User talk:Equinox/EWDC

Hi! EWDC was pretty fun but I stopped bothering after the month when nobody created any of their words at all. (I was also a little bored with the actual cut-and-paste process behind it, but it was 70% automated and I can probably automate the rest if I sit down and code for a few hours.) On the other hand I don't want it to be a chore where you think, "Oh no! EWDC! I have to create my words or Equinox will garotte me!" It's meant to be a fun thing where you are given strange words you wouldn't otherwise encounter.

So I am thinking about starting it up again in 2019. If you still wanna EWDC!!! then I would like your opinions. As in: Is once a month the right frequency? Did you like the old "ten random words", or didn't you like your words? Would you prefer some other approach, like a central watering-hole where you can grab words at will? (WT:REE doesn't really cut it though.) Is there anything that would make it more fun or interesting (bearing in mind that it's hard to make a computer program "know" anything about the meaning and context of words taken from a list)?

For info, my source word lists were:

• OED new words (additions to the Oxford English Dictionary since a few years ago)
• Sowpods (words allowed in Scrabble, based on the Collins Dictionary)
• Lucky dip (my own lists of words I couldn't define, plus stuff I got from Ungoliant, etc.)

So if you have any sexy ideas, or venture capital, drop it here! Let's have a big wiki argument. Equinox ◑ 03:59, 31 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Scrabble dictionaries are awful, I hate that shit. Other than that, sure. Regional words are fun. I think you should gamify it and give people scores. DTLHS (talk) 04:04, 31 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

There are lots of legit words we are missing in the Scrabble dict, though. Maybe we should be able to flag words as "don't give anyone this word again"? Like stupid stuff Edmund Spenser made up? Equinox ◑ 04:05, 31 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Gamifying is tempting (I almost mentioned it in my original post) but it does require a certain amount of infrastructure, and maybe tedious bullshit like logins and passwords to prove that you are the SemperBlotto, and what happens if you're a newbie and you see people with 10,000 points on EWDC, you aren't going to want to join because you will never catch up. The more insidious side of gamification is that people may want to create low-quality stuff just to get their points. It's almost unthinkable that a regular contributor would create rare misspelling entries on a daily basis but I had this horrible dream... Equinox ◑ 04:19, 31 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Rather than giving everybody ten words, one thing you could do is just dump a bunch of words on a central EWDC page every month so that everyone can work on however many words they want (either more or less than the 10, depending on how busy they are). If you wanted to gamify it (which I would be in favour of), we could all compete to create as many entries as possible, perhaps tallying points for every element we add to the entry in addition to a baseline of a definition and three quotes (e.g., pronunciation, etymology, usex, picture, etc.). We'd keep track of points on the same page the words would be listed on, and then declare and keep track of winners for each month (and start the points over so that new EWDCers could join in any time).

We could tag words with "uncitable" and any that are left at the end of the month could either be removed from your master list, or moved into a list of supposedly uncitable terms so that they don't come up again until we (hypothetically) get through the rest of the words. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 04:52, 31 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

(i) So what we'd really be doing would be a parallel WT:REE (which immediately raises the question of why we aren't dealing with the words on that page). (ii) I'm still worried about the points idea because we here would probably be honest about it, and see it as secondary to producing useful entries, but as soon as such a thing exists, it may be a magnet for low-effort shite for people who just want the numbers. (Don't ask me, ask the people who made millions from Candy Crush.) BUT (iii) as you suggest, if we reset points per month, it wouldn't become a pit of jealousy (although equally the points would become rather meaningless). (iv) Uncitable-tagging is good and in a way I would like to share the word lists and let us delete stupid crap collaboratively; I am just always a little worried that stuff may be deleted for a bad reason (e.g. "ythundered? that's a clear typo, a word would never start with y like that!"; or "telestich? clearly a mistake for telestic!" etc. etc. The more I think about this, the more I realise that Wiktionary is a very small and cosy project and I like to spy on the Recent Changes and extend my horrible withered arm over them all, but as soon as there is any real number of editors (hello Wikipedia) you can't do this and you have to just trust that someone else can sometimes do good work. Equinox ◑ 06:22, 31 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

Actually, an immediate quasi-solution to this would be that a word cannot be removed from the list without some brief reason, such as "Spenserism". (Sorry Edmund.) Equinox ◑ 06:23, 31 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

I think regarding number (iii), the idea would be that we'd keep track of which months a person had won, but there would be no official competition for number of months won, just for number of points acquired in a given month. There would still be a sort of friendly competition, and it would be less intimidating than joining in when everyone else has 50,000 points.

All this being said, I'd be fine with continuing EWDC the same way you were doing before. I don't know if I could commit to 10 words a month, though, given that it usually takes me close to an hour to create a quality entry. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:59, 1 January 2019 (UTC)Reply

Slightly separate: the whole EWDC plan has been based on me having a (hidden) list of funny mystery words and using a (hidden) computer program to distribute them. It's not very wiki-like. Really this isn't any different from just having WT:REE except that (i) they have been personally vetted by me, whereas WT:REE is full of sums-of-parts and neologisms, and (ii) we are actually pushing words at people, who might otherwise not spend time going to WT:REE to find words. I do feel that ideally we should just have WT:REE plus curation, but look at it. It's not working today. TLDR: the issue is quality control. Equinox ◑ 06:29, 31 December 2018 (UTC)Reply

I am still into this game, even though I am bad about doing it regularly. Maybe I'll try and finish up the ones you had previously assigned me. - TheDaveRoss 16:31, 31 December 2018 (UTC)Reply