Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2011/March

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Looking for some help at Simple

Over at the Simple English Wiktionary, we'd like to use the technique used here for citations (e.g., Template:quote-book) for synonyms and antonyms. Unfortunately, we are a small group and nobody there seems to have the expertise to implement this. Would somebody mind popping over and helping?--Brett 14:17, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm not sure what you're referring to. Do you mean the way that when you nest an unordered list under a definition,
  1. like
    • this,
it get collapsed into a sort of show/hide thing?
—RuakhTALK 16:52, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That's it.--Brett 18:17, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We use this javascript to hide quotes, but it is tailored for our formatting. If you use different formatting conventions it may not do what you expect.
Hidden Quotes

 
function setupHiddenQuotes(li)
{
   var HQToggle, liComp;
   var HQShow = 'quotations ▼';
   var HQHide = 'quotations ▲';
   for (var k = 0; k < li.childNodes.length; k++) {
      // Look at each component of the definition.
      liComp = li.childNodes[k];
      // If we find a ul or dl, we have quotes or example sentences, and thus need a button.
      if (/^(ul|UL)$/.test(liComp.nodeName)) {
         HQToggle = newNode('a', {href: 'javascript:(function(){})()'}, '');
         li.insertBefore(newNode('span', {'class': 'HQToggle', 'style': 'font-size:0.65em'}, ' [', HQToggle, ']'), liComp);
         HQToggle.onclick = VisibilityToggles.register('quotations',          
            function show() {
               HQToggle.innerHTML = HQHide;
               for (var child = li.firstChild; child != null; child = child.nextSibling) {
                  if (/^(ul|UL)$/.test(child.nodeName)) {
                     child.style.display = 'block';
                     }
                  }
               },
            function hide() {
               HQToggle.innerHTML = HQShow;
               for (var child = li.firstChild; child != null; child = child.nextSibling) {
                  if (/^(ul|UL)$/.test(child.nodeName)) {
                     child.style.display = 'none';
                     }
                  }
               });
 
         break;
         }
      }
   }            
 
addOnloadHook( function () 
{
   if (wgNamespaceNumber == 0) {
      var ols, lis, li;
      // First, find all the ordered lists, i.e. all the series of definitions.
      var ols = document.getElementsByTagName('ol');
      for(var i = 0; i < ols.length; i++) {
         // Then, for every set, find all the individual definitions.
         for (var j = 0; j < ols[i].childNodes.length; j++) {
            li = ols[i].childNodes[j];
            if (li.nodeName.toUpperCase() == 'LI') {
               setupHiddenQuotes(li);
               }
            }
         }
      }
   });

I think Atelaes wrote it initially, but maybe someone can help you port it. Not me since I am .js inept. - [The]DaveRoss 20:07, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've created a version that does what I think Brett wants; interested parties, see [[simple:User talk:Brett#Hiding 'onyms.]]. —RuakhTALK 23:13, 1 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Just in case no-one else has thanked you: Thank you. The javascript in your common.js is well documented and looks great. Conrad.Irwin
Ruakh's script is working well at simple.wiktionary. Thanks very much for everyone's attention and especially to Ruakh!--Brett 12:07, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Tabbed Languages, Definition side boxes, and Sense IDs

I propose that User:Yair rand/TabbedLanguages.js and User:Yair rand/editor.js be enabled by default, and that the template {{senseid}} be used in entries. I'm proposing these at the same time because large parts of them are dependent on each other (TabbedLanguages "new language" button doesn't work without Editor.js, Editor.js's Add Synonyms/Antonyms buttons don't work without senseids, Editor.js's add/edit gloss buttons are useless without senseids, senseids are hard to add or modify without Editor.js, and a lot of Editor.js's features require TabbedLanguages).

  • User:Yair rand/TabbedLanguages.js (based on User:Atelaes/TabbedLanguages.js) changes language sections into "tabs", rather than stacking the sections on top of each other. The languages are listed at the top of the page, and clicking on a language displays that language section's content.
    • The tab open upon loading the page is the section that was linked to if the user arrived at the entry through a link, or the Translingual section or English section if there is one, or the tab of the most recently viewed non-English/Translingual section's language, or the tab of any language that has been targeted with TargetedTranslations (priority given to languages which were added to the user's preferences earliest), or otherwise the first language on the page. (Edited 08:03, 10 April 2011 (UTC))
    • At the right of the list of languages, there is a "+" symbol, for easily adding new language sections, relying on Editor.js's "Add part of speech" function for filling it with content. (We might also want to have this as an option for starting new entries, using something like User:Yair rand/NECV2.js.)
    • At the bottom of the page, the categories of the currently viewed language section are visible, along with HotCat-style buttons for adding/modifying/removing categories. These functions use WT:EDIT.
    • A TOC is not visible by default, but a per-language TOC can be enabled by clicking "Show TOC" in the Visibility section of the sidebar.
  • User:Yair rand/editor.js adds small arrows to the left of definitions. Hovering over an arrow expands a box of editing options, including "Edit definition", "Add gloss" (for senseids), "Edit gloss" (if the definition already has a senseid), "Add example sentence", "Add synonyms", and "Add antonyms":
    • "Edit definition" causes the definition to be replaced by an input box with the definitions wikitext with Preview/Cancel buttons on the right. Senseids to not appear in the definition wikitext.
    • "Add gloss" allows users to easily add senseids. The language code does not need to be added manually.
    • "Edit gloss" edits the definition's senseid. It includes an option to "Edit matching glosses", updating all {{trans-top}}s and {{sense}}s that match the old gloss with the new gloss.
    • "Add example sentence", for easily adding new usexes. All formatting (including script templates) other than bolding is done automatically.
    • "Add synonyms" and "Add antonyms" (requires the definition to have a senseid) adds a new section header of the 'nyms unless there already is one, and adds input fields for adding new 'nyms. Prefixes the 'nym list with a {{sense}} template. (Doesn't have a field for qualifiers, yet.)
    • The script also adds a "Add part of speech" button in the toolbox section of the sidebar.
    • Any definitions added through the "Add definition" function have a editing-options box added to them.
    • All the above functions use the WT:EDIT framework, so multiple additions and modifications can be made at once, and the standard "Page editing - Save changes - Undo - Redo" box is used.
  • The {{senseid}} template adds anchors to individual definitions, allowing linking directly to a definition (example). These templates, formatted like {{senseid|language code|definition gloss}}, also help machine parsing of Wiktionary content, making it possible to directly connect definitions to translations tables and such. The template {{l}} could be modified to add an id= parameter for linking to definitions.

The TabbedLanguages script and the Editor.js script are both available in Wiktionary:Preferences. (The options are labeled 'Tabbed browsing of language sections ("headers" style)' and 'Add expandable editing options side box next to definitions.', respectively). If these scripts get turned on by default, there should be an option for any individual user to turn them off, with both cookie-based preferences and gadget-based preferences. I think that Tabbed Languages will greatly improve usability and that YR/editor.js will make it much easier for new users to edit.

So whaddaya think? --Yair rand (talk) 20:25, 2 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

IMO having "add gloss" or "edit gloss" function is undesirable, as it's too tech-y: people will not know what it is, what it's for, what value they should put in it, that it should be stable, or when to select "edit matching glosses"; I oppose its implementation. I personally don't like using tabbed languages (I like the standard view), but I do think it would be better for newbies to Wiktionary than the current view, so support its implementation.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:46, 2 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The add gloss form, like the tgloss editor, has a link to Help:Glosses, which has pretty good explanation of what glosses are. Ordinarily, though, I think most users who don't already understand it will just not use it unless someone or something specifically asks them to. --Yair rand (talk) 20:56, 2 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I've seen the link to the help page. Nonetheless, I disagree that most users who don't understand it won't use it without being asked, and I think it will lead to the problems I outlined.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:48, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Do you have any ideas as to how this might be fixable? Or perhaps the gloss buttons should just be removed for non-autoconfirmed users? --Yair rand (talk) 19:52, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think the gloss buttons should be removed for all users. At least nonadmins.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:38, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
While I think these are both excellent, I oppose making them the default at this point. This is a major shift in the overall appearance and functionality of MediaWiki, which means that people will have an even harder time just jumping in. I think we need to consider exactly how we go about this very thoroughly before we launch, including some serious functionality and usability testing by numerous people who give feedback. We also need to make sure that the code is ready for prime time usage, it has to be relatively well documented, and generally accessible in case Yair gets hit by a bus or something. Also this is at least three votes worth of changes, so we could certainly roll out some changes in the nearer future than others, but all of these require some thought and discussion about how they will be presented and how they will be received. - [The]DaveRoss 11:08, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If I understand it correctly — and please correct me otherwise — TabbedLanguages decides which categories belong to which language as follows. It goes down the page looking for categories, and applies them to the first language section on the page. It continues to do so until it sees a category "Foo bar" or "foo:Bar derivations", where Foo/foo is the second language section on the page, at which point it starts applying categories to that language and continues until it sees "Baz xyzzy" or "baz:Xyzzy derivations" where Baz/baz is the third language section on the page, at which it point it starts applying categories to that language, etc. The problems with this AFAICT are at least three (perhaps someone will think of more), as follows. (1) If there are more than one language section on the page and one of them, not the last, has no categories (which shouldn't happen but does and will) then the algorithm will apply categories to the wrong language. (2) If a category "foo:Bar" (not "foo:Bar derivations") happens to be the first category in Foo's language section, it will be applied to the preceding section. (This, I'm informed, shouldn't occur. I imagine it does, and am confident it will.) (3) If categories are misplaced (as, if an English-language category is at the bottom of the wikitext although another language is on the page, as it sometimes is and will be), they will be applied to the wrong language.​—msh210℠ (talk) 21:48, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The above description is correct. The first problem could be fixed by a bot adding maintenance categories to language sections without categories, which could be detected by the script. I started a section about this in the grease pit, and also asked Prince Kassad if KassadBot might be able to do it. This definitely needs to be dealt with before Tabbed Languages is enabled by default. Problems two and three require that categories get regularly sorted into the correct language sections and moved to the bottoms of sections, which Autoformat used to do. I don't know whether KassadBot does it now. --Yair rand (talk) 22:14, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Re problem 2, IIRC AF stopped moving cats to the bottom of the language section (and to the correct language section, perhaps) when people complained about its doing so, contending that not all cats belong at the bottom, as, for example, an etymology-related cat belongs in the etymology, or a cat related to one sense belongs at the end of that sense line. (That's a sentiment I agree with, incidentally.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:18, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Are you sure? That seems to directly go against Wiktionary:Votes/2007-05/Categories at end of language section. --Yair rand (talk) 22:35, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Apparently, my memory failed me. You're quite right. (Incidentally, I see Carolina wren was disturbed by the result of that vote in '09, as were Mzajac and I, but seemingly nothing ever came of it.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:47, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Finding sections that don't categorize seems nontrivial to me, if you use the dump or if you use a bot. Templates can add categories- you'd have to know which ones do and which ones don't. Templates can also transclude other templates which will add categories, so you can't just parse each template individually to see if it adds a category. Anyone have ideas on how to do this? Nadando 23:18, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That's an issue not only for finding sections that don't categorize but for assigning categories to the correct section. (I assume an offline version of special:expandtemplates would come in handy. But I know nothing about such things.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 23:24, 3 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
@Nadando: One of the dumps is a multimap between entries and their categories, which can be used as a starting-point. (See Wiktionary:Grease pit#Entries without categories.) —RuakhTALK 21:04, 6 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I tend to think tabbed interface should not be enabled by default. It hides too much what is going on: it pretends that a wiki page contains only a single language when in fact it contains several. --Dan Polansky 06:40, 4 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That sounds rather strange to me, as it displays large, noticeable buttons for each language name across the top of the page, which, in my opinion, are a lot harder to miss than another section all the way at the bottom of the page below all the content for other languages... --Yair rand (talk) 14:26, 6 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I would support enabling tabbed languages by default. At the expense of making things a bit more unfamiliar for editors, we can make things much better for the primary audience, readers. A big scrolling page of potentially-unrelated words in different languages isn't the usual interface people expect from a dictionary. Rspeer 03:05, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think you have it backwards, frequent editors would have little problem adjusting to the new layout, whereas readers would be looking at something unusual. The wiki "look" is very widespread and well-known at this point, thanks mostly to Wikipedia and in part to all of the other projects and Wikia. A departure from the conventional wiki layout is a bigger deal than a departure from a conventional dictionary layout, especially since most online dictionaries already require some scrolling to get passed the ads. - [The]DaveRoss 11:11, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Here's a button that enables the two scripts for testing:
(Please purge your cache so that this button will work.)
--Yair rand (talk) 01:40, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The tabs look up as black/grey text on white background and with a larger fontsize in my browser, Firefox. I think they could be improved by highlighting or decorating in order to make more obvious to readers that they are clickable tabs or buttons, which isn't that clear with the current layout. Matthias Buchmeier 10:41, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Given that they're rather large, and that hovering the mouse over them causes them to react like links, underlining and changing the cursor, it seems like most people would be able to tell that they're clickable. Do you have any specific suggestions as to how the display could be changed to make it more obvious that the tabs are clickable? --Yair rand 11:45, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What about some more catchy font and background color maybe together with horizontal lines, i.e. light blue or light cyan similar to the boxes on the main page? Matthias Buchmeier 12:23, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'd rather the tabs look "clean" enough not to seem strange on single language pages, and background colors would probably bring in a lot of objections. Changing fonts (maybe Arial Black?) or adding boldness might be helpful, but the tabs shouldn't be so distracting that they cause confusion on single-language pages. If you know CSS you could experiment on your common.css; the CSS classes are .selectedTab and .unselectedTab. --Yair rand 21:47, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I've turned on some of the stuff: Definitions now have side boxes containing "Edit definition" and "Add example sentence" buttons. Click the button below if you want to disable these features.
Please purge your cache to enable/disable definition side boxes.
--Yair rand 02:32, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  • I have a couple of questions?
    1. Why is any of this enabled by default for all users?
    2. Why is this heading used to introduce another user-interface change that is unrelated? DCDuring TALK 05:23, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  1. To make Wiktionary easier to edit.
  2. This isn't unrelated. This section is about "Tabbed Languages, Definition side boxes, and Sense IDs". The newly implemented feature is Definition side boxes (with a couple things missing by default), as explained at the top. --Yair rand 05:27, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm supportive. It looks like you've worked pretty hard. I have turned it all on, and I think it is pretty and efficient. It will attract more edits by casual passers-by, if made default. The language names across the top could be misunderstood as an advertisement that says, "Wiktionary is available in these languages, too!" If there are a lot of languages, then they add another row across the top, which will not help my mom, who's browser is already so stuffed with toolbars that she can only read one line at a time. For those of us with usable screen space remaining, and given the amount of scrolling that the language tabs eliminate, it is a positive net benefit. I don't know how you could make the tabs explicitly understandable, except with more text that says "Define what foobar means when used in Albanian|Crimean Tatar|Ido|Guaraní|Quechua." It's a decision between aesthetics and usability. I already know what it means, so please, for my benefit, choose aesthetics. :) ~ heyzeuss 07:20, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I am in favour of the definitions editor being enabled for everyone. If it turns out that it's a large source of vandalism or confusion, it is easy to turn it off (just as the initial deal was with the translations editor). I think that making things easier to use (even in small steps, though I think this is a reasonably large step) is about the most important thing Wiktionary can do right now. As a somewhat sporadic contributor of late, I keep having to look up the documentation for all the templates I need to use (to the extent where I often just don't bother), it'd be great if this could be abstracted away so that I can concentrate fully on the actually hard part of making dictionary entries — i.e. writing definitions. I think Yair Rand has done and is doing great work on the UI there.
I am undecided on the gloss editor (and the features that depend on it) — I think it needs to be presented in a clearer way (though I am at a loss to explain what that clearer way would be). Perhaps hiding the gloss, synonyms and antonyms behind an "advanced" button would make it less confusing for new users. I really doubt a new user could fill in the gloss correctly.
I am not (yet) in favour of enabling tabbed languages. I found when I had them enabled that everything would jump noticably every time I loaded a page — that gets very irritating — and it's not yet clear enough what the tabs are. The best part of the tabbed languages feature is the "+" button that lets you add a new language — we should definitely make it easier to do that, perhaps a "+" tab at the top of each page (or y'know, something that does more that more clearly). The wording on the failed search results page could also be better. Conrad.Irwin 07:46, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
About the "jump", if it actually became the default to have tabbed languages on, the extra bit of CSS that styles the tabs could be added to Common.css instead of importing them from User:Yair_rand/TabbedLanguages.css after everything else, which would help the situation, I think. Additionally, if Mediawiki was changed so that the JS started loading before the rest of the content, it would help things significantly, and I think (though I can't remember where I read this, and I might be mistaken) that someone is working on that. --Yair rand 07:56, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. --Dan Polansky 08:31, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Support Tabbed languages and definitions editor, Oppose sense-id editor, which seems too complicated for the occaisonal user to me. Matthias Buchmeier 09:27, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Support Randolph's changes. I like tabbed browsing in particular. --Vahag 11:16, 7 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Proto langs in topical categories

I just found Category:gem:Light. When did that become consensus? Normally, proto languages are not supposed to be in topical categories. -- Prince Kassad 08:38, 6 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I don't see why they shouldn't have their own topical categories, really. As long as they have topics, there might be a need for topical categories too, I think? —CodeCat 11:15, 6 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It makes them appear together with "languages" in the topical category tree. But they're not "languages", they're reconstructed. -- Prince Kassad 10:02, 7 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
They're languages whose terms have been reconstructed. But they are real languages. —CodeCat 12:17, 7 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There may have been a language that those people spoke; but it was not the language that has been reconstructed. A reconstructed language that people don't actually speak is basically a "toy language", not as real as Klingon or Elvish.--Prosfilaes 18:58, 7 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Votes on geographic names

As a reminder, there are two votes on geographic names running, with fairly low participation:

Both votes have started on 7 March 2011 and have 15 days to go. The participation is low compared to Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2010-05/Placenames with linguistic information 2, on which 23 voters participated. If the votes would be closed today, the mentioned vote on geographic names from May 2010 would be undone. --Dan Polansky 08:28, 7 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Romanian vote in need of voters

The vote Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2011-02/Romanian orthographic norms has only three days to go, with the currently winning option "Proposal 2: use ș and ț (comma forms)" having 6:3:0 for support:oppose:abstain, whereas the other option "Proposal 1: use ş and ţ (cedilla forms)" has 3:6:0 for support:oppose:abstain. If some more people support proposal 2, it may be a clear-cut winner, while if more people oppose, the vote will be a more clear no-consensus one. As it is now, proposal 1 fails while proposal 2 is on the borderline between pass and no consensus. --Dan Polansky 08:47, 7 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

User:MalafayaBot for operation in Article namespace (2)

Hi, all.

I just wanted to let you know I opened a vote to request permission to run my bot in the Article namespace in order to update interwikis locally. If you would like to cast your opinion and/or vote, please do so at Wiktionary:Votes#User:MalafayaBot_for_operation_in_Article_namespace_.282.29. Thanks, Malafaya 22:59, 7 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Vote: Deprecating less-than symbol in etymologies 2

FYI Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2011-02/Deprecating less-than symbol in etymologies is ending today, currently 9:3:1 for support:oppose:abstain, meaning 75% supporting the vote. 13 people have voted, out of 38 people who have taken part on the poll that preceded the vote, which is 34% of the pollers. --Dan Polansky 06:20, 8 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Update: it is now 9:4:1, so 69% supporting. --Dan Polansky 08:06, 8 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Place names are under threat again

Just making you aware about my question regarding possible future place names deletions. Fixing all entries to match CFI may take some time but threatening flags put pressure on editors and discourage, "fix or I delete them". They all have useful translations but etymology, pronunciation, etc. can be added at some later stage but I strongly disagree with threats to delete entries, which don't conform 100% with CFI. --Anatoli 00:00, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

See also the thread #placenames up for deletion, 11 February 2011, on the subject that you are discussing in Wiktionary talk:Criteria for inclusion#Delete or improve?, 8 March 2011. See also the two votes that address the disagreement, in #Votes on geographic names. --Dan Polansky 11:27, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Newspeak

I'm not sure neither that this is the right place to propose this, nor that the proposal is actually workable. Basically, I'd like to propose adding a bunch of newspeak words (proper nouns like Miniluv I don't know, but crimestop and goodthink might be good?), and labelling them as such with a template like {{dated}}. Kayau 13:46, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

We don't include Newspeak words just as we don't include entries in other constructed languages like Klingon, Quenya, etc... They aren't going to be useful to the majority of people since this language is hardly ever used for actual communication. -- Prince Kassad 16:22, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
But... some such words might be attestable in English. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:21, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Is 1984 a well-known work? Including these would then be automatic. As far as I am concerned, this would be a reason to not allow the well-known work exception to our normal attestation. DCDuring TALK 09:54, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It's undoubtedly a well-known work. The problem is, the "well-known work" rule clashes with the "fictional universe rule" in WT:CFI. Let's quote them:

Usage in a well-known work

and

Terms originating in fictional universes which have three citations in separate works, but which do not have three citations which are independent of reference to that universe may be included only in appendices of words from that universe, and not in the main dictionary space.

Now CFI doesn't say it specifically, but I'd take the "[u]sage in a well known work" criterion to mean 'includable in the main namespace'. Furthermore, I don't know what a fictional universe is. Not in any detail, anyway. It's easy to see how 1984 can only be considered fictional, but we've had this rule applied to The Da Vinci Code as well, which is set in modern-day Europe! So it seems that the 'usage in a well known work' is only cut-and-dry when the well known work is non-fictional.

Seriously though, what is a fictional universe? Do we have any sort of definition of it? Mglovesfun (talk) 11:02, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I would propose that it's only terms referring to things in a fictional universe; w:crimestop arguably has a definition independent of the universe, so the fictional universe rule wouldn't apply to it, but Miniluv is only defined in terms of that fictional universe, so the rule would apply to it.--Prosfilaes 20:56, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As a note, the entries for ungood, crimethink and doublethink already exist and there may be more. Kayau 12:24, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sure, but ungood is well-cited; crimethink is citable outside the range of 1984, etc. If you can find two citations that don't refer to Orwell or 1984, then the argument about well-known work and fictional universe is moot.--Prosfilaes 20:56, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Correct but that wouldn't help four our James Joyce stuff. One possible interpretation at WT:RFD#bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthurnuk is that word used in well-known works but only in an appendix. That I assume that the CFI "[u]sage in a well-known work" does not apply only to the main namespace, but also to other ones, such as Concordance and Appendix. Cryptex already failed RFV entirely without being moved to an appendix. --Mglovesfun (talk) 15:47, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Personally, I'm not a huge fan of appendixes. I'd rather put in everything we know about the word in a page in the main namespace.--Prosfilaes 19:19, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Pejorative, offensive, obsolete, colloquial, jargon, scientific terms etc.

I realize that there are many different kinds of users who contribute to this wiki. For that reason, the number of entries are very robust and thorough. However, after a certain point it begins to break down and the wiki's legitimacy as a valuable resource starts to fall apart, because specialized words are intermixed with what would be considered more proper words.

The idea I have put forth to the wiki webmaster, and they asked me to post it here, was that perhaps it would be nice if the wiki users could tag various terms with different labels. These words still participate in the full database and would not be excluded for any reason, but being able to tag words would give the users higher power over accessing the database and their usage. As anything wiki, these labels would be subject to the wiki revision process of the community. These would be similar to labeling things as a noun, verb, adjective, etc. but would provide a higher degree of context for how the word is utilized.

Once that feature is implemented, the webmasters could show the labels in the index view and allow users to filter out words to make usage of the database easier. For example, perhaps you know that the word you are looking for is scientific jargon, so you might be able to filter for these labels and only show a subset of the full index.

Thoughts from the community? — This unsigned comment was added by Imagic.designer (talk • contribs) at 21:27, 9 March 2011.

Unless I'm missing something, these already exist, see Category:Context labels. Also I don't see how including specialist vocabulary causes anything to 'break down' or 'fall apart'. If you don't want to know what something means, don't search for it! Mglovesfun (talk) 22:07, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Our aim is to include all words, as simple as (deprecated template usage) cat, as specialised as (deprecated template usage) catabolism (context label - biochemistry) or (deprecated template usage) catalepsy (context label - pathology). We will continue to do so. SemperBlotto 22:13, 9 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you very much for the clarification on this. Didn't mean to offend with my "fall apart" comment. You see, I use this site more for word studies and data mining of word groupings, not really for definitions of individual words. But I was unaware, and you have educated me on the fact, that this site is in fact equipped to handle such things. For example, lets say I want to not simply know what a square knot is, but to have a listing of all the different types of knots that are included in the database. Or perhaps a listing of all the prepositions in the English language.
What I was calling labels are done with categories on this site. My over-site, so again my apologies. There are a couple of limitations with this strategy, for example a category isn't all inclusive, but it is overcome by the wiki nature of editing over time to place a category label on each word. Thanks again for alerting me to such things. — This unsigned comment was added by Imagic.designer (talk • contribs) at 10 March 2011.
I definitely wasn't offended; I just disagreed with you. As for all the English prepositions, see Category:English prepositions - there are probably some we don't have yet, or that we have and aren't categorized. We also have Category:Knots, same thing. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:20, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
One last comment and not sure how to correct this, but here is an example of how it falls apart, because you get a lot of words (when data mining) that are hard to sift through. For example, (deprecated template usage) red_cunt_hair is labeled in categories of slang and vulgarities but other related terms (deprecated template usage) RCH and (deprecated template usage) RPH are not included in these categories. Perhaps synonyms need some kind of category inheritance. Also categories need some standardization (or a way to cross-reference) because some words are ethnic slurs and categorized as offensive, but do not show up in the ethic slur list. It is hard to maintain some consistency across the entire database. For those interested in word by word definitions this isn't a problem, but those who are interested in the database as a whole with word studies of groupings it is a major problem.
So (deprecated template usage) carpetmuncher is labeled as vulgar, but the plural form (deprecated template usage) carpetmunchers is not, nor is (deprecated template usage) carpet_muncher, nor the alternative (deprecated template usage) rug_muncher
There is also some issue with errors in inputting the word entry. For example, the term (deprecated template usage) acceptance lists it as obsolete when it points to (deprecated template usage) acceptation, #8 in the definition portion. The term 'acceptation' is obsolete, but the word 'acceptance' clearly is not, and yet 'acceptance' shows up in the obsolete category, because it received that label within its definition page. User:Imagic.designer
Re your last point: You're right. Categories (in the software this Web site is based on) can only categorize entire pages, so using categories to mark obsoleteness marks the entire page as obsolete, even though only one sense of the word is really obsolete. Similarly, the entire page "la" is marked, using categories, as an English noun, even though only one sense of la is that of en English noun, and others are, for example, French. Arguably, then, categories (which must work this way, simply because of the software that the Web site uses) are not the best way to mark senses as obsolete or as English nouns — yet I really don't think there's a better way. Alternatively, arguably, we should have a separate page for each sense, and that page can then be categorized unambiguously. Someone's suggested this in the past, but it would vastly decrease usability (and editability) of the site as a whole.

Re marking rug muncher as vulgar: I agree: it should be. This is a collaborative Web site, and you can help by marking vulgar senses as such. Edit the page using the "Edit" link atop it and look for the sense in question. Then put {{vulgar}} at its start, right after the #. Thanks!​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:11, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I certainly will look to see and edit those entries that seem to be mislabeled or incomplete. A couple of things that might help that can be done by the website administrators, might be to merge redundant categories (or at least cross reference them). For example, a term that is pejorative and derogatory are the same thing and yet they each have their own category. Also, the webmasters might be able to have some way to inherit the category listings from their synonyms or plural forms without input from the user to manually include the category for each entry. It makes perfect logical sense that if an entry is included in a category, then the plural or participle form of the word would also be part of the same category. — This comment was unsigned.
Re automatically labeling forms of vulgar entries as also vulgar: While the software cannot do such a thing, it is doubtless possible to write a script that someone can run on his own computer that will do it. But consider: a Romance-language or Semitic-language verb can have numerous forms. (Even an English one has a few; for example, go has go, went, gone, goes, and going.) If a verb is vulgar, and you want all those forms to be marked as vulgar also, then the category will quickly fill up with verb forms and it will be impossible to glance through the category and pick out the forms one wants. (On the other hand, the category will be more complete. It's a trade-off.) This is IMO different from categorizing both carpet muncher and carpetmuncher as vulgar: those are different spellings rather than forms of the very same word, and both should IMO be categorized as vulgar. And it's certainly IMO different from categorizing both carpet muncher and rug muncher: those are mere synonyms.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:43, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Don't forget that we are all volunteers here. If you want something done, you normally have to do it yourself. SemperBlotto 16:34, 10 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Seconded. The feedback you are giving is exactly the kind of thing we work with everyday (by we, I mean regular contributors). Despite our progress, Wiktionary will never be "complete" simply because the content is limitless (such as languages are). When in doubt, be bold, or ask an admin. ---> Tooironic 12:53, 11 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We tend not to categorize inflected forms like fucks, fucked, fucking (etc.) so carpetmunchers isn't categorized because the singular is. --Mglovesfun (talk) 15:49, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Malagasy Wiktionary (mg.wikt)

Does anyone know what the story is with the Malagasy Wiktionary? Each time we get a new dump, and I find new interwiki-links to add, the great majority are to mg.wikt entries. For example, the current batch includes 144,623 edits, of which 109,922 edits (76%) are just to add links to mg.wikt. And those are all links to new pages, obviously, since we already had links to all the previously existing pages. Are they just incredibly industrious, or are they bot-adding pages? If the latter — are they useful pages, with real content, or are they just stubs? And, if the latter — should we be adding interwiki links to pages that don't have actual content?

(I seem to recall a similar question coming up once with ru.wikt entries, but I don't completely remember the conclusion; and anyway, it's been long enough since then that people's views could easily have changed.)

Thanks,
—RuakhTALK 14:35, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, that wiki uses bots to artifically increase the pagecount. It seems to mostly steal inflected forms from other wikis. -- Prince Kassad 14:43, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Here are Recent changes in Malagasy Wiktionary. Here the same thing but with robotic contributions shown. A look at http://mg.wiktionary.org/wiki/in suggests this page has been imported from en:wikt without any postprocessing: en:wikt templates are all over the page. The page was created on 13 February 2011 by User:Bot-Jagwar (contributions).
The pages that they have and that en:wikt does not have may be raw imports from other language dictionaries; this could be discernible by the templates that have been left in the imports. --Dan Polansky 14:59, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Here is the talk page of the bot owner: Jagwar. --Dan Polansky 15:02, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, both of you. So, those pages are basically useless. Even a native Malagasy speaker would be better off using our entry than using an mg.wikt entry. Onto my next question: should our entries have interwiki-links to theirs? I'm leaning toward "yes" — just as a matter of diplomacy, we don't pass judgment on other wikis' content — but part of me feels that we include interwikis because they're useful, so when they're not useful, we shouldn't include them. —RuakhTALK 15:25, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't really know. It seems okay with me if en:wikt interwiki bots don't care to update Malagasy interwikis; going out of our way to delete interwikis seems unnecessary. I don't find their way of procedure perfectly okay. It also comes down to what it costs to add these interwikis, in terms of attention and other resources. I do not know how sensitive the issue is, diplomacy-wise. --Dan Polansky 16:44, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
See also Wiktionary:Beer parlour archive/2010/October#Malagasy Wiktionary. An interesting quote from there: "They do the same from the French wiktionary (without any change to the pages). Some templates have an mg version, making entries more or less readable, but some templates are not supported, and definitions, notes, etc. are in French. Lmaltier 19:54, 4 November 2010 (UTC)". --Dan Polansky 16:53, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Re: "going out of our way to delete interwikis seems unnecessary": Oh, definitely. I wouldn't even contemplate that. I more meant, should I even be bothering to add them? Currently I treat the mg.wikt-only edits as a low priority (I don't do them until after I've done all others), but maybe I should just skip those entirely.
Re: "what it costs to add these interwikis, in terms of attention and other resources": Not free, but not huge. From my standpoint: three-quarters of my interwiki edits are just to add these; but when you consider "fixed costs" vs. "variable costs", they probably only triple the cost of running an interwiki-bot.
Re: "I do not know how sensitive the issue is, diplomacy-wise": I doubt it's a particularly sensitive issue, just, we don't want to get in the business of deeming sister projects useless. We're so consistent in our use of interwiki-links that it's something that can be (and is) performed by bots, so pointedly excluding certain sister projects would be a bit . . . pointed.
Thanks for the link to that past discussion; I don't know if I wasn't paying attention at the time, or if I simply forgot about it. (This didn't affect me at all until I started the interwiki bot.) I guess mg.wikt is simply the current worst offender.
—RuakhTALK 20:09, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Actually, I was looking at the heading of this discussion ("Malagasy Wiktionary (mg.wikt)") and admired its design: it contains two keywords by which someone might be looking for a discussion on this subjects: "Malagasy Wiktionary" and "mg.wikt". Then I wondered what I would find if I sought for "Malagasy Wiktionary" in BP archives, and so I found the other dicussion. I have forgotten the other dicussion long ago. --Dan Polansky 20:48, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The whole point of having Wiktionary in different language versions is to have content in different languages. Report 'em to wikipolice. Njardarlogar 19:51, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yeah, I might do that — not because their content is pointless (though it is), but because they seem to violating our copyright to do it. If they want to mass-import pages like this, they should be using the import tool, not a CopyVioBot. —RuakhTALK 20:09, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We might drop a note to Jagwar on that Wiktionary. Various cultures have various attitude towards copyright, so it may seem to him that he is doing nothing wrong. He may be unaware of the issues related to multiple authors in revision histories. I have seen no post to his talk page that would talk about this practice. He may turn responsive. I am myself not very confident about the issue, so what I could write is something like this: "Hello Jagwar, I and some other people in English Wiktionary think that it is no good idea to copy pages from other dictionaries using a bot. Every page in, say, English dictionary is copyrighted by its authors; if you want to import it to Malagasy Wiktionary in a way that respects copyrights and contributions of other people, you have to use the import tool: see TODO:LINK-TO-GUIDE-TO-IMPORT-POOL. Best regards, Dan Polansky". This could be extended with something like this: "Actually, merely importing pages without the intention to turn them into pages written in Malagasy seems to be a really poor idea: Malagasy Wiktionary should be written in Malagasy." I release this post into public domain, so feel free to tweak it and repurpose as you see fit. --Dan Polansky 20:58, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry, too late! What I did was leave a comment at w:mg:Dinika amin'ny mpikambana:Jagwar#Importation par les bots., in rusty French. Hopefully it asks the bot owner to stop, for copyright reasons, and points him/her at the import tool. It doesn't address the question of whether such edits are at all useful, but I didn't feel it was my place to raise that too strongly. (It does say, « il ne me semble pas utile d'importer de texte non-malgache à Wikibolana », which is hopefully intelligible with the meaning "it doesn't seem useful to me to import non-Malagasy text to Wikibolana", but that's it.) It also doesn't address the question of what to do with the existing copyright violations. (But what I did doesn't seem too different from what you were preparing to suggest.) —RuakhTALK 21:02, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Cool! I was just trying to push myself to put something together in spite of being really uncertain; it is great to see someone know what to do, and actually do it. --Dan Polansky 21:10, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The Malagasy Wiktionary now has more than 1,000,000 entries, so I'm placing it together with French and Chinese in our list of Wiktionaries in other languages. Presumably if this number drops due to concerns of quality or copyright, feel free to revert this change. --Daniel. 21:26, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What makes you think what you did was a good idea? --Dan Polansky 22:28, 14 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I am with Dan here, we want to show the number of entries in the target language, not the number of English and French entries mirrored on the target URL. Let's hold off on including that wiki until a determination has been made about what is to be done. - [The]DaveRoss 10:07, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have posted to Jagwar in English on his WP page and then on his WT page: mg:Dinika_amin'ny_mpikambana:Jagwar. On his WT talk page, people have already been trying to talk to him about the imports. Sorry for posting a link to his WP page; his WT page would have been a better link it seems. --Dan Polansky 13:53, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

He tells me that he no longer imports pages from other Wiktionaries, due to the copyright concerns I had mentioned. (In fact, he says that he had stopped even before my comment, after other users raised similar concerns.) The current bot edits are "form of" entries, and they're actually in Malagasy. Personally, I don't know how useful a bot-generated "form of" is when the lemma form is a redlink, but a Malagasy speaker coming across one of our form-of entries might at least benefit from the grammar explanation of the Malagasy entry, even if for lexicosemantic information they need to come back to our lemma entry. So, I think it's clear that we should keep adding the interwikis. Do you agree? —RuakhTALK 18:52, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Coming from here, speaking in English, we can't really dictate how the mg.wiktionary should be run. Whether bot entries in Volapük or copyright concerns, the deciding factor should be the local community of Malagacy-speaking volunteers, who can decide if the entries are good and useful or not. But is there such a community? And what should the Wikimedia Foundation do with projects that instead of a community only have one or two free-wheeling bot operators? None of us is proud of the Volapük Wikipedia. It's a stain on our reputation as Wikimedia volunteers. I'm bewildered here, trying to restrain myself from creating too many of the Swedish entries in English Wiktionary in lack of a larger community. --LA2 19:09, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We can't dictate how mg.wikt should be run, but we can dictate how we are run. We're within our rights to link to them or not. And since they're violating our contributors' copyrights, we probably have an obligation to notify the Foundation so that this can be dealt with. (I give Jagwar full credit for stopping the bot-imports when the issue was pointed out to him; existing copyvios still need to be deleted somehow.) Unfortunately, I don't know whom exactly to notify, or how. —RuakhTALK 19:17, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I do not know whether we should keep adding the interwikis, and I do not oppose adding interwikis to mg:wikt, or at least not yet. Adding inflected forms that do not point to real content is pitiable IMHO, but possibly still basically acceptable. The high number of entries is driven in considerable part by the category for inflected forms for Volapük, which has 701,121 entries. I have picked one entry from that category, and it has zero Google hits. We have no idea whether these entries are at least correctly constructed; many of them are probably unattestable. Which is a great trick: go creating inflected forms for an artificial language, for which the attestability requirement can be wanted to be lifted. I have no idea how that guy has created these inflected forms, but I think he should better stop. I have posted more to his talk page (mg:Dinika_amin'ny_mpikambana:Jagwar), but to unknown effect. --Dan Polansky 19:55, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This is the problem: we think this is bad and want it to stop. But we speak neither Volapük nor Malagasy, so who are we to speak up? I think the Foundation needs to have some policy in place, similar to the policy for starting new projects. --LA2 23:18, 15 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Must have not noticed an edit conflict earlier as I tried to post in reply to this; as long as the Malagasy Wiktionary has some entries with content, we should keep the interwikis. The second question about adding new interwikis; are any 'good' entries being created there at all? If so, keep 'em and do as LA2 suggests; go to Meta about it. Mglovesfun (talk) 00:19, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think it might be a disservice to our users to have interwiki links to content we are very skeptical of. The only real benefit the interwiki links may have is to point other mg speaking folks to a project where they can contribute, but for our users the links are not so beneficial. - [The]DaveRoss 02:13, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Re: "This is the problem: we think this is bad and want it to stop. But we speak neither Volapük nor Malagasy, so who are we to speak up?": The guy does not speak Volapük either; Volapük is a constructed language. When I suspect that something is running astray, I feel entitled to speak up on a sister Wiktionary project, no matter whether I speak their language. Furthermore, the guy really has no mandate to do what he does: he is the sole admin on the project, so there is no Malagasy opposition that could stop him. If you actually belive what he is doing is wrong, you have to tell him. His inflation of numbers has a side effect that actually affects all Wiktionary negatively, albeit in a minor way: it completely skews the statistics. It is ridiculous to skew the statistics with 700,000 mostly unattestable entries from a constructed language. --Dan Polansky 07:48, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Dan, I do applaud your effort. However, I fear that it might be without effect since this guy can do what he likes in the absense of a local community. As an admin he has done nothing wrong that calls for revoking his rights, he only displayed poor judgement in creating worthless entries. We can't call for the closing of the project, since Wiktionary in Malagasy is a perfectly legitimate project. Maybe we need some kind of all-language Wiktionary committee that can coordinate projects and act (with some kind of authority) as the missing community on smaller projects. --LA2 11:10, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
My effort may have little effect but it achieves at least one thing: Jagwar can no longer claim that his action went undisputed. I am already part of a larger Wiktionary community, without needing a specific formal title for that. So are you. Another effect is that it is now clear that Jagwar understands and speaks English fairly well, so English can be used as the language of communication to make things traceable to the largest audience. --Dan Polansky 13:23, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Time

This is a relatively small project of reorganizing Category:Time. Here is a list of subcategories and few examples of members. It's open to suggestions.

--Daniel. 23:53, 16 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What is the problem you are trying to solve? There are 415 articles in Category:Time today. Is that too many? I don't think so. On the contrary, too many intermediate level categories (e.g. References of time) only make the category tree deep (tall) and narrow. We already have Category:Months as a more natural intermediate there. Many languages only have one set of month names, e.g. Swedish doesn't have words for the Persian calendar months, so there is no need for subcategories for each calendar. --LA2 01:29, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Does anyone agree with LA2? Category:Time is simply one of many messy categories; the lack of logic and consistency of topical categories has been mentioned multiple times by many people.
Here are some problems regarding the specific category tree in question, as it exists today (that can be fixed by various means, including but not limited to implementing the suggested category tree above):
I'm happy to collapse the tree into Time.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:14, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Some of your subcategories make good sense, so you could just create them and start adding articles. I wonder if time travel has enough many articles to make a good subcategory. As for the months and week days, I think the current categories are better than your proposal. Especially, I don't see the point in the rather abstract intermediate category "references of time". To me, that is a synonym to "time". --LA2 15:12, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
LA2, you said that "references of time" is synonymous to "time". I disagree with your statement. Chronos, wristwatch and Novikov self-consistency principle are related to time but are not references, so they might be categorized into Category:Time but not into Category:References of time.
As I mentioned in a previous message, we currently have Category:Islamic months and Category:Hebrew calendar months. The word "calendar" should be either present or absent from both categories, for consistency. Relatedly, we currently have Category:Gregorian calendar months but Category:Persian months.
How many entries do you expect to be enough for a good category named Category:Time travel? --Daniel. 23:42, 17 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If you can think of 20 terms, that's a good reason to create a category, in my opinion. (This rule of thumb would disqualify "months" as a category, if there are only 12 month names. But I'm not claiming to be logical.) --LA2 07:29, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
OK. Category:Time travel would meet the threshold of 20 terms by having time travel, time machine, time-traveller, wormhole, Novikov self-consistency principle, timeslip, flux capacitor, chronoclasm, tesseract, grandfather paradox, clock paradox, closed time loop, bootstrap paradox, closed timelike curve, time dilation, Roman ring, chronovisor, retrocausality, suspended animation and autoinfanticide. --Daniel. 09:41, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I am mentally busy elsewhere so only a sketchy response: Overall, I do not like the proposal made in the introduction of this thread, although there are some parts of it that seem good. One pick in particular is "Category:Duration (new, old, recent)": new, old and recent do not come under the head of duration. "new" and "old" have several meanings in some of which they come under the head of "age"; "recent" comes under the head of "distance in time in the past direction", which I do not know how to say in one word, other than perhaps "recentness". Another particular pick: "Category:Time-measurement devices" is redundant to "Category:Clocks". --Dan Polansky 11:42, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Dan, I would support merging "Category:Time-measurement devices" with "Category:Clocks" to make it simpler and avoid that redundancy. Also, "Category:Duration" may be removed from the proposal, and replaced by one or more categories to fit the multiple meanings of the words in question. For example, possibly Category:Past might contain old, new, recent, preterite, memory, retrocognition, and so on. --Daniel. 12:13, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I created a vote on this subject: Wiktionary:Votes/2011-03/Category:Time. --Daniel. 21:38, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Category:Etymology -- Quechua derivations and Quechuan derivations

Hi! In Category:Etymology ([1]) I see the following sub-cats:

  • Quechua derivations
  • Quechuan derivations

As far as I know both are about the same language. I would like to fix that but I'm not sure what's correct here. (By the way: the topical categories without language prefix are terribly hard to see; they drown in the prefixed ones.) --MaEr 19:01, 18 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I seemed to think that Category:Quechuan derivations was nominated for deletion, and passed. Though, I don't know why. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:53, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Seems that Quechua is a language, and Quechuan is the language family. Hmm. --Mglovesfun (talk) 13:05, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you for the information. This looks a bit complicated. I'll leave it to a quechuanologist. --MaEr 18:46, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I still think it should go. WT:LANGTREAT comes to my mind. -- Prince Kassad 18:48, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Entries with two etymologies

The Greek word μα represents 2 part of speech with separate etymologies. To date I have been entering these with 2 Etymology headings (1 & 2), with POS headings at level four instead of three. An anonymous editor has used a different way of solving the problem - by giving the 2 etyms. under one heading and using the sense (not used but intended) to differentiate the POS (now promoted to the normal level 3).
This seems a clear way of doing things but not one I'm accustomed to.

1. I see that the French and Greek wikts use the one etym head format (at least they do for fr:μα & el:μα. Do we have house rules?
2. Is the one etym format used elsewhere in the English wikt?
3. Is this new format acceptable - and should it have wider use?
Any thoughts? —Saltmarshtalk-συζήτηση 12:29, 19 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I would prefer that layout, because it's a lot less confusing than the layouts we have now. Some of them might have four etymologies and it is very confusing for people who want to look up a word and don't care for its origin at all. —CodeCat 12:36, 19 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think I agree —Saltmarshtalk-συζήτηση 12:49, 19 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think I agree with that as well - so perhaps both methods should be permissable - perhaps they already are? —Saltmarshtalk-συζήτηση 06:05, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
French Wiktionary until recently only used this method. The downside is it can get very confusing, for example when there's more than one noun, you get things like noun #1, noun #2 (etc.). I still prefer to split by ety, but for shorter entries it's ok I think. This entry is short enough that it would all fit on a single page with no scrolling anyway... Mglovesfun (talk) 14:52, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
A reason for putting homographs in different sections is that they are different words which just happen to be written the same. We split different spellings of the same word (colour/color) rather than handling them on the same page like Wikipedia does; it is counter-intuitive to combine unrelated words. - -sche (discuss) 19:30, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It would also be counter-intuitive and confusing to have two systems of etymology; thus we should not permit both methods. As Ƿidsiþ and Prince Kassad suggest, using the single etymology header in complex entries (like race) we would need to distinguish six noun senses from five noun and three verb senses from one noun sense, and to be sure any added senses were correctly listed in the etymology; thus it is best to keep homographs separate. - -sche (discuss) 19:39, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
See also [[User:Msh210/ELE]].​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:44, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Unblocking

Can someone please unblock me? I have been unjustly blocked by Mglovesfun. --Dan Polansky; --188.138.84.132 14:37, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

To quote myself "I'm actually tempted to block you for longer for "intimidating behavior/harassment". That's my main regret. I'm just hoping to avoid it." Mglovesfun (talk) 14:48, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If you check my talk page, you will find not a single recent complaint about my behavior that would be blockable. The single complaint that I have received that suggested blockability was by SemperBlotto on his talk page. I cannot adjust behavior if no one complains about it. SemperBlotto in particular has failed to complain about my behavior that he disliked: my posting notifications for votes. Instead of telling me on my talk page that he does not want any further notifications, he has decided to sabotage a unifiction effort. --Dan Polansky --188.138.84.132 14:54, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
endorse blocking. You do not seem to be able to engage in discussions in a civil manner. This short block was more than overdue. -- Prince Kassad 15:09, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Prince Kassad, you are making a blank accusation of my incivility. Do you care to provide a diff or two that shows what you consider my incivility? --Dan Polansky 15:30, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Could someone link to some of the edits in question? I think I've missed something. —RuakhTALK 15:14, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I have to finishing something offline so this message may be a bit rushed, and I intend to come back online later — This unsigned comment was added by Mglovesfun (talk • contribs) at 16:24, 20 March 2011 (UTC).[reply]

I just wanted you to leave me alone to make some edits. Yes edits, we make lots of them here. I don't object to your calling my actions into question, so I answered your question and then hoped you'd drop it and I could keep on editing.

MediaWiki has no solution whatsoever to this problem, leaving me with the options

  1. Do nothing
  2. Protect my talk page, sysops only
  3. Log out and edit under IP or create a second account
  4. Block you (that is, Dan Polansky)

I went for #4 based also on other people's comments.

Furthermore I think you should get a further block for abusing multiple accounts; I find it highly hypocritical to complain on user's talk pages about not following Wiktionary policy, but breaking said policies when it suits you. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:24, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It is a bad to evade discussions by blocking. On the other hand, it is just as bad to continue fruitless (but entirely civil!) discussions on possible minor violations of bot operation policies. In such cases, I'd personally opt for #1. -- Gauss 16:40, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm evading the harassment, not the discussion. I'll be the judge of whether I feel intimidated or harassed, thank you. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:48, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I get the impression that I'm missing (or haven't paid enough attention to) much of the context; but going just based on the discussion at Mglovesfun's talk-page, it seems that Dan Polansky's initial concern was valid, but that his approach was hostile and confrontational, and that it quickly grew more so, even after Mglovesfun tried to ignore the hostility (per WT:AGF) and to take his questions at face value. Indeed, it looks in retrospect as if Dan Polansky's original comment may have been intended as somewhat of a rhetorical "trap" for Mglovesfun: asking Mglovesfun to defend a position, while preparing to "pounce" with contrary evidence.
I don't know whether Mglovesfun's later comments and subsequent blocking of Dan Polansky were justified, but they certainly seem understandable. :-/
—RuakhTALK 19:07, 20 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I admit I have been confrontational. I came to the talk page with the intent to expose MG as a policy-flouting oligarch, who performs mass changes in the mainspace contrary to consensus and previous unanimous practice, yet opposes mass changes in the mainspace that are preferred by a large majority of the editors. I have chosen the rather aggressive method of asking unpleasant yet relevant questions, trying to get him to accede that the principles that underly his actions are unacceptable. I feel I have treated him no more harshly than he has treated EncycloPetey, so he does not really get to complain.
I have not abused multiple accounts: I have created no other account but rather edited anonymously; IP addresses are not user accounts. When I get unjustly blocked, I feel justified in making anonymous edits that ask for my unblocking (using anonymous IP addresses). I have made no other edits using anonymous IP addresses; in particular, I have created no new entries but rather filed them into a personal list of entries to be created. If there really is a policy that forbids anonymous asking for unblocking, this policy should be revised for its being unjust. --Dan Polansky 15:30, 21 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
One more thought on "abusing multiple accounts": I have acted in good faith that I am violating no policy. Can someone point me to a policy that forbids using multiple accounts? This search does not find anything for me. --Dan Polansky 05:51, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
IP addresses are accounts and no; we don't have policies on loads of things. WT:BOT is toothless and WT:BLOCK was a major step in the wrong direction, as it has a lot less specific detail than its predecessor. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:17, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I'm not exactly known for subtlety myself. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:18, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Finally, "[or] I will make sure that the task is so innocuous that no one could possibly object." Surely no such edit exists; ; surely anyone can object to any edit at any time; Hell, I could object to my own bot edits and cause myself to be in violation of WT:BOT. What I also want to know is what Dan's objection is. I suppose re-reading my talk page, technically he hasn't objected to the edits yet so I'm not in violation of WT:BOT until he does or someone else does (including myself). So what is this objection? Mglovesfun (talk) 11:23, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Let us sum it up: you have made several false statements, such ones that accuse me of things that I have not done, but you do not show any remorse. You have failed to explicitly warn me that you are about to block me. You have given a false reason for my block. Then you have threatened me with extending the block even further. Finally, you falsely accused me of hypocrisy; when asked to provide evidence and links to policies that I have allegedly broken and whose violation should suffice to extend my block even further, you switch the subject and talk about how WT policies are actually broken. Instead of responding straight to the questions I have asked and admitting that you have goofed a bit, you have evaded the question. Also an option. --Dan Polansky 11:52, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You're confusing 'falsely' with the fact we just have differing opinions on the matter. To be honest all I can say in reply is stuff that's already have, or on my talk page. I think we have more important things to do than repeat ourselves ad nauseam. Like I said, to be a violation of WT:BOT someone would have to object, and nobody has. --Mglovesfun (talk) 12:00, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This not a matter of opinion but of fact. Your threat still remains unretracted: "I think you should get a further block for abusing multiple accounts; I find it highly hypocritical to complain on user's talk pages about not following Wiktionary policy, but breaking said policies when it suits you". Instead of admitting that you did something wrong, you continue to switch the subject. A new fallacy that you have introduced consists in your reclassifying matters of fact as matters of opinion, which makes it possible for you to claim of any disagreement that we just have a differing opinion. You imply that I have "abused multiple accounts", when in fact I have only used an IP address to ask for unblocking, which could hardly be construed as "abuse". You have conceded not a single point. Now go, and call EP a bully. --Dan Polansky 12:08, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
How can any statement that starts "I think" be a matter of fact? You can't 'force' me to agree with you. We disagree, period, end of. Now let's do some editing. The dictionary, remember? --Mglovesfun (talk) 12:22, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
First off, if you do not want to respond to me, just stop responding. I do not feel like stopping responding to you. You seem to be entitled to a last word, but I do not think you are.
I did not introduce my statements with "I think". I am wholly certain that no one has pointed to a single policy that I have broken, so, to the best of my knowledge, I have broken no policy and you accusation is false. You do not admit that much, instead resorting to what might be called mere-opinions-no-facts fallacy. --Dan Polansky 12:30, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I introduced my statement with I think. The only impression I really get is that you're angry and upset. Presumably not about MglovesfunBot, which you're not even commenting now, even when I bring it up. My best guess is whatever it is is not Wiktionary related at all, but this is a 'safer' outlet for your anger. --Mglovesfun (talk) 13:03, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I now see what I have indeed overlooked: the first part of the threat, the one before semicolon, was indeed secured by "I think". That has made the threat a little bit more covert and defensible. Nonetheless, the part after semicolon was not so guarded: "I find it highly hypocritical to complain on user's talk pages about not following Wiktionary policy, but breaking said policies when it suits you", unless you construe "I find" as yet another guard, yet the part "breaking said policies when it suits you" is not so guarded. But even I admit that this is getting really technical. The essence is that you are evading responsibility for your threats, and you show no remorse when you are proven wrong; you do not admit things until you get pushed very far by very targeted questions, which of course is nothing else but interrogation, a rather unpleasant thing to be exposed to. --Dan Polansky 13:23, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Let me ask another question that I have not asked: do you believe that I have "abused multiple accounts"? --Dan Polansky 13:29, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Re: "Presumably not about MglovesfunBot, which you're not even commenting now, even when I bring it up." Wait a minute. Where have you brought up MglovesfunBot? Is there something you said about MglovesfunBot that you want me to respond to? (Fact is, there is still one blatantly false statement of yours that I have still have not mentioned, sitting in the pipeline. I am much more enraged by your having unjustly blocked me, though, and I do not want to discuss too many things at once. )--Dan Polansky 13:33, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Because Dan Polasnky is angry (or enraged as he puts it) and wants people to know about it. Nothing to do with Wiktionary. --Mglovesfun (talk) 13:46, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Fact is, I have posted on your talk page today, but you have referred me to Beer parlour. If you want to continue on your talk page, we can do that. --Dan Polansky 13:57, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Fact is, you're being selfish. This debate says to me "I'm upset; everyone look at me until I feel better" while what people are actually doing is concentrating on the dictionary-side of our project. Yes dictionary, remember that? --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:20, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You have made yet another inaccurate statement about me pushing things to Beer parlour, but do not retract. If I am being selfish, what is it that makes you respond to my objection? What prevents you from ignoring me and going to build the dictionary, as you have suggested several times? (You don't need to answer. I am as okay as you are to have the last word, and win the bear-fight described by László Mérő. I still have some resources to waste. But I am inclined to leave your next response unanswered in order that you can "go building the dictionary", and collect your bear-points. ) --Dan Polansky 14:26, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You're determined to turn this into some sort of macho pissing contest. It ought not to be. You're confusing "inaccurate" with "opinionated". I have an opinion. I've often been told not to present my opinions as facts, but this is the first time I've had it the other way around; I present an opinion and the other person tries to present them as facts against my will. --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:35, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
See the bracketed part of my previous post :). And enjoy your mere-opinions-no-facts fallacy. --Dan Polansky 14:41, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I declare this discussion over. -- Prince Kassad 15:02, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Prepositional phrases

Since Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2010-01/Allow "Prepositional phrase" as a POS header passed some time ago, I assume that we should be going through Category:Prepositional phrases and changing the headers of all the ones that don't have ===Prepositional phrase=== with a bot/AWB. Am I right? —Internoob (Disc•Cont) 18:11, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

There are cases where the phrase is only used adverbially, so an adverb category and heading is appropriate. When I add something as a prepositional phrase I try to make sure that it is used both as adjective and as adverb. So it is not a good bot candidate. AWB also makes for a rush to judgement, but could work with sufficient self-restraint. DCDuring TALK 19:35, 22 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Could you provide some examples, DCDuring?--Brett 12:25, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'll try later to provide some candidates. I would look among phrases with non-spatial prepositions and those that are idiomatic. Another approach to finding them is to use the category-intersection capability of CatScan on the tool server. The intersection of English prepositional phrases, English adverbs, and NOT English adjectives would provide some. But not all such phrases would be hard-categorized as prepositional phrases. DCDuring TALK 16:26, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
From the first 30 or so generated by catscan prep phrases + adverbs: against the clock, against time, at a glance, at a pinch (I think, not part of my idiolect), at all, at any rate, at heart. Let me know how many candidates you would like. DCDuring TALK 17:13, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ruakh has provided a helpful list (below) of entries that are at once (!) idiomatic and categorized as prepositional phrases and adverbs, but not adjectives. in front is an example of an entry that has IMHO improperly so categorized, but which now has prep phrase as header and category using {{infl}}. As the list is dynamic, it no longer appears on the list. It was #10. The items preceding it seemed more likely to be adverbial only, IMHO. DCDuring TALK 18:56, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
two hundred English prepositional-phrase idioms that are (supposedly) only adverbial

Thank you for the examples. And could you explain what you mean by preposition functioning as an adjective? I get the adverb idea (you mean it answers the questions when, where, why, and how, right?) --Brett 19:37, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

After forms of "be" and other copulas. DCDuring TALK 20:03, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Compare: This item costs next to nothing vs. The cost of this item is next to nothing. —Internoob (Disc•Cont) 21:21, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There are many expressions where either a great deal of either expertise, work, consultation of references, or arbitrary decisiveness is required to make the classification as to whether something is "really" adjectival or adverbial. I don't and won't have CGEL in front of me, don't have the expertise, am not decisive about such matters, and am unwilling to work to a resolution. I am simply interested in preserving the result of the labors of those who have gone before and may have correctly classified a given prepositional phrase into one of the traditional PoSes. When a good usage examples provided shows use of the prepositional phrase after a copula, that suggests that they were not so careful about PoS (as was the case with in front. As to my own personal preference, I wouldn't mind everything being called a prepositional phrase, but I'm not willing to impose that preference on others. DCDuring TALK 22:08, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If you're wondering about what the CGEL would say, one of its key principles is the separation of category and function. In the CGEL there is no question of something functioning as an adjective or an adverb. These are categories, and dictionaries label things primarily by their category. Thus something is an adjective (or AdjP) or it is not. The adjective may or may not function as the complement of a linking verb, and if it doesn't (e.g., drunken) a note to the effect would be a useful kindness, but that has no bearing on its category. What you are calling "adverbial" is a common but unfortunate label which leads people to conflate the category of adverb with a function that is commonly performed by adverbs. As far as the CGEL is concerned, if something is headed by a preposition, it's a prepositional phrase. Period.--Brett 23:39, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
And I don't remember seeing a single entry in any dictionary that specifies a PoS for a phrase, except for NPs and phrasal verbs. Nevertheless, when adopting the Prepositional phrase header was discussed, there was an explicit statement of conservatism used to sell it. Let's not break faith with voters, however common that practice might be elsewhere. DCDuring TALK 00:27, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I missed the vote, but I went back and read the discussion. I don't find such a promise. Sorry for being a pain, but could you point it out for me?--Brett 00:42, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
See the talk page for the vote and Wiktionary:Beer_parlour_archive/2010/January#Preposition_forms_and_prepositional_phrases.. Also note the tiny number of voters. DCDuring TALK 00:51, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, I've been through it. I see no explicit statement of conservatism.
Regardless, I'm not sure why we would make the careful category-function distinction between true adjectives and nouns used as modifiers but when it comes to various uses of prepositional phrases, take the other route. The fact that one is a lexical category and one a phrasal category should have no bearing on the matter.--Brett 01:06, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That particular example — next to nothing — seems like a pronoun to me. You can refer to it not only with how much ("next to nothing is how much I make") but also with what ("next to nothing is what I make"). But what do I know.​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:17, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, and no. Here, next is not the head, and nor is to. The head is the determiner no, but it is part of a compound determiner: nothing, and it's being modified by the prepositions. Nothing is not a pronoun as pronouns cannot be modified by adverbs (e.g., almost nothing but not *almost I; yes you can have that's almost it, but almost here is part of the VP, and doesn't modify it; cf. *almost it was there.)--Brett 23:39, 23 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
So I'm not really sure what it is, but I'd say it's SOP.--Brett 01:12, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm creating a Kindle dictionary based on Wiktionary

I have produced a first version of a free ePub/Kindle dictionary based on Wiktionary and GCIDE v.0.46 XML, i.e. Webster's 1913 Unabridged with additions from WordNet. See: http://personal.inet.fi/koti/korhoj/

Now my goal is not to sell this, it's freely available. For convenience, I want to publish it in Amazon, and due to distribution costs they require a minimum price of $2.99 for files over 10 MB! They are considering whether public domain books (yes, I know that Wiktionary is not PD) might be published for free. At any rate, my dictionary is freely available from my webpage. Anyone have anything against this?

I read the Jan 2011 article Wiktionary:Beer_parlour#Publishing_a_Wiktionary. I'm not overly concerned about the legal side as I'm not selling it as such and I trust you don't want to sue me. I merely linked to the English Wiktionary site and included a reference to the license. There's really no good way to include a list of authors in Amazon book details. The best I could come up with I listed "Wiktionary Volunteers" as an Editor. The book itself is less of a problem. I suppose we could produce a compilation of all the volunteers and I could link to it. Although I don't think it's worth the effort.

Interestingly enough, GCIDE is covered by yet another (free) license so I had to license entries from GCIDE under that license. Since I'm not a lawyer (I'm an IT expert) I'm not sure if this is the way to do it but should be good enough.

Now so far I have mostly tackled with GCIDE XML, using an XSLT2 transformation. For Wiktionary I have yet created only the most crude transformation based on entries in the single-line format. The goal was to just quickly include the bulk of the definitions. I'm yet to tackle most of the niceties such as inflections. For GCIDE I have already included most of them though.

As I do have other engagements, I was wondering, is there any interest in participating in say SourceFourge based development of the Java program? It is really crude at the moment. I only read the editing rules this morning...

Korhoj 06:30, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Might I recommend you get hold of an IP lawyer before proceeding further?​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:08, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Boldface in image captions

I think there should be no boldface in image captions. For boldface in image captions, see this revision of "grillwork"; for no boldface, see most images in Wiktionary and this revision of "grillwork", which was reverted by a local oligarch without a summary. If anyone has an idea how to achieve no boldface in image captions, please let me know. --Dan Polansky 10:33, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

In a sense, an image is a usage example, so the headword should be in bold shouldn't it? —CodeCat 10:54, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
For one thing, I have a proposal in the pipeline to remove boldface from usage examples, as I do not see what useful function it serves and it highlights what should not be highlighted. Definitions contain no boldface and are more important than usage examples. Other dictionaries do not highlight the terms in usage examples using boldface, from what I have seen (lemmings). This proposal stands little chance of passing through a supermajority, though, so I have planned to let the proposal sit in the pipeline indefinitely.
For another thing, image captions are not really usage examples. It is true that the images themselves are examples of things to which the word is used to refer, so, informally, the images themselves are somthing like uage examples, and yet, images are not exactly usage examples. In any case, the current hugely prevalent practice is to have no boldface in image captions, and I like this practice.
As regards processes, I do not see why a minority of editors should overthrow the common practice in the main namespace. --Dan Polansky 11:06, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Oops, the images themselves are not examples of things to which the word refers; they are mere images of the things to which the word refers. --Dan Polansky 11:08, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Argument 1: That captions are running text
  1. All usages of a word in running text on its entry page have been highlighted, including principally usage examples and usage notes.
  2. Captions are a form of running text.
Argument 2: That imperfect, yet useful, images require relatively longer explanatory captions.
If one believes that the only images he have or should have are those that provide perfect self-explanatory images that need no caption other than the headword itself, then one might believe that there is no need for captions that make explicit the link between an image and its caption. We do not have access to a sufficient range of images to provide those perfect images. And yet even imperfect images can illustrate a definition of a headword. If a caption has a less-than-obvious relationship to a headword sense it may be essential to make clear what that relationship is, which almost always means a longer caption. Bolding the headword in the caption reminds the user of what is supposed to be important about the image.
Argument 3: That a caption is as good a usage example as most.
An explanatory caption may be a phrase or a sentence. It is not likely to be particularly unusual or unrealistic if it actually explains something in an image.
Argument 4: That images may only relate to a single sense of a headword requires bold to draw attention to the sense.
Polysemic words may have an image relating to but a single sense. It is necessary to make sure that users can understand which sense is illustrated. Whether it is a sense number or a gloss, the bolded headword draws attention to the immediate vicinity of the sense number or gloss.
Argument 5: A consistent user interface requires that if the headword is sometimes to be bolded in captions, that it always be bolded.
Both for contributors and for users, a consistent rule is desirable.
This summarizes arguments favoring bold for image captions. DCDuring TALK 15:00, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Ad 1: Usage notes do not always highlight the headword: our practice is inconsistent. Etymology sections, when they mention the headword (which is, admittedly, not often), do not generally boldface it. Derived-terms lists which list phrases including the headword to not boldface it. Nor should any of those.
Ad 2: The caption should clearly enough point to the relevant sense that there be no need to emphasize the headword. A close-up picture of someone serving a tennis ball, used to illustrate racquet, can read "Someone holding a racquet while playing tennis"; this is clear enough without boldfacing.
Ad 3: Granted. This may be sufficient reason to boldface the headword in an image caption. Still, personally, I don't like doing so.
Ad 4: I don't understand this argument. How does boldfacing the headword in an image caption specify which sense is meant?
It draws attention to the headword, which immediately adjoins the gloss or "sense" + sense number. More bolding strikes me as excessive and creating deception, confusion, and distraction. — This unsigned comment was added by DCDuring (talk • contribs) at 16:40, 24 March 2011.
Ad 5: Granted, I suppose, but I've answered your arguments (i.e., 1 and 2) that relate to only some entries.​—msh210℠ (talk) 16:06, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with all or most of what msh210 said. I will pick some highlights.
Statement 1-1 is false, as msh210 has pointed out: not all usage notes have the headword in boldace, and IMHO no usage notes should have the headword in boldface.
Argument 5 is a glaring fallacy. The argument that says that consistency requires "... if the headword is sometimes to be bolded in captions, that it always be bolded" can be easily rephrased as "... if the headword is sometimes to be not bolded in captions, that it always be not bolded"; the structure of the argument does not support bolded over nonbolded at all. But this is very plain: the requirement of consistency of formatting of captions does not in any way indicate preference of one formatting over another.
To hear "Both for contributors and for users, a consistent rule is desirable" from a person who has helped to ruin the recent vote on unification of formatting of etymologies (Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2011-02/Deprecating less-than symbol in etymologies, also diff) is curious indeed. Nonetheless, I agree that unified formatting of image captions is desirable. There already is almost unified formatting, without boldface. --Dan Polansky 07:34, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I'm against bold face as it doesn't work well in all scripts (see CJK for example). -- Prince Kassad 15:30, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I tend to use bold face like I would for a headword. I suppose when boldface is not used for the head word then it shouldn't be used elsewhere, such as CJK and Hebr. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:33, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I would not think that we would necessarily impose, prefer, or allow such a practice for scripts where the harm was greater than the benefit. I am only speaking for Latin script, really English. Should this be a matter for Wiktionary:About English? DCDuring TALK 16:40, 24 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

CFI and vandalism

Now this is a section CFI could do well without:

==Vandalism==

From time to time, various parties will insert material into Wiktionary which clearly has nothing to do with Wiktionary's purpose or practices. Such activity is considered vandalism and will be undone at the first opportunity. If the vandalism consists of an edit to an existing page, that edit will be reverted. If the vandalism consists of a new article, that article will be removed. This is done at the discretion of the administrators and does not require discussion, even if the vandalism consists of a new article for a term which would otherwise meet these criteria but has not yet been entered legitimately.

Any supporters of removal of the section from CFI? And if removal is not supported, are there any proposals for abbreviation of the section?

The section first appeared in CFI in this revision, on 11 August 2005. --Dan Polansky 10:22, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I support its removal.​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:52, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No strong feelings but it seems to me this is relevant and correct so it could stay. It's staing the obvious but I don't mind that in policies; I don't think you can have too much clarity. --Mglovesfun (talk) 15:59, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There is a risk of meta:instruction creep and excess bureaucracy if everything is explained to a high level of detail. However, in this case it is relevant and helpful to outline guidelines for dealing with vandalism. I do think it could be shortened a bit though. Tempodivalse [talk] 19:41, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Here is a shorter version of the text:

==Vandalism==

Edits and pages which clearly have nothing to do with Wiktionary's purpose or practices will be undone or removed at the first opportunity, at the discretion of the administrators.

--Daniel. 21:55, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Much better! It says the same thing in a more concise fashion. Tempodivalse [talk] 22:55, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That is a nice and succinct statement the original; thanks! Yet, I still think it does not belong to criteria for inclusion. CFI governs (a) what terms should be included, (b) what senses of the terms should be included. CFI does not govern which other material should be included: it does not govern the inclusion of etymologies, pronunciation, example sentences, quotations, derived terms, and other material. Furthermore, CFI does not govern the process details of removal of material, such as via what process (RFD, RFV, speedy deletion), within what discussion time frame, and under whose discretion things should be removed from Wiktionary. See also WT:Vandalism. --Dan Polansky 05:40, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You're welcome. I agree with Dan Polansky's reasons to remove the Vandalism section from CFI. Perhaps the succint version of that section should be moved to another policy. The current Wiktionary:Vandalism is not a good place to do that, because it is worded as a help page, rather than a policy; so I believe it should be renamed to Help:Vandalism. --Daniel. 10:38, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I also agree that the CFI does not need and should not have a section on vandalism. Vandalism isn't content. - [The]DaveRoss 03:14, 27 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well... it is until it's removed. But I take your point. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:11, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Name of the language codes osx, gml and nds

The names that these three codes expand to are a bit inconsistent. {{osx}} expands to Old Saxon, {{nds}} expands to Low Saxon. But the code {{gml}}, for the descendant of Old Saxon and the ancestor of modern Low Saxon, expands to Middle Low German. Shouldn't that last one be Middle Low Saxon then? —CodeCat 15:05, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

No, because it's known as Middle Low German. That's the code: German, Middle Low. Middle Low Saxon gets 13 hits on Google Books; Middle Low German gets 350. Middle Low German also gets 30 times as many hits on Google. It's the standard name for the language.--Prosfilaes 17:03, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I agree; but we might consider changing {{nds}} to "Low German" (which is much more common, and which Ethnologue does identify as an alternative name). —RuakhTALK 17:23, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There is also the code {{nds-nl}} which expands to Dutch Low Saxon. Maybe the other code is Low Saxon because of that... otherwise you'd have Dutch Low Saxon and Low German. Or even Dutch Low German? :p —CodeCat 18:30, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Like I stated in the deletion discussion, {{nds-nl}} is pointless because there's already {{gos}}, {{twd}}, {{drt}} etc. -- Prince Kassad 21:46, 25 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Psychology and psychiatry

Has there been any discussion on when these two categories should be used? It seems arbitrary now. I would suggest putting official diagnoses and psychiatric drugs in Category:Psychiatry but putting all the more general words in Category:Psychology. Sorry if this has already been discussed, I couldn't find it. WurdSnatcher 06:08, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

CFI and protologism

I propose to remove the section for protologisms from CFI:

===Protologisms===

The designation protologism is for terms defined in the hopes that they will be used, but which are not actually in wide use. These are listed on Appendix:List of protologisms, and should not be given their own separate entries.

see discussion for exclusion of the words in lists - Protologisms, Wikisaurus, concordances etc, from application of the CFI to each individual listed word.

My rationale is that protologisms are already excluded by failing the attestation criterion specified at the beginning of CFI, so this section reads like a comment rather than an additional regulation.

While my favorite option is removal, rewording the section would also be better than doing nothing. Dropping the text that is small and in italics seems also better than nothing.

The section is a result of the following edits to CFI (I could have overlooked very minor tweaks):

  • diff, Richardb, 26 February 2006, addition of the small text
  • diff, Eclecticology, 23 May 2005, minor tweak in wording
  • diff, Dmh, 2 May 2005, creation of a dedicated section while the text remains unchanged
  • diff, Dmh, 12 April 2005, initial wording of a paragraph

Any supporters? --Dan Polansky 06:20, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Afaik, WT:LOP is actually deprecated - it is no longer linked to from the pre-defined deletion summary, for example. Therefore, I support removing the section wholesale. -- Prince Kassad 08:43, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, remove it and re-nominating WT:LOP for deletion. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:09, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

CFI and formatting of alternative spellings

One more proposal; I hope to be excused for the series.

This subsection of the section "WT:CFI#Spellings" could be removed or simplified:

====Formatting====

Once it is decided that a misspelling is of sufficient importance to merit its own page the formatting of such a page should not be particularly problematical. The usual language and part of speech headings can be used, followed by this simple entry:

# {{misspelling of|[[...]]}}

An additional section explaining why the term is a misspelling should be considered optional.

Layout of formatting is not within remit of CFI. The part "the formatting of such a page should not be particularly problematical" seems outright worthy of removal.

Any supporters? --Dan Polansky 07:46, 26 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, support; I've spotted this before, it's non-CFI material; formatting is not CFI, it should be in ELE (and I think it isn't). So I'd support such a removal, and coverage in WT:ELE. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:08, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Good one! Support. -- Prince Kassad 22:14, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This section tells us not only how to format the entry (which certainly belongs elsewhere and not in the CFI) but also that the entry should be a mere 'soft redirect' that clearly spells out that the misspelling is just that, rather than a real entry or "alternative spelling" entry. I think that that belongs in the CFI. So unless and until we agree on wording that specifies that without specifying formatting, I say keep the section as it is.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:14, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Headword-line templates

Suddenly changing their names with "move" operation, in particular when that change is accompanied with mass-substitute operation committed by a bot under the command of the mover, is generally undesirable. Every template name is a form of API that can be used both by humans to type, or by external programs to parse. In case of Serbo-Croatian, I utilize such external tools which process regular dump for inconsistencies, help me create new entries etc. And I'm sure I'm not the only one that relies on such tools for regular editing activity. Each time you change a template name, template parameter name or functionality, without making an effort to inform the concerned parties affected by it, you're introducing braking changes into the system. This is especially douchey if you're doing it for the languages that you're not editing it.

Also: the headword-line template names and their pointless abbreviations. They are not standardized. Any standardization is de facto, not de iure. Why on earth would I have to scratch my head each time, manually looking up the documentation, to find out whether the pron in xx-pron refers to a "pronoun" or "pronunciation", or whether the conj in xx-conj refers to "conjunction" or "conjugation", and so on. So far the existing headword-line template abbreviations in wide use (adj, adv, conj and such) are leftovers from the old days where editors where hoping to spare some keystrokes, and were also IMHO biased by similarly coined abbreviations that have a long use in certain computing environments where the length of a filename was an issue. I see no use for them today. They are not reducing the footprint of the database (both xx-adj and xx-adjective will compress equally, or almost equally), they are introducing unnecessary ambiguities as outlined above, and they are hardly sparing editors of much typing (which, if it really is an issue, can be solved by creating redirects that can be resolved by bots at a delay, from abbreviations to full names). So I propose that we get rid of them completely and use xx-<full part-of-speech name> Wiktionary-wide.

Also, if any of the local Javascript wizards is up to it, I'd love to have some Intellisense-like capabilities for templates. E.g. you type {{abc, and a drop-down list appears showing a list of available template names, and once a name has been fully typed/selected, its documentation taken from Template:template-name/doc the is shown as a tooltip. That wold greatly enhance the typical template usage scenario IMHO, which all too often relies on guessing the name and clicking the documentation page manually. -Ivan Štambuk 09:59, 27 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

  1. Support Daniel. 05:34, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    • I support the standardization effort of having {{en-adjective}}, {{en-noun}}, {{en-adverb}}, {{en-verb}}, {{en-interjection}}, {{en-pronoun}}, {{fr-noun}}, {{es-noun}}, {{fr-adjective}}, {{es-adjective}} and so on.
    • My main concern is consistency. It would be nice to have an easily recognizable pattern like "xx-conjunction for all conjunctions of all languages, always, no exceptions". For that goal, I would support either using full names of parts-of-speech like "en-adjective" or abbreviations like "en-adj". However, full names aren't bad and are common: Wiktionarians often are trained to type full language names as L2 headers, full context labels, full category names and so on.
    • In addition, at least from a technical point of view, since these are templates with multiple functions, every (reasonably short) name can be seen as an "abbreviation". {{en-adjective}} is a very, very short way of telling the software to format the headword bold, display links to other entries, categorize the current entry, etc. --Daniel. 05:34, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I like to blame my tiredness rather than something more inherent in me, but I do not understand that point of your first paragraph, Ivan. But I agree with your second — standardizing template names — so long as the name an editor in a particular language is used to remains as a redirect.​—msh210℠ (talk) 07:56, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The point was to remind editors not to be too casual about innocent-looking template-rename operations, on widely-transcluded and long-term-stabilized templates, as these could have some unforeseen repercussions that break things. I undid several such renames recently by multiple editors, so instead of issuing explanations on multiple talkpages, I decided to bring it up here instead. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it" as Americans would say. --Ivan Štambuk 09:35, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I strongly agree with the ain't-broke-no-fix point as a general rule for widely used templates, such as the inflection-line family. Specifically I greatly prefer short template names where they are unambiguous. In English conjugation isn't used so "en-conj" is unambiguous. OTOH it is not so widely used that we would be wasting many keystrokes to have it spelled out. Similarly for "en-pronoun" and "en-contraction". But "en-adv", "en-adj", and "en-prep" do save keystrokes and don't have the same ambiguity risk AFAIK. We don't have generally discussed and accepted templates for headers like "Proverb" and "Phrase" (ambiguous among use for phrasebook entries and other uses as for phrases that might have multiple or uncertain grammatical functions or be non-constituents). These could probably stand to be spelled out or even extended to resolve the ambiguity (eg, en-phrasebook or en=phrasebk), at least once we have more consensus on Phrasebook generally. DCDuring TALK 20:01, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Support consistent naming of such template; I don't care what name that turns out to be; NB the redirects would be kept, for example {{en-adj}} redirecting to {{en-adjective}} (currently it's the opposite). Mglovesfun (talk) 22:06, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Attestation from Google Groups

Google Groups contains various non-Usenet groups. Are they "durably archived"? For example, can pages like this and this serve as sources to attest a word? --Daniel. 05:23, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Interesting question. At the moment, they seem to be as durably archived as any Usenet post archived by Google. I suspect, though, that others will care more about Usenet posts than about them, and scrap them when buying Google's Usenet archive whenever Google divests itself of Groups or folds. But that's all conjecture, and not necessarily useful conjecture for a discussion of our CFI. One point that might be worth considering is that Usenet hits are already weaker than edited works' and many regulars dislike using them; extending the weakness of the CFI to further fora may be out of order. Do note that certainly (AFAICT at least) the status quo is not to allow them.​—msh210℠ (talk) 08:06, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
What he said. Furthermore I still don't know what "durably archived" means in a Wiktionary context; I don't think we have anything on the issue at all. The way we use the term seems to me to be circular; it's durably archived if we considered it to be so, otherwise it isn't. --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:17, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It's not circular, though there is ambiguity at some broad margins. We consider what we find at Google Books and Scholar to be durably archived because it is almost without exception from print (though I am not sure about Scholar). News is almost always from print, but there are many hits from newspaper blogs and online-only newspapers of uncertain archival status. Usenet is the only content we have been accepting that exists purely in digital form.
We are following a very conservative approach in that we do not accept electronic media unless they are in the custody of multiple long-lived institutions (eg, public libraries, university computing centers). The digital archives that offer snapshots of the Web at frequent intervals don't seem to count because of their uncertain long-term future. Similarly with Google itself. DCDuring TALK 19:43, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
w:Usenet#Archives does not list any archiver of Usenet except Google. I can't find any evidence of any now in operation, either, except for the archives of specific newsgroups.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:01, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Linking to sister projects

Please see these two pages:

They don't exist.

When one accesses a page on Wikipedia that doesn't exist, they can see a good-looking box of alternative sister projects that use "Special:Search" to go directly to the page or automatically begin a search if the page doesn't exist in the other project too.

However, when one accesses a page on Wiktionary that doesn't exist, the only suggestion of sister project is a rather hidden link to Wikipedia that is spelled exactly like the word in question (that is, it doesn't use the aforementioned Special:Search).

I suggest copying the box from Wikipedia to Wiktionary, to enhance the user experience by giving them more places to look for whatever they are looking for, and starting the search automatically when the page is not present in the other project as well. --Daniel. 06:40, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

While someone who doesn't find what he wants in WP might find it better here or at b: or s: or q: or commons, I really do think that we're best off sending people to w: when we lack what they seek; the additional links would just lower the ratio of signal to noise. That said, I agree we should link to the search page rather than the article page, so as to increase the likelihood of being helpful.​—msh210℠ (talk) 08:00, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Good catch, Daniel.. I agree with Msh210's specific recommendation as a default. Perhaps we could have a specific template deployed something like {{only in}} for cases where the w: default isn't good enough and there is evidence that users mistakenly come here or a contributor has a lot of enthusiasm and a good theory for anticipating such user behavior. DCDuring TALK 19:30, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for your input. Yet, I disagree with your reasons to send people only to Wikipedia, either always or as a default procedure. Let me explain why:

Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiversity and Wikibooks are very close to each other in contents (they are supposed to provide information on relatively everything, after all); in fact, they differ mainly by coverage and presentation. Therefore, it would be helpful to, at the very least, link between these 4 projects. If one wants to know what "water" is, then their thirst of knowledge may be relatively satiated by an encyclopedic article, a dictionary definition, a "learning resource" and/or a "textbook".

Differently, Commons, Wikiquote, Wikinews and Wikisource have a greater focus on coverage or presentation, in detriment of providing information. The existence of sister projects with different focuses and goals is a Good Thing™. However, again, if one wants to know what "water" is, then media, quotations, news and sources are not inherently or easily going to be helpful.

That said, I suggest linking between all eight projects, under the rationale of Wikipedia, Wiktionary, Wikiversity and Wikibooks being strongly related with each other; and Commons, Wikiquote, Wikinews and Wikisource being merely complementary material. --Daniel. 23:52, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Gothic entries in Latin script

Right now we have quite a few entries in Gothic. Most of them use the Gothic script, but a few (those from Crimean Gothic) are in Latin script. I was wondering if it would be desirable to have Latin script entries for the others as well, and have them redirect to the Gothic script entry as 'alternative spelling of' or something like that. It would be very useful for looking up Gothic words, because support for Gothic script is generally poor, and most actual sources on Gothic only use Latin script. —CodeCat 13:42, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I think the others are in Latin script because w:Crimean Gothic is only attested in Latin script. The other works are written in Gothic script, so why should we not use it (it's not like it's not in Unicode)? -- Prince Kassad 14:08, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not saying we shouldn't have entries in Gothic script. What I'm suggesting is that we allow entries in Latin script as alternative spellings of the Gothic script entries. Because as far as attestation is concerned, there are a lot more sources with Latin script than there are in Gothic. —CodeCat 14:20, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I see. What you're saying (IMO) is that Gothic words (some, at least) can be attested in the Latin script in running text (that is, not purely as transliterations). --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:34, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Well, it depends on the interpretion of CFI and whether people think it only takes historical sources in account for extinct languages. -- Prince Kassad 14:42, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think it's more a practical consideration. People who are studying Gothic generally study it in the Latin alphabet, and read transliterated texts. It would be rather inconvenient to ask them to transliterate back into the Gothic alphabet before they can find terms. Even though Gothic is only natively attested in the Gothic script, Latin transliterations are far more abundant than texts in the original script. —CodeCat 15:27, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Note that Special:Search already finds terms if you enter the transliteration (provided it's given in the entry, of course). -- Prince Kassad 16:03, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
That's true, but search is very inconvenient for terms that appear in many entries. Try searching for the Gothic entry 'aba' and you'll see what I mean... —CodeCat 16:11, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Then you use "Gothic aba" in the search box, and in general "<language name> transliteration". You can use ====Transliterations==== section to provide other less-used transliteration schemes. --Ivan Štambuk 20:26, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Personally, I find doing Gothic in the Gothic script to be a silly affection. As far as I know, Gothic has never been published in the Gothic script. Whenever you find it in real life, it's in the Latin script, unless you're actually looking at an ancient artifact or manuscript, in which case I don't think you're using Wiktionary.--Prosfilaes 19:56, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
But I think CFI only allows the ancient artifacts or manuscripts to be used...? -- Prince Kassad 20:03, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see where you're seeing that. CFI suggests using printed sources, not manuscripts, whether that be of Stephen King (who, for all I know, might have terrible spelling that gets normalized by his editors) or Bishop Wulfia. I find that interpretation silly; is it out of line to cite Pepys, because he wrote in shorthand, not Latin script? Are we really going to have words not listed under the spellings that they're being published with because those spellings don't match manuscripts that few get a chance to look at?--Prosfilaes 20:13, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Publishing is irrelevant. What matters is the attestation in the primary sources, regardless of whether they are hand-written or printed. Gothic written in Gothic script is the only (apart from Crimean Gothic which gets special Latin-script treatment, and which is silly to even mix with centuries-older Gothic proper, but that's another issue) "real-life" source of Gothic lexemes that we can harvest, as it was written and used by native speakers of Gothic language. Enabling additional functionality of soft-redirecting transliterations to main entries (similar to what we use for e.g. misspellings) should be done at the level of MediaWiki software, by selecting desired checkboxes which would confine search to parts of the page that list transliterations for a specific language. Adding Latin script transliterations as mainspace entries for Gothic would inevitably lead to the same argument being applied for Sanskrit, Mandarin and many other languages each of which utilizes gazillion disparate transliteration schemes. We don't want those kind of maintenance problems, unless they can be 100% automated. Many ancient languages, and especially in case of those such as Gothic where we're dealing with a rather small corpus, have primary sources digitized and freely available as high-resolution images on the web, so there is no problem with that. --Ivan Štambuk 20:34, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Publishing is rarely if ever a primary source. I'll ask the question again; can we not cite Pepys's Diary because the manuscript is not written in shorthand, not the Latin script? Gothic written in Latin script was good enough for generations of lexicographers and linguists, as that is how they received every bit of information about the language. Why is the Gothic script suddenly important?
My argument is that the spellings in which people in the modern world read texts should be recorded. When people buy a book of Middle English texts, they should be able to look up the spelling in the book on Wiktionary. When people buy a book with Gothic in it, they should be able to look up the spelling in the book on Wiktionary. 100% of the time, that Gothic will have been written in the Latin script. That's not true for Sanskrit, Mandarin, or any of these other languages.
Let's talk about a modern language community which your policy hurts. 19th century Turkish was written in Arabic; if there's some words only used by Ziya Pasha and his contemporaries, your policy would demand we only have them in Arabic script (and useless transliterations), not modern Turkish spelling, even if that's the script that our users would be most likely to find the text in, even though most Turkish users couldn't read or enter Turkish in the Arabic script.
Wiktionary should not be an idle or scholarly project. We're here to produce a dictionary for the average user, and the average user--in fact all users--looking up Gothic words do so in Latin script.--Prosfilaes 21:31, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Re Turkish, that's what we're doing already. See Category:Ottoman Turkish language. Also, Wiktionary should not be an idle or scholarly project - why not? I think we will attract many good contributors if we apply scholarly standards upon ourselves. Otherwise, we would be just another unreliable website. -- Prince Kassad 21:34, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Not having both spellings for 19th century Turkish means that we are making it impossible to use modern editions of 19th century Turkish texts. It's like stopping people from looking up words in Twain unless they can transcribe the words into Deseret. It's fine to apply scholarly standards, but it's not fine to target only a scholarly audience. In the case of Gothic, having only the Gothic script makes it hard for everyone to look up Gothic; everyone trained in Gothic is trained to use a Latin spelling of Gothic, not the Gothic script.--Prosfilaes 21:42, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
we are making it impossible to use modern editions of 19th century Turkish texts - Exactly. I personally see no problem with that. If there are some old Turkish words attested (as used) only in the 19th century (and earlier) Arabic-script spellings, they must not be added in the modern Turkish Latin script. Although, this is again a different type of problem: transliteration of a script to Latin that was never originally written in Latin, but only artificially by language specialists in other to facilitate its study (none of them actually being a native speaker of it), and reprinting a known work in another alphabet because standard alphabet has officially changed, with the language itself being very much alive, are two very different things. Personally I'd allow for exceptions such as when the alphabet was officially changed, or when there are multiple used alphabets for a language but a word can be attested only in one, to add it in the other ones too in order to maintain symmetry, and similar. --Ivan Štambuk 16:05, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You see no problem in preventing some real world users from using Wiktionary to look up words found in textbooks for theoretical reasons? I see no reason why we shouldn't serve our users.--Prosfilaes 18:21, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not familiar with the shorthand notation used by Pepys so I cannot comment on that. But in general no - shorthand spellings cannot be used as sources of attestation of any word in any language, if they cannot be added in their original form as Unicode-encoded words. But that is another problem that has nothing to do with the issue of Gothic language transliterations in Latin script.
Gothic written in Latin script was good enough for generations of lexicographers and linguists - But it is not good enough for us. We have Unicode, digitalized sources, programming skills - tools that enable us to be orders of magnitude more productive than any poor drudge of the analog era. There are no technical excuses for us except in a few corner cases (e.g. langauges not yet in Unicode and so on).
My argument is that the spellings in which people in the modern world read texts should be recorded. When people buy a book of Middle English texts, they should be able to look up the spelling in the book on Wiktionary. When people buy a book with Gothic in it, they should be able to look up the spelling in the book on Wiktionary. 100% of the time, that Gothic will have been written in the Latin script. - Anyone who bothers enough to learn Gothic grammar can waste another half an hour (if that much) getting accustomed to Gothic alphabet, and half a minute installing Gothic Unicode fonts and a keyboard mapping. The inability to search transcriptions and confine search results to specific languages should be solved at the level of MediaWiki software, and not by introducing Latin-script clones of entries.
Wiktionary should not be an idle or scholarly project. We're here to produce a dictionary for the average user, and the average user- - Yes it should be a scholarly project. Every dictionary is a scholarly project. Anyone who bothers to pick up a dictionary from time to time in order to look up new words that he has encountered or expand one's vocabulary is already in some 10% of population. We must not be confined by the parameters of average human's sphere of (dis)interest, stupidity and laziness. Dumbing down in general is undesirable. In case of ancient languages such as Gothic it doesn't make much sense either, since we're already dealing with an obscure topic, and those who study it are accustomed to separate set of high standards. --Ivan Štambuk 16:05, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Shorthand is exactly related to this case; do we worry about what Stephen King actually wrote in his manuscripts, or do we worry about the printed text our users will actually be looking up. We've cited Pepys a couple dozen times, despite the fact that his diary was kept in shorthand, not Latin script; are we going to delete those citations? Gothic users have made an active choice not to use the Gothic script; see Don't Proliferate; Transliterate!. Why should they spend any time at all figuring out how to set up their computer to use a website that ignores that choice? To add another script to the equation doesn't make anyone any more productive.--Prosfilaes 18:21, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Can I quote the whole of the above?
[quote] Personally, I find doing Gothic in the Gothic script to be a silly affection. As far as I know, Gothic has never been published in the Gothic script. Whenever you find it in real life, it's in the Latin script, unless you're actually looking at an ancient artifact or manuscript, in which case I don't think you're using Wiktionary.--Prosfilaes 19:56, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[end of quote][reply]
I don't see how 'Gothic in Gothic in Gothic script' is any odder than Latin in Latin script. I don't really know what you mean by published; a lot of old works weren't published as publishing didn't exist yet. Furthermore I'm not sure why someone who's looking an an ancient artefact or manuscript wouldn't use Wiktionary. On the contrary really. Mglovesfun (talk) 21:53, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Why do we have English in Latin script, instead of English scripts like Shavian or Deseret or a shorthand? Because English is actually published in the Latin script. Why do we have Japanese in Chinese script, instead of only Japanese scripts? Because Japanese is actually published with Han ideographs. What I mean by published is published; and all old works that we use have been published, and rarely in photocopies or any close copies of the original, but in modern fonts with lower-case letters with ligatures and abbreviations expanded out. Every time Gothic has been published, it's been published in the Latin script. Nobody cared about encoding Gothic, because no one was printing or working with Gothic in Gothic script.*
If there are people looking at ancient artifacts or manuscripts instead of the printed form who would choose an incomplete source like Wiktionary, given that they were trained to read Gothic in the Latin script, and probably transliterate the manuscripts or artifacts before reading them, I suspect the use of Gothic script would be a turn off. If they had a program to look up words they were typing in, it wouldn't work with Wiktionary, because they would be entering the words in the script their publishers and audience would expect, the Latin script.
* Gothic is beyond the 2-byte limit, meaning early versions of Windows and Java and other programs couldn't handle them. It was one of the first batch of scripts so encoded, and it, like Deseret and Shavian, were chosen because nobody wanted their script to be first to be placed there; so some scripts nobody actually using Unicode was using were encoded there, to encourage support and future encoding there.--Prosfilaes 23:19, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We do support Shavian for pronunciation sections, if you were wondering. See {{shavian}} and water as an example. -- Prince Kassad 07:13, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Support Gothic in Latin script. Agree that Gothic in Gothic script is a silly affection. --Vahag 06:15, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I have no opinion on whether use of the Gothic script is silly or an affectation, but if Gothic works are primarily or exclusively published in the Latin script, then we should definitely have entries for the Latin spellings, either as main entries or as alternatives. Questions of languages and script have a lot of awkward edge cases, but this doesn't seem to be one of them. —RuakhTALK 17:31, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I will not support this without a VOTE. -- Prince Kassad 17:42, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Again, what part of WT:CFI says that we can't cite printed works?--Prosfilaes 18:21, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
While we do have rules against transliterations, doesn't this become a different matter if the entire work is a transliteration, and this transliterated version is far more common than the original? Gothic texts are published in just that way. —CodeCat 19:29, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
We have (toned) pinyin. Even if we keep the Gothic script entries as the main entries, we should have Latin script entries like our pinyin entries. - -sche (discuss) 05:01, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Allowing Romanized Korean as entry titles

Do we allow Romanized Korean as entry titles, as opposed to only as transliterations? Should we? Is Romanized Korean used as a 'language', that is, are there published works in it, or whole paragraphs written in it in CFI allowable sources? If not, we should just treat them as transliterations. We don't have too much Romanized Korean so getting rid off it wouldn't be too painful. --Mglovesfun (talk) 14:22, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

To answer your questions: no, no and no. Korean is a syllabic and very regular script (unlike Japanese kana and Chinese ideographs) so there's no need to have romanizations as separate entries. -- Prince Kassad 14:27, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
This kind of relates to the topic above this one. I think romanisations should be allowed, for the sake of convenience since most of our users will only be able to read or type the Latin alphabet. And there is also our mission statement, to include all words in all languages. Isn't a transliteration also still a word, just a different representation of it? —CodeCat 19:47, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
There are many transliterations from Korean to the Latin script; are we going to have all of them? All transliterations from all languages to Latin will do good for our entry count, but won't make it easy to find anything, especially if two Korean words transliterate to the same spelling using different transliterations. This isn't like the Gothic case; Korean is always written in the Korean script, and users who expect to work with Korean will know how to enter it.--Prosfilaes 20:04, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
CFI line one "As an international dictionary, Wiktionary is intended to include “all words in all languages”." Transliterations don't meet CFI as they aren't words. Conversely, if we're going to allow Gothic and Korean in the Latin script, we should allow, English, Dutch, Finnish (whatever) in Gothic and Han script too. Mglovesfun (talk) 21:48, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Not necessarily. This is a dictionary aimed at English-speaking users, and the only script we can expect English speakers to know is Latin. So just as we treat English in a privileged way, we might want to give the Latin script a special place too. —CodeCat 21:51, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Not necessarily, no. But why not? Mglovesfun (talk) 21:55, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
So then, you expect the Russian Wiktionary to transliterate all English words in Cyrillic script? Or should the Mandarin Wiktionary transliterate all English words in Han script? Or should the Ancient Egyptian Wiktionary transliterate all English words in Egyptian Hieroglyphs? Or should the ASL Wiktionary transliterate all English words in SignWriting? -- Prince Kassad 22:03, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The point is, for me that is, WT:CFI#Attestation allows words/terms to meet CFI in three different ways; use in a well-known work, clear widespread use or three independent durably archived citations. Transliterations won't meet CFI if they're only transliterations, and I don't think we want to extend CFI to allow words that aren't used in a language, like philein not being used in Ancient Greek texts. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:19, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think the problem wouldn't be nearly as bad if the search function always showed possible transliterations first, or could be made to search for only a given language... —CodeCat 22:44, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I plan on addressing that on the Beer Parlour when it's a bit quieter. Concerning Korean and Korean only, we've had a quite a good arfument above why Romanized Korean shouldn't be allowed; would anyone argue the opposite? Is it worth rfv'ing some Romanized Korean entries to see if even one of them can pass or, if there are no objections, do we just delete the lot? I certainly don't mind rfvs providing there's a realistic chance that even one such entry could pass. If Prince Kassad's right, there isn't. --Mglovesfun (talk) 15:27, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
WT:RFV#Hunmin Jeongeum, my initial search came up with absolute zero for the Korean entry. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:44, 2 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

WT:CFI#Company names

Company names

Being a company name does not guarantee inclusion. To be included, the use of the company name other than its use as a trademark (i.e., a use as a common word or family name) has to be attested.

Um, that's it? Any company name that has another meaning can be included? What about Suzuki and Honda then? Mglovesfun (talk) 22:35, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

As I've said elsewhere, and in much the same words, I don't think that section is terribly well phrased, but I take it to mean that company names aren't included, period. I think it's saying that if a company name is also a family name, then that's included; and if a company name is also a regular word, then that's included, but in no case will the company name itself be included (except in the loose sense that a word might be included while also, simultaneously, being a company name). —RuakhTALK 00:26, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Fwiw, I agree with Ran.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:17, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Now I took about 45 seconds to discover or refresh my memory about the fact that Ruakh's name is Ran. :p Well, I agree with his interpretation of the policy too. --Daniel. 06:40, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I just want to see the unvoted-on section on company names removed from CFI. (I have said this before, I know.) I don't care all that much about what the section is intended to mean exactly; I do not assign it any authority. I would like to see "Verizon" included, if only for the pronunciation. A regulation dedicated to geographic names has been deleted recently; company names (names of other specific entities) could follow the suit. --Dan Polansky 08:00, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding above sentence "but I take it to mean that company names aren't included, period". Really? I could never interpret it like that. For example, to me Ford as a vehicle manufacturer would meet CFI as it's attested as a family name. Actually, not many company names would be attested with other meanings, so in reality 99% of companies would be excluded. But, if I started up a company called Smith it would meet CFI as long as I could satisfy WT:CFI#Attestation as it clearly meets the criterion above. --Mglovesfun (talk) 12:51, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You're looking at it from the perspective of a veteran RFVer: such-and-such sense is included, now we have to see if that sense meets the CFI, hey look, WT:CFI has rules for whether a company-name sense is included, hey that's weird, the rules say we include a company-name sense if there's any other sense at all. But I don't think it was written from that perspective. I think it was mostly written from the perspective of, we don't include company names, hey but wait a sec, we don't want to exclude "Smith" or "Apple" just because they're company names, O.K., so to clarify, we don't include company names that are just company names. (Actually, if you look at the history of that section, it's more complicated than that; in its original version there was a parenthetical side-note that clearly assumed my perspective, but much of the other text could be taken either way; but years of refactorings have changed the parenthetical part from a side-note to a key defining element of the section, such that IMHO the only way to read it now is the way that I described.) —RuakhTALK 14:23, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I can't do much more than repeat what I said above; I could never read it that way. I could possibly ignore the text itself and take a guess at what the person (or persons) who wrote it intended and come up with your interpretation. Frankly, that's it. --Mglovesfun (talk) 15:04, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
It was almost certainly intended to be read with the attributive-use rule. Thus it remains as a testament either to our limited ability to draft proposals and conduct votes that anticipate significant consequences, even those involving explicitly discussed topics in the same document or specific defects in the vote and discussion about removing attributive use. DCDuring TALK 15:33, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Problems arise from complexity. Clearly stating the rule all words, all languages (whatever the meaning of the words) would make things simpler: company names should be included, but only when they can be considered as a single word rather than as a sequence of several words. However, words created by somebody and not used by anybody else should not be included, and company names are not an exception: several attestations independent of the company should be required. Lmaltier 20:46, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If I'm talking about a company, and I use its name in reference to it, is that considered "independent"? (I mean, assuming I have no relationship with the company other than talking about it?) —RuakhTALK 21:13, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Of course, it's a use using the normal sense of the word. But uses found in advertising, etc. should not be considered as independent attestations.
In my opinion, Société Nationale des Chemins de fer Belges or IBM, Inc should not be included (not single words), but SNCB or IBM should be included. The boundary is not always obvious. Lmaltier 05:31, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Unless I have overlooked something, there are only two edits to CFI that have lead to the current text for company names:

  • diff, by DAVilla, 21 November 2007, creation of a section dedicated to company names, with today's phrasing
  • diff, by Uncle G, 22 May 2005, a new paragraph on trademarks and company names

The current intended meaning has to be known by DAVilla. But I still do not see how the intended meaning matters to anything, given the section has close to zero authority. Fact is, there is no consensus on which rules should govern the inclusion of names of specific entities, although there was a consensus at some point on the rules that currently govern brand names. --Dan Polansky 09:36, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Seems like an atypically clear case where the passage should be removed. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:04, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for the diff! I agree with the interpretation above, and that it isn't very well written. The original text below, before my edit, had a lot of corporate propaganda between those two sentences. It was removed because the brand names vote meant it no longer applied. We did stuff like that then, voting on principles rather than whether to make the wording consistent. Previous discussions about trademarks heavily sided on including genericized terms at the very least. The term xerox is listed as a verb in the OED, a slightly higher authority on linguistic matters than Xerox Corp. DAVilla 06:29, 6 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Being a trademark or a company name does not guarantee inclusion. (Of course, some company names are derived from family names, and are included on that basis.) Although some words are trademarks and company names, not all trademarks and company names are words. (Indeed, trademark holders will vigorously defend their trademarks against becoming words. According to Adobe Systems, there is no such word as Photoshopped, since Photoshop® is a trademark and not a common verb that can have a past participle; according to Xerox there is no such word as xerox, since Xerox® is a trademark and not a common verb; according to Sony there is no such word as Playstationize since there’s no word Playstation at all and PlayStation® is a trademark and not a common verb.) Many trademarks and company names are deliberately protologisms. To be included, the use of a trademark or company name other than its use as a trademark (i.e., a use as a common word) has to be attested.

WT:AN and WT:NFE

What is the difference between the purposes of these two pages?

  • WT:AN (Wiktionary:Announcements)
  • WT:NFE (Wiktionary:News for editors)

--Daniel. 23:02, 28 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Asked and answered: see [[Wiktionary talk:News for editors#Wiktionary:Announcements]].​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:17, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks, but the answer from the discussion that you linked is either inaccurate or simply not always followed by people. Both pages have been used to inform about changes of templates and changes of rules. WT:AN is more abrangent, by listing technical aspects of Wiktionary such as the Bug #5033 and a particular instance of the site being temporarily offline; also, it lists a small number of admins and 'crats. And it often duplicates parts of WT:Milestones.
My main concern is that I don't get why we need these two pages. Shouldn't one of them be RFDO'd or RFC'd, perhaps the bigger one? --Daniel. 06:32, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I tend to think we don't need both; a merge sounds good, at least worth a proposal. --Mglovesfun (talk) 15:33, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I don't mind getting rid of AN so long as NFE and Milestones are kept.​—msh210℠ (talk) 15:48, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

CFI and a double negative

I suggest getting rid of the double negative found at the top of WT:CFI:

  • It should not be modified without a VOTE.

And replacing it by:

  • A VOTE is required to modify it.

--Daniel. 09:00, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Neutral, it's not a grammatical double negative as without isn't grammatically negative. The two phrases seem to be exactly equivalent to me. --Mglovesfun (talk) 12:53, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Sourced policies

I suggest revising our two major policies as follows:

The "sourced" versions have sources. In the form of a "References" section in the bottom, linking to various relevant votes. I think I could list them all, but feel free to correct me. Thoughts? --Daniel. 10:28, 29 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I haven't checked to see whether your sourced versions are absolutely identical to the current policies, except for the inclusion of references; however, if all you're doing is adding footnoted links to supporting VOTEs, then I wholeheartedly support your proposal. Are the linked-to VOTE pages protected against alteration? — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:19, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think all the linked-to VOTE pages aren't protected against alteration. They naturally may be protected anytime in the future. Yes, the sourced versions are absolutely identical to the current policies, except for the inclusion of footnoted supporting VOTEs. --Daniel. 17:48, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
As long as the VOTEs are protected, this could only be a good thing. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 13:57, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
OK. I protected all the 17 VOTEs. --Daniel. 14:21, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I'm unprotecting them. This is a wiki, and those vote pages are informative. People may have good reasons for editing them, and that is not forbidden. —RuakhTALK 14:25, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Personally I'd have left them protected, but I don't feel strongly enough to do anything about it. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:44, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
The vote pages should better be left unprotected: I don't recall any vandalism targetting the vote pages, while I recall sensible adjustments made by non-admins, such as updating a link to a BP discussion, and adding the percentage of votes. As long as each vote page contains the revision history, I do not see why protection should be needed for the purpose of sourcing. --Dan Polansky 15:06, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

User:Pilcrow for rollbacker

Per User talk:Pilcrow, he seems to spend a lot of time fighting vandalism. I think it's too early to nominate him for admin, but for rollbacker seems ok (or else I wouldn't be doing it, now I think about it). Rollbackers can quickly revert all edits to a single page with one click; this also marks the vandalized edits as patrolled; right now I'm marking a lot of these as patrolled as Pilcrow can't do it. Mglovesfun (talk) 15:46, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Have all his reversions hitherto been justified? — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:54, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
No idea, but, surely asking for 100% is asking a bit much? Mglovesfun (talk) 16:02, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I wasn't really; I was just wondering. I think the nomination's a great idea. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 14:01, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I have noticed (on my daily pre-breakfast vandalism hunt) that I am constantly following vandalism that he has removed. So I am in favour of this change in status. 16:06, 30 March 2011 (UTC) — This unsigned comment was added by SemperBlotto (talk • contribs).
¶ I will admit, I do not always include my reasoning in the summaries, as I often thought it was unnecessary, example: replacing a page with ‘crap lol’ does not usually warrant a comment of mine, or so I hope. Sometimes I am afraid I will misspell my summaries as well, and I am sensitive about my spelling. ¶ I will write better summaries next time. --Pilcrow 16:07, 30 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Using the rollback tool eschews edit summaries anyway, so don't worry about it. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 14:01, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Support. The only other time we approved someone for rollbacker, it was at [[WT:WL]] and using that page's procedures (a nomination and second from two admins with no dissents): diff. I think that that would work in the (present and) future also. We currently then have enough to make Pilcrow a rollbacker; but since it's here at the BP already, I won't act yet.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:26, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Made it so. It can be easily undone. SemperBlotto 07:41, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Great! Congratulations to Pilcrow! — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 14:01, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Congratulations. --Daniel. 14:22, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
¶ Thank you very much for your congratulations and thank you for this promotion! I promise I will not let it go to waste. --Pilcrow 19:20, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Don't forget to check your next paychecks for the customary percentage increase. DCDuring TALK 19:42, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

{{transterm}}

Sometimes in English entries we give citations which are translations of things not originally written in English. Many translations in fact are key English texts (various Bibles for example). And often it's useful to know, for a given English term being cited, which original FL term it's being used to translate. When I know or can check, I've been adding this in by hand, as it were, but I decided to create a simple template to do it. See for example at (deprecated template usage) night-bat or (deprecated template usage) Great Turk. Any comments, thoughts, violent attacks etc, let me know. Ƿidsiþ 06:01, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I've tweaked it a little. Revert ad lib.​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:21, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Interesting. I've been trying to find a few but it's very difficult when you don't speak the language (for example, throw has a quotation translating the Heimskringla in Old Norse which is available online)- maybe a request template is needed as well. Nadando 06:38, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Both {{transterm}} and the request template seem like excellent ideas. DCDuring TALK 06:54, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
{{transterm req}} Nadando 07:01, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Oxford Modern Grammar

Oxford has recently published the Oxford Modern English Grammar by Bas Aarts. It is a relatively slim and accessible reference grammar at a reasonable price. It is modern both in that it looks at modern English and that it takes account of modern linguistic description. If you find the CGEL daunting, this might be a good alternative for you. Although Aarts has not adopted all the innovations in the CGEL, he does follow it in many respects. --Brett 14:29, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Poll: adj vs adjective

We have headword-line templates for adjectives whose name includes either "adjective" or "adj". Following are some examples. For more results, feel free to check Special:Search.

Can we standardize them, to use only one of these two naming systems?

Feel free to support multiple options.

Thank you for your attention and your input. --Daniel. 15:34, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Poll: adj vs adjective — Preference 1

I prefer using only the short version: en-adj, es-adj, sh-adj, ru-adj, etc.

  1. Support Daniel. 15:34, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Support —CodeCat 15:39, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Support Prince Kassad 15:59, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Support DCDuring TALK 17:27, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Support — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:19, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Support Panda10 19:45, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  7. Support Matthias Buchmeier 10:23, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Poll: adj vs adjective — Preference 2

I prefer using only the complete version: en-adjective, es-adjective, sh-adjective, ru-adjective, etc.

  1. Support --Pilcrow 17:19, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Poll: adj vs adjective — Preference 3

I prefer allowing names of templates to freely include either "adj" or "adjective".

  1. Support Ƿidsiþ 17:16, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Support. Constantly changing things annoys infrequent editors. Consistency would have been nice, but changing existing templates to make them consistent across languages is not so nice. —RuakhTALK 20:03, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    What about using redirects from older names to newer, consistent names? --Daniel. 20:08, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    I'm fine with redirects, though redirects from the consistent names to the legacy names might be more clear. (Otherwise someone is sure to ask what the redirects are for.) —RuakhTALK 20:13, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    If someone asks what the redirects are for, surely someone else is going to answer easily. :) Now here is a rhetorical question: if redirects from the consistent names to the legacy names are to be created, which names are the consistent ones? --Daniel. 00:49, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    Re: "which names are the consistent ones?": Either way. I have no strong preference. —RuakhTALK 00:55, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    Disregarding laboriousness of entry, templates named -adjective are better, but I'd prefer to save myself six keystrokes per template. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 12:23, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Support —Saltmarshtalk-συζήτηση 06:30, 2 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Poll: adj vs adjective — Preference 4

I am indecisive or indifferent about adj vs adjective.

  1. Informally speaking, I am hesitant about which of the two discussed schemes I like better: one is concise, the other one is explicit.

    However, this poll is poorly designed. A preference is always of something over something else, but the options fail to indicate what is preferred over what. The designer of the poll even agrees at the same time with "I prefer using only the short version: en-adj, es-adj, sh-adj, ru-adj, etc" and "I prefer using only the complete version: en-adjective, es-adjective, sh-adjective, ru-adjective, etc", which would mean that he is indifferent about which of the two options is chosen. Thus, there is a confusion of the notions of support and preference, which is admittedly suggested by the use of the icons and wording for "support" taken from votes; having some other template that says such things as "I agree", "Holds for me", "True of me" or whatever sounds best to natives would be nice. --Dan Polansky 09:18, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

    I've fixed my former vote of implied indifference; thanks for pointing that out. Yet, the word only in "only the complete version" and "only the short version" already states that they are preferences over everything else. The concept of supporting a preference is similar enough with agreeing with a preference, and the entry support doesn't suggest otherwise. However, for greater accuracy, I'm inclined to support a new template such as " I agree". --Daniel. 09:54, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
    I have created {{agree}} with a green icon. Blue icon does not indicate an agrement to me. --Dan Polansky 14:52, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Poll: adj vs adjective — Discussion

If {{en-adj}} redirected to {{en-adjective}}, and we could rely on a bot to change all human additions of {{en-adj}} to {{en-adjective}}, but that human users were still allowed to use {{en-adj}}, I would become indifferent to the outcome of this poll. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:29, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Similarly, I am indifferent, as long as humans can use either and one redirects to the other. (If I'm not mistaken, that's the current state of affairs.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:22, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Wholly agree with this. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:00, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

The wording of the preferences is not parallel. For preferences one and two the question is what one prefers using. For preference three the question is what one would allow. Option four is consistent with either preference or rule. Is this a survey about one's personal preferences or about what rules one would wish imposed on others? DCDuring TALK 14:44, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]

What happened to the logo?

When did the logo get that unsightly addition of a red caret and schwa? Heck, we all know the logo's not great, but that's hardly an improvement. Moreover, that correction of the pronunciatory transcription is certainly not the most urgent — whereas many accents do omit the schwa, none (AFAIK) pronounce an alveolar trill instead of an alveolar approximant. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:26, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

It's April Fool's Day. Some idiot thought that was funny. --Vahag 19:28, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, I see. It's still the 31ˢᵗ of March where I live for another three hours and twenty-six minutes. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 19:34, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Anyway, who uses a schwa? Americans use /ɛ/, and I thought Brits use nothing.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:36, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
support changing the addition to an /ɛ/ — lexicógrafa | háblame — 19:38, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Where is Dan Polansky when he is needed? He is good at organizing polls. --Vahag 19:40, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

¶ Please, this is seriöus business. --Pilcrow 19:31, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

I agree with the new logo. Let it stay. -- Prince Kassad 19:36, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

¶¶ It wasn't me, Pilcrow/Wonderfool. Somebody must have used my computer when I was in the bathroom. I think it was Ruakh: when I came back my keyboard was covered in matzo crumbs. --Vahag 19:37, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]

¶ I do not find your ethnocentric foolery amusing in the slightest. Such immature remarks only make me feel less comfortable volunteering for this website. --Pilcrow 19:45, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
@Vahag: As a Sephardic Israeli, I don't eat matzo, but matzah. Sheesh, what a n00b. —RuakhTALK 19:56, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
LOL, pwnt! — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 20:06, 31 March 2011 (UTC)[reply]
For the record, despite Ruakh's good humour, I don't find this sort of thing remotely funny. Or appropriate. Ƿidsiþ 09:22, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
You wanna lollipop? --Vahag 11:16, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
I think he wants less of your overt racism displayed on this project, and I am right with him on that. I am sure there are plenty of great venues available on the internet for you to be disparaging of Jews or whomever else you would like to insult, no reason to bring it here. - [The]DaveRoss 15:00, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
If you think my joke was racist, you should see a doctor. --Vahag 16:19, 1 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
Vahag's remark didn't strike me as necessarily racist. Though we can decide this matter easily by Wiktionary:Votes/2011-04/Ethnocentric joke policy. --Daniel. 02:10, 2 April 2011 (UTC)[reply]
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