Wiktionary:Information desk/2023/November

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← October 2023 · November 2023 · December 2023 → · (current)

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Uwu pronounce

i would like to talk because i want to add the pronounciation of uwu in dutch (ɯ◌̞wɯ◌̞) IPineappleJay (talk) 15:41, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't think this is a Dutch word.  --Lambiam 18:03, 2 November 2023 (UTC)

x is locked

Please unlock it so I can add some Derived terms. Or better still, add yourself those relevant from moto-x|x factor|x-axis|x-band|x-cat-ik|x-direction|x-div.|x-factor|x-height|x-intercept|x-irradiation|x-radiate|x-radiation|x-ray|x-ray vision|x-risk|x-wing|x-word P. Sovjunk (talk) 14:01, 30 October 2023 (UTC)

List of online sources we consider to be verifiable

Hello, I was wondering if there is some sort of list available documenting all the online sources (Usenet, Twitter, Reddit, etc.) that we currently consider to be verifiable. WT:ATTEST says that Usenet is durably archived through Google, but it also says "Other online-only sources may also contribute towards attestation requirements if editors come to a consensus through a discussion lasting at least two weeks." So, I don't know if I can add a word from a certain site, because I don't know if it would last through this process or not. So I would like to gauge what kind of sites have survived this process before, what terms have survived, etc, somewhat similar to Wikipedia's Wikipedia:Reliable sources/Perennial sources. It would be really useful to have. Thanks. Nervelita (talk) 07:24, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

@Nervelita: Hi! There have been various discussions on using other online sources before, but as far as I know, none except Usenet have ever yet been reached a favorable consensus. If I’m not mistaken, this is why no sites are listed at WT:ATTEST; there simply aren’t any that have survived the process. You could always make a new proposal at the Beer Parlor for a certain site to count toward attestation requirements, but it would likely be an uphill battle. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 01:29, 10 November 2023 (UTC) EDIT: My apologies, I was wrong, and a small handful of websites have been voted into acceptance; see the link in Lattermint’s response below. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 01:33, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

I see, thank you for the reply. Nervelita (talk) 08:15, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@Nervelita: There is User:Fytcha/Sources. Also the way I interpret the other online-only clause is that pretty much any online-only source can hypothetically be used, but the consensus safeguard is there to prevent that from happening so that only specifically vetted citations pass. From what I've seen in practice, it's usually Twitter and Reddit quotations that get added to entries. However, technically, before having gone through RFV, any entry that has only online-only citations is not CFI-compliant since there hasn't yet been a "a discussion lasting at least two weeks", but that doesn't prevent people from creating entries like that. And I'm not saying this disapprovingly or anything. I myself have done that and think it's generally fine, since if you provide good quotations for a term clearly evincing use and spanning a time period large enough to not have been coincidental or fabricated, then someone else will be less likely to doubt its existence or RFV it, and if they do, then you employ the clause. Speaking of the history, here are examples of the it being used that I know of: Talk:cisoid, Talk:-maxx. And you probably know of the whole transgender slang thing... There were also a number of votes in 2022 on reaching consensus on certain words but most of them got failed and people were pretty upset about them. Speaking of other sources, I've also seen Mastodon and 4chan get used, maybe that will give you more idea of what can fly. I'd say go with whatever you want to add, but I feel like the general trend is that usually people are reluctant/unwilling to create entries with online-only sources except a select few editors who do. And one last thing: speaking strictly, even news websites that don't get published in newspapers or magazines or broadcast aren't durably archived (thus the votes on VICE and HuffPost), but I don't think I've seen something get rejected over this, unless it's some really shady website. lattermint (talk) 01:25, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks for the link, although as one could reason from the beginning, the community hasn't decided much on anything. I do try and *generally* add terms that aren't just in use in obscure places on the Internet, and can at least be found in some self-published books (still not the best, but eh). I think the term lasting a long time is really what matters here; I'm going to try adding some fandom specific terms here some time in the future, and the ones that have been around for at least 10-15 years have a much better chance of being accepted by the community I think.

Oh yes, I know of the transgender slang ordeal, I like to think I'm partially responsible for it lol, I'm glad those terms weren't deleted.

4chan as a source would give quite a great deal of new lingo to add but I don't think really anyone would like that very much. Even though external archives exist, they're all third-party so the "durably archived" clause is really not in effect there.

Thank you for all this info, lattermint, I guess I do just have to be bold, and add terms that I think need to be preserved and documented. Nervelita (talk) 08:14, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

There is definitely a lot of confusion about the two-week clause. Some say it means we vote for two weeks on the individual word ... some say it means we need to have a discussion lasting at least two weeks (and it would likely be left up much longer if it were close) on adding a new source to the list of automatically accepted online sources. The solution I think we've settled on is to interpret it both ways, which is no stress, because almost all discussions that involve voting last at least a month as it is.

We used to hold highly visible Votes on individual words, yes. I was editing here then, but rarely left mainspace, so I dont know much about that process except that a lot of people disliked it because it seemed like too much effort for too little gain, as we were effectively putting the listing of a single entry on par with sweeping sitewide policy changes and requests for adminship.

We still do have votes on individual words, but they're rare and take place on the Requests for verification page. What this means, following from the above and from a Beer Parlour discussion from September 2022 is that entries who depend on cites to Twitter, if challenged at RFV, are required to run through a discussion lasting at least two weeks to ascertain if the editing community finds them acceptable. This discussion is a vote, unlike ordinary RFV discussions. In practice, although we have used this clause a few times, it seems people find this to be rather a chore as well, and few of the Twitter-dependent words have been brought through the inline RFV voting process. I suspect also there's been a lot of restraint on the hand of entry creators ... we could be scouring Twitter and all its subcommunities looking for words that just barely pass CFI due to the new expanded criteria, but by and large, we've simply not been doing that. —Soap— 09:36, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, I see, thank you it is very confusingly worded and not explained in depth. Nervelita (talk) 08:06, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

Why is госпожа (Russian) classified as irregular?

The genitive plural form of the word госпож seems regular to me. I looked at gramota.ru and it doesn't say anything about its irregularity. Samuel4388 (talk) 12:44, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

@Samuel4388 The regular form would be *госпоже́й (*gospožéj). Theknightwho (talk) 22:11, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

If the word were *госпожь, then the genitive plural form would be *госпожей. But it ends in а, just like рожа, whose genitive plural form is рож. Samuel4388 (talk) 00:21, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

@Samuel4388 It's because it has stress pattern b, so *госпоже́й (*gospožéj) would be expected, but the genitive/accusative plural declines as though it had stress pattern a. That makes it irregular. On the other hand, ро́жа (róža) is a regular stress pattern a word. Theknightwho (talk) 00:51, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Thanks, I didn't know that. It was right then. Samuel4388 (talk) 05:21, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Good job, @Theknightwho, you picked it up correctly! Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 05:27, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

English words with the most vowel sounds in a row

I just stumbled on ooaa, which has four vowel sounds in a row with no intervening consonants. Are there words with five or more vowel sounds in a row? (I am asking about sounds, not letters: euouae has more letters but fewer sounds.) - -sche (discuss) 19:28, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Aha, this mentions some placenames, if they meet CFI. - -sche (discuss) 20:36, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Good to see Jeff Miller's site is still online. I think he's a retired high school teacher and the site was originally hosted by the school. Or maybe he's still there. I emailed him a year ago to add a new word and never got a response, and he hasnt added the word, so he might be busy lately. See also page 7 for more abot vowels.

I dont have it offhand, but there are potentially contrived medical and biological terms with five consecutive os, from taking a word ending in /o/, adding the familiar Greek linking -o- to it, adding the word for "egg" (e.g. oovore), adding yet another -o-, and then adding a word beginning with o. Although I think the very first /o/ would be dropped, so this is more likely a way to get four. Alternately, having a morpheme with two /o/'s on one side of the compound. ploo-oo-vore could be a "word" for something that lives in the intestines of egg-bearing animals, feeding on their eggs and part of their intestinal wall. Or plooooosteitis could be a term for inflammation of the ovaries, bones, and part of the intestinal wall. But the closest i can find that we call a real word is salpingooophoritis, with only three.

I've been keeping a collection of my own, but my page is mostly about repeated consonants and only gets to the vowel sequences towards the end. So far as I know, there are no English words with more than four vowels in a row, either pronounced or spelled, but i exclude words like euouae that are abbreviations for other words. —Soap— 12:01, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

@Soap: cooeeing has 5 vowels in a row (letters, not sounds). Equinox ◑ 10:59, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

and miaouing :) and a few taxonomic names and words like Jussieuean, Rousseauian, zooeae. (Btw, Soap, re your page's comment on ooaa: if Wikipedia and these are right, oo is imitative of its call, and aa means "dwarf" referring to its size.) - -sche (discuss) 17:07, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Editing by administrator Equinox

Re: recent editing of "hotcha" by administrator. What is the point of deleting really good actual quotes from the relevant period (1930s-'40s) that were from original source material and had a lot of research and work put into to find these quotes. Quotes that no other dictionary has and that gave Wiktionary far superior examples of quotes than anyone else. Not only deleting quotes but replacing them with a quote from another slang dictionary!

What do we need to refer to Wiktionary for if it is simply just quotes from other dictionaries?  Not to mention Equinox changing a word in one of the few quotes left. Not just changing the definition. Changing the QUOTE. That is now a misquote.  Equinox, if that is the amateur level that you want Wiktionary to operate on then good luck with it all. What a joke!  2001:8003:5C5C:5B00:C1EA:FF39:2D5F:2267 03:41, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

This is not a very helpful way to frame some dispute. If you want to be constructive, I'd recommend you try explaining what the issue is in more dispassionate terms. If you just want to rant, this is not the venue for that. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 06:31, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

It looks like Equinox reverted most of your edits, but not all the way back. This post will bring more eyes to the discussion ... without knowing what the dispute is, I cant tell bad from good ... it might be that you are right, it might be that we need to actually revert even more, or it might be somewhere in between. Thanks for bringing this up. —Soap— 12:18, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Also, as a rule, we don't quote other dictionaries. At all. It may be that for some rare words, another dictionary may have found the same source as us, especially if it's the first attested instance of the word. But that doesn't mean we're quoting the dictionary. We always quote the original source directly. —Soap— 12:33, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

@Soap: I take it you mean that we don't lift quotations from other dictionaries. There are a great many entries that have been lifted from other dictionaries (sometimes out of copyright) rather than depending on the editors' knowledge of the language or other original research; details may have been removed to avoid blatantly infringing copyright. The aim may be to have every lemma backed up by three quotations, but for some languages we do well to have a reference to a dictionary as a 'mention'. --RichardW57m (talk) 13:53, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

There are other dodgy practices, such as back-transliterating a critical edition and quoting the back-transliteration. I'm conflicted over whether to tag such quotations as dishonest or leave them as better than no quotation at all. --RichardW57m (talk) 13:53, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

University articles

Hello. Are there any rules here for creating university (or school) articles? (e.g. 한림대학교, 연세대학교) Dubukimchi (talk) 08:14, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

You mean like creating University of Amsterdam? Yeah, please don't. Acronyms and nicknames are allowed, like Univen, PKU. Jewle V (talk) 08:23, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

@Jewle V: I mean that I found some RFDs on 한림대학교 and 연세대학교 (with 연세대; an acronym for it), but I am not sure that it should be deleted or not. Because people will be able to create articles for any universities in the world, if it should be kept. So, I just wonder if there are any rules regarding university/school articles. Dubukimchi (talk) 10:16, 12 November 2023 (UTC)

We are a dictionary, not an encyclopedia. The entries in Wiktionary are not “articles” as on Wikipedia; they do not describe a term, but merely define its meaning. In general, the name of a university will not be a lexical term and should not have an entry. It would have been fine to define 연세대 (Yeonsedae) as “a short name for 연세대학교 (Yeonsedaehakgyo) (Yonsei University)” except that it falls short of our SOP criterion, since it is a transparent sum of 연세 (yeonse) +‎ 대 (dae), with the last part have sense 3 of 대: “(only in university names) Short for 대학교(大學校) (daehakgyo, “university”).”.  --Lambiam 15:58, 13 November 2023 (UTC)

krdict pronunciation audio: useful?

I just realised that the CC BY-SA 2.0 KR licence on the National Institute of Korean Language's Basic Korean Dictionary means that all its pronunciation audio files are eligible for upload to Commons. I could set up a bot to upload these files to Commons, but before I do I'd like to check: would this be of any use to Wiktionary? I can't find any existing audio files from this source, which makes me suspect that they might be deliberately excluded. --bjh21 (talk) 14:01, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

After a bit of wrangling of the API, I've found what I suspect is the answer. While it's not obvious from the dictionary pages, the pronunciation files are licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0 KR and hence not eligible for Commons. At least, the ones I've looked at, like https://krdicmedia.korean.go.kr/front/search/searchResultView.do?file_no=309565 are. Sorry to have bothered you. --bjh21 (talk) 22:20, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Not a bother. You can put them on https://nccommons.org/ if you're motivated. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:50, 16 November 2023 (UTC)

Term for a word that came later, not used contemporarily

e.g. Bloody Code: usenote says "This relatively modern term was not used in the period to which it refers." Don't we have a category for that? (But it's not a retronym because it wasn't coined to resolve an ambiguity.) Equinox ◑ 13:21, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Like the Middle Ages. I guess people never said sth like "Can't wait for the Middle Ages to be over"Jewle V (talk) 13:26, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Hmm, is it not a retronym? Our definition says a retronym can be "A new word or phrase coined for an old object or concept [...] which did not originally have a specific name", which would seem to cover the situation of people at the time just calling the Bloody Code "the code" (of laws), "the law", etc, or people in past ages just referring to "this age", "this era", "modern times", etc, and modern-modern people now needing a specific / non-ambiguous name. I admit a number of other onine dictionaries do have less informative definitions of retronym and only focus on them being cases where a new word (like acoustic or cloth) has to be added to an existing word (like guitar or diaper) that was originally specific but has become nonspecific, but (a) that still covers the situation of "the code" and "this era" now having to be "Bloody Code" and "medieval era" to distinguish from other codes and eras, like "mail" now being "snail mail", doesn't it? and (b) maybe there's benefit to preferring the more inclusive definition here even if some other sites don't...? Many works similarly offer less informative definitions of ghost word and focus only on one aspect or another, in particular often only including words a dictionary published based on misunderstanding, which would mean we'd be without a category for cases where the ghostliness was intentional or in an encyclopedia, if we switched to those sites' definitions.
I guess an alternative would be to change our "retronyms" categories to something like "anachronistic terms"...? (Since I can't imagine very many people would manage to understand or maintain or be helped by the distinction if we tried to just add "anachronistic terms" alongside "retronyms"...) - -sche (discuss) 15:47, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

 Done Okay. Added to retronym category. Equinox ◑ 19:58, 17 November 2023 (UTC)

Modern Greek

A friend has the Greek wiktionary with English as the background language. How can I download this version instead of the version entirely in Greek? Ευτυχια50 (talk) 09:33, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Pardon me for being not 100% clear what you mean, but have you seen https://dumps.wikimedia.org/? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 09:59, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you! No, I hadn’t seen it but will investigate.

My friend has an Android phone and when she downloaded el.m.wiktionary.org it came up with English as the language you use for negotiating the site although still being a Greek dictionary and source of info about conjugation of verbs etc; when I download it on my iPhone it’s all in Greek!!( and my Greek is not up to this…) Ευτυχια50 (talk) 15:12, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

How to pronounce reconstructed words, such as *(s)leh₂b-

Is there any documents or something that I can study about how to read these kinds of words? They don't appear to be written in global IPA. Duchuyfootball (talk) 16:32, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

@Duchuyfootball Scholars don't generally reconstruct PIE in IPA because 1) the laryngeals are very uncertain 2) phonemes could be a wide variety of things. This is an issue that is not just on Wiktionary, but linguistics as a whole. We'll get back to you once linguistics as a field has come to a consensus on the exact IPA pronunciations of PIE. Vininn126 (talk) 16:41, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

But is there really no documents as to how these might be read? What is the difference between h2 and h3 for example. Duchuyfootball (talk) 01:47, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

See w:Proto-Indo-European phonology and w:Laryngeal_theory#Pronunciation.--Urszag (talk) 02:27, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

@Duchuyfootball this is a common misunderstanding about reconstructions: a reconstruction is basically a way of representing a set of correspondences between languages, not a way of going back in time to learn exactly how people spoke. Thus, *t is used to represent whatever it was that became th/þ in many Germanic languages as opposed to t in Latin, τ in Ancient Greek, and त् in Sanskrit. It's reasonable to guess what a reconstructed form sounded like in many cases- but it's always a guess.

As far as I know, the only descendant languages that we're pretty sure preserved laryngeals were Hittite and other Anatolian languages, and we aren't 100% sure how they pronounced them. In languages such as Ancient Greek, the influence of laryngeals on neighboring sounds caused a difference in the descendants of those sounds, so we can often tell which laryngeal is which, and get some vague ideas about what the different laryngeals were like. Thus *e with a neighboring *h₁ will generally remain an "e" sound, *e next to an h₂ will generally become an "a" sound, and *e with h₃ is likely to be an "o" sound. The laryngeals themselves have disappeared, with neighboring vowels being lengthened, and lengthening can trigger other changes- so it can get complicated. There are linguists who have come up with rather specific proposals about what specific laryngeals really were, but there are other linguists who have come up with contradictory proposals or have dismissed the original proposals as utter hogwash. Nothing is completely settled.Chuck Entz (talk) 02:26, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

I'm enlightened. Thank you for this information! Duchuyfootball (talk) 13:03, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

-ɑːŋ vs -ɑŋ

Pyongyang is listed as (sometimes) rhyming with /-ɑːŋ/, whereas Penang is listed as (sometimes) rhyming with /-ɑŋ/; however, AFAICT, for speakers who use that vowel, the words rhyme with each other (the length is not contrastive). So should I move Penang to -ɑːŋ? Which one is the diaphoneme or 'RP representation of the underlying phoneme' that our rhymes pages are in? - -sche (discuss) 22:58, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

Length markers are used after ɑ for the UK transcription but not the US one (/ˌpjʌŋˈjɑːŋ/ vs /ˌpjʌŋˈjɑŋ/). Penang currently only shows /pəˈnɑŋ/ as a US pronunciation, so there is no inconsistency. If you would like to add a UK pronunciation /pəˈnɑːŋ/, a length marker would be consistent with the existing UK transcriptions.--Urszag (talk) 23:10, 18 November 2023 (UTC)

The inconsistency is that rhymes pages are intended to be based on the RP notation of a given vowel rather than the US notation as long as there is no phonemic (only allophonic) difference. Hence, if Americans sometimes rhymed foobaro with go, the relevant rhymes page for that pronunciation would be -əʊ, even if British people never rhymed the word with go but instead always rhymed it with roo: the page would given the rhymes as "-uː, -əʊ", to avoid people having to look on two pages (-əʊ and -oʊ) for rhymes of go. I hoped someone could confirm whether the underlying RP notation here was -ɑːŋ, or whether Brits distinguish -ɑːŋ vs -ɑŋ in some words. Unless anyone suggests that British people do have -ɑŋ words, I will correct Penang's rhymes page link to -ɑːŋ (without needing to add anything to the UK pronunciation). - -sche (discuss) 07:58, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

I hadn't noticed that you were talking about the rhyme pages. For those, the lexical set corresponding to UK "/ɑː/" and US "/ɑ/" would be transcribed as "/ɑː/", so -ɑːŋ is the right rhyme category.--Urszag (talk) 14:09, 19 November 2023 (UTC)

Examples vs quotes

According to the wikitionary guidelines, quotes seem to trump contrived examples. Is it generally appropriate to remove examples after 'proper' quote(s) are added? If not, then why are examples more visible than quotes, being "uncollapsed" by default? AP295 (talk) 23:31, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Examples have the benefit of being short. They can even border on cliché. It is more convenient to have a good example with quotes supporting existence. An example is just there to inform the reader of a broad, general use. Vininn126 (talk) 23:35, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

So then, quotes don't replace examples? Incidentally, is it okay to use the same quote in two different entries, e.g. if a derived phrase also matches part of the quote? — This unsigned comment was added by AP295 (talk • contribs).

Yes, fine to use in multiple entries. (Don't know if replacing is "okay", but I like to remove usexes when we have the required 3 cites for a sense.) Equinox ◑ 23:42, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

I assume you mean examples. Thanks, that answers my question. AP295 (talk) 23:46, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

("Usex" is jargon around here for "usage example".) Equinox ◑ 23:47, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Real citations are actual evidence. Made-up examples are sometimes totally improbable and use collocations that can't be found in a search. However, some have argued that the made-up examples can be kept simple (like a learner's textbook) which assists some readers. Equinox ◑ 23:41, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

I was considering deleting an example after having found an appropriate quote. AP295 (talk) 23:44, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Depends on the example. If it's really unhelpful or contains inappropriate content, then definitely. Vininn126 (talk) 23:47, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

I don't particularly like the example (Mike's a conspiracy theorist; he thinks NASA faked the moon landings.) for conspiracy theorist but two or three quotes sounds like a reasonable "replacement threshold". I'll leave it alone for now, unless you think the quote I added will suffice. AP295 (talk) 23:51, 22 November 2023 (UTC)

Regarding equinox's earlier point about simplicity: note the difference of language between the Hitchens quote and the usage example. The example is short and refers to a canonical conspiracy theory most readers are likely familiar with and is therefore self-explanatory. The quote is useful, but not as accessible and more abstract. Jberkel 08:50, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Reading your last posts on the talk page, it seems like you're more concerned about POV-pushing than the quality of usage examples. Jberkel 10:48, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Is my quote not a good one? I've not removed the old usage example either. Anyone having an opinion can be accused of pov-pushing, so it's a rather facile critique. At any rate, the language is being abused but not by me. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=conspiratorial%2Ccollusive&year_start=1950&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3&case_insensitive=true AP295 (talk) 17:42, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

If there's something wrong with my contributions, then please say why. Likewise if you don't agree with my perspective on the talk page then you're more than welcome to comment on it. If there's nothing wrong with my contributions and you can't or won't participate in the topic I've started, then why accuse me of 'pov-pushing'? It's just mudslinging, which is against the rules but more importantly against common decency. It's exasperating to make so many thoughtful and well-intended contributions only for long-time regular editors to write them off and act as though you've broken the rules when you haven't. This seems quite common in my experience and when one inevitably gets fed up and angry, they're treated as a behavioral problem. Every wikimedia project emphasizes ad nauseam that they welcome participation and appear to enjoy rather undeserved reputations for being inclusive when they're often quite hostile without apparent reason. AP295 (talk) 18:04, 30 November 2023 (UTC)

Usexes and quotes should ideally be two different things. Usexes should be used to illustrate aspects of the term and its usage in a clear, succinct way, while quotes show the term in its natural habitat, behaving normally.

It's like you might have a drawing of a bird in a bird guide that shows all the markings and the shape of the head, wings and tail, even though no bird would ever assume such a pose in real life. You would also have photos to show what the bird would look like in the wild.

If you can find quotes that do what a usex does, then it would be better to keep the quotes than the usex- for one thing, they usually show by whom, where and when it was used, and one can go to the originals and see the context. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:07, 23 November 2023 (UTC)

Foods: "derby" and "fendel"?

Lyrics found online for Cab Calloway's song Everybody Eats When They Come to My House include: "Pass me a pancake, Mandrake / Havin' a derby, Irvy / Look in the fendel, Mendel / Everybody eats when they come to my house." What kind of foods are "derby" and "fendel"? Equinox ◑ 10:46, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

@Equinox: I don't think those are foods. Who would "look in" an item of food?. It looks to me like playing around with words so the number of syllables come out right. I doubt he had friends named "Mandrake" and "Mendel", either. If I had to guess, I'd say "derby" refers to a race, and "fendel" is altered from "fridge". Chuck Entz (talk) 19:32, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

Indeed, I notice a lot of lyrics sites transcribe that line "Look in the fendel (?), Mendel" with a question mark to signal they don't know what word he meant, either. There is a company called "Findel International", and fridges appear to be among the things they sell, so maybe he has or is invoking a Findel fridge? - -sche (discuss) 20:04, 24 November 2023 (UTC)

How to edit a protected page?

Specifically: Hamas? – Phazd (talk|contribs) 03:20, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

Until January 15, you have to be an autopatroller to edit. The way to become an autopatroller is explained here: Wiktionary:Autopatrollers. If you can't get autopatrol in the interim, then you'll have to wait. You can ask for the protection to be removed or reduced, but it's not likely. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:31, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

That's an odd policy, IMO. I don't think I'd be nominated for becoming an autopatroller any time soon, and it's a waste of time to wait almost two months until I can improve the page (assuming the protection wouldn't be extended further). Can I ask an autopatroller to edit it and provide them with the text that I'd add? – Phazd (talk|contribs) 03:46, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

You can 100% post to Talk:Hamas and anyone watching that page could see your request and make it, for sure. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 03:55, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

@Koavf Ok, thank you :) — Phazd (talk|contribs) 03:58, 27 November 2023 (UTC)

So is it okay to ask be nominated, or does one just have to wait to be noticed? JulieKahan (talk) 15:55, 30 November 2023 (UTC)