lang="' .. langcode .. '">' .. text .. '</span>'. (A fanatical consistency, by the way, will not have any actual benefit aside from making a prettier UML diagram. It really will do no harm if two different templates handle the same simple task in two slightly different ways, as long as they both handle it in a way that's easy to read and maintain. For something as simple as this, your separate-module approach fails on both counts. Save your architecture for tasks that benefit from architecture.) —Ruakh 21:01, 6 September 2012 (UTC)

I did think you are right, but then I thought of something else. Occasionally someone brings up the idea of having subpages per language, or moving appendix entries somewhere else. Such a move would be very easy to do if all links to entries are created by the same function(s). So by using a function even for small links, we can keep things flexible. —CodeCat 20:03, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

It will never, ever happen that all links to entries are created by the same function(s); and even if that were to happen, "very easy to do" is not an apt description of the moving or splitting of every single page on the entire project. If we ever decide to do something like that, it will be a heck of a lot of work, and will take a heck of a lot of planning. There will be a lot of things to do. A Dutch conjugation template that generates links to [[...#Dutch|...]] instead of [[.../Dutch|...]] can join the list. (The problem with designing something to be flexible in one eventuality is that you always end up finding that you really needed it to be flexible in some different way that you didn't think of. The original, unused flexibility then becomes an irritation, because it doesn't play well with the flexibility you now actually need.) —Ruakh 20:16, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

Qualifier after the word?

I'm not sure if that's a good idea. We already display transliterations and such after the word in brackets, it could be a bit messy. —CodeCat 19:59, 8 September 2012 (UTC)

attention|fi

When you leave an attention tag, it would be most useful, if you could write a short comment on what cought your attention. I think I got it right with silpoa, velloa and vellova, but can't be 100% sure. --Hekaheka (talk) 16:24, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

I often do, but with these entries, it seemed rude to write {{attention|fi|I don't know of any specific problems, but this was added by an anon who doesn't quite seem to know what (s)he's doing}}, and redundant to write {{attention|fi|I changed these from 'see also' to 'related terms', because it seems like that was the intent, but I don't actually speak Finnish, so please make sure I'm not being an idiot}}. Anyway, if you left the entries in a state that seemed O.K. to you, then I'm 100% satisfied. Thanks for taking care of them. :-)   —Ruakh 18:08, 9 September 2012 (UTC)

Tabbed languages; תשובה

I have a few unrelated questions. First of all, what do you think about making TabbedLangs default (for anons and LIUs, but with LIUs having the ability to disable it)? Also, how would that be enacted, technically speaking, were a vote for it to pass?
Secondly, please see Talk:תשובה. I also am a little suspicious of the pronunciation — do you think you could record it yourself? Thanks so much --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:24, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I'd support having Tabbed Languages enabled by default. That would be done, technically speaking, by editing MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition to change TabbedLanguages[ResourceLoader]|TabbedLanguages.js to TabbedLanguages[ResourceLoader|default]|TabbedLanguages.js. (See mw:Extension:Gadgets.)
As for תְּשׁוּבָה (t'shuvá) — the listed pronunciation is correct. Another instance of t'sh- being pronounced /tʃ/ is תְּשַׁע־ (t'shá-, “nine-”).
—Ruakh 12:15, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Great. Thank you again. I'll try to write up a vote in the near future. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:54, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Quality control

Frankly, I agree with your comment at the WebCite vote (although obviously I would have preferred that you did not vote against). I might just start a discussion on a quality clause for citations. The trouble, as I see it, is that any objective quality standard that I can think of is going to end up excluding usenet. How do you think that would go down? SpinningSpark 17:22, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

To be clear — I don't think I'm suggesting a quality standard to exclude cites from poor sources, so much as a quality standard to restrict the ways in which such cites can be used. For example, we should include slang terms, including ones that don't appear in books, provided they're actually used; and Usenet and arbitrary web-sites are great for that sort of thing. But when it comes to simple misspellings ("the perpose"), typos ("the anwser"), misunderstandings ("absolute penultimate"), misconstruals ("a lot people think so"), and so on, we should check if these consistently occur in well-copyedited works by native speakers. I don't think there's any specific quality standard that I would vote to include in the CFI; I just want WT:CFI to acknowledge, in vague terms, that quality is relevant, and that even well-attested errors can be excluded. —Ruakh 18:00, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

I think I understand that. I'll try and put something together that can be run past the BP. SpinningSpark 21:05, 10 September 2012 (UTC)

Interwikis in redirects

Hi, Ruakh.

Not that it does any harm, but interwikis in redirects? Cheers, Malafaya (talk) 10:37, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, interwikis in redirects. I'm not sure what the question is? —Ruakh 11:46, 15 September 2012 (UTC)

wiktionary validator

Hi, I'm writing a validator for wiktionary and instead of asking in the beer parlour I'm thinking about keeping all questions and discussions in my page so they don't get lost in the archive and at the same time to start writing a formatting guide trying to cover all details (just formatting, nothing about content). I'd like to hear your opinion before writing in the beer parlour about it, could you take a loot at my page? Thank you! Fedso (talk) 17:49, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Remember that, per our terms of service, all contributors irrevocably agree to release all of our contributions under the CC-BY-SA 3.0 License and the GFDL, and therefore it's permitted to copy our contributions (with attribution). As a consequence, this isn't an either/or thing: after you've asked a question in the Beer parlour, and the discussion has finished, you can copy it to your page, so it will be both in the archives and in one central location. —Ruakh 17:54, 21 September 2012 (UTC)

Etymologies.

Thank you for your message. I will try to remember all this. "Compare to xxx" is a too vague formulation indeed.

For the "→ see", I won't use it anymore, it's just that I like these little arrows :D

By the way, thank you for having nominated me to auto-patrolled status. --Fsojic (talk) 22:35, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

Oigo and Gracias

Hello, Ruakh, thanks for your welcoming message. Yes, you're absolutely right, I should have used the brackets and will change it right away. Best, --Edgefield (talk) 02:10, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

I'll slow down

I saw your message. What would you like me slow down on?

• ps. I'm trying :) --81.9.217.33 00:38, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

I just meant, fewer edits per day. A lot of your edits are good ones, but a lot of them aren't (for example, changing [[w: to [[Wikipedia: doesn't actually solve the problem, but because it means that we'll no longer see those entries on that clean-up list, its effect is to conceal the problem rather than address it). If you make fewer edits for day, you can get useful feedback; as it is, all the time that I might have spent giving you feedback, I instead spend just rolling back large numbers of your edits. :-/   —Ruakh 00:22, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

fatah

Hey, yeah the President did use the word in his recent 60 minutes interview. (Technically, if the Queen uses a word, it becomes English automatically; I'm not sure how we do that here in the republic.) I'm not sure how else he meant it other that as the U.S. conquest of al-Queda. I'll try to find you a link to his usage. -- Kendrick7 (talk) 00:48, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Neither the President nor the Queen automatically makes a foreign word "English" by virtue of borrowing it. But regardless — even if Obama referred to the U.S. conquest of al-Qaeda as a "fatah", which seems farfetched (surely Obama, of all people, knows that we haven't conquered al-Qaeda?), that doesn't instantly mean that "fatah" simply means "conquest" in English. I mean, I can't imagine that anyone goes around referring to the Norman fatah of England, y'know. —Ruakh 00:26, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

antaa (as an example)

Out of curiosity, why do you apply the template "onym" to words listed in synonyms, antonyms etc. sections? Finnish is not written in a non-Latin script nor do the words need further explanation where they are. You are the only one in the community that I have noticed doing this. --Hekaheka (talk) 04:10, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

{{onym‎|fi|suoda‎}} has at least three IMHO-advantages over [[suoda]]:

• it links directly to the Finnish section (which is beneficial in and of itself, but even more so when various optional features are enabled, such as Tabbed Languages, and such as the orange-links thing).
• it adds lang="fi" in the generated HTML, allowing various kinds of language-specific intelligence on the client-side.
• it adds semantic information to the wikitext itself; {{onym‎|fi|suoda‎}} means "the Finnish word 'suoda', as a synonym or alternative form or derived term or whatnot (see section header)", whereas [[suoda]] is much vaguer: it could be a Finnish term, or part of a Finnish term, or an English word that's commenting on a Finnish term, or any of various other things. This may be a lost cause, since almost no one besides me actually uses {{onym}}, but on the other hand, almost no-one misuses it, so its semantics are pretty reliable . . . in the tiny proportion of entries that use it. :-P

—Ruakh 04:28, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for clarification. I have reverted it in a couple of occasions (I'd say max 5) as I first thought it to be an error. --Hekaheka (talk) 05:19, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• Also, what are the advantages of {{onym}} over {{l}}? --WikiTiki89 (talk) 11:10, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• One advantage is that users of {{l}} have explicitly disclaimed the notion that it has any semantics; they use {{l|en|...}} when using an English word in running text (such as definitions), and they'll even write things like {{head|fr|verb|{{l|fr|boire}} {{l|fr|comme}} {{l|fr|un}} {{l|fr|trou}}}} (which expands to <b class="Latn " lang="fr">ExpandTemplates</b><nowiki/> <nowiki/> (''<span class="Latn " lang="fr">[[boire#French|boire]]</span> <span class="Latn " lang="fr">[[comme#French|comme]]</span> <span class="Latn " lang="fr">[[un#French|un]]</span> <span class="Latn " lang="fr">[[trou#French|trou]]</span>'') — note the <span>s within <span>s, which aside from being silly, also means that this notation can't be used for the many languages that we use e.g. font-size:125% on).
  The other advantage is a host of advantages; in terms of actual behavior, I find {{onym}} to be superior to {{l}} in every way. Like {{term}}, it italicizes transliterations; like {{term}}, it puts transliterations and glosses in a single set of parentheses; like {{term}}, it allows you to leave the second parameter blank and provide your own links in the third, so you can write things like {{onym|he||מי שהוא|tr=mí shehú}} (whereas {{l}} generates garbage when you try this).
  —Ruakh 12:22, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• If we really want to add so much semantic information to Wiktionary, I think the current approach is doomed from the outset. We should be using XML instead! —CodeCat 12:02, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• Like this?: <onym lang="fi" sc="Latn" type="synonym" sense="to give" description="the Finnish word 'suoda', as a synonym or alternative form or derived term or whatnot (see section header) moodWhileAddingThisText="hungry" cerealIHadForBreakfast="Honey Nut Cheerios" planetThatChewbaccaComesFrom="Kashyyyk">suoda</onym> --WikiTiki89 (talk) 12:20, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• @CodeCat: <sarcasm>You're right; we should also get rid of all the headers ===Alternative forms===, ===Synonyms===, ===Translations===, and so on, and just put everything in ===See also===. After all, without the recursive nested structure of XML, what does it even mean for something to be "in" a section?</sarcasm> —Ruakh 12:22, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• Well... that's not quite I meant. It was more of a hopeless ideal, that we'd use XML elements for the sections, and use something like XSLT to turn the page into HTML. So an entry might have looked like this:

  <entry lang="fi">
  <noun>
  <def>to <a>give</a></def>
  <synonyms>
  <li sense="to give">suoda</li>
  </synonyms>
  </noun>
  </entry>

  We could have even used XML schema or some variety to check the validity of pages and reject them when they are saved if they are not valid. It would have saved bots a lot of work. I know that this will never happen, and that XML may not be very readable to new users, but it does have its advantages... —CodeCat 12:33, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• I'm not disputing the view that XML is hopeless, nor even, necessarily, the view that it's an ideal. I'm just disputing the view that, in the absence of XML, semantic information is a doomed cause. —Ruakh 12:46, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• Ok, I can understand that. I don't think it's a bad idea to add semantic information, but what I think is doomed about it is that Wiktionary's coding is very presentation-oriented, so it is hard to convince people to think about what something is rather than what it looks like. And they're also lazy. I tried to propose using a template to link to English definitions in foreign entries, and that fell flat on its face. Most editors here seem to want to keep everything simple, meaning "as they know it", even if simple means less useful in the long term. Aside from that though, I'm not quite sure what value there is in {{onym}} over {{l}} either. If a link appears in a list item within a Synonyms section, what can we do but assume it's a link to a synonym? Do we need a separate template to emphasize the point? —CodeCat 12:53, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

• Re: "If a link appears in a list item within a Synonyms section, what can we do but assume it's a link to a synonym?": Here are some entries with synonyms-sections where such an assumption would be wrong:
  • [[gratis]] (links to [[libre]] and to [[free as in speech]])
  • [[elephant]] (links to [[Elephas]], to [[maximus]], to [[Loxodonta]], and to [[africana]])
  • [[LDP]] (links to 自由, to 民主, and to 党)
  • [[crude]] (links to [[immature]] and to [[unripe]], which are both actually correct, I guess, but they aren't intended to be viewed as linkified synonyms; also links to [[Wikisaurus:raw]])
  • [[are]] (links to [[thou]])
  • [[koira]] (links to [[doggy]], to [[hound dog]], and to [[mongrel]]
  and I could easily list many, many more — some in the same vein, some in other veins. We've got plenty of variety.
  —Ruakh 22:24, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

In each of those cases, the formatting is somewhat different though. Either something that isn't {{sense}} or {{qualifier}} precedes the link, or there are two links with just a space between them. If we humans can see when a link isn't a synonym by itself, then a program could probably see that too. It would just need some specifying. I understand that using {{onym}} might make that job easier, but it isn't required necessarily. —CodeCat 22:43, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Re: "If we humans can see when a link isn't a synonym by itself, then a program could probably see that too": Well, sure, anything that a human can figure out, a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence will be able to figure out. But why wait? —Ruakh 23:07, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Bloke

Hi, if you have a moment could you take a look at w:Bloke_(word)#Australian_bloke and let me know what you think about incorporating this Australia-specific sense of bloke on Wiktionary. Thanks. Green Cardamom (talk) 07:13, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

I will give it some thought. —Ruakh 12:44, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

Discussion is apparently stalled so I restored the text (again). If you revert again without explanation will be pursued through outside conflict resolution process as I don't want to edit war with you and you leave me no other option. -- Green Cardamom (talk) 18:22, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Mea culpa, this had slipped my mind. Thanks for the notice. I'll see about replacing your text with something more reasonable . . . —Ruakh 18:42, 29 October 2012 (UTC)

Ok with that definition. Thank you. -- Green Cardamom (talk) 19:27, 6 November 2012 (UTC)

October 2012

interwikilinks

hai madom, in connection with the linterwikilinks at अंशुकम्- giving interlinks is the easiest way to make that word in that language. that is why i gave links in that. interwikilinks are not automatically coming. so what is the problem of giving interwikilinks?--Dvellakat (talk) 09:44, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

The primary purpose of interwiki-links is to let readers know which other Wiktionaries have the same entry, so they can read it in whatever language they're most comfortable with. A secondary purpose is to let editors know which other Wiktionaries have the same entry, so the various Wiktionaries can take information from each other, to the benefit of all. Both of these purposes are subverted when you add interwiki-links to entries that don't exist. Re: "giving interlinks is the easiest way to make that word in that language": No, it's not. If you're capable of creating an interwiki-link, then you don't need to. —Ruakh 12:21, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Marrone

You don't agree with the dictionary's etymology? http://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=marrone&diff=18308052&oldid=18286043 Djkcel (talk) 20:03, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't agree with stealing it. See w:Copyright. —Ruakh 20:08, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

OK, I would like to provide information from external sources that's relevant. How can I properly add it - paraphrase, use quotes? I did provide the source. Djkcel (talk) 20:27, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

Providing the source is not enough: it addresses the plagiarism, but not the copyright violation. As for how to avoid copyright violation — I don't know. Copyright does not cover facts/opinions/ideas, only the expression of them, so I think it should be O.K. to take information from a source, as long as you express it in your own words? —Ruakh 20:42, 1 October 2012 (UTC)

this is a dictionary

You do realize that that's a particularly ridiculous example of SOP, right. And also that it's not going to get me to change my opinion on SOP, right? Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 21:22, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Wait a minute Purplebackpack89, since you don't believe that SOP should be a reason for deletion, why would it matter to you how ridiculous an example it is? Unless I'm missing something, you're vocally in favor of entries like this is a dictionary. Mglovesfun (talk) 21:31, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

As Mglovesfun says — if you accept that [[this is a dictionary]], were it to exist, should be deleted, but you object to the very idea of using "SOP" as an argument for deletion, then you need to offer some other argument in its place. —Ruakh 21:52, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

Templates outside a language section

Hi, you seem to be the most knowledgeable/experienced with this, so could you have a look? Wiktionary talk:Word of the day#Move 'was WOTD' template into English section? —CodeCat 23:24, 2 October 2012 (UTC)

maggot

yo, I disagree with your rollback 94.197.65.192 17:48, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

. . . —Ruakh 17:50, 10 October 2012 (UTC)

one and a half

In my opinion the content was useful because of numerous languages with a separate term for the number 1.5 and the fact that the Wiktionary is a dictionary aimed on translating into foreign languages as well. I see no reason for it to be non-usable and worth only deletion. 37.30.166.74 18:59, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

It's true that we do include a few terms only for their translations; but in this case I would have removed the translations anyway (a single editor had added translations into twelve different languages, ranging from Tamil to Yiddish to Latin, which is good reason to think that the translations aren't accurate). If you want the entry to be recreated, feel free to list it at Wiktionary:Requests for deletion. —Ruakh 19:22, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

I have verified 90% of the translations and I can add more with confidence. I also think the entry was important and I was advocating its creation as a translation target at some stage and I am going to restore it. For deletion, feel free to add {{rfd}}. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:34, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

sannur#Icelandic

See Talk:sannur#Neuter about its inflection.

Advices

Thanks. I'll make use of them. --Fncd (talk) 23:54, 14 October 2012 (UTC)

Druidry

I'm confused about your deletion of Druidry and the others as "copyrighted". I did not paraphrase anything. I worded them in my own way. Pass a Method (talk) 10:56, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

They were clearly copies of Neodruidism?oldid=18483522 by 84.13.29.124 (talk). —Ruakh 12:03, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

That IP is actually me. My computer crashes sometimes hence making me log off unknowingly. You can tell its me by looking at the other two contributions (also by me), both areas i have recently worked in with my account. Should i re-create them? Pass a Method (talk) 14:38, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I'm sorry. This would have been obvious if I'd noticed that [[Neodruidism]] had been created less than a minute before your edits to it; somehow I'd thought that [[Neodruidism]] was an older entry than that, and that you were doing a re-organization. I'll undelete the entries I deleted. —Ruakh 15:46, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I will go ahead and re-create them. If you dont believe the above IP is me, then please prompt me to rewrite/reword instead. Thanks Pass a Method (talk) 15:43, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Karaimism

Would have been polite to discuss it with me first no? Anyway, let's start the discussion now. Would you be kind enough to retrieve the reference from the deleted version since you have the capability to see the deleted version s and I don't yet? Many thanks. WordsWorth (talk) 20:53, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

The reference was http://www.unesco.kz/qypchaq/Docs/KaraiMol/KaraiMol.pdf. —Ruakh 21:03, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

OK great, thanks. Please open Central Asia's UNESCO website URL provided above and have a look at prayer 122 on page 61 in the document. You will see the same prayer in two columns one on the left in Karayce tili, and the other on the right in Russian language. If you are unfamiliar with the Russian language you will be able to copy the whole Russian section

122. Отче наш, сущий на небесах

[Матфей 6: 9�13; Лука 11: 2�4]

Отче наш, сущий на небесах, да славит)

ся единое имя Твое, и да укрепится

царствие Твое и воля Твоя на небесах

вверху и на земле внизу.

Ежедневный хлеб дай нам и прости все

грехи наши.

Не дай нам совратиться с прямых пу)

тей Твоих, но спаси нас от искусителя.

Амен.

and insert it into a translate.google.com and select from Russian to English. If you are able to read and understand Russian then so much the better because the Google translation is pretty poor after the first few lines, although it does get the point across and allows one to get to the heart of what the Turkic Karaims (not Karaite Jews) believe illustrating neatly how different that religion is from the Jewish version of the religion. No Karaite Jews in the world can agree that prayer belongs in their religion. So basically it is very clear that there are two different religions with two different names (naturally sometimes confused by even very well educated people who don't check their assumptions, but then that makes due diligence in our our duty of care towards ensuring correct related dictionary entries matter all the more important right?) I look forward to your feedback. WordsWorth (talk) 23:54, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I am not making any claims about whether there exists a Turkic group whose endonym resembles 'Karaim' but whose religion differs from that of Karaite Jews; you say there is, and sure, whatever, I'll accept that statement for the moment. The only claims I'm making are (1) that the claimed English term Karaimism is somewhere between "extremely rare" and "nonexistent", and (2) its few stray uses are all clearly either (a) referring to the religion of Karaite Jews, not that of this Turkic group, or (b) not distinguishing between these two religions. Since your reference neither uses nor mentions the claimed English term Karaimism, it has no bearing on my claims, and no bearing on whether we should have an entry for the claimed English term Karaimism. —Ruakh 00:46, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Many thanks for your response. It is very curious that there should exist two very similar sounding words for the religion/culture of one group rather than referring to the practices of two different but very similarly named groups. I do take on board your comment about the sources though and I would like to follow this line of investigation please. If you could have a little time to find time to find a reliable source where Karaimism without doubt refers to Karaite Judaism and not to the somewhat "Eastern Christian" Turkic ethnicity (who are so endangered that they now similarly "somewhere between extremely rare and non-existent" as you aptly put it) that would be great. WordsWorth (talk) 08:36, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

"Reliable source" is not really a relevant concept; the question is whether and how the term is used, not what "reliable sources" have to say about it.

google books:"Karaimism" turns up five borderline-usable cites:

• c. 1970, in East Europe, volumes 19–20,^[11] page 25:

  In any case, it must be emphasized that Mosaism or Karaimism was not the prevailing religion in the state of Khazaria.

• 2001, Ursula Owen, Genetics and Genomes,^[12] Index on Censorship (publisher), →ISBN, page 214:

  The most widely accepted theory on Karaimism claims that it started as a reform movement among Mesopotamian Jews in the eighth century during the reign of Caliph Abu-Jafar-Abdullah al-Mansur.

• 2001, in Anna-Mária Bíró and Petra Kovács (editors), Diversity in Action: Local Public Management of Multi-Ethnic Communities in Central and Eastern Europe,^[13] LGI Books, →ISBN, page 333:

  Karaims are one of ancient indigenous peoples of the Crimea. The Karaim language belongs to the Turkish language group. Their religion is Karaimism, based on the Old Testament.

• 2005, International Institute of Crimean Karaites, Karaites of Turkey:^[14]

  page 7: When the Karaimism (the mainstream that does not recognize the authority of the post-Biblical tradition incorporated in the Talmud and in the later rabbinical works) became the state faith of Khazarian Kaganate in 740 A.D., the community of […]

  Elijah (Eliyagu) Bashiyachi ben rabbi Menahem from Adrianople (died in 1490 in Constantinople, where he lived); one of the most outstanding scientists, writers and teachers of the XV century, last principal authority in Karaimism.

• 2006, Victor Tiriyaki, Complex of Karaite Kenassas in Eupatoria and Other Kenassas Around the World,^[15] Vadim Mireyev (publisher), page 3:

  There are also some Jews and Russians who profess Karaimism. The principles of Karaimism are derived from the books of the Torah (the Old Testament). The aim of Karaimism is to serve G-d, love everybody, and preserve the laws of the Torah. The Karaites are distinct from Rabbinical Jews, Muslims, and Christians and therefore do not use concepts from Talmud, Koran, […]

As you can see, all of them take "Karaimism" to be synonymous with "Karaite Judaism". (We could maybe justify an entry along the lines of "(extremely rare) Karaite Judaism; used only in reference to the Crimean Karaims"; but that's obviously not the result you want.)

—Ruakh 12:30, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

This is a lovely start Ruakh, and thank you for sparing the time to discuss this. But when you wrote:

• As you can see, all of them take "Karaimism" to be synonymous with "Karaite Judaism".

I must confess that I don't see that at all. I had asked for "reliable" (by which I meant not self-published websites where the author can change his/her definition whimsically day to day) which you did provide, but also where it "without doubt refers to Karaite Judaism" so from bitter experience might I suggest that we both take extra caution concerning what we assume. Imagine if you will a situation where an Israeli Karaite Jew having read on a wiki site that Karaimism and Karaism is the same and that Karaims of Eastern Europe are co-religionists with the Karaite Jews of Israel. Imagine if you will that this Israeli visits a "Kinesa" (from the Aramaic word for Church but related to the Hebrew word Knesset) in Lithuania or Crimea where the Karaims still pray and joins in prayers. Now this Jew is suddenly in the uncomfortable situation of finding himself praying the Our Father taught by Jesus in the Gospel of Matthew and Luke. He is basically surrounded by uncircumcised Unitarian Christians led by a Torah observant priest and finding it very difficult to escape. For missionaries interested in converting a Jew a situation like this is ideal of course, but for the Jews in question it is not necessarily something they would have walked into willingly if they had been reliably better informed. Some people in this situation might not be favourably disposed to the Wikimedia foundation at all following that. You probably have some post-graduate qualification under your belt like me and you will know therefore that any high-school student can quote a source without understanding it. We however know better that it is vitally important to be able to critically engage with a source to be able to make proper use of it. All I am suggesting is that we critically engage with what you have provided here. If we do so honestly we can see there is no evidence that these references to Karaimism concern Karaite Judaism. Mosaism (Torah observance like that of the Molokans and Subbotniks) yes but not any recognisable form of Judaism. How do we know? Because all the references you have provided concern the Turkic/"Khazar" group of Eastern Europe, whose prayer book which includes the "Our Father" you linked to at the beginning of this conversation.

• c. 1970, in East Europe, volumes 19–20,^[16] page 25:

  In any case, it must be emphasized that Mosaism or Karaimism was not the prevailing religion in the state of Khazaria.

Mosaism like that of the Molokans and Subbotniks is a word specifically used to describe Torah observance which is not any form of Judaism.

• 2001, Ursula Owen, Genetics and Genomes,^[17] Index on Censorship (publisher), →ISBN, page 214:

  The most widely accepted theory on Karaimism claims that it started as a reform movement among Mesopotamian Jews in the eighth century during the reign of Caliph Abu-Jafar-Abdullah al-Mansur.

The most widely accepted theory yes, but not the most accurate theory. While Karaite Jews believe their religion began with Anan ben David among the Messopotamian Jews, the followers of Karaimism believe he was converted to this religion by someone called Abu Hanifa (see Leon Mimoy's "Karaite Anthology")

• 2001, in Anna-Mária Bíró and Petra Kovács (editors), Diversity in Action: Local Public Management of Multi-Ethnic Communities in Central and Eastern Europe,^[18] LGI Books, →ISBN, page 333:

  Karaims are one of ancient indigenous peoples of the Crimea. The Karaim language belongs to the Turkish language group. Their religion is Karaimism, based on the Old Testament.

Yet again no reference to Karaite Judaism.

• 2005, International Institute of Crimean Karaites, Karaites of Turkey:^[19]

  page 7: When the Karaimism (the mainstream that does not recognize the authority of the post-Biblical tradition incorporated in the Talmud and in the later rabbinical works) became the state faith of Khazarian Kaganate in 740 A.D., the community of […]

Again in Khazaria, but no mention of Karaite Jews.

• Elijah (Eliyagu) Bashiyachi ben rabbi Menahem from Adrianople (died in 1490 in Constantinople, where he lived); one of the most outstanding scientists, writers and teachers of the XV century, last principal authority in Karaimism.

Indeed he was inspired by Karaimism and borrowed from it because it had innovative solutions to the problems encountered by Karaite Jews, but his approaches are not recognised as legitimate by modern Karaite Jews.

• 2006, Victor Tiriyaki, Complex of Karaite Kenassas in Eupatoria and Other Kenassas Around the World,^[20] Vadim Mireyev (publisher), page 3:

  There are also some Jews and Russians who profess Karaimism. The principles of Karaimism are derived from the books of the Torah (the Old Testament). The aim of Karaimism is to serve G-d, love everybody, and preserve the laws of the Torah. The Karaites are distinct from Rabbinical Jews, Muslims, and Christians and therefore do not use concepts from Talmud, Koran, […]

Indeed some Jews (for example Gershom Tzipris and his followers) or perhaps one should better say ethnic Jews because their Halakhic status is questionable, have indeed abandoned normative forms of Judaism (including Karaite Judaism) and adopted Karaimism with its Christian prayers instead. Victor is correct in saying this, but it is not many by any means literally just some. I hope you can how important it can be to make sure that there are no grey areas in addressing such words and their usages. Many famous academics who are not-experts in this field have misused shamefully these words simply upon their assumptions (although in their defence everyone has a blind spot). Wiktionary can help people navigate this complex terrain if we do things right. Looking forward to your enlightening response. WordsWorth (talk) 18:11, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

My "enlightening response" is simply that we are a dictionary, and we document terms as they are used, not as we think they should be used. If the people who use the term "Karaimism" fail to distinguish between two things that we think should be distinguished, then that's all there is to it. We don't get a say. —Ruakh 18:32, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

Great then let's do that! Also, when you really have found an educated example where Karaimism "withough doubt" refers to Karaite Judaism and not to the religion of the Turkic "Khazar" Karaims let me know. I am only suggesting due dilligence in our duty of care against making invalid assumptions. Until that time, the references you found provide good evidence that Karaimism refers to the religion of the Turkic "Khazar" Karaims of Eastern Europe and that is a good enough definition for the page is it not? Define the word as it is used not as you assume it is. Best wishes. WordsWorth (talk) 07:17, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

British and Irish Isles

Hi,

I re-created this entry with citations. I presumed this is OK given your comment on the talk page. However, I notice it has just been deleted (pretty much straight away). The sources I used were:

I've notified the deleting admin.

Regards, --Rannpháirtí anaithnid (talk) 21:31, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Actually, neither of those sources is relevant, because both are mentioning the term rather than using it; see w:Use–mention distinction. We are a secondary source, not a tertiary source; we base our entries directly on primary sources that actually use a term. (This is in contrast to Wikipedia, which is a tertiary source, basing its articles on secondary sources that discuss a concept.) —Ruakh 21:51, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Ah. I had assumed otherwise. Are these better:

--Rannpháirtí anaithnid (talk) 22:21, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, much. (Note that we actually require three uses, but I'm sure you'll have no difficulty finding a third.) —Ruakh 22:36, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

Cool. Here's a third ;-)

Should I hang on for User:SemperBlotto or is it safe to re-create the entry? --Rannpháirtí anaithnid (talk) 22:58, 17 October 2012 (UTC)

I think you can go ahead and re-create it; just be sure to include the quotations in there from the get-go. And be prepared for the possibility that it will be listed for deletion, since some of the objections were more along the lines of "this doesn't belong in a dictionary" than along the lines of "this doesn't exist". —Ruakh 00:48, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

@Rannpháirtí anaithnid: I went ahead and restored the entry, since that's easier than you having to retype the whole thing. - -sche (discuss) 01:43, 18 October 2012 (UTC)

RE: A bunch of copyvio

Just wanted to let you know that I was SnoopY (old account from high school, lost the logins) and was the anon who edited, reported, and followed up with you. Brownie Charles (talk) 17:22, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Joseon814

User_talk:Joseon814 has not provided the sources used for adding Goguryeo. In addition to the user page, I have asked that person twice by e-mail. Once I got a response that made no sense, and I have since sent two more e-mails. In the one I just sent, I said I would recommend deleting all of Joseon814's contributions if I don't hear back within three days. --BB12 (talk) 21:19, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

He (or she — assuming "he" henceforth for convenience of typing) e-mailed me five times to tell me his source, plus once to tell me that he didn't know how to reply to talk-page messages. I tried to explain how he could do so, but he just kept re-e-mailing me variations on the same message over and over, until I finally modified his block settings to stop him from sending e-mail. (Technically speaking, he should already have my e-mail address, since I had replied to two of his messages, but he seems to have ignored my replies, so it wasn't a problem.) Anyway, his source is some edition of Christopher I. Beckwith's Koguryo, the Language of Japan's Continental Relatives: An Introduction to the Historical-comparative Study of the Japanese-Koguryoic Languages with a Preliminary Description of Archaic Northeastern Middle Chinese. According to Buyeo languages#Japanese–Koguryoic hypothesis, "Beckwith reconstructs about 140 Goguryeo words, mostly from ancient place names" (emphasis mine), so apparently these are scholarly hypotheses rather than actual attested terms. (Actually, it's probably even worse than that: I can't imagine that Beckwith's book presents his Goguryeo reconstructions in Hanzi rather than Latin script, so unless I miss my guess, Joseon814 is extrapolating wildly.) Conclusion: yes, I think these should all be deleted. —Ruakh 21:54, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for that. Now I understand the cryptic "Koguryeo Language of Japan's Continental Relatives" s/he mentioned. Reconstructions can be put in an appendix, right? Could we suggest that to avoid bumming Joseon814 out? --BB12 (talk) 21:59, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

Re: "the cryptic 'Koguryeo Language of Japan's Continental Relatives' s/he mentioned": Yeah, it took me a while to figure it out: three of his e-mails gave the wrong title, and another one gave only part of the title.   Re: "Reconstructions can be put in an appendix, right?": I don't know. That's what we do for accepted reconstructions in languages like PIE; I'm not sure that we do it for individual scholars' one-off reconstructions. (You might want to discuss this with CodeCat; she's done a lot with reconstructed languages here, and might have better input.) Even if we allow that in this case, we'd need to do a good job citing the source work (to avoid plagiarism), and I really don't trust Joseon814 to do that. :-/   —Ruakh 22:28, 22 October 2012 (UTC)

As Joseon814 is not responding and does not seem likely to, I would like to propose that all Goguryeo data be stricken from Wiktionary, about 120 entries. Should I advertise this proposal on the BP? See Category:Goguryeo_language. — This unsigned comment was added by BenjaminBarrett12 (talk • contribs) at 20:51, 2 November 2012 (UTC).

Probably at BP, and at RFD post a link to the BP discussion? —Ruakh 21:16, 2 November 2012 (UTC)

Reply (rite of passage, bot)

Thank you for the explanation! I indeed saw nothing out of place in the bot's edit; should've asked at the Grease Pit first, sorry for the trouble. Cheers, --CopperKettle (talk) 14:37, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

No worries. :-)   —Ruakh 14:38, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Spanish feminine nouns

Hi. I'm not sure which entry you were referring to, and I apologize if I added gender to an adjective, I usually don't. But there are nouns with two gender forms in Spanish and only one in English, particularly those referring to people's occupations, such as geographer, and in those cases both genders should be provided in the translation, don't you agree? Cheers, --Edgefield (talk) 17:50, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Re: adjectives: I was referring to [[transitive]]. And there's no need to apologize; people do it a lot.

Re: nouns: I, like you, prefer to give both, but some people prefer to give only the male/masculine form (at least, in cases where the female/feminine form is regularly derived from it). I don't think we have a standard one way or the other.

—Ruakh 18:43, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

Fair enough, thanks! --Edgefield (talk) 21:59, 23 October 2012 (UTC)

ku-noun

Hi Ruakh

I added see here(tried to add) the parameters for plural forms in Kurdish but you can't see the green link for easy-creation of plural forms.Could you fix the templtae so that it will work.Thanks in advance and best regards.George^Animal. 17:50, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but that template is a mess; it looks like a lot of different things have been copied-and-pasted into it, and some of them have been commented out, but others haven't. As a result, it expects the plural to be parameter #2, except that it actually/also expects the plural to be pl= . . . Overall, the lack of a green link is really the least of its problems. You should fix everything else first, and then it won't be so hard to get the green link working. —Ruakh 18:16, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Also — that template is used on almost a thousand pages. You should perform your experiments in a sandbox, and only copy them to {{ku-noun}} once you have them working. —Ruakh 18:24, 24 October 2012 (UTC)

Dump question

Just curious, how long does it take you to get through a database dump with your Perl script (assuming you aren't doing any heavy processing of the results at the same time)? DTLHS (talk) 02:56, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

Typically between 3½ to 4 minutes. —Ruakh 03:20, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

To elaborate a bit . . . that's that's if I write bzip2 -d < enwiktionary-20121021-pages-articles.xml.bz2 | perl …, which is usually what I do. If I write bzip2 -d < enwiktionary-20121021-pages-articles.xml.bz2 > enwiktionary-20121021-pages-articles.xml and perl … < enwiktionary-20121021-pages-articles.xml as separate commands, then the latter is under thirty seconds. Clearly that is the approach I should be taking, since I do have enough hard-drive space for it.
How about you?
—Ruakh 13:01, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Several hours. This is in Python with the xml.sax parser on the unzipped dump. Obviously not optimal... After reading your comments below I'll probably abandon any official xml parser and just process the file line by line. DTLHS (talk) 22:02, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

對象

Hi, please give me a reason why you revert my Vietnamese meaning of this word? http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%B0%8D%E8%B1%A1 Vutrankien (talk)

I didn't: you never added the meaning. You just created a sort of stub section that claimed that this is a Vietnamese Han character. (Which isn't even true: it's a sequence of two Han characters. If it exists in Vietnamese, then it must be a noun or a verb or an adjective or something.) —Ruakh 12:41, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

So I understand that I should add information about whether it a noun or verb right? Because in Vietnamese that 2-character Han compound word it's a widely used term for meaning of 'object', and as I understood Han writing system had been used in Vietnamese until around 1930.

I've seen you revert some of my other addition too: 計算, 題材, 記憶, those are widely used term in Vietnamese also ( though they didn't use that writing system anymore )

— This unsigned comment was added by Vutrankien (talk • contribs) at 16:05, 30 October 2012 (UTC).

Take a look at 大洋#Vietnamese. I'm not sure if it's 100% perfect — I don't speak Vietnamese, so I really can't judge — but it looks like an excellent starting-point. You can use it as a model for your own entries. —Ruakh 17:04, 30 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, the entry 大洋#Vietnamese is correct. @Ruakh. Do you know many Arabic translations that have been stuffed by removing alt. I think, I saw you posting about it somewhere. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 13:28, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Are you referring to Wiktionary:Grease pit/2012/October#xte, and my comment that the {{t}}-ification script tries to change {{Arab|[[أجل|أجَل]]}} (’ájal) to {{t|ar|أجَل|tr=’ájal|sc=Arab}}? If so — I have no idea how many, if any, have been broken in this way. But we can probably find such cases after-the-fact, since if I'm not mistaken, the rules for recognizing a valid page-name (like أجل; as opposed to valid page-text, like أجَل) are straightforward (right?), so we could analyze the XML dump to look for cases of Arabic translations where the page-name is invalid in this way. —Ruakh 14:51, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Yes, that's the one. Among others, I have fixed the Arabic translation of flag from {{t-|ar|راية|رايَة|f|tr=rāya}} to {{t-|ar|راية|f|alt=رايَة|tr=rāya}}, which must be in the same boat. I'd appreciate if you could make some list from a dump (if it's not too hard). I must be missing some tools/skills to work with the XML dump. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 21:38, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Nope, [[flag]] is unrelated; but you can see a list of entries with that sort of problem at Wiktionary:Todo/Weird translations templates. —Ruakh 21:59, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Wow, that's a lot of problems. Thanks. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:12, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Template:l

I just changed to what it was before CodeCat removed Xyzy. Specifically, this revision. -- Liliana • 17:04, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Xyzy now handles the case that sc= is specified but blank. This change was needed, because of templates that called {{term}} using sc={{{sc|}}}. It is possible that there are no places where {{l}} has a specified-but-blank sc=, in which case your change probably didn't break anything; but I assume you didn't check?

I'm really willing to help with changes, if I have an opportunity to: i.e., if they're discussed beforehand. But you don't like to discuss changes, and you don't like to receive help, so my only recourse is the "rollback" button.

—Ruakh 17:54, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

The thing is, it was like this before, so strictly spoken, your edit would have needed consensus, because it's a change from the previous state. -- Liliana • 17:57, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I did discuss those changes at the time. (It's funny — you're so unused to discussion and consensus-gathering that you can't even imagine that anyone else actually engages in them.) —Ruakh 18:27, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Otherwise, I'll just go ahead and create {{l2}}. I've done this before to put pressure on people. (Remember {{poscatboiler2}}? That was my doing.) -- Liliana • 17:58, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I recommend you remove that comment (and this reply to it). Freely admitting that your reason for taking an action is that you know people will object to it? Is a pretty quick path to permablocking. —Ruakh 18:27, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm not acting in malicious intent, I just want to fix the performance issue. It is fact that {{l2}} is much faster than {{l}}, just as {{t-simple}} is much faster than {{t}}. It should be probably kept to high-profile pages but other than that, I don't see what's so bad about the template. -- Liliana • 18:42, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Relatedly, so I don't overreact to the WT:REE and Wiktionary:Requested entries (Scientific names) performance improvements, why is {{l}} a good idea when used with {{{1}}}=en compared to a plainlink? On pages with loading-time problems, it seems undesirable in routine use. Of course other languages benefit from it or from {{term}} depending on the circumstances and sometimes it is easier to type than "#English" in a plainlink. DCDuring TALK 18:12, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't think {{l|en|...}} is much (any?) improvement over [[...#English|...]]. —Ruakh 18:27, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

It does apply some helpful classes, though. Dunno if anyone uses them but... -- Liliana • 18:28, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

The problem is that it's not billed as doing so, and the result doesn't really work. It's currently used in places where those classes are already added, by the containing context; so if someone, say, wanted English-tagged text to appear somewhat bigger than the surrounding text, then sometimes the result would be that it appeared much bigger. —Ruakh 18:33, 27 October 2012 (UTC)

Dumps

Hi, I'm trying to get a bit of an idea how to use XML dumps (yes, finally!). But I wonder which of the dumps listed at [21] I should use? I imagine I want one that is as small as possible so that it loads faster. It really takes a very long time to go through the dump, so I'm wondering if I'm approaching it the wrong way. I am trying to generate a list of all transclusions of {{recons}}, but going through every page in the dump looking for that template seems a bit too slow. I could probably tell the bot to fetch the list of transclusions from Wiktionary itself, but then I would like to parse only the entries in the dump that are in that list of transclusions. How can I do that without having to parse the whole dump anyway? —CodeCat 14:27, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

[after e/c; note: this is a reply to your original comment]

Re: "I wonder which of the dumps listed at [22] I should use?": With the exception of enwiktionary-YYYYMMDD-pages-meta-history.xml.7z and enwiktionary-YYYYMMDD-pages-meta-history.xml.bz2 (which are the same except their compression-format: 7-Zip vs. bzip2), each file has different information; so, you should read the descriptions to figure out which one(s) you need. The one that I use most often — and the one I am invariably referring to when I say "the XML dump" without qualification — is enwiktionary-YYYYMMDD-pages-articles.xml.bz2 (just look for the one whose description is <big> and <b>). It includes the current wikitext of almost the entire project.

Re: "I imagine I want one that is as small as possible so that it loads faster": You probably don't want to "load" the entire dump into memory; rather, you normally want to examine one page at a time, writing out whatever information interests you. (In particular: although the file is technically an XML document, you do not want to pass it to some sort of XML parser that parses the whole file into a ginormous DOM object. Personally I don't bother with an XML parser at all — the file is in such a regular/consistent/straightforward format that you don't need full XML support — but you can use an XML parser, if you want, provided that either (1) it's a streaming parser, giving you a token at a time rather than parsing the whole document at once, or (2) you break the document into <page>…</page> sections, and hand one at a time to the XML parser as though it were a complete document.)

Re: "How long would it normally take to parse the whole file?": If I unzip it first, then — less than 30 seconds. If I unzip it on-the-fly, piping output from bzip2 -d into perl, then — between 3½ to 4 minutes.

Let me know if I can give you any help getting started.

—Ruakh 14:34, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

What is the approximate size of these dumps, zipped and unzipped? --WikiTiki89 14:55, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

The download page gives the zipped sizes. enwiktionary-20121021-pages-articles.xml.bz2 is 344.7 MB. For unzipped sizes, I think you can assume they're about ten times bigger (for the .bz2 and .gz files). —Ruakh 15:01, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Re: "I am trying to generate a list of all transclusions of {{recons}}": In Perl, I would probably write something like perl -nwe 'BEGIN { $/ = "</page>\n" } next unless m/{{\s*recons\s*\|/; die unless m{<title>([^<]+)</title>}; my $title = $1; die unless m{<text xml:space="preserve">([^<]+)</text>} or m{<text xml:space="preserve" />()}; $_ = $1; print "$title\t$1\n" while m/({{\s*recons\s*\|.*)/g' < enwiktionary-20121021-pages-articles.xml > uses-of-recons.txt so I had a small working set, and then do whatever further analysis I wanted. —Ruakh 15:01, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

I'm using the XmlReader.py script that is part of the PyWikipediabot package that I use for all bot work. It uses a streaming parser, so it can parse entries in the dump as they are requested by the script - Python has a feature called "yield" for this, which allows a function to generate new elements of a list as they are iterated over. It returns them to me as whole pages with metadata already parsed, which is convenient. However, for it to iterate through every page in the dump takes several minutes. I believe that it uncompresses the file on the fly, so I could try uncompressing it myself first to see what happens. —CodeCat 15:16, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

I tried it and compared the times. Uncompressed, iterating through the dump without any processing whatsoever takes 273 seconds, and when the dump is compressed it takes 480 seconds. So there is a significant difference, but still nowhere near the 30 seconds that your script achieved, probably because it does a lot of extra parsing to include the metadata. Unfortunately I can't read Perl code, so can you explain what steps your code above does so that I can recreate it? (Note that I am not just looking for pages that transclude {{recons}}, I want to extract the parameters of each invocation too, so that I can build a list of which reconstructed terms are being linked to and from which pages) —CodeCat 15:39, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Re: "I am not just looking for pages that transclude {{recons}}, I want to extract the parameters of each invocation too": Yeah, the above Perl script prints out everything from {{recons| to the end of the line, so you can do whatever subsequent analysis you want.

Re: "Unfortunately I can't read Perl code, so can you explain what steps your code above does so that I can recreate it?": Oh, gosh, I can try . . .

• The options -nwe:

• -n wraps the entire program in a loop that reads one line at a time, saves that line in the default variable ($_), runs the specified program, and loops.
• -w enables warning-messages.
• -e '...' says that '...' itself is the text of the program. (N.B. this is in Bash, so I can wrap an argument in '. If I were using the regular Windows command-prompt, I'd have to use ", and then avoid " inside the program. Fortunately that's not hard in Perl. Dunno about Python.)

• The program itself:

• BEGIN { $/ = "</page>\n" } runs before the program begins, and says that the line-terminator ($/) is the string </page>\n. (So, instead of giving me one line at a time, Perl will now give me one page at a time.)
• next unless m/{{\s*recons\s*\|/; says to skip to the next loop-iteration unless $_ (the page-XML) contains {{ followed by optional whitespace followed by recons followed by optional whitespace followed by |. (This is just for performance reasons; the program would still behave the same way even without this line.)
• die unless m{<title>([^<]+)</title>}; says to error-out unless $_ (the page-XML) contains <title>...</title>. More importantly, it saves the ... (the title, except with & written as &amp;, etc.) in the variable $1.
• my $title = $1; copies the title (XML-ified) to the new variable $title for later use.
• die unless m{<text xml:space="preserve">([^<]+)</text>} or m{<text xml:space="preserve" />()}; says to error-out unless $_ (the page-XML) contains either <text xml:space="preserve">...</text> (non-empty page text) or <text xml:space="preserve" /> (empty page). More importantly, it saves the ... in the former case, or the empty string in the latter case, in the variable $1.
• $_ = $1; copies the page-text (XML-ified) to the default variable, $_. (Previously we'd had the full page-XML in $_, but we don't need that anymore.)
• print "$title\t$1\n" while m/({{\s*recons\s*\|.*)/g finds each line containing {{ followed by optional whitespace followed by recons followed by optional whitespace followed by |. For each line, it prints the page-title (XML-ified), a tab, and everything from the {{ to the end of the line (XML-ified). (Actually, this description is somewhat oversimplified — the "optional whitespace" I mentioned can include line-breaks — but that's the idea.)

• < enwiktionary-20121021-pages-articles.xml > uses-of-recons.txt are shell notations for taking standard-input from enwiktionary-20121021-pages-articles.xml and sending standard-output to uses-of-recons.txt.

Naturally, the above is written in a way that plays to Perl's strengths. If I were writing it in Python, I'd handle a lot of things differently, because Python doesn't have strengths.

By the way, note that this code misses some cases. If an entry contains {{recons}} with no arguments, this will miss it. If {{recons}} appears on a talk-page, this will miss it. If {{recons}} is called indirectly, e.g. via {{proto}}, this will miss it. If the call to {{recons}} contains line-breaks, this will catch it, but in an less-than-perfect way. This is par for the course in analyzing the XML dump: it's impossible to match all cases perfectly, and it's not worth the effort to try too hard to come close. We just have to make the best tradeoff we can — and encourage editing practices that promote the tractability of wikitext.

—Ruakh 17:47, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

excessive and defective spellings

Hi. I hope you're well. Your comment makes it sound as though you view excessive spelling (at least as it's used in the displayed text of {{he-excessive spelling of}}) as derogatory or implying a negative judgment, much as excessive is usually used (put excessive pressure, etc.). (Do you view defective spelling that way too?) I'd been understanding excessive spelling as not derogatory but a term of art, meaning simply "spelling with matres lectionis not found in some other spelling" with no judgment implied (and likewise but in reverse for defective spelling). Thus, in my view, anywhere {{alternative spelling of}} can be used, so can the other, if the difference in spelling is (and is only) the presence/absence of matres lectionis. We should sort this out, because, if we're going to be doing things your way, then I'll need to know for my future edits and I suspect there are already a good many entries that need fixing.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:48, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't view either term as derogatory, but I think of them as both being relative to some sort of contextually-determined implicit default spelling, such that "defective spelling of _____" implies that "_____" is the default. For example, when people talk about excessive spellings (or rather "plene spellings" — judging from the Google-hits, "excessive spellings" seems to be a me-ism that I accidentally introduced into our Hebrew template system) in the Dead Sea Scrolls, I take that to mean, relative to the [most common] spelling in the Masoretic Text. For our purposes, I take the implicit default to be the spellings that are currently common in text without nikúd. Perhaps I am wrong to take it that way. (Actually, I guess this is the same issue that most editors seem to have with "alternative spelling" — they take it to imply "less common" or "less good" — but I've managed to internalize the idea that {{alternative spelling of}} just means "we've put the main definition elsewhere", whereas apparently I haven't managed to internalize the analogous ideas for "excessive" and "defective" spellings.) —Ruakh 20:04, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Re "excessive" vs. "plene": that's the beauty of templates: we can just fix the template. Re "I take the implicit default to be the spellings that are currently common in text without nikúd": ah, so this is our old difference of opinion over what we should consider primary. Even if you do take that to be primary, though, I don't think {{he-excessive spelling of}} is any more indicative of "the other one's better" than {{alternative spelling of}} is (which seems to be what you're on the berge of agreeing to in your final, parenthetical remark). Nor less.​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:38, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Plene? We have that as a vocative (of an adjective which actually makes sense with this meaning), which wounds like an odd choice. Perhaps we're missing a sense of plene. Or did you mean perhaps one of the nominative singular forms?​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:42, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Re: main point: O.K., yeah, I'm pretty sure that I can bring myself to accept that use of these templates. Re: "plene": I don't know Latin; I took that term from the English Wikipedia, because it sounded familiar, and fared well on Google and on Google Books. I'm pretty sure we are missing some sense at [[plene#Latin]], because [[plenus#Latin]] lists plēnē as a related term (whereas the form that you mention is plēne, and not liable to be listed in the related-terms section); but I can't say whether said missing sense is the relevant one. —Ruakh 23:44, 31 October 2012 (UTC)

Re Latin: plēnē means "fully", but this is probably just an anglicisation of plēnus/plēna/plēnum itself, following the standard pattern. Re Hebrew: I don't have much of an opinion, but I tend to agree with Ruakh about the "implicit default". —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:45, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

FWIW, Dictionary.com has "plene" as an English word meaning "full, complete", but marks it obsolete. - -sche (discuss) 04:04, 1 November 2012 (UTC)

November 2012

דובים

Do you know why w:he:דוביים uses this strange spelling with two yuds? Or is it supposed to be "דֻּבִּיִּים" meaning "bear-like things". --WikiTiki89 09:16, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

he.WP names these articles by a sort of Hebrew scientific name for the taxon, in this case דוביים (dubiyím, “Ursidae”). (It really threw me for a loop, too, the first time I encountered it.) Notes:

• I don't know where exactly these Hebrew scientific names come from, but he.WP isn't making them up; my almost-forty-year-old, hard-copy, twenty-volume translation of Félix Rodríguez de la Fuente's schoolchild encyclopedia of wildlife also mentions them. (Well, actually, it only seems to use them down to level of the family, whereas he.WP uses them for even-lower-ranked taxa; but it could just be that the Hebrew terminology has made progress since then. Or it could have been an editorial decision, since a lot of he.WP's genus names are things like דוב and סוס that are identical with common names, and that may have been judged too confusing for schoolchildren.)
• But not everyone uses them. Even-Shoshan, when he feels the need to give a scientific name, always gives the regular/international/Latin-like/English-script one. (Though in part that could be because the Hebrew scientific name would generally be closely based on the Hebrew common name that he's defining, so, not very useful.)
• And "scientific" might not be the right word, anyway, because although they seem to be coextensive with corresponding scientific names — e.g., תוכאים meaning exactly the order Psittaciformes, no more, no less — he.WP articles nonetheless give the international name as the שם מדעי ("scientific name").
• Although he.WP's naming-conventions document has a section called ערכים על אורגניזמים ("articles on organisms"), it does not mention this practice, and what's more, it seems unaware of the existence of any Hebrew scientific names. I really don't know what to make of that.

—Ruakh 14:58, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

Interesting! You may want to take a look at this discussion... perhaps the Hebrew names should be added as translations of the taxonomic names? - -sche (discuss) 22:09, 4 November 2012 (UTC)

clarification

This was made back in the day when I was mostly just blindly copying stuff. I hope that you don’t think that I am stupid, as your summary could imply. --Æ&Œ (talk) 02:16, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry if my edit-summary offended you. I wrote it tongue-in-cheek. I wasn't sure exactly what led to that error, but I opted for the funniest explanation rather than the plausiblest. :-P   —Ruakh 02:34, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I have a nasty tendency for the over‐dramatic; a lot of jokes go over my head. Please excuse me whilst I go listen to emo music and bawl in my pillow for several hours crying about how you don’t love me and you think that I am stupid. --Æ&Œ (talk) 02:45, 10 November 2012 (UTC)

Template_talk:term#mention-tr-gloss-paren

Any comments on this, or not? -- Liliana • 17:13, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

Debug Javascript?

I'm trying to fix a script but it's not quite doing what it's supposed to. I would like to show a debug message of some sort, to see what the value of a variable is at a certain point in the script. How can I do this? Is there a way to show an alert message that only I can see, not anyone else? —CodeCat 19:17, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, I do that all the time. For example, in MediaWiki:Gadget-PatrollingEnhancements.js you'll find this:

if(mediaWiki.config.get('wgUserName') == 'Ruakh')
alert(shortMsg + '\n' + debugInfo);

—Ruakh 19:33, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Ok, thank you! —CodeCat 19:37, 15 November 2012 (UTC)

Template:PL:pedia

I think Mglovesfun's edit was meant to fix sauna#Serbo-Croatian. Your edit seems to have broken it again. —CodeCat 14:17, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm not opposed to some change to {{PL:pedia}} — I think it's essential that we handle cases like sauna#Serbo-Croatian, and it seems that some change is needed for that — but that specific change was wrong, for the reason I gave in my edit summary. —Ruakh 15:01, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I know, I'm just letting you know why that change was made, so that you can think of a better fix. —CodeCat 15:18, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Ah. Thank you. :-)   —Ruakh 16:07, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Thread:User talk:Yair rand/WT:ACCEL

Your expertise has been called on... any help is appreciated. Thanks —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:19, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

That stuff is just so complicated. I've been meaning to fix the Hebrew for a while now, and it's . . . daunting. I may take a look, but don't hold your breath. :-/   —Ruakh 20:07, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Problem mostly solved, but I'm still relying on Yair to add the spans to the rest (yes, I am still inept). Maybe I'll give it a try, it's not that widely transcluded... —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:57, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Hebrew direct object suffixes

Do you know where I can find a list of the old Hebrew direct object suffixes? I only know the first person ־נִי (-ni, “me”) and ־נוּ (-nu, “us”). --WikiTiki89 14:40, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

I think they're essentially the same as the other pronominal suffixes. Unfortunately, it's basically impossible to search for examples, but here are a few that come to mind:

• 2ms — גְאַלְתִּיךָ — Isaiah 44:22
• 3ms — וַיְקַדְּשֵׁהוּ — Exodus 20:11
• 3fs — שִׁלְּחָהּ — Deuteronomy 24:4
• 3mp — וְשִׁנַּנְתָּם — Deuteronomy 6:7

but really you can hardly read a chapter of Tanakh without finding some examples. (I came across plenty more while looking up the above, though unfortunately they were all additional examples of 2ms/3ms/3mp.)

By the way, I imagine the reason we get a nún in forms like asáni, bar'khúni, etc., is that it immediately follows a vowel. When the pronominal suffixes attach to nouns or prepositions, they tend to merge with or destroy any preceding vowel, and some of them lose their own consonant; but when they attach to verbs, they tend to leave the final vowel intact, and therefore keep their own consonant. For a better-attested example . . . when it attaches to a noun or preposition, the third-person masculine singular pronominal suffix is usually -ó, as in sif'ró, or -(á)v, as in mitsvotáv or pív, and when it attaches to a verb it's usually -hu; so you might think it's two different endings. But then you get forms like קָצֵהוּ (katséhu, “the edge of it/him”), demonstrating that it's not clear-cut as all that.

(Really, I think the best way to view them is as inflectional endings. In English, are -s and -es and -Ø and -en the same suffix?)

—Ruakh 20:05, 20 November 2012 (UTC)

Re: -ni: I eventually thought of כמוני \ כָּמֹנִי (kamóni) and מִמֶּנִּי (miméni). —Ruakh 23:27, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Actually, to answer you a bit more directly — see pages 1596–9 of the four-volume Even-Shoshan. He gives full conjugation tables, including pronominal suffixes, for one regular verb from each transitive binyán (specifically: פָּקַד (pakád), לִמֵּד (liméd), and הִפְקִיד (hifkíd)), and partial conjugation tables, with a few sample pronoun-including forms, for seven irregular verbs from each transitive binyán. (I seem to recall your mentioning that you had access to Even-Shoshan at a library or bookstore or something? If not, or if you prefer, I can try to scan those four pages and e-mail them to you, albeit not until next week. Next Monday or so, send me an e-mail if you want me to do that, and I can reply with an attempt at scans.) —Ruakh 02:48, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

I would really like to see that. At the bookstore I was in, they only had a single-volume Even-Shoshan. But I'm sure somewhere in Tel Aviv there is a library that has it. Would you happen to know any such library? --WikiTiki89 08:22, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

No idea, sorry. (I mean, I live in the U.S.; I don't really know anything about libraries in Tel Aviv. I would assume that one of Tel Aviv University's libraries would have it, but I don't know which one, and I suspect that those libraries are less open to non-students than their American counterparts would be.) According to WorldCat, the closest library to Tel Aviv that has the four-volume edition is the National Library of Israel, in Jerusalem; but I'm sure it's just that WorldCat is incomplete. —Ruakh 00:51, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

It turns out the single-volume version also has these pages (and I actually ended up buying one). Thanks! --WikiTiki89 20:32, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

תִּתְחַדֵּשׁ! —Ruakh 20:45, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Recent reversions

Hi, you recently reinstated a punctuation error in ablate, and removed information from .de, and in each case gave no reason. I've just reverted. If you still think there's a reason for the changes you made, please tell me what it is. — Smjg (talk) 00:08, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Your edit to [[.de]] was simply wrong. I'm not sure what more explanation I can give; it was wrong, I reverted it. The edit to [[ablate]], I admit, I was too quick to revert; the edit-summary of "tpyo" made it seem like a fatuous edit — and really, "punctuation error"?! — but the edit itself was O.K. —Ruakh 01:28, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

If you can't explain why an edit was wrong, it implies that you're just gratuitously reverting edits for the sake of it. Either know why you're making a given edit or don't make the edit. And so you know for the future, "tpyo" is a deliberate tpyo for "typo", and is a fairly common summary used to indicate that the editor is rectifying one. — Smjg (talk) 08:02, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Re: first two sentences: I guess you now understand why your edit was wrong, so I'll ignore this.

Re: third sentence: I've gathered as much, but your edit wasn't rectifying a "typo". It was adding a period where one was optional.

—Ruakh 13:47, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

No it wasn't. I removed an extra fullstop where there was already one as part of the template. — Smjg (talk) 19:29, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

Gah, sorry, mea culpa. You're right; and that makes more sense. (So, yes, you're right, "punctuation error".) —Ruakh 19:59, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

@Smjg: your edit removed the ". +" formatting from [[.de]], but was otherwise alright, AFAICT. .de does derive from the German nation's autonym. It seems to be Wiktionary's current practice not to indicate such things, but I don't see why (it's etymological information, after all). - -sche (discuss) 03:49, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

OK, so I was confused by the ". +". It looks like a typo until you realise that it's splitting the headword into two portions, the "." and the alphabetic portion, especially given that the "." isn't linked to anything. Maybe there's a better way to notate it.... — Smjg (talk) 08:02, 21 November 2012 (UTC)

I need to delete some redirects again

I remember you did this for me before. I am trying to delete all of Special:PrefixIndex/Proto-Germanic * and I tried to adapt to your script, but I don't really understand what it does and it won't work. It's at User:CodeCat/common.js and I listed some of the entries at User:CodeCat/sandbox. Can you have a look? —CodeCat 22:25, 22 November 2012 (UTC)

One problem is that jQuery('div.allpagesredirect > a').each(/*...*/) finds all <a> elements whose direct parents are <div class="allpagesredirect"> elements, but you haven't included any <div class="allpagesredirect"> elements on User:CodeCat/sandbox, so it doesn't find anything, so it doesn't do anything. (On Special:PrefixIndex, such a search would find all links that point to redirects, but that's a specific feature of that page, not a general feature of MediaWiki.)

Another problem is that if(! /[/]User:CodeCat[/]sandbox[/][^?]+$/.test(this.href)) return; skips any links whose URLs don't contain the string /User:CodeCat/sandbox/, which isn't what you want.

—Ruakh 00:23, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/2012-10/Enabling Tabbed Languages#Decision

You've been mentioned as someone able to help clarify matters.—msh210℠ on a public computer 03:19, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:01, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Actually, I think you should close the vote. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:03, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

Re: m:Bureacrat

By the way, I was and am totally uninterested in those petty battles; I was merely pointing out for your benefit that, procedurally speaking, you had still not addressed this problem (which is still there). --Nemo 21:40, 26 November 2012 (UTC)

December 2012

Vote

How do I get the "Quality of sources" vote closed? It is now well past its close date. SpinningSpark 20:57, 2 December 2012 (UTC)

I've given it a shot . . . we'll see if people agree with how I closed it. :-P   —Ruakh 02:36, 3 December 2012 (UTC)

Talk:דוסי

Are you able to help, please?​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:05, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Nope, sorry. I know I've heard it before, but I can't clearly remember how it was pronounced. And it almost goes without saying that it's not in Even-Shoshan. —Ruakh 13:21, 4 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks anyway.​—msh210℠ (talk) 01:23, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I know this sounds stupid, but want me to ask an Israeli? I mean, I know that WikiTiki and I come into contact with native Hebrew speakers on a daily basis, and I doubt we're the only ones around here, but if it can help... —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:55, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

That doesn't sound stupid at all. Over the years, I've reposed a fair number of Wiktionarian questions to my parents, to my older sisters, to friends who live in Israel, to the good folks at he.wikt, and so on. (Though unfortunately, I've sometimes made the mistake of asking multiple people. Turns out, people never agree on anything!)
In this case, however, it now occurs to me that it may not be necessary, because while most of the YouTube hits for דוסים depict Haredim themselves (rather than people talking about them), this one has a news-show-host-person repeatedly pronounce the title of the book מגדיר דוסים (roughly “classification of Dosim”) in his wonderful precise newscaster-like voice, where it is clearly /ˈdo.sim/, with no attempt to mimic an Ashkenazi kamáts. (I mean, there's some mimicry inherent in representing it as /o/ rather than /a/, but he stays in the normal Modern Israeli Hebrew vowel repertoire.) Though he uses the singular /dos/ rather than /ˈdo.si/; and his interviewee, who mostly seems to avoid using the word in speech, does seem to use /dos/ at about 3:51. But if you want to solicit opinions from other Israelis, to see if there's some variation or whatnot, be my guest!
—Ruakh 04:26, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

That's pretty good; I vote dósi now. By the Ashkenazi kamáts, you mean Yiddish [ɔ]? But I'll ask iff I remember. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:58, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Ashkenazi kamatz is unrounded I think: more like ʌ. (But I can't speak to what Ruakh meant.)—msh210℠ on a public computer 05:02, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for searching videos; and great idea.—msh210℠ on a public computer 05:02, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Everything in Yiddish converges on ʌ~‌ə in unstressed positions. I mean when it's stressed, like in this case. Or am I just ignorant of something established in Ashkenazi phonology? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:05, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

There's just a very wide variation in pronunciation because Yiddish was really a macrolanguage, so it's hard to generalize. The standard Yiddish /ɔ/ is [ʊ] in Poylish. And English borrowings seem to usually have it as /ʊ/ or /ʌ/. Russian borrowings seem to always have /u/. Basically it's unclear to me whether [ʌ] is English influence or was a genuine Yiddish pronunciation. --WikiTiki89 08:07, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Oh, okay, I guess I mean ɔ, then. (I know almost no Yiddish-specific phonology (or phonetics) beyond what I've gleaned from hearing it spoken.) (But I meant stressed, Metaknowledge.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 14:52, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't know Hebrew but can we put multiple translit variants, if there are disagreements about the readings depending on the speaker (perhaps up to 4, max)? In my opinion, if the word doesn't appear in dictionaries with niqud or romanisation and is pronounced in different ways, then Wiktionary can list all. The situation with Arabic is even worse and the fact that both Hebrew and Arabic don't normally write vocalisation creates variants. We can still make the users' life easier by suggesting the pronunciation. My two cents only, my concern that we have many Hebrew translation with no transliteration, even though the contributors may have a rough idea how to pronounce those words. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:09, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Many, many of our Hebrew words are pronounced in more than way depending on lect, but we have a standard way of transliterating. (Well, almost standard. Some things aren't pinned down yet.) The problem is that that standard transliteration depends on the pronunciation/vowelization of the term, which is clear for most older terms and even for most modern terms, but wasn't clear for this term. Variants pronunciations are included in the Pronunciation section if at all: we include only one transliteration. I think if there really were two ways to pronounce it, they would be considered different (invisible) vowelizations and thus we'd have separate definition lines for them.​—msh210℠ (talk) 02:14, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

I see. Perhaps if there are multiple pronunciations, then vowelization would be cumbersome to use on the header or having to split. Arabic entries seldom use vowelization. I actually meant missing transliterations altogether (usually on translations, haven't seen on entries) but there are many in Category:Hebrew terms lacking transliteration. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 05:46, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

No, no, I wasn't clear. The vowelization is the same: how those vowels (and consonants) are pronounced differs. Terms lacking transliteration is (sometimes neglect, of course, but otherwise) typically because our editors don't know what the vowelization is, not because there are two different vowelizations for the same word. (Sometimes there are, but that's relatively rare.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:02, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Talkback

Talkback. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:01, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

TB2. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:09, 5 December 2012 (UTC)

Another user having trouble seeing quotations today

See Talk:cromulent. DCDuring TALK 14:20, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Hebrew stress marks

Theoretically, if font support for this weren't virtually non-existent, would you have anything against adding stress marks (U+05BD: HEBREW POINT METEG) to our Hebrew entries? --WikiTiki89 22:16, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Only for mil'él, I assume? —Ruakh 23:02, 6 December 2012 (UTC)

Well, anything other than milrá'. I don't know if you would consider דוֹקְטוֹרִים (dóktorim) to be mil'él exactly. --WikiTiki89 00:30, 7 December 2012 (UTC)

Good point. Anyway — no, I'd have nothing against that. In fact, I'd consider it a helpful practice. (Incidentally, w:Modern Hebrew verb conjugation uses U+05AB HEBREW ACCENT OLE instead of a méteg. But I don't know why; despite what w:Ole (cantillation) says, I've only ever seen méteg used that way, except in that one Wikipedia article.) —Ruakh 01:05, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I assume you also mean except for full outright cantillation marks. Anyway the only fonts I've found that do a decent job are the ones in the "Guttman" series. They display the meteg in the right place even if the codepoints are backwards (which they will be because of the whole character equivalence thing that wikimedia does). The problem with them is that they are all either too fancy or too awkward-looking. Also, in most of them the meteg still slightly overlaps the segol. The best one I found is "Guttman Mantova", but no one is gonna have that installed. --WikiTiki89 15:18, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: first sentence: Sorry, I'm not sure what you mean. :-/   —Ruakh 16:54, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

In text with cantillation marks, the cantillation marks are located on the stressed syllable. So every cantillation mark is also a stress mark. I guess the meteg (and supposedly the ole) was borrowed from its use as a cantillation mark to be used as a stress mark in texts without cantillation. --WikiTiki89 17:08, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: "every cantillation mark is also a stress mark": O.K., I see what you mean. I more think of cantillated text as not needing stress marks because the ta'amím indicate stress anyway, rather than as having stress marks in the form of ta'amím, but I guess the two amount to roughly the same thing. (But if you look through a bit of real cantillated text with an eye toward this specifically, I think you'll soon see why I look at it the way I do; for example, Genesis 1:2 has תֹ֙הוּ֙, where the mark appears on the stressed syllable but is also "copied", so to speak, to the last syllable. This is reasonable for a tá'am, but would be bizarre for a stress mark.) —Ruakh 18:42, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Oh, I see what you mean. It's the same question as whether the iPhone is a photo camera. I've always wondered though what cantillation marks mean at the end of a word (i.e. not on a syllable). Another good example is Numbers 1:2 אֶת־רֹאשׁ֙, where there is no other cantillation mark, so which syllable does it apply to? the last one? --WikiTiki89 18:57, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Not every cantillation mark goes over/under the stressed syllable: some appear at the start or end of the word. As noted for תֹהוּ, the mark is sometimes duplicated over the stressed syllable — but sometimes it's not. (And many texts I've seen duplicate it for certain marks and not for others.) Just fyi.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:09, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

What do they indicate when not on a syllable? --WikiTiki89 19:35, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

They indicate the cantillation (the way the word is chanted). The cantillation mark in your example (which is the same one as in my example) always appears at the end of the word, because it serves to link the word to what follows (tóhu to vavóhu, ét-rósh to kól-adát b'néi-yisra'él); it's slightly like the Unicode undertie symbol ‿, or like a much weaker version of the makáf. —Ruakh 19:42, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I have seen ole used as a stress marker. Also U+0592 _segol_. But I've seen both far less often than _meteg_.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:09, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

סופגנייה

Can you check my translation of the citation at סופגנייה? Thanks in advance! --WikiTiki89 17:58, 9 December 2012 (UTC)

To me miznón doesn't mean "buffet"; when I hear miznón I picture something more like a concession stand or a miniature restaurant or something. The (an?) official English translation of that book uses "canteen", which I think is much closer to the mark. Also, I'd translate mét ál- as "crazy about", rather than as "to love […] to death". (But the official translation just has "love".) And I'm not sure I like the scare-quotes around "donuts". Is that an attempt to translate the effect of ka'éle? Because I think scare-quotes indicate irony in a way that the ka'éle does not; as I see it, the discourse purpose of ka'éle is to indicate that the speaker is not being very precise in his wording (in this case probably "American"), and invites his listener to make the appropriate leap. So in this case I think I'd translate ka'éle as something like "those" or "you know".
More generally . . . I usually like to use existing translations where available. If a book is a translation from English, I'll use the English source-text as a sort of back-translation. For the Bible, I usually use the King James Version, unless I really dislike it for some reason, in which I'll use Artscroll. In this case, you might want to use the official English translation as a starting-point at least (and list it as a reference). It's not a close translation, so you may well want to make changes to it, but at least it's a "safe" version to start with.
By the way, I was going to object to "k'éle" (as opposed to "ka'éle"), but Google does find some instances of כְּאֵלֶה (though albeit seemingly fewer than of כָּאֵלֶה). Do you know what the story is? Is there some difference? Is ka'éle a result of leveling from kazé?
Also by the way, unless I'm really missing something, you have the author's name wrong. You might want to double-check the other metadata just to be sure. And the whole sentence is part of a quoted utterance, so you might want to wrap it in “” with {{...}}.
—Ruakh 02:04, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Google doesn't feel like giving me access to the English version of the book (maybe you have to be in the US?). Does "snack bar" work for "מזנון"? I wanted to include the allusion to death in "מת על" (it's a book about a murder after all), but if you think that's wrong then "crazy about" will do. The quotes around "donuts" were an attempt to translate the foreignness of "דוֹנַטס" (does "כאלה" mean that those were the same donuts referred to by the first occurrence of "סופגנייה"?). --WikiTiki89 07:30, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: Access to English version: It didn't give me access to the Hebrew version from your link, but to get it to work, I just had to change co.il to com. So, if the same principle works in reverse, you can try <http://books.google.co.il/books?id=QlSO7togTcsC&pg=PA176&dq=%22Hanukkah+doughnut%22>.   ·   Re: "Snack bar": Sure, that works.   ·   Re: Death: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Mét ál is a very common expression meaning "crazy about". (But I don't think "love ___ to death" is wrong. If you get a kick out of the cleverness, then go for it.)   ·   Re: Foreignness of "דוֹנַטס": Oh, I see. Yeah, that's tricky. Maybe something like " […] those American dónats […] "? Or just, not worry about it. Dónats isn't that foreign.   ·   Re: "does 'כאלה' mean that those were the same donuts referred to by the first occurrence of 'סופגנייה'?": No, not at all. To clarify what I wrote above: when I described its discourse purpose, what I meant is that it's a discourse particle, and that is its purpose.   —Ruakh 13:38, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Google automatically converts ".com" to the domain of whatever country you're in anyway (which is why I always accidentally post ".co.il" links). There are ways around it, but I can't access the text of the English version from either domain. As for cigars, it's usually the context that determines whether they can be more than just a cigar. In this case, not having read the book, all I know about the context surrounding this quote is that the book is about a murder. Since I can't say for sure in this case whether it is an allusion to anything, I'd be happy with either one (and "crazy about" does sound more natural than "love to death"). As for donuts, is there anything wrong with putting it in quotes? In my mind, it has the effect I desired, but it's hard to judge something that you wrote yourself. If in other peoples minds the quotes don't make them think donuts are foreign then they are useless and I'll remove them. Re: "כאלה", Ok, just wanted to make sure. --WikiTiki89 14:40, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: English translation: In that case, here's that paragraph in the official translation:

“So,” Zadik said, addressing Michael, “I see you’ve become a permanent fixture in the News Department. You think that Israel Television is only the news? Come, let’s get out of here, nobody here has time for you now, they’re running full steam ahead. I’ll take you down to the canteen, that’s where everything important takes place anyway. Maybe they’ll even have a leftover Hanukkah doughnut for us. I love doughnuts. Not the American kind, but the Hanukkah kind, like my grandmother used to make.”

Re: cigars: Batya Gur is a serious writer; that's not to say that there's no humor in her books, but they won't randomly overuse death-related expressions.

Re: quotes: To me they come off like scare quotes: "American 'donuts'", as if to imply that they're not even real donuts, just what passes for donuts in America. But maybe that's just me.

—Ruakh 16:53, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the translation. Too bad book translations don't strive to be literal the way Bible translations do, but it still helps me see the point better.

Re: cigars: I never said anything about humor. It's more like subtle irony. If I understood it right, there is another reference to death in the same paragraph in the Hebrew: "עכשיו זה שעות מתות בשבילך".

Re quotes: Well doesn't that just serve to reinforce the point the speaker is trying to make? I'll get rid of them if you really want though since American is already enough.

--WikiTiki89 17:31, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: cigars: Too subtle for me, but O.K. :-)

Re: quotes: But the speaker specifically reserves dónats for the American kind, using sufganiyót for the Hanukkah kind. So the quotes, if interpreted as scare-quotes, would imply essentially the opposite terminological viewpoint from his own.

—Ruakh 18:45, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

I can see how they can be unnecessary, but I don't see how they can imply the opposite. But anyway, what do you think of the translation as it is now? --WikiTiki89 19:00, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: how they can imply the opposite: Can you imagine an American saying, "I don't even see how you can call British cops 'bobbies'. Real bobbies would have guns!" It just doesn't make sense; it's like accepting the British term as equivalent to the American, and then therefore rejecting it as inapplicable to its British referent.   ·   But anyway, yes, I think the translation is good.   —Ruakh 19:25, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

Quotes

I'm a very new/naive contributor to the Wiktionary. My contributions are mainly quotes and subedits. As a contributor of quotes, I stopped putting them in when they seemed to disappear from the display though they appeared in the source code. Very mysterious.

Today I decided to check and discovered that there is now a little button to bring up the quotes on demand. This seems like qa very good idea to me. but ...,

When I'm putting in a quote the preview doesn't show the quote and I have to save the edit before I can check the quote (by 'quote' I mean what the tag calls 'quotation'). My browser is Firefox, by the way.

When I put a quote in alongside examples (as I just did for 'imagination' then it needs to precede the examples otherwise it appears awkwardly placed below them.

If you use 'quote' instead of 'quotation' in the tag then you could enlarge it; at the moment it's uncomfortably small. Also the tag (button?) would be much more useful/informative if it were followed by the range of years of the quotes (or the single year).

The new system of quotes is particularly useful as it encourages quotes to be attached to the relative meanings. I would suggest that the separate Quotations section be abandoned and existing items in the sections be moved to the appropriate meanings.

Along the same lines the Citations sections could be abandoned/transferred.

Enough of quotes ...

I have taken to subediting when I notice that a meaning doesn't start with a capital letter and end with a full stop. I have done this because of my subeditting experience at a newspaper more than 60 years ago. Arethere Wikipedia standards for such matters ? If so, where do I find them ?

Will I be emailed a response to this post ? If not, where would I look for it ? (An email to [e-mail address redacted] would be greatly appreciated even if it oly answered this question.)

10:12, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

— This unsigned comment was added by Hlmswn (talk • contribs) at 10:12, 11 December 2012 (UTC).

I'm not sure that I can adequately address all of this, but:

• Re: the button to show quotations: That's actually always been there. If you weren't seeing it, it was probably due to a bug. (Are you using Firefox 3.0? If so, then that's why: until last week, we were using a function that wasn't added to Firefox until 3.5.)
• Re: remaining bugs (e.g., not seeing quotations on preview): Are you willing to help us track down and debug these issues?     By the way — whenever a page has collapsed quotations, the sidebar at left should have a "Visibility" section, with a link that says "Show quotations" (if you have quotations set to be hidden) or "Hide quotations" (if you have them set to be shown). Clicking that link will actually modify your preference for the future (though it only works within the same browser, and only for 30 days). This might help, indirectly, with your preview problem.
• Re: quotation alongside examples: I know what you mean, but even so, please put the quotation(s) below the example sentence(s).
• Re: size and appearance of the 'quotations' button: I don't think I have an opinion on this. But I'm fairly confident that the small size was due to a specific esthetic or usability decision, and not tied to the length of the word "quotations". (The goal being to make it clearly distinct from the definition.) But you might want to start a discussion at Wiktionary:Beer parlour.
• Re: getting rid of the separate ====Quotations==== section: Yes, absolutely. We've been working on that for a long time now. :-)
• Re: getting rid of Citations: pages: That's not gonna happen, unfortunately. A lot of editors really like those pages, and annoyingly, you'll sometimes even see people remove all the quotations from the entry!
• Re: capital letter and full stop: We don't have a standard on this. If you see an inconsistently-formatted entry, you can fix it, but if you see an entry that's consistently formatted in the way that you don't like, you just have to grin and bear it. :-/
• Re: Wikipedia standards: This is Wiktionary, not Wikipedia. :-)   We have Wiktionary:Entry layout explained.

—Ruakh 16:25, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Taking over from Tbot

Now that it seems like the whole {{t}} family drama is more resolved than not, I was wondering if you would consider taking over another of Tbot's functions that has lain dormant all these years, namely the creation of FL entries from translation sections. One of the problems was that Tbot created FL sections in tons of languages that nobody has ever gone through and which we don't have active editors in, like Swahili. Instead, I think this time around Rukhabot should only create entries if editors working in that language explicitly ask for it. For example, Anatoli has suggested that he's willing to check Russian entries, and I would certainly check Latin entries. Languages that wouldn't be requested (most likely) include languages like Oriya (i.e. those having no active editors) and Yiddish (i.e. those having a generally low quality of translations, which will need to be fixed first). Are you technically capable of this (I'm not making a judgment here, I honestly don't know what it will take), and are you willing to try this? Many thanks —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 03:02, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, please (if you can and would)! I'm sure a few people will be requesting the same for their favourite language(s). If you remember Tbot was checking for existence of the entry in the FL wiki, the gloss, part of speech, transliteration, gender were coming from the English Wiki, pronunciation (IPA and audio), images were borrowed. Doesn't have to be the same but that was the idea. A remaining unchanged Tbot entry example: абажур#Ukrainian. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:11, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

One problem is that many translations are currently singly-linked SOP, which would lead to many unnecessary SOP entries. --WikiTiki89 07:47, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Except that it wouldn't happen. (Did you read what Anatoli wrote above?) If it's truly SOP, the FL wikt won't have it. I suppose we could override the FL wikt restriction for a language like Tok Pisin, where I'd be willing to go through and delete the SOP ones (converting the {{t}}s to {{t-SOP}}s back at the original entry along the way). Otherwise, that wouldn't be a problem. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 07:52, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Oh. I guess I was just confused by the "FL" abbreviation. --WikiTiki89 08:06, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

As far as I know, the historical Tbot still created entries even when the FL wikt had no entry, though it noted whether the FL wikt had an entry or not. That doesn't mean Ruakh's bot shouldn't behave differently, but not all FL wikts are as complete as our trans tables(!). - -sche (discuss) 08:40, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't think it created an entry unless the FL wikt (not just any FL wikt but the one in the language in question) had the entry.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:00, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Shouldn't we also add that the FL wikt in the language in question should have an entry in that language? --WikiTiki89 18:59, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

That is easier said than done, for two reasons. Firstly, it would require the bot to actually examine the FL-wikt entry, which is not something bots usually do; and secondly, it would require the bot to understand the FL-wikt entry layout, even to the point of knowing how the FL-wikt identifies entries in its own language (e.g. ==English== for en.wikt, == {{langue|fr}} == for fr.wikt, ==.*== for he.wikt). It's definitely possible, and actually it wouldn't shock me if the original Tbot did it (since ISTR that it took images from the FL-wikt entry), but I think it's significantly more difficult than a bot that doesn't do those things. —Ruakh 22:40, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Well if the bot is enabled language by language based on request, it wouldn't be too hard to go and quickly figure out the structure on that language's wiki one language at a time. And it would save quite a bit of erroneous entries from being created (such as when a translation is in the wrong language, especially a very closely related language). --WikiTiki89 23:11, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I think it would suffice if the bot were to check for existence of AN entry in the appropriate FL wiki and leave the rest to the editors, monitoring the processes. Deleting bad entries (wrong script, wrong language or SoP) doesn't take long, they could also be moved (renamed) if a non-lemma or SoP entry were created. Moreover, even if there was no check at all but basic structured entries were dumped in some kind of appendix (not in the main space), even without any checks, directly from translations, then good one could gradually be moved into the main space after checking and proper fixes, additions. To clarify - translations with a basic check in the FL wiki - into the main space, no check - appendix or separate container. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:16, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

But it would also take work away from improving the entries that are correctly created. The Tbot entries are often very ambiguous and unclear even when they are correct. --WikiTiki89 23:31, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

Everyone works on what they like and wish to do. Entries need improvement and this will always happen but we are not talking about improvements here but mass creation of new entries in foreign languages. If you followed the discussion, it's only for languages where people are available for checking generated entries after an explicit request, removing ambiguities and making sure they are correct. No one will demand from you to stop working on improving English or Hebrew entries and check bot-generated entries in Russian, Hebrew or any other language, if you don't want to do it. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:46, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

You misunderstood me. I am only referring to entries that would be created by this bot (and the editors who volunteer to work on them). It would be a better use of time improving the entries that are correctly created by the bot, than deleting entries that are incorrectly created that could have not been created in the first place if the bot does this additional check. The entries that the bot creates correctly will still take a lot of improvement. --WikiTiki89 00:09, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, correctly created entries would be a priority but I wouldn't linger to make all entries perfect from the start (OK, I won't pursue creating of entries without checking other wikis.) The above entry абажур#Ukrainian is about good enough, even without the audio file. Transliteration and definition (i.e. (an unambiguous) translation into English) are the most important things in an FL entry. Declension/conjugation, etymology, example sentences, related terms, synonyms, etc. all can be added later (in this order, IMHO). They are bells and whistles, not the essential parts. (Ruakh, sorry for hijacking your discussion page, should we move to BP?). --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:17, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I wasn't referring to "Declension/conjugation, etymology, example sentences, related terms, synonyms, etc.", only to the definitions themselves. The ones I've seen from Tbot are usually very ambiguous and unclear (since they are only the English headword and the translation table heading). --WikiTiki89 01:29, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Is that really common? I don't know many examples of bad entries generated from good translations, even after a check with the other wiki. Could you give me a couple of example? --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:55, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

@-sche: Not quite. What happens is, the very earliest Tbot entries didn't check for FL-wikt entries, but Robert soon changed it to add that check. So you've probably seen some entries that mention their FL-wikt counterparts (because they were created after the change) and some that don't (because they were created before the change, and their counterparts likely don't even exist), but at no time did Tbot have an intermediate state like you describe. —Ruakh 16:54, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I'll join the clamor, but I disagree with "I think this time around Rukhabot should only create entries if editors working in that language explicitly ask for it": I think the big notice indicating the entry may be wrong (couple with, of course, the other safeguards, like the one I mention in my comment above of even timestamp) suffices.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:00, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

This is not so hard, but (for a few reasons) it's not something I'm likely to do in the near future. If someone else is interested in doing it, I'd be happy to help. —Ruakh 16:54, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

All right, no worries. Thanks. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 22:13, 12 December 2012 (UTC)

I wonder if maybe a bot isn't the best approach? Conrad.Irwin (talk • contribs)'s language-indices include not only terms that already have an en.wikt entry, but also terms that appear in en.wikt translation tables; and it includes links to the en.wikt entries containing those translation tables; so it's easy for a human to browse for translations-tables that have redlinks in a given language. So if we take that starting-point as a "given", I think all we'd need is some JavaScript that, when it sees a redlinked translation to a language you're interested in, converts that redlink into a "greenlink" that prefills the linked creation-page with information from the current page. This would both prevent any creation of bad entries (because you'd see them before creating them, and could simply fix any bad translations), and allow you to make any improvements you want even before you click "Save page". —Ruakh 01:00, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Now, there's an idea! I would support that. --WikiTiki89 01:04, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Well... except that most of the languages I'm interested in don't have indices, and those that do have them are updated rather infrequently. But otherwise I support. (Naturally, that also requires that somebody write the JS.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:10, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

@Metaknowledge. See my post below. Languages you're insterested in can be monitored if the indices are generated from English translation. You'd need to speak to User:Matthias_Buchmeier about your request. He kindly added a few languages on my request. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:27, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Conrad.Irwin's indices are heavily out of date and it doesn't seem he is going to refresh them soon. I like User:Matthias_Buchmeier's English-FL indices, which can work as offline dictionaries if downloaded. They are generated from translations only (not from entries) and one can also see red and blue links. Also, he made some but only few languages available in reverse order - FL-English. All these dictionaries are refreshed regularly. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:25, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Indices from translation tables are indeed easy to create for any language on request. The situation is very different for FL entries, which are a real pain, because each language uses its own formatting/templating and many languages are quite messy when it comes to headline- and form-of-templates. That means that those indices will either contain some degree of inflected forms or be missing some lemma entries. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 10:30, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

@Μετάknowledge: Re: first sentence: Hopefully Anatoli's response sufficiently addresses that . . . if not, then, I'm also quite willing to generate lists for this purpose for any language you might be interested in. That should be a pretty straightforward XML-dump–analysis task.   Re: parenthetical sentence: I don't think that should be a problem. I can undertake that, if at least one person is really serious about running it, and as long as y'all are willing to potentially wait a few months. (I am going to be crazy busy for the next two months or so.) But if someone else wants to beat me to it, that would be even better. :-)   —Ruakh 01:31, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm serious about Russian and Stephen agreed to help. Hopefully Vahagn, Wanjuscha, CopperCattle, Wikitiki89, One_half_3544 join the efforts for Russian. I'm sure there will be serious commitments for other languages as well. Generating entries without commitments from editors won't be harmful either, see msh210's message above. If entries had a better warning than Tbot's, something like WARNING, this entry was automatically generated from "BLAH", it needs attention of ..., blah-blah. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:55, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: "Generating entries without commitments from editors won't be harmful either": But remember, what I'm proposing is that I wouldn't generate entries; I'd merely write JavaScript that would (hopefully) make it easier for other people to generate entries. So I'd want a commitment that people would actually do so. (But not really a "commitment"; that's too strong a term: what if people try out the JavaScript and find that it doesn't really make things easier for them?) —Ruakh 02:32, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I see but perhaps this JavaScript won't be extremely helpful, since everyone can save a template for creating entries from about (language name) pages, similar to what Tooironic wrote about creating basic Mandarin entry? What Metaknowledge and I were suggesting is an automatic mass-creation of entries, similar to Category:Tbot_entries. Don't you like this idea? --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 02:42, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I think you missed a few comments. If you search this page for I wonder if maybe a bot isn't the best approach?, you'll see where I changed the subject a bit. :-P   It's not that I dislike the idea of a bot, but I personally don't like to write bots that will make bad edits. I prefer to write "conservative" bot-tasks where, say, >99% of edits are clearly neutral-to-positive; and it's clear that with Tbot-entries, that's not an attainable goal. And Tbot-entries automatically require editor intervention anyway, so it seems like that intervention might as well be "front-loaded", happening before the entry is even saved. Also — I'm not likely to run such a bot any time soon. I don't have a server or anything, so every bot I run, I run it on my laptop. That severely curbs my desire to run open-ended bot-tasks. With the JavaScript approach, I might be able to write the JavaScript within the next two weeks, and will almost certainly be able to do within the next three months; a bot, I probably wouldn't run for another year or two. Plus, with the JavaScript it would be on-wiki, and other editors could (at least theoretically) make improvements to it, whereas a bot is pretty much locked down. In the case of generating entries in a language I don't speak, I'd really prefer that. —Ruakh 03:01, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I missed some comments. This idea is not bad either, even though it's quite different from the original request. Any simplification in the creation of entries is welcome. I've got some technical questions. What tools do you need to download, what language is used to write bots, how do you view the database? I always approached Wiktionary from the linguistic point of view, never tried to program in it, maybe I could start. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:11, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: "what language is used to write bots?": Almost any language. Bots interact with the site over HTTP (see http://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php), so you can use any language that you feel comfortable with, as long as it has an HTTP library. Personally, I use Perl; but most other Wiktionarian bot-runners seem to use PyWikipediaBot, which is a framework for writing bots in Python.   Re: "how do you view the database?": You can't view it directly, but the Wikimedia Foundation regularly generates "dumps" of various aspects of the database — some as XML-files, some as SQL scripts — which you can download from http://dumps.wikimedia.org/backup-index.html.   —Ruakh 03:22, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

תודה רבה!. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 03:38, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Binyan of ניגש

How should I describe the binyan of ניגש \ נִגַּשׁ (nigásh) in the headword line? --WikiTiki89 08:27, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

I think I'd write {{head|he|verb|head=ניגש|ניגש \ נִגַּשׁ|tr=nigásh}}, manually categorize it as both pa'ál and nif'ál, and leave the details for usage notes; but if you prefer to try to use {{he-verb}}, I'd say nif'ál (plus usage notes). —Ruakh 17:33, 15 December 2012 (UTC)

Is the current usage note true — that נִגַּשׁ "uses the pa'al construction for the infinitive, imperative, and future tenses, but the nif'al construction for the past and present"? Or is it, rather, the case that נִגַּשׁ uses the nif'al for past and present and has no other (extant) forms, and לָגֶשֶׁת uses the pa'al for the infinitive, imperative, and future, and has no other (extant) forms? The latter seems more reasonable to my (linguistically untrained) mind.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:49, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

I would say those are two equally correct ways of analyzing it, but your way would require two separate definitions and two separate conjugation tables. --WikiTiki89 07:49, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

As Wikitiki89 says, they both seem like valid analyses. My (also linguistically untrained) mind is not sure how to set about distinguishing them experimentally. But if the past tense of go is went and the finite forms of be are am, is, are, was, and were, then I, at least, am fine with saying that the infinitive of nigásh is lagéshet. (FWIW, my copy of Tarmon and Uval treats it as a single irregular verb, albeit of binyan pa'ál.) —Ruakh 11:13, 16 December 2012 (UTC)

(A reply to both of you.) Seems reasonable. Thank you.​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:21, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

WT:RFD#side wall

Something you'd commented on.​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:21, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. —Ruakh 19:01, 20 December 2012 (UTC)

Is this possible?

I rashly advocated something at BP that I don't know is possible.

Would it be possible using CSS or CSS + JS to suppress the display of a definition line that contained a context tag such as {{obsolete}}?

Would it be possible to allow users (without registration) to switch the display using options such as be use for the option display of expanded translations, quotations, and items enclosed in {{rel-top}} and its relatives?

I suppose that if these are possible, it should be relatively easy to allow registered users to specify what they want displayed or suppressed by default. DCDuring TALK 02:20, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Anything is possible, if we're willing to accept the tradeoffs. In this case, tradeoffs include:

• The definitions displayed when you view the page will not match the definitions displayed when you edit the page.
• {{obsolete}} will become overloaded, having both its current meaning and also the meaning "hidden by default", and this will naturally affect editors' decisions about when to use it and when not to use it. (You can expect frequent subconscious thought processes, and occasional conscious ones, along the lines of "This sense is important, it should be shown, I'm sure someone somewhere would understand it, let's just mark it {{archaic}}" and "This sense is really pretty rare nowadays, there's no reason to show it, let's mark it {{obsolete}}.")
• Orphaned translations-tables and so on, that correspond to a hidden definition. (This is not likely to be a huge problem — if a sense is genuinely obsolete, then it shouldn't have translations — but when it does happen, it'll sure confuse people!)

—Ruakh 17:00, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. Sorry for the tardy response to your thoughts.

I agree that there are issues. I advanced the idea because of the overhasty, incomplete discussion of reordering senses. I question the wisdom of straw polls because they lead to a hardening of vaguely felt preferences into positions.

The non-matching problem could be partly addressed if a control for the display of obsolete senses appeared on the entry display in addition to what was on the left-hand side (where Yair (?) has the display controls for rel and trans tables.

A "bias" in the use of the tag follows from any function that it has. We could attempt to sharpen our definitions of obsolete and archaic by putting time frames and absolute or relative frequency parameters on it, presumably specific to each language, but certainly specific to English.

There are possible solutions to the translation-table problem, including inserting "obsolete" into the trans-table headers for the senses marked obsolete. I have long noted the enthusiasm of translators in providing translations for rare, archaic, and obsolete terms whose principal attribute seems to be etymological relationship to a term in the FLs. We do need more trans-sees for obsolete, archaic and rare senses.

We'll see what happens with the BP discussion. DCDuring TALK 16:41, 28 December 2012 (UTC)

A couple of deletion requests

There are a couple of redirects in WT:SD (שתים, אוץ) that I've refrained from deleting or untagging because I'm not sure how we handle variations like this. I certainly wouldn't advocate making lemmas out of them, but they seem to be within the realm of what people might run into in texts or other references. Do we do alt-spelling entries for variants that only differ in whether the yods and waws are written defectively or not? Chuck Entz (talk) 02:17, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Well as redirects, they are useless and it won't hurt to delete them and that's why I tagged them. Ideally I guess they should be form-of entries. --WikiTiki89 02:24, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Re: שתים: That's an alternative spelling; in a case like this, you can use {{he-Defective spelling of|שתיים|.=.}}, or just the normal alternative-spelling template, as you prefer. (I've just  done the former.)
Re: אוץ: That is not an alternative spelling, but rather, an artifact of a lexicographical convention that we do not use here. However, it's also the masculine singular imperative form, as well as the "gerund" or "bare infinitive" or "infinitive construct" form (which doesn't really exist as its own form, but we pretend it does); so, we can use {{he-Infinitive of|bare|אץ|wv=אָץ|tr=áts|.=.}} and {{he-Imperative of|אץ|wv=אָץ|tr=áts|g=m|n=s|.=.}} (as I've just  done).
—Ruakh 03:07, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

פרעה

I've just neatened this, but would appreciate your taking a look at three things: 1, it was listed as a ===Noun=== and so categorized, but I'm not sure it shouldn't be a proper noun. 2, I've added a usage note that might need improving. And, 3, I've set cons=-, but I'm not sure that's correct. Thanks much.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:21, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

I agree that, in Biblical usage, it's a proper noun with no construct form. (This is particularly clear, IMHO, in Exodus chapter 1, which covers the transition from the Pharaoh of Joseph to the Pharaoh of the Exodus: the chapter switches back and forth between mélekh and par'ó, using the former when it needs a common noun or a construct form and the latter when it does not.) The usage note seems fine, except that it seems like another way of saying "this is a proper noun", so is redundant to just changing the POS. :-P

Modern Hebrew usage is a bit trickier. Using the Hebrew Wikipedia as a guide . . . some articles, such as w:he:פרעה, consistently use the term in the same sort of way as the Bible. (And w:he:פרעה is very mention-heavy, preferring to talk about the term par'ó rather than about Pharaohs, which makes sense if you view it as a proper noun; imagine having an article w:Carl about people named Carl.) But there are other articles that frequently or even consistently use par'ó as a common noun; hence phrases like these:

[…] היה פרעה מצרים השישי לשושלת ה-21. — […] hayá par'ó-mitsráyim hashishí l'shoshélet ha-21. — […] was the sixth pharaoh of Egypt of the 21st dynasty. [from w:he:סיאמון]

תחת הפרעה הראשון — tákhat hapar'ó harishón — under the first pharaoh [from w:he:מצרים העתיקה]

שלטונם של הפרעונים הסתיים רשמית ב31 לפנה"ס — shiltonám shél hapar'oním histayém rishmít b'31 Lifn.Has. — The rule of the pharaohs officially ended in 31 B.C.E. ibid.

(The latter article is interesting in that it uses it consistently as a common noun, or at least in ways construable as common-noun uses, except in one place: the phrase ארמון פרעה (armón-par'ó, “palace of Pharaoh”). I wonder if this is related to the fact that — according to w:he:פרעה — par'ó actually originally referred to the house of Pharaoh, rather than the Pharaoh himself.) The Hebrew Wikipedia also uses par'ó sometimes before a name, as in פרעה מרנפתח (“Pharaoh Merneptah”).

—Ruakh 17:22, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks a lot; and Wikitiki has edited the entry (and [[Pharaoh]]) in accordance with the above (and thanks to him, too).​—msh210℠ (talk) 23:13, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Does the common noun have a plural? --WikiTiki89 23:18, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes: פרעונים (par'oním). (I'm not sure if that's the only plural, but it's the only plural I'm familiar with, and it's the only plural I noticed while looking through the aforementioned Hebrew Wikipedia articles, so I feel reasonably safe in saying that it's at least the primary plural.) —Ruakh 23:24, 24 December 2012 (UTC)

Tbot-like JavaScript

Hi,

Thank you for your efforts. Sorry, I was away with family and friends today. My browser is Firefox 17.0.1 on Windows 7 and Windows NT. I have added the import line onto User:Atitarev/monobook.js and hard refreshed the page. I don't see any difference though. What should I do next? --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 10:51, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Just look for translations-tables with properly-formatted Russian redlinks, such as (as of this writing) the "something particularly good or pleasing" table at [[beauty]] or the "word used to indicate disagreement or dissent in reply to a negative statement" table at [[yes]]. —Ruakh 13:16, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

I did check for red-linked translations but I didn't see any change. Red-links open as blank create pages as before. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 20:12, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Hmm. I guess we'll have to debug . . . could you change your monobook.js from using User:Ruakh/Tbot.js to using User:Ruakh/Test.js, and visit [[User:Ruakh/Test]], and tell me what you see in the box labeled "Output from the Tbot script"? —Ruakh 00:06, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Done and after the hard refresh I only see "Output from the Tbot script:" in a box with nothing after it. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 00:12, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

I have just tested with MS IE 7.0 (after logging on and a hard refresh) with the same result. Any further tests I will do after a hard refresh. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 01:00, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Strange; that makes it seem like the JavaScript isn't even being run. Can you e-mail me the text you see at http://en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php?format=jsonfm&action=query&meta=userinfo&uiprop=options? —Ruakh 01:10, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

It looks much better now, thanks! Are you open for other languages in the near future, e.g. cmn and ja? I don't think the template can be made perfect but a few differences to Russian. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 05:24, 27 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, I'm definitely open to adding special support other languages, improving the special support for Russian, etc. —Ruakh 14:11, 27 December 2012 (UTC)