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RFD
Latest comment: 15 years ago8 comments7 people in discussion
SoP. If not, we would expect to have one of these entries for every sport, which is sheer insanity. P.S. I realise they may translate to single words in other languages, but that doesn't force the existence of English entries; the translations from those other languages need only be broken into multiple links. Equinox◑22:46, 28 February 2009 (UTC)Reply
Basketball player and tennis player have previously passed RFD, on the basis that in common use they refer specifically to a professional player of the sport. The same reasoning would presumably apply to soccer player and baseball player. I am slightly less convinced of this reasoning than I was the last time around, but still don't see any pressing need to delete; the set of entries to which this argument applies is quite small. -- Visviva04:42, 1 March 2009 (UTC)Reply
Keep. As Visviva has noted, we've been through this discussion twice before (at least). Without new reasoning or a change in policy, there is no need to go through this discussion again. --EncycloPetey16:30, 1 March 2009 (UTC)Reply
Keep per EP. Perhaps we could file a copy of the last discussion on the talk pages of the three or four most common entries? -- ALGRIF talk17:09, 2 March 2009 (UTC)Reply
Please do (or preferably a link, to avoid partial duplication), or else this will come up again and again. I had no idea that a person who plays basketball non-professionally wouldn't count as a basketball player (and I think that's ridiculous and wrong, but I will yield to consensus). Equinox◑00:22, 4 March 2009 (UTC)Reply
This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.
"A person who plays tennis, especially professionally." Talk:tennis player states that this was kept because tennis player implies a professional (though the definition doesn't reflect this, has the definition been changed?) Anyway, to the best of my knowledge tennis player does not imply a professional. It implies a player of tennis. Am seeking verification of that. Definition will be reworded to fit with RFD debate. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:49, 9 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
Same or almost same wording is used in soccer player, baseball player, basketball player, ice hockey player, squash player, chess player and whatnot. If I recall right, the reasoning was that these may be professions and all professions should be included. The reasoning also served as justification for the current wording and, I think, to circumvent the obvious SOPism of defining a tennis player as one who plays tennis. BTW, for some reason we do not have golf player, although "professional golf player" gets more than 30,000 hits in a Google search. --Hekaheka (talk) 05:43, 10 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
Doubtless, the term is attested in the sense "A person who plays tennis." If the "especially professionally" part of the definition does not get attested, a pro-keeping argument to be subsequently used in RFD is translation targets per Italian "tennista", Polish "tenisista", and Russian "теннисист", all single-word translations that are non-compounds. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:19, 10 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
I say keep as-is. Barack Obama plays basketball, but he isn't a basketball player; LeBron James is a basketball player, even though he might also have played a game of tennis or football at some point. The term passes the, well, "tennis player" test of WT:IDIOM. Most available citations are of the given definition, which adequately conveys the quasi-idiomatic nature of the term. - -sche(discuss)07:54, 14 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Barack Obama is a basketball player, it just isn't the first thing that comes to mind when you hear his name. LeBron James can be called a tennis or football player during any period of time during which he at least semi-regularly plays tennis or football. In any case, you can put any sport in front of the word player and get the same result so it is SOP with the relevant definition belonging on player. --WikiTiki8908:22, 14 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
Yes, delete: of course Obama is a basketball player because he plays basketball. The phrase "keen basketball player" (always an amateur) makes this clear. Equinox◑09:54, 15 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
I noticed (belatedly) that the term in its first sense (professional) had already passed RFD and was kept. The word "especially" implies that non-professional tennis players can also be called that. No need to create an additional sense for non-professionals. The entry should be detagged and left alone. --Anatoli(обсудить/вклад)21:49, 14 November 2012 (UTC)Reply
Fails the tennis player test. Tennis player means a player of tennis, either professionally or not professionally. The 'professional' bit has to be worked out from the context, i.e. by reading the whole passage or document and not just the words 'tennis' and 'player'. Renard Migrant (talk) 16:11, 2 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
X-player terms have previously been kept on the grounds that a non-professional X player isn't an X player, which I have refuted more than once. (After all, one can talk about a "keen tennis player", "amateur basketball player", etc. which are clearly not professionals.) So I'll just raise that point again and repeat my delete. Equinox◑17:56, 2 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Well consensus can change: for one, accordion player has failed since 2012. 2012 was RFV not RFD so in fact 2009 was its last RFD, aroud 7 years ago. That's a lot. For an organization to have changed its views in 7 years is not very surprising. Renard Migrant (talk) 19:25, 2 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Delete A look at Google books shows that actually, "tennis player" implying professionalism is far from universal. Of the hits for "is a tennis player" where I can see the context clearly, the following are about adults who are amateur tennis players:
amateurs
1978, introduction to Samuel Pepys, The Illustrated Pepys: Extracts from the Diary, Univ of California Press →ISBN, page 7
In this perspective the great personages are reduced to the same dimensions as the rest of us - the King is a tennis player and an amateur of science
2002, Abraham N. Lieberman, Shaking Up Parkinson Disease: Fighting Like a Tiger, Thinking Like a Fox : a Book for the Puzzled, the Hopeful, the Willing, and the Prepared, Jones & Bartlett Learning →ISBN, page 193
George is a tennis player and was having difficulty with his backstroke.
2002, Frederick Charles Copleston, Contemporary Philosophy: Studies of Logical Positivism and Existentialism, A&C Black →ISBN, page 77
Smith may be both a metaphysician and a mystic, but this no more means that mysticism is synonymous with or a part of metaphysics than the fact that Jones is a tennis player and a doctor means that the practice of medicine is synonymous with or a part of tennis-playing.
2006, Michael F. Bird, Jesus and the Origins of the Gentile Mission, Bloomsbury Publishing →ISBN
In the academic sphere, to my Doktorvater Dr Rick Strelan (who is just a fine a scholar as he is a tennis player).
2007, Victor Woods, A Breed Apart: A Journey to Redemption, Simon and Schuster →ISBN, page 248
My father is a tennis player and he would often talk to me about the many duels he would have on the courts at the country club he belonged to.
The following is about a professional tennis player:
pros
2013, Mark Hodgkinson, Andy Murray Wimbledon Champion: The Full and Extraordinary Story, Simon and Schuster →ISBN
Where is a tennis player's body most likely to plead with him to drop his racket in the middle of the rally, put his head under a towel and retreat to the locker-room? Well, it's not Wimbledon
And these are about students who play tennis:
students
2004, David L. McKenna, Isaiah 1-39: Isaiah 1-39, Thomas Nelson Inc →ISBN
Our youngest son, Rob, is a tennis player who seldom wor a major championship in high school or college because he lacked the “killer instinct”needed to crush his opponents.
Delete. The claim that a basketball player is necessarily one who plays professionally is at best a no true Scotsman fallacy and at worst an outright lie. — Ungoliant(falai)18:25, 2 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Make it a translation target or delete it, either way overturning the "tennis player test". I don't mind keeping it as a translation target, I just want us to recognize that it's not idiomatic. google books:"tennis player" "robot" shows that even defining this as "a person who plays tennis" is wrong!
1991 April 30, Weekly World News, volume 12, number 30, page 43:
"Gala is five times stronger than your average male tennis player and never gets tired because she is a machine. Her Japanese researcher has robot tennis player that and plays rings around
Let's not personalize the debate like that. I see the point that "woodwindist" is a very uncommon term, perhaps not one where people would think to look for translations. The question, I suppose, is whether people (who are presumably vaguely aware that we don't include entirely unidiomatic strings like "the shirt is blue", and hence who don't expect us to have translations of "the shirt is blue") would expect us to have translations of "woodwind player". If they would, then we should have a redirect of some sort to woodwindist (or, some might argue, an entry) at "woodwind player". (My main concern is that we recognize these things as unidiomatic translation targets, rather than pretending they're something idiomatic, something more than just "tennis" or "woodwind" + "player".) - -sche(discuss)22:13, 2 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
That's a much more constructive comment. RM needs to be reminded that users cannot be forced, and they can vote with their feet. Donnanz (talk) 22:35, 2 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Keep. Deletionism is rising again… Job titles for athletes in English are well fixed. No child says “I wanna be a player!” when he/she wants to be a tennis player. If tennis player was an arbitrary combination, you could say player of tennis interchangeably, but at least in modern English everyone says tennis player when referring to a professional tennis player. The cover term of tennis player, baseball player, etc. is rather athlete, not player. — TAKASUGI Shinji (talk) 23:30, 2 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
People also say "my child" far more often than "child of mine," that doesn't mean that "my child" is idiomatic. People say "cook" when referring to professional cooks, yet cook doesn't apply exclusively to professional cooks. - TheDaveRoss00:13, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
BTW, in regard to "robot tennis player", this is the same issue of prototypicality as with "glass bird". Our defn of bird says it's an animal with wings and feathers that usually flies; glass birds are none of these (unless you throw them at someone?) but that doesn't make the defn wrong. Benwing2 (talk) 01:19, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Delete. Let's try to imagine how this would look in a printed dictionary:
Basketball: a game played by two teams of five players, in which the object is to maneuver a ball, called a "basketball", into the other team's goal, known as a basket.
Basketball player: one who plays basketball.
Chess: a strategy game for two players using a board with sixty-four squares and two sets of sixteen pieces of varying rank and function.
Chess player: one who plays chess.
Tennis:(orig. lawn tennis) a racquet game usually played by two players stationed on opposite sides of a tennis court, with a low net stretched between them.
Tennis player: one who plays tennis.
Just how many examples should I list? I could release quite a volley: baseball, football, soccer, quidditch, hockey, darts, table tennis, croquet, badminton, volleyball, checkers, Monopoly, backgammon, lacrosse, horseshoes, polo, water polo, Marco Polo, one old cat, two old cat, rounders, court tennis, jai alai, poker, blackjack, gin rummy, jacks, tiddlywinks, marbles, pool, snooker... and many others. Who is served by these obvious definitions? I don't mean to fault anyone's intentions, but the mere fact that we often have impressions of some of the persons described by a phrase (such as some of them being "professionals") doesn't seem to point to any pressing need. Such a set of definitions doesn't appear to match what other dictionaries have done; is there an urgent reason for Wiktionary to break new ground? Is there really some advantage to having "tennis player" primarily for non-English speakers who cannot not intuit the meaning of tennis + player? I can't force anyone to agree with me on whether such phrases should be left in or taken out; if people aren't willing to change their minds, resolving this will be a deuce of a challenge. All I can say to them is that the ball is in their court. P Aculeius (talk) 13:30, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
If you want examples from another online dictionary, which leaves Wiktionary in the shade - (several pages). Some terms such as football player have an equivalent (footballer), but this doesn't apply in every case, including tennis player. Donnanz (talk) 20:14, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
That's not a dictionary, it's a wordbook. Its sole purpose is to provide translations from English into German, so of course it includes all kinds of examples we don't have or need. Or are you suggesting that we should add English entries for every word or phrase that exists in German? If so, then we need to add accordion player, attacking player, bagpipe player, bass player, billiards player, blues player, Bosman player (as well as Bosman), bowls player, brass player, bridge player, card player, cautious player, cithara player, clarinet player, clavichord player, clean player, club player, concertina player, conservative player, contract player, cricket player, cymbal player, daring player, defensive player, doubles player, experienced player, fellow player, fistball player, flute player, former player, global player, golf player, guitar player, gusle player, harmonica player, harp player, harpsichord player, homegrown player, individual player, intermediate player, key player, keyboard player, lottery player, lute player, mandolin player, market player, midfield player, oboe player, offensive player, opposing player, organ player, outfield player, radball player, reckless player, recorder player, reed player, regular player, rugby player, sitar player, skat player, skittles player, squash player, string player, tambourine player, top player, tournament player, trombone player, trumpet player, tuba player, viol player, viola player, violin player, visiting player, weak player, wind player, woodwind player, young player, youth player, zither player, beach volleyball player, blues piano player, cycle polo player, cycle-ball player, double bass player, English horn player, exceptionally skilled player, fellow skat player, frame drum player, French harp player, French horn player, ice hockey player, international football player, left-footed player, locally trained player, and visually handicapped player, as well as all of the above, and many others, such as Scrabble player, four-square player, kickball player, Calvinball player, wiffleball player, eight-ball player, nine-ball player, ninepins player, tenpins player, duckpins player, rubber-band-duckpins player, ping-pong player, Twister player, Hungry Hungry Hippos player, Operation! player, mumblety peg player, hide-and-seek player, I spy player, bingo player, pinball player, air hockey player, air guitar player, blind man's bluff player, canasta player, cribbage player, Dungeons & Dragons player, duck duck goose player, hot potato player, musical chairs player, king-of-the-hill player, keep away player, kick the can player, monkey in the middle player, Mikado player, mahjong player, dominoes player, dice player, craps player, baccarat player, roulette player, leapfrog player, pattycake player, peekaboo player, pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey player, Poohsticks player, Pick-up sticks player, Russian roulette player, rock-paper-scissors player, seven-up player, hearts player, spades player, crazy eights player, snap player, old maid player, authors player, spin-the-bottle player, tag player, truth-or-dare player, Yahtzee player, trick player, practical joke player, serpent player, sackbut player, sousaphone player, cornet player, contrabass player, soprano saxophone player, alto saxophone player, tenor saxophone player, and many, many, many more. Can you give me one good reason why readers would benefit from these entries? What is it about them that isn't discernible, even by speakers of foreign languages, from the separate and constituent parts of each phrase? P Aculeius (talk) 22:57, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
You don't like the question? That's too bad. Nobody made you waste your time reading it. In answer to your query, "did I waste all that space asking a silly question?" the answer is, of course, NO. I wasted all that space replying to a silly suggestion that the challenged entry was justified by its occurrence in a wordbook together with pages and pages of similar entries. P Aculeius (talk) 04:12, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I have noticed that you tend to waste a lot of space wherever you leave your four tildes, not just here. Every entry should be judged on its merits, and I have spent some time deliberating on whether to make an entry, e.g. woodwind player - fortunately I don't create many in English - someone thought this entry is worthwhile and I agree. If it is deleted many translations, quite a few of which are not compound words, will be orphaned as a monument to stupidity. Perhaps you would like to vent your spleen on clarinet-player instead (current RFV). It was entered by the same user who nominated accordion player for deletion, so a double standard was employed. Donnanz (talk) 10:36, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Well, bully for you! I'm glad somebody on Wiktionary makes it his personal mission to ensure that nobody wastes too much space. As we know, space is in very short supply on Wiktionary. Each unnecessary jot and tittle uses thousands of photons on each computer screen, and our world has much more need of them for combating hunger and disease! You too can contribute by not attempting to refute other people's arguments with murky reasoning that we should keep "tennis player" as an entry, because a German user would be confused by the notion that tennisspieler merely equals tennis + spieler! If it was not your intention to suggest that all of the above list be turned into entries because they might be compounded into single words in German or other languages, then why exactly did you make the point of how many similar words there were? Perhaps your aggression toward others ("you wasted all that space in asking a silly question? ...NO. ...you tend to waste a lot of spaces wherever you leave your four tildes. Perhaps you would like to vent your spleen...") is a sign of misdirected anger toward your own inability to present a cogent argument based on your opinions. If you think a particular entry is useful and ought to be kept, fine, say so, state your chief reason, and let others present their opinions without the need to imply that their reasoning must be faulty because you can find distantly-related examples that even you don't consider relevant to the discussion. And when such arguments are effectively rebutted by showing what kind of strange results would come of following your reasoning to its logical end, I suggest you give up, rather than attacking what you consider to be the personal faults of the contributor ("your posts use too many Kilobytes! You're killing too many e-trees! You're wrong because you're an angry person!"). I'm sure your talents could be put to better use. P Aculeius (talk) 13:55, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I had to plough through all that lot of nothingness to get to the bottom line. Yes, you're right in one respect, I have better things to do than argue the toss. I have made my point. Donnanz (talk) 16:27, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Donnanz you've failed to explain which of those terms should be created and which shouldn't. You say 'of course, NO' and I assumed you'd've have said 'of course, YES'. What criterion are you using to separate these into two groups, then. Renard Migrant (talk) 18:29, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I have reread what I have written, and I can't find one word which constitutes a personal attack. Yes, I have given criticism, but we all have to take that whether we like it or not, and I seem to get plenty. Donnanz (talk) 20:12, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Do you hear yourself? You can't expect us to have to edit every other editable online dictionary to justify making a change here. --WikiTiki8901:12, 5 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
My point is that dict.cc's CFI are fundamentally different from Wiktionary's, because dict.cc routinely includes unidiomatic things up to and including entire long sentences, whereas we don't. Hence, the inclusion or non-inclusion of "tennis player" in dict.cc, which you cite, is not relevant to us. - -sche(discuss)02:11, 5 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I thought you meant the translation was wrong. But I have seen example sentences including translations within entries, which is not such a bad idea. Donnanz (talk) 10:16, 5 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Delete. I'm fairly certain that this is covered by a meaning of player (one needs to be added as a subsense of "one who plays"), and is entirely SOP. It could be applied to any sport, board game, video game, etc. The fact that it's a profession doesn't seem like a good argument for keeping it. By that logic, we'd also have vacuum cleaner salesman among a host of others. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 23:59, 3 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Keep as a translation target. Do the supporters of deletion really think that we should omit translations from SoP English terms in cases where many other languages use a single-word term for the concept in question? This, that and the other (talk) 10:28, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
YES WE DO. We've heard that argument 99 times before too. Agglutinative languages often have single words for extraordinarily complex concepts (that-he-was-about-to-pick-up-the-newspaper), or things unknown to Anglophone culture (do we need an English entry for e.g. Maori digging-stick since that's one word in Maori)? Equinox◑13:04, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
That's the perennial problem that we're up against all the time with compound words as used in German and other languages, and it certainly applies to this RFD. Donnanz (talk) 13:38, 5 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Well, we clearly need to draw the line somewhere between "water" and "that-he-was-about-to-pick-up-the-newspaper", and it looks like I see this term falling on the "water" side of the line (mainly because it's a reasonably simple, common term that could plausibly be found in the English-to-X part of many paper bilingual dictionaries), while many others see it on the "that-he-was-about-to-pick-up-the-newspaper" side. In my view, deleting entries like this makes Wiktionary worse for our readers. This, that and the other (talk) 23:25, 5 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I voted Delete in the last 25 discussions about this, and I still vote the same. There has not been a single convincing argument to keep it. --Ce mot-ci (talk) 15:41, 4 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
An example entry is ], where a part of the definition is (This entry is here for translation purposes only.) (it's all it needs) and belongs to ]. The entry lets find idiomatic translations (and optionally non-idiomatic) into numerous languages and is a compromise. --Anatoli T.(обсудить/вклад)11:44, 6 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I don't like these "This entry is here for translation purposes only" texts and the template. I don't find it more useful or better. On another note, "tennis player" is in Collins; since Collins shows translations, it may be there as a translation target, but I don't know. Collins does not show "This entry is here for translation purposes only". --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:47, 6 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I don't insist on that text. It just indicates that the entry was kept or created for the purpose of translations, especially if it's more common to have idiomatic translations in the target languages. If the term appears in Collins, then it passes the lemmings test. We should keep it and stop wasting each other's time. --Anatoli T.(обсудить/вклад)12:00, 6 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Question: is there some reason why the German entry for tennisspieler can't show the English translation as tennisplayer (two words, each leading to its own entry)? If it's allowable, why would it be so confusing? Tennis and spieler are both perfectly ordinary German words, and German speakers are perfectly well aware that tennisspieler is simply tennis + spieler, and player is the usual translation of spieler in English. P Aculeius (talk) 14:24, 6 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Aculeius, you are absolutely right. I do that all the time, see e.g. my recent entries for tennispelaaja(“tennis player”), osa-aikaeläke(“part-time pension”). Finnish, like German, uses a lot of closed compounds, many of which are esentially SOP, and I believe it would be nonsense to have an English entry for each of them. --Hekaheka (talk) 06:50, 8 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
And it wouldn't simply be easier to include translations under the Czech entry in English Wiktionary, as well as under the German, and the Catalan, and the Polish, than it would be to have an entry in English as the hub, linking to translations in every language. Is that the argument? That does make some sense, but it would seem to be an argument for having an English entry for every phrase that is regularly expressed as a single word in any other language, even if it never is in English. Is there any logical or objective criterion for limiting the scope of such a policy? The number of such entries could easily stretch into the tens of thousands. I'm not sure that people could be counted on to agree to include only words or phrases of a certain commonness, much less on what meets the definition; if tennista produces a list of equivalents in other language, why not tiddlywinkarista (assuming the term exists)? P Aculeius (talk) 17:42, 6 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
No, that argument has been refuted multiple times. An "amateur tennis player" is still a tennis player, though not a professional. Equinox◑13:18, 14 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Keep. I note also that it passes the lemming test – the OED has it (as a main entry, not just a sub-entry), as do some other dictionaries. Ƿidsiþ16:15, 18 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Delete as SOP, or keep as a translation target. I have always found the tennis player test strange, and I am happy to overturn it (or at least force it to be renamed the "truck driver test" or the "border guard test"). —Mr. Granger (talk • contribs) 13:49, 21 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
RFD kept as no consensus for deletion: >= 12 keep votes. Note that translation target was used often as the keeping rationale, while the "tennis player test" was rejected by multiple participants. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:38, 12 March 2016 (UTC)Reply
