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Quite a few entries use the labels "dialectal", "dialect" and "dialects". This is allowable, because sometimes a user may not know which dialects a word is used in. But we should always attempt to be more specific, IMO. I'd like to make people aware of the label "including", which allows listing dialects in a way that makes clear the list isn't exhaustive. E.g. in the entry favor: {{lb|en|transitive|in|_|dialects|including|Southern US|and|Cajun}} → (transitive, in dialects, including Southern US and Cajun). (I can also find evidence that the sense was used in British dialects a century ago; I don't know whether it still is or not.) - -sche(discuss)00:35, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
Flash card function for language learning publicly requested
In this blog article the author suggests the desirability of having the Wiktionaries offer a flash-card like system for learning African languages. The advantage of hosting such a system is that it would offer the opportunity for teachers or advocates of the language to add entries to the languages of interest to them to achieve sufficient language coverage to make the effort worthwhile. This came up on the Wiktionary-l mailing list, so we should try to make as constructive response as possible. DCDuringTALK18:39, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
I've been extracting flashcard files (for Anki et al.) from the dumps for personal use for several years (one component of a language-learning program that has helped me earn a tidy little set of ATA certifications). It would be fairly trivial to make such files available on a regular basis for any given set of languages. -- Visviva (talk) 21:44, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
I think the blog author and the fellow who put it on the mailing list may be looking for more. Actually there must be good, free web-based software or free applications that could run this. Perhaps we could assemble a list with links and select words and (god help me) phrases suitable for basic word and phrasebook flashcards. DCDuringTALK21:57, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
FWIW, Anki is open source and has web-based, desktop and app versions. The author's idea of a "flashcard mode" for Special:RandomInCategory is interesting (and could be accomplished with some clever JavaScript, I think), and could have some real pedagogical value if combined with a "basic words" category (rather than an "all lemmas" category), but it would still be a pretty poor substitute for a proper spaced-repetition flashcard program. -- Visviva (talk) 22:44, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
The common element is the core list of words for all languages and some target-language-specific words. I wish I could do it. All I'd need is the talent. Maybe some false friends, though that depends of both target and native language. The common element just seems like a good idea. There are the Swadesh lists, but we have to add some more contemporary material. I liked the spirit and tone of the original Gimmick series. Anyway, we can take requests if we want. I suppose this needs to start with just one or a few languages. DCDuringTALK00:29, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
Is there any reason why particularly African languages would lend themselves better to flash cards? But in all seriousness, this is a good idea, but do we have anyone willing to do anything about it? --WikiTiki8921:48, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
This seems like a grant-worthy project for the right talent and proposal. MWF would probably support it. That's probably what the fellow who put it on the Wiktionary list was thinking. DCDuringTALK00:32, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
FWIW, I just wrote User:Dixtosa/history.js that keeps track of searched terms in specified languages (you need to override historyjsIncludeLanguages variable). Then on your history page (username+/history, e.g. User:Dixtosa/history) you can view and manage (like deleting and deleting and even deleting) all the terms and all the targeted languages generated by JS. --Dixtosa (talk) 22:17, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
Abstain I oppose both images of these Chinese penises. We should replace both with a picture of a more realistic, bigger penis. --Vahag (talk) 11:46, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
Abstain I support replacement with a drawing in principle, but as for the proposed medical drawing, I wonder whether I would recognize it to be a drawing of penis if I did not already know it was one. I am not sure the proposed edit is really an improvement. I collected some drawings at Commons:Human penis drawing. At the very least, File:Illu repdt male.jpg seems better to me, but I still wish we would have a much nicer drawing. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:31, 5 July 2015 (UTC)
As an aside: If there are any other explicit pictures in any language, I would like to know. The entry masturbation had an explicit animated gif from May to June 2015, it does not have any image at the moment. --Daniel19:49, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
Is there any reason this needs to be in the Beer Parlour? It's discussing one entry and so should be in the Tea Room. --WikiTiki8917:02, 6 July 2015 (UTC)
I just forgot about TR. Maybe my brain went ou autopilot and subsconsciouly considered this as a follow-up to the other BP discussion. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:06, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
Presentation of Katharevousa Greek in en:Wiktionary.
I currently treat Katharevousa as shown here, entering it as an alternative form of the Standard Modern Greek one. Where an SMG form does not exist I would define it thus:
That looks like a good way to do it to me. See b́edro for an example of how I treated an obsolete word whose modern spelling is unattested. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:25, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
There are two distinct "areas": "polytonic orthography" is the one and the other is "Katharevousa". "Katharevousa" has only "polytonic orthography" but "Demotic Greek" (official language of Greece since 1976) was also printed in "polytonic orthography" (officially until 1982). But there are polytonic forms that belong purely to "Demotic Greek" (βασιληᾶς or βασιλιᾶς). Also "Demotic Greek" is not a "descendant" of "Katharevousa". But there are many words created (most translated or transliterated) during the period where "Katharevousa" was official language and thus can be somehow stated that come from "Katharevousa". IMHO "Katharevousa" should be used only if form has only "polytonic orthography" and the printed word cannot be treated as a polytonic form of a word in use. Also "Katharevousa" is far more distinguished by her own set of grammatical and syntactical rules which cannot be "presented" in individual lemmas. (about the above mentioned example: Ἀριθμοί is the polytonic form of Αριθμοί which, in turn, comes from Ancient Greek Ἀριθμοί and not from "Katharevousa"). --Xoristzatziki (talk) 16:14, 5 July 2015 (UTC)
I'm curious about the policy on eye dialect spellings of ing verbs in English. For example we have walkin' but not buyin'. AFAICT none of the eye dialect spellings are cited. Is there a special policy on when to include them? Just to pick an obscure verb, with a little casual googling I found a use for transmogrifyin' -- just one, but if I could find one barely looking, I bet there are more out there. Do we make pages for every English verb where someone has written it like that enough times to meet CFI? Are we actually required to find examples? There are no examples for any eye dialect words I've checked including some ones I'd have been surprising to find in writing, like agonizin' and considerin' (neither of which have any easy to find results on Google Books). Just curious if this has been discussed, I don't plan on mass-making these pages or nominating them for deletion or anything like that. WurdSnatcher (talk) 13:58, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
I personally consider them less useful than "common misspellings", as the general rule of dropping the "g" becomes obvious to a language learner rather quickly. We are not very good at agreeing on quantitative criteria for any class of inclusion/exclusion decisions, so the motivation and opinion of contributors, subject to the RfV process, governs, leading to an unsystematic result. DCDuringTALK14:17, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
As far as I'm concerned, they're includable if they meet CFI: at least three uses in independent, permanently archived sources, spanning more than a year. For most verbs it shouldn't be difficult to find usage, considering how widespread such forms are in reported speech. But they're not eye dialect and shouldn't be labeled as such; they should be labeled {{nonstandard form of}}. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:22, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
In an old discussion, we sorta decided to include them like any other word: any that meets our attestation requirement is in; any that doesn't is out. Ourdiscussionssincehave followed that rule AFAICT. (And I agree with it, personally, fwiw.) However, I've found one discussion that did not apply that rule to multi-word terms, preferring instead to have only the single-word g-less term and the g-full phrase.—msh210℠ (talk) 18:14, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
Sometimes a page is moved between Appendix<->Wiktionary namespaces, this would be because appendices are of interest outside of the scope of Wiktionary, Wiktionary namespace is for Wiktionary policies.
A few years ago, the BBC organized a large series of conversations between members of the public across the country about their dialects/accents. This information is now maintained by the British Library (so we can assume it's permanently archived) and although the files don't have full transcripts (just summaries), it's still a useful source for a lot of terms that are difficult to archive. To pick a random example, several participants in the Hartlepool conversation use the word cuddy-wifter/cuddywifter, which is difficult to cite even in its standard meaning of "left-handed person" (only one non-mention on Google Books), but as comes out in the course of the chat it has an additional meaning on Teesside of "Catholic". Given that a lot of the problems that we have with collecting dialectal terms is that they are often used in speech but seldom written down, can we use this archive as a citation? Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:29, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
Well, we have chosen not to accept voice recordings as sources, even though there are plenty of movies, music, and other media containing voice recordings that are durably archived. However, the transcripts can probably count as written sources. --WikiTiki8911:48, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
The untranscripted recordings afford an opportunity to cite pronunciations, thereby upgrading the objectivity of our pronunciations. Is there any kind of index to the untranscripted recordings to help one find where a particular word is pronounced? DCDuringTALK14:15, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
Some (not all) have been looked over by linguists who've indentified the phonemes the speakers used. For example, here's the analysis of the Birkenhead recording, which has some snippets with interesting pronunciations highlighted and transcribed (very closely) with IPA. For example: "I was hung-over yesterday so (yeah) and then I got a phone call from the college saying, “oh you’re in an interview tomorrow” and I was like, “what what about?”" (incidentally, I think the s in that quote are typos for ). There's also more general notation of standard phonemes - it notes that the FOOT vowel is , that there's a lot of H-dropping, etc. I don't think there's a proper archive - the best way to find a word is probably to do a Google search of the http://sounds.bl.uk/ domain and try your luck. Smurrayinchester (talk) 15:40, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
Re "we have chosen not to accept voice recordings as sources": on the contrary, WT:CFI explicitly says "Other recorded media such as audio and video are also acceptable, provided they are of verifiable origin and are durably archived". Libraries often archive copies of CDs and DVDs (songs and movies), and several of our entries cite songs and movies as a result. There was some discussion of the subject in in May 2012, where it was pointed out that using only audio citations of a term we can't be sure of the spelling of would be problematic, but audio citations can be used in conjunction with written citation (as on Qapla') or (as Chuck put it) "where only one spelling is possible and the audio or video confirms usage", such as (as Ruakh put it) when "we often RFV a specific sense of a term, or an idiomatic expression whose component words are clear. In both of these cases, it can sometimes be quite clear what the spelling is." - -sche(discuss)18:11, 7 July 2015 (UTC)
What other dictionaries distinguish proper nouns from common nouns and could offer us guidance? I recall from discussions of personal names and some other words that many other dictionaries don't distinguish proper from common nouns, and a surprising number of works, even high school and college English textbooks, erroneously equate "proper noun vs common noun" with "capitalized vs lowercase". Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, Collins and Cambridge all have "Buddhism", "Paul" and "White House" all just labelled noun, strongly suggesting that they simply don't distinguish proper from common nouns. (This means that if we could be consistent and correct in our labelling of things as proper vs common nouns, we'd be offering readers something other dictionaries don't!) Our colleagues at de.Wikt, who do distinguish proper from common nouns, have Buddhism as a common noun. - -sche(discuss)05:55, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
Other languages do not consider them proper nouns. Same thing with language names and names of days and months. I think English calls them proper nouns only because English capitalizes them. —Stephen(Talk)07:56, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
They're proper nouns because there's only one of them. Christianity is a particular set of beliefs; you don't generally speak about a Christianity, or these Christianities. (There are of course cases where "Christianities" is used, but that's true as well for any proper noun, e.g. Elvis Presleys or Elvises or Elvii.)--Prosfilaes (talk) 08:09, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
But you can talk about "this iron and that iron", but not "this Christianity and that Christianity". Perhaps physics should be a proper noun. --WikiTiki8914:14, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
The grammatical (mostly countable usage, modifiability by adjectives, etc) and orthographic (initial upper case) behavior of the names of religions and other systems of belief is almost identical to that of language names, especially those that are not homonymous with adjectives. We treat all languages as proper nouns. DCDuringTALK14:23, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
Physics can be used in a countable-like way in the phrase "alternative physics" example Not sure if that should be considered an idiom or not. Plenty of hits for "an alternate(ive) physics".WurdSnatcher (talk) 14:25, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
We are well aware that nearly any proper noun can be commonized: A Joseph from our Vermont created a new Christianity. But nevertheless the primary usages of these words are as proper nouns. --WikiTiki8914:29, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
One can even use a proper noun as a verb: Elvised and Elvising would meet our standards for attestation. Even Christianitied and Christianitying can be found on the web. This kind of use doesn't warrant creating a new PoS section IMO. DCDuringTALK14:47, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
Wikitiki, you can talk about "this or that" Christianity, e.g. "The Christian imprint upon his thought is certainly clearly evident everywhere. But this Christianity is very much modified and very abbreviated." Equinox◑17:37, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
I think we should abandon proper nouns and treat them as nouns. Grammatical properties, like whether an article precedes a word, are more diverse than proper vs. common. The uniqueness of a referent is a semantic property rather than grammatical and not relevant to part of speech. —CodeCat16:40, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
The Penguin Writer's Manual (2004, →ISBN says this:
A proper noun is a noun that denotes a specific person or thing. It is, to all intents and purposes, a name. Proper nouns include people's first names and surnames, the names of places, times, events, and institutions, and the titles of books, films, etc. They are spelt with an initial capital letter: Sam, Shakespeare, New York, October, Christmas, Christianity, Marxism, and Coronation Street. All nouns that are not proper nouns are known as common nouns.
Apart from being spelt with an initial capital letter, proper nouns have other characteristics that usually distinguish them from common nouns. They do not, generally, have a plural and they are not, usually, preceded by a or an. There is only one Australia; there was only one Genghis Khan. there are many exceptions to . There are occasions when either a specific example or several examples of something denoted by a common noun must be referred to: keeping up with the Joneses; one of the warmest Januaries on record.
The manual then goes on to describe concrete nouns (like table) and abstract nouns (like happiness and unity), countable nouns (table again) and uncountable nouns (mud, foliage), and collective nouns (flock).
I have yet to find any English grammar reference, of any vintage, that doesn't discuss proper nouns. I suppose that print dictionaries and their online descendants rely on capitalization, the habits and experience of speakers, and common sense to communicate what needs to be communicated to users without wasting space on pages or screens. CGEL handles proper nouns and proper names in less than twenty pages, so it shouldn't be all that difficult for us to interpret the treatment of proper nouns in grammar references to help us differentiate proper from common nouns. DCDuringTALK18:04, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
Comment: While there are some borderline cases, such as the names of months and days, most nouns can be readily distinguished as common or proper. The actual criteria and grammar of proper nouns are of far more debate, albeit philosophical. The problem arises in that the names of abstractions and philosophies behave grammatically much like proper nouns. Is socialism a common noun or a proper noun? In older texts, it was capitalized and treated much like Confucianism or Christianity. All three are philosophies. Further, capitalization cannot always be relied upon as a guide, since a number of common nouns and even adjectives are capitalized by virtue of their etymological source (e.g. Welshman, French dressing, African). --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:27, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
While a few users have suggested that distinguishing proper from common nouns is not useful, we have established and seem to be in agreement that religions are proper nouns. A long as we maintain a distinction between common and proper nouns, I will update Islam etc accordingly. - -sche(discuss)23:09, 10 August 2015 (UTC)
I found them to lack consistency as some of those had only a "English citations" section while others had a "Translingual citations" section without specifying which language is each citation. So I am trying a new format to standardize them all.
See Citations:VL. I separated the citations with language-specific labels within the "Translingual citations of VL" section. I also put them in the respective language categories: Category:English citations, etc. (Maybe something like Category:Translingual citations in English could be an improvement. Still, maybe this level of granularity is not necessary now because there are only few of those citations. If we had hundreds of Translingual citations I might think differently.) I made sure all the 30 pages are following this new format at the moment. I'd like some feedback to see if other people like this format or it could be improved some other way.
I'm thinking that there should be no such thing as a translingual citation. The citation itself is in a language, even if the term it's citing is used cross-language. —CodeCat22:03, 8 July 2015 (UTC)
@CodeCat: I disagree with you on this point. IMO, having "Translingual citations" mirroring the Translingual section of the entry itself is useful because allows us to group different language citations into the same senses. See Citations:(, specifically sense "Punctuation mark: expands a word into another word, inflection or spelling"; it has both Portuguese and English examples. It could have even dozens of languages in the future. It serves for easier comparison of how the same specific sense is used, to check if the Translingual definition is true in all languages. Current sense at ( is inaccurate. It is: "Begins denoting an alternative option for a preceding word. / dog(s)", but there are citations with "colo(u)r" and "(re)criação" (Portuguese). For punctuation marks, one could even argue that one sense of a punctuation mark is truly "Translingual" if it has been attested in multiple languages; ¿ has only the Spanish section. But taxonomic names would be truly Translingual even if attested in only one language, I hope: Citations:Anous stolidus has only one Portuguese citation at the moment. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:21, 9 July 2015 (UTC)
The Translingual case shows that the naming convention for the citations categories assumes there to be no difference between the language label for the term and the language label for the citation. AFAICT only Translingual violates the assumption, though Translingual itself is a highly heterogeneous collection of ideograms, symbols, taxonomic names, and other scientific names. Arguably it should also include Latin-derived term that appear in medical, legal, even alchemical running text of many languages.
IMO, Any citation pages for Translingual terms should remain where they are and those pages should be categorized as Translingual, eg, the current Category:Translingual citations. IMO, there could certainly be additional categorization into categories for the language in which the translingual term is embedded in each citation. This would enable the citation to be found and reused for citing the terms of its language that it includes and subjected to any language-specific maintenance that might be required.
I don't see any great advantage to having a category like Category:Translingual citations in English rather than two categories: Category:Translingual citations and Category:English citations, but one disadvantage: there is no simple single category that contains all the pages bearing in whatever content namespace that have all the citations in each language. The current search engine makes it easy to search for the intersection of categories. As long as there is no regression of search-engine capability, we should be good for real-time search. We also have the dumps to process should there be regression. DCDuringTALK00:17, 9 July 2015 (UTC)
I am thinking, maybe I would support that "Latin-derived terms that appear in medical, legal, even alchemical running text of many languages" be Translingual entries. Some phrases and terms to consider: List of Latin phrases and List of legal Latin terms. Maybe the pronunciation of those would be slightly different among different languages but taxonomical names with pronunciations would also have this issue to consider.
I agree with DCDuring's reasons for having the Category:Translingual citations, in addition to the reasons I stated above in my response to CodeCat. About Category:Translingual citations in English, I'm not really interested in it at the moment, but it's possible that at some point in the future I'm going to bring it up again. IMO, if we had hundreds of Translingual citation pages, then I would prefer using categories than using the search engine for more navigable results. (seeing 200 page titles at once, sorted alphabetically, where it's possible to see how many members one category has, etc.) --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:21, 9 July 2015 (UTC)
No one except for me wanted a pronunciation header for taxonomic terms. I only wanted one suggested (ie somewhat prescriptive) pronunciation. But since Translingual terms are unlike the usual terms in a few ways, perhaps we should reconsider what the distinctive characteristics of the various types of Translingual entries are and develop a custom ELE for them. For example, we could have a "hidden" pronunciation section for taxonomic terms with pronunciations in as many languages as people care to provide.
I added the Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation in the Translingual sections of Homo sapiens and Vulpes vulpes. I deleted the English section of H. sapiens in the process, because it seemed to me it had no value other than having pronunciations, foreign script translations (like ホモサピエンス, moved link to Translingual section) and the plural "Homines sapientes", which I cited in Portuguese too. The English section had some random translations of man/person too, which I just deleted.
Custom ELE for Translingual entries = WT:AMUL? I guess it would be both the CFI and ELE for that "language", though it would have to be edited further as I see it currently focuses almost entirely on criteria for inclusion and says little about layout. I support the proposal: 'we could have a "hidden" pronunciation section for taxonomic terms with pronunciations in as many languages as people care to provide'. But maybe for the moment we could just keep adding pronunciations in any language to Translingual sections without bothering to have them collapsed. Related category: Category:Translingual terms with IPA pronunciation (292 members). --Daniel Carrero (talk) 06:52, 9 July 2015 (UTC)
I think the Chinese entries are a possible model: we should have a collapsible pronunciation table along the lines of the translation table, since the same symbol is read out loud in different languages and dialects as period, full stop, point, Punkt, etc. One problem to deal with: scientific names, at least, also have syntactic information in various languages. For instance, scientific usage in English is to refer to "the family Malvaceae", but a lot of people who aren't familiar with this refer to "the Malvaceae family". Another is that scientific names are more often read than heard, so pronunciation can vary widely from person to person: I would pronounce Malvaceae as something like /malˈvej si ej/, but I often see the pronunciation given as /malˈvej si i/. Writing for the public on pronouncing scientific names tends to say things like "there's no one right way to say it- everyone is different". This is especially true when scientific names are based on names of people: if one recognizes the name, one may pronounce it after the pronunciation of the person's name, rather than by the usual rules. For example, "hopei" might be pronounced as two syllables or three, depending on whether one notices that it's based on the surname Hope. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:00, 9 July 2015 (UTC)
Sounds like we should have a Pronunciation section at WT:AMUL(or WT:ATAX?) to which we can have a standard link, perhaps as part of the control for hiding/showing the pronunciations. It seems impractical and speculative to offer too many idiosyncratic pronunciations within each language. My own inclination is somewhat prescriptive with respect to a term like hopei, in case we don't have an etymology or a user doesn't look at it or make the appropriate inference. DCDuringTALK14:15, 9 July 2015 (UTC)
If my input is of any value: if Wiktionary had pronunciation of taxonomic names and had them more thoroughly covered, I would look them up regularly, and would expect (and want) the prescriptive (presumably Latin), more neutral pronunciation, rather than the way it is pronounced in various languages (unless it's in common use outside of the scientific community like Homo sapiens or T. rex). The pronunciation would vary from person to person and would have too many variants for there to be any point in looking it up rather than sounding it out using the pronunciation rules of the language of the context. JodianWarrior (talk) 14:49, 9 July 2015 (UTC)
While this approach sound good in theory, it has little practical value. The prescriptive back-constructed Classical Latin pronunciations are not actually used by modern scientists in the area of taxonomy. For example, the genus of pine is Pinus, which in Classical Latin sounds exactly like English (deprecated template usage)penis, so only the most eccentric of taxonomists uses that pronunciation. Even the family names in botany vary wildly in their use pronunciations by country, and none of them use the Classical-style pronunciation that I have ever heard (and I've heard US, UK, Danish, French, and Portuguese botanists).
So, what would be the point of prescribing pronunciations that no one actually uses? If we're going to include pronunciations for scientific taxon names, then I would suggest we limit ourselves to those pronunciations found in English-speaking countries, and include as a matter of course, a link to a page where the variability of these names in other cultures is explained with some examples. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:41, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
That seems like a sensible recommendation. It would give English users of Wiktionary some clue about one or more intelligible (descriptive) pronunciations and might provide hints relevant to other languages, such as stress pattern, diphthongs, or diaeresis, hard vs soft c and ch, etc, which probably apply across many languages. DCDuringTALK22:58, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
"Audio" in front of pron files for non-pluricentric languages
Do languages that do not have several very well established regional varieties (an example of this could be English (US), English (UK), English (Aus), etc.) need the text "Audio" prepended before their pronunciation file players? Neitrāls vārds (talk) 20:31, 9 July 2015 (UTC)
Proposal for a "best practices" recommendation: "Audio" before a pronunciation file should be used only in the presence of some other qualifier. It is otherwise redundant As bullet points are used to itemize/list text, a bullet point is not to be used either (because a Flash element is not text.) (Ping some users whose editing involves pronunciation files User:Pereru, User:Panda10, anyone else welcome to express their opinion.)
Pronunciations would be formatted in the following way for pluricentric languages languages:
Modified 2nd version: "Audio" is not to be used in the absence of some other qualifier but bullet point must be used.
3rd version: "Audio" is not to be used in the absence of some other qualifier. An editor can choose whether to use a bullet point. ({{IPA}}doesn't appear to be checking for namespace when adding categories the IPA examples should be removed from this page at some point or namespace-checking/cat suppression should be added to the template.)
I think the bullet point should be retained in all cases. It makes the flash element align with the other things, and gives them all the same visual 'introduction' (a bullet point); it also makes the edit window more legible, IMO; furthermore, it helps when indentation is used: for example, if audio were added to impact, it could be indented under the 'noun' and 'verb' lines (although see object for another way of presenting such information; we are not consistent).
If we were to drop "Audio" from non-pluricentric languages, could we just drop it from all languages? Then we would have:
I prefer the bullet point NOT to be retained -- the result is that the flash element is placed right under the pronunciation transcription to which it refers, as part of the same paragraph -- which to me is more logical: the pronunciation file is not a separate pronunciation, a separate item in a list of possible pronunciations, but an actual realization of the same pronunciation that was transcribed with the IPA right above it, i.e. logically part of the same paragraph. (I might even prefer it if the flash element occurred in the same line and after the actual IPA transcription; but occurring right under it is also OK.) --Pereru (talk) 21:56, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
I'm fine with removing the "Audio" label. If there are qualifiers, they can be displayed without the "Audio" label. It would also be fine removing the bullets but without them two or more audio templates will be displayed in a single line. It doesn't look good. Maybe you can modify the audio template to resolve this. Leaving the use of bullets optional is probably not a good policy. Some editors would use it, others won't. It would create too much inconsistency in the layout. I assume the new standards will be implemented by a bot and they will continued to be checked after every edit. --Panda10 (talk) 12:44, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
The only concern I have is that the player and associated graphic do not always display in some browsers or under certain conditions. If we remove the "(Audio)" text, can we ensure that when the player fails to display, that default text of "(Audio)" or something equally descriptive appears in its place? --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:45, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
Proposal 1:All entries should be written left-to-right
The majority (if not all) of the languages that use Ital are written boustrophedon and thus could have lemmata appearing in left-to-right or right-to-left order. Modern scholarship, however, tends to merely unspool the inscriptions and then present them in left-to-right order. I therefore propose that all languages using Ital should be lemmatized in left-to-right order.
Support. This is proper use of Unicode, because Ital is encoded as left-to-right. If we ever decide to make some piece of Old Italic text in boustrophedon or right-to-left, it should be done with HTML, never by typing it backwards like some have suggested. — Ungoliant(falai)14:00, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
SupportperUngoliant. It would be wonderful if we could have a template to wrap Old Italic quotations which would present the text boustrophedon. — I.S.M.E.T.A.18:27, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
Proposal 2:Allow alternative use of Ital characters
For much of Ital script, the character may be transcribed unambiguously or with only minor phonetic deviations from the canonical. Examples are represented be a blue box in Appendix:Old Italic script and include:
𐌂: canonical - c; Camunic, Oscan, South Picene, Noric, North Picene - g
However, in some cases, one language may use one glyph to represent an entirely different sound (whether by innovation of a new but similar letterform or by reällocation of a previous letterform). Examples are represented be a red box in Appendix:Old Italic script and include:
I therefore propose the use of the character which most closely resembles the letterform in a particular language. Therefore South Picene matereíh should be lemmatize as 𐌌𐌀𐌕𐌄𐌓𐌄𐌑𐌇(matereíh) and not 𐌌𐌀𐌕𐌄𐌓𐌄𐌝𐌇(matereíh). The rules will be those set forth in Appendix:Old Italic script
My initial reaction is to oppose. As was just noted in the Grease Pit, "б in Serbian is sometimes displayed differently from the б in Russian", but we don't handle this by using a different character for Serbian б in an attempt to mimic its shape. For Runic, we make do with ᛊ or ᛋ, even when the inscription clearly has S. If Unicode has encoded something as, for example, "LETTER SHE", and we use it in spelling a word which is actually spelled with "LETTER II", I don't see how readers are supposed to figure out that the word isn't spelled with she (and wonkily transliterated by us). - -sche(discuss)18:47, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
Re "in some cases, one language may use one glyph to represent an entirely different sound (whether by innovation of a new but similar letterform or by reällocation of a previous letterform)", I suppose there is an important theoretical difference between innovational homoglyphs and reällocated glyphs; the former simply doesn't exist in the encoded repertoire, whilst it is perfectly appropriate to transcribe the latter in whatever noncanonical way according to the reällocation of a given language. I doubt that the distinction has any more than theoretical importance, however, so I find myself inclined to support the use of noncanonical transcriptions where a given language calls for it. — I.S.M.E.T.A.18:27, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
Proposal 3:Add extra characters into Ital temporarily
The interpunct ·, two dot punctuation ⁚, and tricolon ⁝ are all variously used as word separators in Ital languages and should be used as punctuation in entries. Furthermore, South Picene (always the culprit) uses · to represent the letter o and ⁚ for the letter f. Thus the entry mefiín contains the quotation:
𐌀𐌐𐌀𐌄𐌔⁝𐌒𐌖𐌐𐌀𐌔𐌌𐌑𐌍⁝𐌐𐌞𐌐𐌞𐌍𐌉𐌔⁝𐌍𐌑𐌓⁝𐌌𐌄⁚𐌉𐌑𐌍⁝𐌅𐌄𐌉𐌀𐌕⁝𐌅𐌄𐌐𐌄𐌕𐌑
apaes qupasmín púpúnis nír me iín veiat vepetí
The nobleman lies, the chief of the Picenes (?) is (?), in the middle of the tomb.
Until such time as Unicode adds one-, two-, and three-dot word-separators to the Ital code block, · (U+00B7), ⁚ (U+205A), and ⁝ (U+205D) should be used in entries and, in the case of South Picene, in page names (mefiín should be moved to 𐌌𐌄⁚𐌉𐌑𐌍(me iín)).
Oppose. This is improper use of Unicode. It’s no different than using | (pipe) instead of I (capital i). I prefer using transliteration since the script variant used by South Picene is clearly not covered well enough by Unicode, but using 𐌏 and 𐌚 are also a better solution. — Ungoliant(falai)13:53, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
Support. I disagree with Ungoliant. This is nothing like using | (pipe) instead of I (capital i), because I (capital i) exists in Unicode. --WikiTiki8916:58, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
Support. I seriously doubt that Unicode will add Old Italic specific punctuation; punctuation is for all scripts where possible.--Prosfilaes (talk) 18:43, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
I can support using U+00B7, U+205A and U+205D for punctuation, but using them for letters is indeed a misuse of Unicode like Ungoliant said. Why not use the regular "O" (U+1030F) and "F" (U+1031A) codepoints for South Picene? It does not seem particularly distinct from, say, the Serbian variant of Cyrillic to me. — Keφr08:01, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
I support using · (U+00B7), ⁚ (U+205A), and ⁝ (U+205D) as punctuation marks in Old Italic languages (until such time as Unicode encodes punctuation marks specific to Old Italic). I oppose using · (U+00B7) and ⁚ (U+205A) for South Picene o and f; we should instead use 𐌏 and 𐌚 in conjunction with a font that will make those letters display as dots (as I suggested at User talk:JohnC5#Testing transliteration modules). — I.S.M.E.T.A.18:27, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
Proposal 4:Page names should be in Ital when applicable
For several of these languages (Old Latin most notably), there may exist a corpus written in the Latn alphabet. The majority of the languages exist primarily in their version of the Ital alphabet and should be lemmatized as such. It is the scholarly practice to place words transcribed from Ital in boldface and those found in Latn in italics or roman. Where possible, we should strive to put words found in Ital or Latn according to their appearance in the source. The major offender at this point is Faliscan, the majority of whose entries, I suspect, should be in Ital (also, -el̄u shouldn't have a macron in the page name).
Support. Entries should be in the same script as the original attestation, not printed transcriptions. --WikiTiki8917:01, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose. We are a printed work, therefore we should follow the standards of printed works. Don't Proliferate; Transliterate!. Trying to post entries in Old Italic also demands that we have translation entries for Latin script so people actually using printed works can look things up.--Prosfilaes (talk) 18:53, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
Extremely strong support, except, perhaps, for Old Latin (iff its corpus is primarily Latn). Perhaps we should do something similar to what is done with Gothic, and have entries for the Latn spellings of every Ital lemma. — I.S.M.E.T.A.18:27, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
Sorry for how long this is, but I needed to discuss all the different issues because each affects how words will be lemmatized. When we have a decision, I will create WT:AITAL with the information.
For the record, I do not feel that I have neither enough knowledge of Old Italic nor of its script to offer any meaningful opinions in this discussion. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:40, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
Collapse multiple inflection-of definitions into one with subsenses?
I've always been bothered by entries like agri and aquae. There's no need to repeat "of (word)" four times on separate lines. So I'm thinking it would be good to extend {{inflection of}} so that you can specify distinct multiple inflections instead of just one. These would be displayed as subsenses, so that aquae would look like:
I think this would look a lot better, and above all there is only one link to the lemma rather than 3 extra redundant ones. We can also make the list of subsenses collapsible in cases where there's too many (like for German adjectives).
To implement this, {{inflection of}} would need some way to indicate how to separate multiple inflections. This would have to be some kind of special tag that is inserted as a separator, like: {{inflection of|aqua||nom|p|(sep)|gen|s|(sep)|dat|s|(sep)|voc|p|lang=la}}. My question is what the separator should be. It should be something that isn't legitimately used in existing entries and would not likely be used in future ones. If proposals are made, the current template can be modified to track any uses of those proposed tags in current entries, which would then allow us to assess the situation better. —CodeCat20:20, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
Meh. A trivial case of redundancy not worth addressing. And I think subsenses should not be used unless a word has so many definitions that they would become too hard to navigate otherwise. And I especially oppose having them collapsed. Which particular inflected form the word is in is crucial information and the reader should not be required to click through to see it. — Keφr20:38, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
So you want to make definition lists less usable for the sake of one word? (Which is not going to help with anything anyway; collapsible or not, you still have a long list.) — Keφr13:05, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
I don't see how they're made less usable to begin with, I think this increases usability. But roten isn't the only German adjective like this; all German adjectives have one form ending in -en which has this many definitions. Editors have so far sidestepped this issue by using {{inflected form of}}, which really isn't any good as it doesn't say anything about what inflected form. You said yourself that this is crucial information. —CodeCat13:22, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
I find it completely bearable. Your "solution", on the other hand, does not shorten it at all. You are going to have a long list no matter what. The only situation in which this proposal would be of any help is when a single token is derived from multiple lemmata; but I suspect these situations to be quite rare. — Keφr13:48, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
Support. I would like to suggest a comma or a semicolon, since those are separators people would use in running text- we might as well make it as intuitive as possible. Chuck Entz (talk) 00:19, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
A comma could be used legitimately, like if someone wants to write "nominative, accusative and dative". —CodeCat00:20, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
Another thought: allow groups that share one element, so that you could have "|nom|acc|voc|s|" that would be the same as "|nom|s|,|acc|s|,|voc|s|" Chuck Entz (talk) 00:26, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
It would be quite complicated to do that, the module would have to somehow guess that the singular label applies to all of the previous. Not worth the trouble considering all the edge cases there are with this. Dutch has a form for masculine/feminine gender, plural or definite adjective inflection, just to name an example of overlapping sets. —CodeCat00:33, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
It wouldn't change anything directly, it just adds new possibilities. You'd have to modify the entry to make use of it. In this case, you'd change the definition to: {{inflection of|vizsgál||1|p|indic|pres|def|;|1|p|subj|pres|def|lang=hu}}. —CodeCat13:03, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
Ok, that works. I noticed the word "inflections of" is in plural since it lists multiple inflected forms below, but for some reason "inflection of" would sound better to me because it is after all a single form used in multiple places. --Panda10 (talk) 13:36, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
I lean towards "inflection of", too, even when multiple inflections are given. It certainly shouldn't be "inflections of" if only one inflection is given. Will the template still indent the "list" if it only contains one item, like abnegationem? (It's not disastrous if it does, but it's unnecessary.) - -sche(discuss)18:56, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
Since there seems to be overwhelming support, I've added the necessary code for this to {{inflection of}}. I've chosen ; (semicolon) as the separator. See aquae, which I've changed to make use of this new option. We would likely want to inform bot owners of this, and also run a bot to convert existing entries. —CodeCat13:05, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
One day after starting the discussion? Typical CodeCat. Just stop and let the discussion proceed in a regular fashion. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:20, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
They can be, in languages like English that have little inflection. But for highly-inflected languages like Latin, they cannot. We want documentation of the various inflected forms, and many Latin verbs are incompletely conjugated, and some other Latin words have inflectional irregularities. It is not feasible to try to include supporting quotations for all forms of a Latin verb under the lemma; there are simply too many forms, and identifying and sorting the various forms within a lemma page would be disastrous for the sanity of both editors and users. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:40, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
Angr is right, quotations and usage examples go on the lemma form. Quotations shouldn't be used merely to attest a term, they exist as a higher-quality alternative to usage examples. If the idea is to show attestation of a term, then it should go on the citation page, which exists for that purpose. —CodeCat13:55, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
No, Angr is wrong about this. We are not simply attesting the term and its usage as a collection of forms, but are cataloging spelling variation, different plural forms, and different inflected forms. While any of these can be listed at the lemma, it serves no useful purpose whatsoever to restrict them there. It is much more useful to be able to find supporting citations associated with the specific form of the word, rather than with a lemma form that, in some cases, has been chosen arbrtrarily from among the possible alternatives. If we are showing usage examples, as you say and as I agree, then those need to be placed on the forms pages too. If I want to see how the dative form of a word is used, I want to look at a collection of usages in the dative, not usage of all of the forms together. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:51, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
Then that certainly goes against the common practice among editors. Editors put usage examples for any of the inflected forms on the page of the lemma, and have done so since forever. They don't restrict themselves to putting only usage examples for the lemma form on that page. This practice is established enough that some editors will move the usage examples from a non-lemma page to the lemma. A change to this would certainly need further discussion. If you're looking for usage examples for the dative in a given language, you should not expect to find them in a dictionary under some random word. Explaining how cases are used is the job of a grammar, not a lexicon. —CodeCat21:07, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
@CodeCat Re: "Editors put usage examples for any of the inflected forms on the page of the lemma, and have done so since forever.": Evidence, please. That does not match my recollection. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:53, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
As CodeCat and Angr have said: citations showing how a term is used go in the lemma entry. If in specific, unusual cases citations are needed to verify that the dative plural of a term is foobarenn rather than the usually-expected foobaren or whatever, then those citations go on the citations page. This has been the case for years. - -sche(discuss)21:47, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
Argument from what "has been the case for years" (and I will not bother to argue whether this has actually been the situation or not) is a weak argument that does not address any objective Wiktionary is trying to accomplish. Further, your argument above makes sense only if (1) citations exist solely for the purpose of demonstrating grammatical usage, and (2) grammtical usage does not vary with form. But in some languages, the usage of a term may actually vary with the form of the inflection. As a simple example, the grammar of singular and plural millē are very differently in Latin. I would also argue that assuming point (1) is an unnecessary limitation on Wiktionary. Citations exist to document forms and spelling at least equal in measure to documenting proper grammar. To that end, each variant should ideally be (eventually) documented from sources. That cannot be reasonably accomplished if all the various citations are limited to the lemma page. And CodeCat, no one is suggesting we put the citations under a "random word"; that is a straw man argument. --EncycloPetey (talk) 00:21, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose. I prefer the relational presentation over the hierarchical one. The hierarchical presentation takes one more line. Furthermore, I find the proposed wiki markup exemplified as {{inflection of|aqua||gen|s|;|dat|s|;|nom|p|;|voc|p|lang=la}} (diff) ugly. Moreover, the markup makes it impossible to place quotations per inflected form. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:18, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
We do not have an entry for any form of mene mene tekel upharsin (numbered, numbered, weighed, and divided). I think the language is Chaldean Aramaic (Biblical Aramaic) and it was probably written on the wall in Neo-Babylonian cuneiform script. Today, however, it is commonly used in English texts in Roman letters. Should there be an entry in Roman letters, and if so, what language to label it? I supposed it could be written in Hebrew (מְנֵ֥א מְנֵ֖א תְּקֵ֥ל וּפַרְסִֽין), Syriac, and/or cuneiform (if the spellings could be found in those scripts). —Stephen(Talk)15:33, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
The phrase was never used in Aramaic in Roman letters. The pronunciation currently in the entry is the English pronunciation. So either it should be converted to English, or it should be a redirect. --WikiTiki8912:44, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
Use "male" and "female" for gendered nouns
Many languages have nouns that occur in different forms depending on the natural gender of the referent, like French comédien/comédienne, English actor/actress. This is not actually grammatical gender the way we know it, exemplified by the fact that languages that have no grammatical gender can still often make such distinctions. Of course grammatical gender may align with natural gender in this case, but it doesn't have to (I can't think of an example, but maybe someone else can). Spanish amiga is not a grammatically feminine form of the lemma amigo; rather both are independent nouns and have different meanings. The choice is made based on the referent rather than based on grammatical rules.
So I think that using the terms "masculine" and "feminine" and using {{feminine of}} and such for these cases is incorrect and confusing, as it conflates grammatical and natural gender. It's especially bizarre in entries like mayoress with languages that don't even have grammatical gender. I'm therefore proposing to introduce the separate terms "male" and "female" to refer to natural gender in these cases. amiga is the female equivalent or female counterpart of amigo, not a form. There would need to be two new form-of templates. —CodeCat20:17, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
If they are independent nouns then why do we need more templates at all? Define them separately, as e.g. "a man who mows lawns" and "a woman who mows lawns", and each can link to the other as a related term. Equinox◑20:20, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
That's not ideal, because they might have many distinct meanings. Duplicating them all would be bad. The idea of a new template is to indicate "this noun means the same as this other one, except referring to a female individual". —CodeCat20:25, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
No, gato means male/unspecified cat, while gata means female cat. And, this is exactly my point. Grammatical gender is arbitrary. "Feminine of gato" tells us nothing; it merely indicates that this noun is related to "gato" but has feminine grammatical gender. Nothing in the entry indicates that the cat itself has to be female, only that the word referring to it is feminine. —CodeCat20:25, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
I can think of cases where grammatical gender doesn't match natural gender (cailín(“girl”) is masculine, while gasóg(“boy scout”) and stail(“stallion”) are feminine), but I can't think of a case where a word referring to a person of one gender is derived from a word referring to a person of the other gender, but grammatical and natural genders don't match (in a language that has grammatical gender, unlike English). —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:31, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
gatta, as it is now, looks good. But as I said above, with highly polysemic words it becomes a problem to copy all the definitions. A simple template that refers to the definitions of the gender-neutral term is more effective. Also, this entry illustrates another important distinction between "feminine of" nouns and adjectives: the female equivalent noun can have meanings the male one doesn't have, or the reverse. With true grammatical gender, like that found in adjectives, that would be unthinkable. They really are separate nouns. —CodeCat20:36, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
I'll write more later, but at the moment I just want to highlight that the observation that "the female equivalent noun can have meanings the male one doesn't have, or the reverse" calls into question the sensibility of avoiding spelling out which senses each word has and instead using a template that would "indicate 'this noun means the same as this other one, except referring to a female individual'". - -sche(discuss)21:05, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
You're right about that point. I just wanted to accommodate users who certainly want to use a template, and also existing entries that have no definition beyond {{feminine of}}. —CodeCat21:08, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
It may be wise to distinguish languages which have grammatical gender from those which do not. Because English does not normally* mark gender grammatically, it's at least debatable whether mayoress should be described as 'female' or 'feminine'. (The references turned up by google books:English "-ess" "feminine form", compared to the irrelevance turned up by google books:English "-ess" "female form", suggest that the traditional analysis has been that it's a 'feminine' rather than a 'female' form.) *Of course, note how google books:"blonde mayoress" gets two hits while "blond mayoress" gets none, and "blonde mayor" gets no hits while "blond mayor" gets at least five (plus a lot of chaff), suggesting that there are some areas where grammatical gender agreement is found in English. In German and other languages with grammatical gender, the case for describing Wissenschaftlerin et al. as 'feminine' rather than 'female' forms of Wissenschaftler et al. is necessarily stronger, since they are feminine, and take feminine adjectives, etc, independent of whether or not they are regarded as 'feminine forms' or 'female forms' of the corresponding masculine nouns. - -sche(discuss)22:26, 11 July 2015 (UTC)
One other thing to keep in mind is that sometimes the "female equivalent of X" means "woman is who is an X" but sometimes it means "wife of an X". In the UK at least, a duchess is always the wife or widow of a duke; no woman can become duchess by virtue of her birth. Our definition of Burggräfin is "female burgrave", but when burgraves were still running around they were always male; a Burggräfin is the wife of a burgrave. A hundred years ago or so, Professorin almost always meant "wife of a professor" but today it almost always means "female professor". In the E. F. Benson novel Trouble for Lucia, a woman becomes mayor of a town in England and has to choose a mayoress to help her, but she is not the mayoress herself—in that context, then, mayoress means neither "female mayor" nor "wife of the mayor" but rather "woman who assists the mayor". I doubt a single template can or should accommodate all this variation. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 05:56, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
Those are excellent points. For words like those, I'm persuaded that we should give the words actual definitions (as Equinox said). For English, almost all of the -ess and -rix and other such entries I've seen do have definitions, and we should just clean up the few that don't. For German, the Duden has -in entries only as pointers to their masculine counterparts, but de.Wikt gives them full definitions, and entries like de:wikt:Professorin (which records the different meanings) vs Duden: Professorin (which doesn't acknowledge them) convince me that full definitions are preferable (and, I think, already the norm). That doesn't preclude the existence of entries that would be better handled by a template whose wording could then be debated, but we should probably identify some such entries before debating wording further. - -sche(discuss)07:26, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
I agree with CodeCat that there is a problem with some entries: The current presentation at amiga#Spanish reads "feminine of amigo, friend", which seems suboptimal since it highlights grammatical properties rather than focusing on the referent. However, I don't agree with CodeCat's solution of using a template. Czech učitelka says "female teacher", which seems fine to me, and preferable to using a template. Above, Angr makes a good point about duchess: female duke vs. wife of a duke. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:23, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
I came across another problematic entry, coreana. The noun presumably indicates a female person, but there is again nothing in the entry to indicate that. —CodeCat19:38, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
Language codes
2015-07.11 16:30
I'd like to add some language codes for some swedish "dialects" (they should be considered languages IMO) because I don't wanna clutter the swedish entries with tons of dialectal versions, not to mention the dialects have their own grammar and pronounciations and I would like it if I could list those.
The ones I have in mind are Pitemål (Peijtmåle), Lulemål (Leulmale), Överkalixmål (Överkölismale) and Jamtlandic (Jamska).
Don't know what else i'm supposed to say really, Codecat told me to post here about it. — This unsigned comment was added by 88.83.34.190 (talk).
@-sche: Thanks! I a little new to wiktionary, or well, the discussion parts of it anyway. Is there anything special I need to provide to get this suggestion get accepted?Br0shaan (talk) 19:58, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
@Br0shaan: we do not have the requisite framework for handling languages with a lot of dialects. Armenian has circa 50 dialects with their own word forms, pronunciations and grammar. For now I have come up only with a way to show the word forms on the entry with the literary spelling: Module:hy:Dialects. See it used in փետուր(pʻetur), գազար(gazar), բամբակ(bambak). You can create a similar module for Swedish. --Vahag (talk) 08:30, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
@Vahagn: That's a shame, but the module looks alright. How do you deal with words with formations completely different from standard words? Just create a new word entry? Also how should I list these in derivation trees when looking at things like norse or proto-germanic? not at all? Because that would be very dissapointing. Anyway, thanks for the help and the quick reply! :) 88.83.34.19013:30, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
Just create a new entry, like կյա̈զա̈ր, and label it with {{label|se|dialectal|Lulemål or whatever}}. The list of labels can be added to Module:labels/data which will allow automatic categorization and linking to Wikipedia. As for derivation trees, there is no accepted way of doing things; I have tried a format like in ճանդարի(čandari). --Vahag (talk) 13:43, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
I actually figured it out myself before i saw your answer, so yeah it was pretty easy. Most of the trouble was finding out how to make a new module page haha. Br0shaan (talk) 15:18, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
Merging ( and ) into a single entry
I was thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to merge entries of separate brackets "(" and ")" into matched-pair entries such as "()" and leaving only single-character entries with definitions about actual uses of a single character without the other, when they exist; when they do not exist the single-character entries could redirect to the matched-pair entries.
Rationale:
1. (repetition) The way it is now, most definitions are repeated: sometimes, the left side sense is "Begins X" and the right side sense is "Ends X". I don't think one should be required to check two separate pages to see definitions for the same thing; also, "begins" and "ends" makes it a bit longer to read, especially when these two words are present in almost all senses in the two pages.
2. (consistency) With two almost identical entries, editing one entry requires editing the other for consistency. I am in the process of updating ( and ) to conform with uses quoted in Citations:(, but that makes it somewhat more cumbersome to keep both entries updated. One example of inconsistency (although easy to be fixed) is that { currently has a sense that } doesn't.
3. (lexical unit) I'd argue that since in most senses of () you can't use one without the other, they are together only one lexical unit. IMO, having them separated is like having the entry . (full stop) with the sense "The first, second, or third dot in an ellipsis, which indicates a pause or omission."
(The reason 4 was added later the same day, 21:44, 12 July 2015 (UTC) - original message linked here.)
4. (incompleteness) “ is defined as "Starts a quotation." and ” is defined as "Ends a quotation." Like a number of other current single-character entries, this seems directed to readers who already know how to use the brackets or quotation marks. (Compare ― (horizontal bar), defined as: "Introduces quoted text.", which from its definition seems exactly synonymous with “ but does not actually require any mark at the end of the text.) If they are merged into “”, then the definition is obviously going to change some way. But if they are kept as separate one-character entries, it would be more accurate to define them as:
entry for left quotation mark (“) - "Starts a quotation that ends with ”."
entry for right quotation mark (”) - "Ends a quotation that begins with “."
More examples of repeated definitions: ( - Begins supplemental information.
Yes, please. Though I would prefer a title of ] to avoid the impression that "()" appears in texts without anything in between, and because the ellipsis also lends itself well to phrases that are otherwise hard to lemmatise (e.g. I'm ... year(s) old). — Keφr09:49, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose’, at least is not usually a paired character. ” is also used as an unpaired character. Even when not used as apostrophes or transliteration characters, what pairs of quotes there are and what order they come in is language-dependent; to turn « and » into «», »« and »», as w:Guillemet says is necessary, is not a win.--Prosfilaes (talk) 10:58, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
I have never seen an unpaired use of ”; I have seen ″, however. Guillemets could be handled by {{alternative form of}} (and a usage note saying which form is preferred in which language): not perfect, but not tragic either. — Keφr12:34, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
Because it's not as neat as a- -ing. Because quotes stand alone at the starts of lines to mark continued quotes in older books; because quotes are used in different pairs in different languages and different time periods. Because many quotes, whether or not you've seen them, have been used for non-quote purposes. The braces and parenthesis can probably justifiably be put together, at least I haven't seen an exception, but the quotes are much more complex across all writing then just simple standardized matched pairs.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:47, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
If we create entries for every combination in w:Quotation mark#Summary table for all languages, then we would have these, as long as they are attestable: (using the format with space in the middle) “ ”, „ “, „ ”, ‘ ’, ‚ ’, « », " ", ‹ ›, » «, › ‹ and » ». I propose creating all the matched-pairs (11 entries don't look like too many, unless I'm missing something?) while leaving the single-characters with indexes to the matched-pairs. If we decide to do the opposite, e.g. keep only single-character entries and thus not create any of those matched-pairs, then the single characters would still need to have accurate indices of all formats of all language(s) either way. As an aside: 「 」 and 『 』 are fine to me, but I don't know exactly what to do with vertical brackets, I wonder if they could be treated as single-character exceptions until further discussion: ﹃﹄ and ﹁﹂. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 00:28, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
The merger seems like a good idea, as the matched-pair usage is, in a sense not SoP, but it is probably also true that we can find attestation of the use of each character in isolation and, just as in the case of the morphemes that make up a compound, we would probably want to keep separate entries, even if there were no attestation apart from the matched-pair use.
We would in any event need to have hard redirects from the unmatched characters to the corresponding matched-pair entry. If we go the route of extensive hard (and soft) redirects, then the objection that no normal person would ever search for ] becomes moot. IOW as I see it each paired entry would need at least 3 hard or soft redirects to it and would not be useful without them. DCDuringTALK13:35, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
BTW, why don't we have non-gloss definitions for the use of most of these as part of the character-based emoticons that some of us use, eg, ?(:-【} ? They seem to be usable productively, possibly even in widespread use, eg, in Usenet. DCDuringTALK13:44, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
I do not think it should be listed as a sense. For one, the meanings of individual characters of emoticons are very context-dependent: in the "]" in ":]" is a mouth, but in "]:->" it represents devil's horns. Would you add a sense of "represents a head in orz(orz)" to ]? — Keφr16:00, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
@Kephir: I would use {{n-g|Used to form images, especially of faces, used in some text-based computer communications|lang=mul}}. Usage examples would probably be better than explicit glosses. DCDuringTALK23:52, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
Having in mind the emoticon o_o or o_O, you could also tweak your definition to mention that the letter "o" is used "to form images, especially of faces or eyes". --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:05, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
How about ? Definitions of that kind would apply to so many other characters (while the actual meaning is so context-dependent, and relatively obvious in context anyway) that I doubt it would be practical or necessary to cover them all. Ever heard of ASCII art? — Keφr07:56, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose: They are different characters and are rarely, if ever, used successively. There's also no clear-cut way to represent them in a single entry. Purplebackpack8915:18, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
I oppose using ( ... ) as the central location; the target should be blank. I abstain on whether, say, ) could be created as a soft redirect to (, for the time being. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:11, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
I request that pages ( and ) are left as they were at the start of this discussion for at least three days after the start of the discussion. I have undone moves of ( and ) done today by another user. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:18, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
If you so wish, then go on and create a page with a blank title. I will be waiting here. — Keφr16:24, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
Let me point out that ) has sense "Separates a number or letter from an item in a list" in which "1) New York, 2) London, 3) Paris" is given as one of multiple examples; that does not fit ( ... ). --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:34, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
In my mind, we would have the entry ( ) with all uses of both parentheses together and the separate, cross-linked, entry ) for that sense you mentioned. One of multiple senses of ( ) would be exactly a variation of the sense you mentioned: "Encloses a letter or number starting an item in a list.", with "(1) New York, (2) London, (3) Paris." as the list of examples. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 01:32, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
I can also think of a mathematical context in which { is not paired. So what happens when someone who, not unlikely, doesn't know our chosen convention looks up ) or { expecting to see how parentheses or curly braces are used? Since these wouldn't be redirects, do they then have to click on a link to the entry with the pair in the title to arrive at the more common definitions? DAVilla00:48, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
Is it grammatical to say ne pas just like that? If yes, the entry can be at ]. If not, use ]. The ellipsis should only be used as a last resort. — Keφr16:24, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
I'm adding now the 4th bullet point of the rationale in my first message above; please see it. Concerning the page name, IMO I was thinking of adding a space in the page name, like this: ( ), « », ¿ ?, etc. Although I still see much merit in the spaceless (), «», ¿?, etc. I don't like ( ... ), particularly the fact that it's more difficult to type; though entries like this certainly would be linkable or redirected from their single-character parts. I am worried about ' and "; spaceless matched-pair entries for these two would be and ""; these look too ugly and (two apostrophes) looks identical to " (one quotation mark) to me. I think the same with space (' ' and " ") is great. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 21:44, 12 July 2015 (UTC)
In accordance with this proposal, or to test it a little to see if it looks good, I created 18 new entries for most of the variations of quotation marks listed in w:Quotation mark. I chose to link to and from all single-characters rather than using redirects. This improves our coverage since our entries didn't mention all these varieties before. Having separate entries is also an opportunity to explain better how they are used in each language. IMO, just having the entry ” with "Ends a quotation." is worthless if we can write the quotation marks as many ways as “ ”, ” ” or „ ”.
See this link, it is very interesting. It is the previous version of the entry “ with a translation table of 33 languages - just the starting quotation mark in each one, no mention of how to end the quotation, which I find confusing and annoying since you had to go to the other page to see how the quotation mark ends — sure enough, this other link is ” also with a translation table under the same circumstances, except with only 30 languages. If you saw the first table and discovered that Hungarian and Romanian apparently start quotations with „ and Swedish starts them with ”, the second table won't help you to know how they end. Apparently this was intentional — since all these three seemingly end with ”, putting this information on the table would not be a "translation". Anyway, I deleted both tables and replaced them with one of my own. ({{quotation marks}})
Also, Dan Polansky (talk • contribs) requested: "I request that pages ( and ) are left as they were at the start of this discussion for at least three days after the start of the discussion." While I did not touch the parentheses specifically yet, I've intentionally done as he said since the discussion started on July 12 and I edited the entries of quotation marks on July 16.
Thoughts? Is it just me or do other people think they look good too? Do people think it was a waste of time and that the new entries should all be deleted? (I acknowledge some people here opposed the proposal, others supported it.)
I mostly just copied Wikipedia as I don't speak all those languages, and I used only minimal definitions for each entry. If there's any mistake in the entries or the table feel free to fix it, also expand the entries if you like. If it's alright, I'd like to do the same for ( ), square brackets, ¿ ?, etc. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:16, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose proposed merge of ( and ) on the grounds that each is susceptible to unique senses. Specifically, ) typically signifies a "smile" in emoticons, and ( typically signifies a frown. While it is true that it is possible to write emoticons going the other way, this is far less common in practice. I have no opposition to having a separate entry for () or ( ) or ( ... ) for uses unique to that setup. bd2412T13:27, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
I argued above that being a part of an emoticon should not constitute a sense. Does "(" in "(^_^)" signify a frown? — Keφr14:30, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose merging, but it wouldn't hurt to have an entry for the combined form, with a single sense line at the left and right symbols' entries referring users to the combined ones for more complete information/more senses. We don't want to remove information, just add to it and organize it better. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:56, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
Those two last comments read like supports, actually. When a paired character has a definition corresponding to standalone usage, then this definition obviously cannot be merged with the counterpart character. — Keφr14:30, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
I agree that BD2412 (talk • contribs) and Chuck Entz (talk • contribs)'s comments actually read like supports, in that both are supporting the proposal of creating entries in the format of ( ). ("I have no opposition to having a separate entry for () or ( ) or ( ... )", "it wouldn't hurt to have an entry for the combined form"). I take the point that BD2412 and Chuck are opposing specifically the possibility of having hard redirects from single-characters to matched-pairs, like redirecting ( to ( ). --Daniel Carrero (talk) 19:41, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
That is correct. I am specifically opposed to "merging ( and ) into a single entry". I do think that we should have an entry for "" (if that is possible), because that can be used to indicate the elision of text in a quote. bd2412T22:16, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
Poll: Format of the matched-pair entries
What should be the format for the matched-pair entries? (This says nothing about keeping or deleting the entries for single characters, just what to do with the matched-pair entries.)
As with other polls and votes in the past, if you'd like to, you are allowed to support either one or multiple options, the same holds true for oppose and abstain.
Are parentheses used like that outside of the phrasebook? I'm of the opinion that the phrasebook should be a semi-separate thing, like the rhymes and Wikisaurus are. (It could include translation targets that are SOP as well.) I just don't think the phrasebook should be used as a base for formatting. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:01, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose option 3
Oppose Harder to type. Even if we have redirects from ( ) and () to ( … ), most people would try to type the entry name with ellipsis anyway before figuring out the redirects, since the name with ellipsis would be the actual entry name. Redirects would not be intuitive unless we start adding the {{shortcut}} template to entries. I've created as an example of entry which has the ellipsis as part of the entry name, not as an indication that it is a blank space to be filled. Having simultaneously with that entry would require some additional explanation of what is a space to be filled and what is an actual ellipsis. Just like with the English circumfixes, I don't think the ellipsis is necessary to demonstrate that the space between parentheses is a blank to be filled, because: 1) in the case of parentheses and other common English symbols, most readers probably already know how they are positioned in relation to the text anyway; but 2) especially in the case of unknown and FL brackets, the definitions should explain this satisfactorily; even a simple phrase like "Encloses supplemental information." at ( ) is good enough IMO, especially when together with examples, and perhaps usage notes when needed. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 11:28, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose The ellipses aren't actually part of the punctuation, and while they may indicate that something should go between, they look messy to me. If the user looking up the brackets/parentheses/whatever doesn't know that something goes between the two parts, then they may not know that the ellipses just stand in for something. If they know that text is supposed to go in between the two sides, then the ellipses are redundant. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:01, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Comments
Note that (…) is defined as something else than just the parentheses: "Symbol used to substitute parts of a quotation that are deliberately omitted.". --Daniel Carrero (talk) 10:37, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
Also note that the left and right curly braces adjacent has a meaning in mathematics as the empty set, a synonym of the symbol ∅. It would be difficult to comprehend that {}, or similarly if { }, would be defined as opening and closing marks intended to be separated on the one hand, and as a symbol that does not incorporate intervening text on the other. DAVilla00:48, 31 August 2015 (UTC)
FL example sentences
There seems to be a great deal of inconsistency in the formatting of example sentences under foreign language entries. I've been reformatting them as I come across them, but it's a lot of work, and I'm not sure if there are any accepted formats besides the one given in the guidelines. Speaking of which:
(Definition.)
Voici un exemple.
Here is an example.
(Definition.)
Voici un exemple.
Here is an example.
Both of the above are considered correct according to WT:ELE, and both are common. Is one preferred over the other, or are both in equal use and equally allowed?
Now, here are some formats of FL examples that I've come across frequently for Spanish sentences (but with often missing punctuation included):
(Definition.)
Voici un exemple. - Here is an example.
Voici un exemple. — “Here is an example.”
Voici un exemple. -- Here is an example.
There are others, but the above seem to be especially widespread (at least in Spanish entries), and at least some are being included in new definitions. Should I just leave them alone, or fix them as I see them? Is it possible to fix something like that with a bot? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:36, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
For very short usage examples, it is sometimes better to display them as a single line. You can add the argument inline=1 to {{ux}} or {{usex}} to make it so. — Ungoliant(falai)19:39, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
As for bolding the term in the translation, you should do so whenever possible. The only exception is that sometimes the differences between the languages will make it impossible to isolate the term in the translation. --WikiTiki8919:55, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
The example translations and transcriptions further down the page at WT:USEX don't show that the translation/transcription of the word is to be in bold as well as the term itself, nor is that mentioned at WT:ELE. I would add it for clarity's sake, so new users like me know to do it, as trivial as it may be.... Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:19, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
@-sche I missed this before, but the example "For non-English words in non-Latin alphabets" at WT:USEX specifies that there are to be no italics or words in bold in the translation. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 01:02, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
I consider these numerous persistent extensions (in summa: 4 with a fifth attempt thwarted; I find the præsence of the adjective fair in this fifth attempt maladroit) of a single vote truly inappropriate or at least disconcerting. I would like to clarify that currently this not a critical remark regarding the vote’s closing or outcome, instead I would like to discountenance said adjustment ad libitum of the expiration date of that already protracted vote with the aim to impede an outcome that at the time of the second extension (beginning of April) was an evident lack of consensus (7-6). Actually this had been mine initial motivation for participating in the vote: the desire to contribute with one more vote to the manifestness of the rejection and hopefully præcipitate the closure of that vote. To me, there is no reasonable justification for extending any vote more that one month (to put it simply or to appeal to æsthetics: those numerous struck extensions encumber the mere lecture of the vote’s content), or at most one and a half months, but I would be interested to heed to others’ suggestions (if any arise) for a temporal limitation in that sense in order to præclude future unconfined extensions. The uſerhight Bogormconverſation20:01, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
I would like to know what are the reasons for extending a vote. Should we really wait for the people who voted later?
Concerning the Sanskrit vote, I've made a chart of the extensions and what would be the results if the vote, which ended 56 July 2015, had ended on each of the previous scheduled dates:
If, instead of respecting the deadline, we repeatedly move it ahead until such time as we happen to have a sufficient number of voters to call it a consensus (which 12–6 isn't really, but let's ignore that arguendo), then we're favoring view of such latecomers as happen to come across the vote first, a selection bias. If we believe that a longer time is necessary or desired, then (0) that longer time should be set when first proposing the vote and not extended. And if that realization comes post facto, then, ideally, (1) call it no consensus, discuss and advertise the issue better in the BP and perhaps elsewhere, and start a new and better vote, if desired. Or, at least, (2) we should have a limit of one extension on a vote. Or, at the very least, (3) we should extend a vote as long again after consensus is achieved as we did before it was (and as long again after it's achieved in the opposite direction, if that happens). Any of those would seem much fairer than the method employed at the particular vote that led to this discussion.—msh210℠ (talk) 20:55, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
I agree with Msh210 that the practice of extending votes until victory (or defeat) is achieved is an unfair procedure. I don't think it matters on which side the extender votes or whether the extender abstains, but it is particularly suspect when the outcome is the same as the extender's vote. It is at best a lazy procedure and at worst a corrupt one.
The only remedy is to void the vote. Obviously it can be reproposed and revoted, possibly after recrafting the proposal. DCDuringTALK23:09, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
Everyone had four full months in which to question, complain, or lodge a protest, but everyone was silent during all of that time. Voiding the vote now, after acquiescing to the multiple extensions by maintaining silence, would be unfair to those on the winning side of the decision. The best thing to do at this point would be to leave this vote as it stands, and to develop a policy that will address the extensions issue in future vote. However, if a lot of people are hell-bent on overturning the decision, then we should put it to an official vote on whether to void the decision and redo the original vote (emphasis on official vote to void the decision). —Stephen(Talk)12:41, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
It seems to be a fairly common practice for votes (and discussions) here to drag out seemingly without end. This one was no exception. Furthermore, discussions are not mere exercises in bean counting. Five out of six editors expressing opposition to the proposal provided no substantive argument on the matter. The sixth provided a factual error as their premise. All of that can reasonably have weighed into the outcome. Are we now going to reopen every discussion that was closed after a series of extensions? bd2412T13:40, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
This is about a corrupting procedural matter, not substance. For those whose ox is gored as a result of the abuse of voting procedure, the option of not accepting the extensions was open.
"Are we now going to reopen every discussion that was closed after a series of extensions?"
No. If we do it once and adhere to a policy of no unilateral extensions, we will never have to void a vote again. If the extension process had not been abused by repeated extensions only to result in a bare victory for the view supported by the person extending, this would not have come up. DCDuringTALK14:35, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
If you thought it was a corrupting procedural matter, why didn’t you say something about it during those four months? There have been quite a few votes where the end date was extended, often more than once. Why didn’t you say something during all of those times? Any one of you could have close the vote and made the decision at the end of each of those extensions, but none of you did. Why not? So why now, all of a sudden, has it become a "corrupting procedural matter"? Whether it was a good idea or a bad idea, you, like all the rest, went right along with it until somebody didn’t like a decision, so now you want to throw around accusations of curruption. That’s ridiculous, you had ample time and opportunity to speak up and say that you are against it. Instead of bashing someone who was just trying to do what he thought was right, while you kept silent and looked the other way, just propose that we have a vote to void the decision.
And whether you like it or not, it creates a precedent, and anybody in the future who does not like an outcome can claim malfeasance of some sort and demand the vote be thrown out. Either we accept that it’s okay to void a vote someone does not like, or we don’t do it. —Stephen(Talk)14:55, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
You're right: I should have spoken up after each extension. I saw them and ignored them. Maybe it's w:Kitty Genovese syndrome or a simple desire to avoid confrontation. (To answer your "Any one of you could have close the vote and made the decision at the end of each of those extensions, but none of you did. Why not?", though — I fully intended to after two of the later ones, but they were re-extended before I had a chance.) But closure on the first opportunity, on a slim margin, by someone who voted like the closure? I needed to say something. Note, though, that I don't mind the substance of the decision at all: I looked only a little into the Sanskrit issue, but think the proposal makes sense. Nonetheless, the procedure followed stank.—msh210℠ (talk) 22:15, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
As I. You can't void a vote because you don't like the use of the established process. If you want to overturn the decision, start a vote for that. If you want to change or clarify the rules going forward, we can discuss that.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:03, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
I didn't get involved in the vote because I didn't have an opinion and wasn't watching the page. I've missed lots of votes. We haven't had anything quite as egregious as this lately. Were the procedural process not such a bad precedent I wouldn't have cared. Sorry that your ox is gored as a result of the practice of other supporters of the proposal.
The vote is ended and decided. What you are suggesting is voiding the decision (without a vote to do so) and opening the vote again so that you can beat the bushes to scare up enough votes to win the opposite decision. It is the same thing as overturning the vote and having a redo. Why not just save everybody the trouble and declare the decision reversed (failed)?
If you want to void the decision (which is unfair to the majority who supported and won already), you need to hold an official vote for the purpose of voiding the decision of the Sanskrit vote and doing the vote over again (which will set a precedent for having do-overs whenever anybody does not like the outcome of a vote). —Stephen(Talk)23:16, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
By the way, DCDuring, there are several votes on WT:Votes that are ready for closure and decision right now. Since you think we’re egregiously corrupt and bereft of ethics, why don’t you nip over there and close the votes yourself? Or would you prefer that we continue to do it so that it’s more convenient for you to say we’re corrupt? —Stephen(Talk)23:28, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
I don't think I ever said that individuals were corrupt, only that the process was. In any event, that is what I intended and I stand by that. I'd favor other people closing votes rather than me as I can't figure out how the archiving is suppose to go, but I closed a few votes that had run their appointed term.
Judging by the low participation, I wonder why we give any force at all to the outcome of some votes. If we can't muster a quorum (6, 7, 8, 10?; counting abstainers?; differing for various classes of votes (bot status, admin votes, substantive?), then there should be no mandatory policy resulting from the vote. Votes probably need to be more publicized. The subpage structure interferes with achieving comprehensive coverage of votes. Would Editor news be good for that or BP? Do we need a tickler system (a single page?) of some kind to remind folks when a vote starts, when it is about to end, when and how it was decided?
Your accusing me of making my suggestion "so that can beat the bushes to scare up enough votes to win the opposite decision" is inappropriate and insulting. First of all, I mentioned above that I mind the procedure followed not the decision itself. Second, even if I disagreed with the decision substantively, that'd be a groundless accusation. You're right that the vote has been called. Arguably, it's been called inappropriately. Can't people contest the closure on the vote page and see if consensus builds there to let it stand closed or not, without holding a new vote on the issue, and with the burden on those who wish to reopen it (viz so that, if no consensus builds at all, the vote stays closed)? In my opinion yes.—msh210℠ (talk) 05:03, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
@msh210: I don't think the initially set end date of the vote is a deadline, and that our procedure is to forbid extending a vote. That would be another procedure, not the one that we have. In fact, we do not have a specified procedure as for the meaning of the end date of the vote, merely the common practice. And the common practice is to allow extensions of a vote, as was done e.g. in Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2010-05/Placenames with linguistic information 2; if anyone is interested, I can collect all votes that were ever extended. My extending this particular vote was driven by the same tentative unspoken principles I was using in previous votes that I have extended. You participated on extension of Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2014-03/CFI: Removing usage in a well-known work 3; have you changed your mind, meanwhile? --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:26, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
You are misrepresenting my participation on the 2014 vote, Dan, no doubt due to unawareness rather than malice. As the talkpage there shows, my extension was only after there was a clear consensus and because the consensus had been newly reached during a previous extension. That is exactly in the spirit of my comments here (if perhaps the details vary slightly).—msh210℠ (talk) 04:04, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
@msh210: Oh, I see, sorry for that. As an aside, I do realize the danger of selection bias, and do see where you are coming from in principle even though I happen to think the concern with selection bias is excessive, and that the real risk is much lower than it appears. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:28, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Repeated extensions of votes are a great thing. People are slow to come to votes. There is nothing unethical about extending votes, nothing that I was able to discover when I investigated the question. There is very little opportunity for the extender to use selection bias. You cannot on any vote just wait until 2/3 supermajority happens; most votes do not create that opportunity. In any vote in which waiting until 2/3 worked, there was in fact a lot more support than opposition. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:03, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
It is a simple question of allowing rabid parliamentarians to dominate the voting process by effectively steering marginal proposals to victory or defeat by the simple rule of: Terminate the vote at the stated termination date if the outcome is what one wants; extend the vote if it is not. It was and is how many legislative bodies are run, but we don't have to let it happen that way. DCDuringTALK22:31, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
No extension of votes, to prevent closer/extender from choosing when the right time to close it. Minimum number of voters for a vote to be effective, to prevent votes that were not well publicized from being enacted. I'm open to other suggestions. Any proposed vote needs a seconder. DCDuringTALK01:17, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
All we should do is to show active votes more actively. For example, putting them in the watchlist page below Wanted Entries will dramatically increase the awareness of new votes. This has been suggested by YairRand ••Dixtosa (talk) 10:36, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
In general, oppose extension of votes Discussions need not drag on indefinitely. Votes are open for a month as it is; easily long enough for people who edit here with any kind of activity at all to notice them. Same with RfDs: after a month, they should be closed and archived, even if there isn't a clear consensus, with the "no consensus" outcome defaulting to keep. Purplebackpack8919:31, 22 July 2015 (UTC)
Deletion of good faith edits with no explanation
I have been a very sporadic contributor to Wiktionary for a number of years. Sometimes I have little bursts of activity, and then sometimes long gaps of inactivity. One of the things that repeatedly drives me away just when I might be getting enthusiastic about joining the project is the unexplained deletion of added content, such as happened here. This comes across as extremely rude and hostile. I understand that a lot of vandalism and nonsense has to be reverted, and I understand that mistakes are sometimes made. However, this has happened to me too often, and mostly (as far as I recall) from certain editors, for it to always be a mistake. I think instead it is a cultural problem here amongst certain members that the community would do well to address. 109.153.244.2120:56, 13 July 2015 (UTC)
One thing that would help would be for you to become a registered user. That is what makes it possible to communicate and helps us take contributions more seriously. It also helps if the name is not too frivolous, though that is not a requirement.
Do we not have a notice that unsourced material may be challenged or removed? That might be a good start. It's hard to see why the patrollers like SB should be expected to do the work of verifying (or formally RFVing) every random unverified sense that gets added. -- Visviva (talk) 01:57, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
I see no notice on the frame of the edit window that suggests anything of the kind, only the license links.
It seems that we really would like Wiktionary to be less wiki-like for anonymous users, imposing some kind of limits on their changes. Isn't that like what WP has, with some changes from some users being held in suspense until reviewed? DCDuringTALK02:31, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
I'm with WurdSnatcher on this one. There seem to be a number of "experienced" editors on this page who never bother to explain their reverts of good-faith edits, especially to new editors, and get uptight when asked to. And we wonder why we're bad at attracting new editors... Purplebackpack8917:50, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
Ungoliant and other admins have explained some of my errors to me, and I didn't made those mistakes again. I do find it very helpful when I'm told what I did wrong, since I usually do it out of ignorance. I would likely have been discouraged from editing, or would have repeated the same mistakes had my edits been undone with no explanation. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:54, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
I think an explanation should be given. The revert tool shouldn't be used when the editor can be reasonably expected to take heart. —CodeCat19:59, 14 July 2015 (UTC)
Yep, the auto-revert tool should really only be used for obvious bad-faith edits. If they're making a meaningful attempt, they deserve a real message explaining what's wrong. WurdSnatcher (talk) 00:27, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
Not necessarily only for vandalism, but for any edit where it is judged that an explanation will not have a significant effect on the editor. So it would also include editors who persistently make mistakes and bad edits and won't change their ways. —CodeCat15:17, 15 July 2015 (UTC)
The edit history isn't just for the benefit of the user being reverted; it will be seen by any other editor happening across the page. That's reason enough to make it helpful. Keith the Koala (talk) 06:17, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
Italicizing the entry name of taxonomic names
I am just announcing an edit I made, since I was thinking about it for a while and decided to just do it today without discussing beforehand.
I made {{taxoninfl}} italicise the entry title of all entries for taxonomic names that use this template, so that:
Sorry about that. Based on your comment, I've changed the template further to italicize the entry name only when i=1, just like the headword line. That way, Homo is italicized while Hominidae isn't. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 18:29, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
And that conflicts with the German use of Homo. Maybe I should just undo the change and leave all the affected entries without italics like they were? That said, the italicized name looks good on Homo sapiens, Acer rubrum, etc. and all the species names, though. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 18:32, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
There's no good reason to have a pl parameter. All taxa are proper nouns. At rank of genus or lower they have the form of a singular Latin noun. At ranks higher than genus they have the form of a plural Latin noun. That is more or less part of the prescribed "grammar" of such names. Plural forms of generic and subgeneric rank taxa are not, strictly speaking part of the taxonomic name system. One could consider them to be borrowings into whatever language they are embedded. It would be interesting to see whether they appeared in New Latin genus and species descriptions, but arguably they would then be Latin. DCDuringTALK18:46, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
There are at least 179 exsiting entries for which English capitalized forms correspond to Translingual genus names. DCDuringTALK19:36, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
I reverted my edits to {{taxoninfl}} concerning italicization of entry names; now Homo sapiens and the like don't have the entry name italicized any more.
Concerning pl=, I used it with exactly 2 names: Homo sapiens=Homines sapientes and Pithecanthropus erectus=Pithecanthropi erecti. At least Homines sapientes is cited in English and Portuguese through Citations:Homo sapiens. DCDuring (talk • contribs), about your comment, particularly "Plural forms of generic and subgeneric rank taxa are not, strictly speaking part of the taxonomic name system. One could consider them to be borrowings into whatever language they are embedded." In the past, before I started editing Homo sapiens and Homines sapientes for a number of different reasons, there were English sections, an (odd) translation table and pronunciations; I moved all the applicable information into Translingual. Personally, I'd rather keep them that way, even if other entries for declensions of homo+sapiens are attestable (Hominis sapientis? Homini sapienti?), especially if those are found in running text in multiple languages. But it would be understandable if you and/or other people wanted to use different language sections for those like we do for CJK languages. You said the plurals are not strictly part of the system, for this reason I apologize since the current format with pl= makes it seem like the plurals really are part of the system. I propose keeping the plurals Translingual, at least until further discussion, while linking from the singular forms as Derived terms or the like, if you'd agree with that. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:18, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
@Daniel Carrero: Why bother for two instances? I would have thought that {{mul-proper noun}} (which is not deprecated, just not my preference for taxonomic names) was perfect for that. Furthermore it is difficult for me to accept that plural and genitive forms are taxonomic names. The citations indicate that the terms are being used as plural for members of the group Homo spaiens, not for plurals of the group. Every taxonomic name is of a group, not of its members. One great advantage of limiting the use of {{taxoninfl}} to taxonomic names is that it can be used to identify taxonomic entries that are lemmas. Remember that the heterogeneity of Translingual makes the idea of a single class of Translingual lemmas useless for most practical purposes. DCDuringTALK22:07, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
@DCDuring: You are most involved with entries for taxonomic names and I edit them only occasionally. I have the feeling I'm probably going to fold and revert quick if you say I've done something wrong with the templates or the entries. Still, there's a point I would like to discuss. About: "Every taxonomic name is of a group, not of its members." as well as "Plural forms of generic and subgeneric rank taxa are not, strictly speaking part of the taxonomic name system. One could consider them to be borrowings into whatever language they are embedded." Wiktionary is a descriptive dictionary. Even if taxonomic names are intended to be used as proper nouns representing entire groups, while this should be respected and informed in the entries, I'd argue that their separate usage as nouns is nothing special. Just like you can say: "I've found a member of Vulpes vulpes!", you could say "I've found a Vulpes vulpes!" and find plenty of citations of "noun" versions of taxonomic names like this in multiple languages. IMO, cited uses like this don't constitute a reason for having separate sections other than Translingual for any languages, let alone a great number of language sections just for cited noun senses for a given entry as they are found, especially if any plurals attested use the rules of Latin grammar in multiple languages. I'm not sure if we could have Translingual noun senses along with proper noun senses, or maybe not? My point is just that it does not seem to merit separate language sections just for this. What do you think? --Daniel Carrero (talk) 01:17, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
I don't think that the way people use them is the same in every language and I have no idea how to get that information. I'm not even going to do it in English. What authoritative resource would we use for that? It I can't imagine doing the attestation. I'm not going to beat my brains out to incorporate relatively subtle variations which most users won't even notice. Our dictionary is rife with omission of much less subtle information in areas that are know to cause English language learners problems: ambiguous, erroneous, and misleading use of determiners in our definitions and failure to provide basic grammatical information ((un)countability), (in)transitivity, complements) come to mind.
In any event we would have to document the usage of taxonomic names in the communities that use them most. A very small share of taxonomic names even have vernacular-language homonyms that correspond to the taxa and we have entries for some of those, especially in horticulture, eg. azalea, andromeda, rhododendron. DCDuringTALK02:02, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
Daniel is right, though: while the authorities may prescribe that the names be used only for "the group X", many of them are well attested in multiple languages as terms for "a member of the group X", which can be used with the indefinite article and in the plural (see e.g. Citations:Homo sapiens, and google books:"un Homo sapiens"). - -sche(discuss)03:37, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
I would think it more useful to have note on how folks borrow taxonomic terms into each language in general than to lexicalize a million or even a hundred instances of such borrowing.
All someone has to do is attest the pattern of usage (capitalization, pluralization, and other inflections in some languages) for each language in which the Translingual term is borrowed and used. I don't see any way around it. Today I looked at plurals of Virus. In some germanic languages the plural is Virusen. I don't think that belongs in Translingual as it reflects a pattern specific to at most a group of languages.
I certainly won't protest if someone chooses to do all of that, but I am more interested in having Translingual entries for purposes of disambiguating vernacular names; helping folks read scientific literature by providing etymology, pictures, and translations; and even providing gender to help folks with naming species. DCDuringTALK04:03, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
A language-specific plural is evidence that the Latin/Translingual term has been borrowed into another language. (Jumi Vogler, Was der Humor für Sie tun kann, wenn in Ihrem Leben mal ..., 2014, page 20, has this example of Eindeutschung: Zumal damals das Warenangebot an Homo sapiensen noch relativ klein war.) If a Latinate plural, however, is used in as many languages as a Latinate singular, I don't see how only one of them could be excluded from the Translingual section short of saying "we copy what the authorities prescribe on this matter", which doesn't comport with descriptivism. Here's one way such information could be presented (note not only my added sense and usage note, but the plural which is already provided). If one wanted to weigh the scales a bit in favour of prescriptivism, one could even confine both things to the usage note, i.e. not add a second sense-line nor a plural to the headword-line, but mention both in the usage note. I suppose if the 2 or 3 entries which currently have plurals are the only ones that pluralize and/or are used with the indefinite article to refer to members of a group / species / etc, and they only do so in 5 or 6 languages, one could argue it's easier to add 18 different language sections than to expand 3 Translingual sections... but if more entries than that pluralize, it becomes untenable, IMO, to require a myriad of different language sections rather than expand the Translingual section. - -sche(discuss)07:43, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
It isn't the way we handle borrowings into English, which we show as English whether or not there is any alteration in the term, eg, sang-froid. Wouldn't we need to include multiple pronunciations in a Translingual entry? DCDuringTALK12:50, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
I won't invoke our slogan. Wikispecies generally does not bother with obsolete taxa or with the gender and etymology of any taxa. (Few other taxonomic databases bother with gender and etymology either.) They also do not always have entries that correspond to well-attested vernacular names including those we already have, which is the purpose of the lists at User:DCDuring/MissingTaxa. Wikipedia doesn't bother with gender and is very uneven about covering etymology and obsolete taxa.
That we don't provide pronunciations or translations of taxa is a result of our decisions, not whether such would be useful to users. Our decision about translations is apparently based on the perceived need to reflect how native speakers of various languages actually pronounce the taxon, not how it ought to be pronounced, though that is what users seem to want. Our decision not to have translations seems as much to be that a vernacular name could be viewed as a monolingual synonym, as a translation, or as a term identifying members of the group named by the taxon, so we didn't want to depart from the gem-like precision of our conceptual model of language to include them. DCDuringTALK19:14, 17 July 2015 (UTC)
@DCDuring: Going the other way around, what is so special and different about Wikispecies, then? Would you say that Wikispecies can be totally replaced by Wiktionary's coverage of species? --Daniel Carrero (talk) 01:17, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
@Daniel Carrero: They have some big offsetting advantages relative to us, but few relative to outside databases.
They have vernacular names in multiple languages in many species and genus entries. We have decide to exclude non-English names on the taxon page, relying on the English vernacular name, which may not exist, eg, for species that don't occur in English-speaking lands, especially plants.
They pay more attention to the authorities behind each name. We don't, which on a small number of occasions has led to some confusion.
They have about 20 or more times as many taxon entries as we do.
Their average page is better linked to external sources. But for some reason they don't link to WP or Commons very much. Our best entries are better linked to outside sources than theirs (useful for determining gender, checking consensus on circumscription and placement).
One other disadvantage they have is that they don't do much (translations?) that other databases don't do and most other databases do something they don't. DCDuringTALK01:40, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
Some comments about the utility and challenges of Wikispecies:
For a long time, a single sysop ran the entire operation his way, 24/7, overruling anyone else making edits there. A lot of animosity developed between this sysop, other sysops, and some other wiki projects. That user has since been banned, but this also means that style and content are a bit unstable as the community finds its footing again.
Wikispecies goes in heavy for sourcing the publication, description, revision, and circumscription of taxa. This often has no bearing on the use of the word, but is of vital importance to researchers.
Wikispecies has a highly navigable taxonomic tree built into every entry, such that taxonomic changes can be easily implemented without having to re-edit every affected entry.
Commons links to Wikispecies whenever there is an entry to match a Commons category. Some Wikipedias (such as fr) also build in a link to Wikispecies from their taxoboxes. This isn't universal, though, in either direction, in part because the classification systems in use at different Wikipedias does not always match.
Further, since Wikidata now controls interwiki links between the Wikipedias, the link situation has deteriorated. The editing of interwiki links between botanical taxa, for example, is under the control and supervision of User:Brya, who has been banned here, at the English Wikipedia, and at the Dutch Wiktionary and Wikipedia, for contentious edits, sockpuppetry, and a number of other problems. Her idiosyncratic ideas have led to a fragmentation of data items on Wikidata so that identical circumscriptions of taxa given different names, attributions, or rank on different Wikipedias are no longer interlinked. And links will only exist if everything about the taxa match exactly (and even then I've come across baffling counterexmaples).
So, we're a long way from useful interlinking between taxon entries on different projects. It is therefore difficult to avoid or streamline any duplication of content or redundancy of data. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:11, 24 July 2015 (UTC)
Please don't italicize the headword lines of taxonomic names. Acer rubrum should not show the headword line in italics. Note they are translingual, and you have not shown that they are universally used in italics in multiple languages. Please undo your changes while the discussion is pending. --Dan Polansky (talk)
cs-noun and animacy
Can someone please undo the recent edits of {{cs-noun}} to provide for pseudo-genders m-an and m-in. They are intended to mark "an" for "animate" and "in" for inanimate. Animacy is not gender and should not be marked as part of a gender. Thanks. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:19, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
See my other comment ... I think rather than asking for undoing this change, if you really object to the general concept of having "gender" include "pseudo-genders" then you should (a) propose an alternative, (b) open a more general discussion about how to handle this. As I mentioned, this is far from the only place that "gender" has been co-opted to include other gender-like properties. Benwing (talk) 08:06, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
I have not seen pseudo-genders in Czech templates. I do not watch the template situation outsite of Czech closely. Which other comment should I see and where? As for an alternative, that is obvious: create an animacy parameter. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:12, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
We have added an animate and inanimate parameter to our masculine template on the French wiktionary. It is most useful to distinguish nouns, compare French entry kohoutek with local entry kohoutek. --Diligent (talk) 08:36, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
I agree with creating the animacy parameter, among others it could also enable adding the entries into special animacy categories. However, I strongly oppose removing the "pseudo-genders" (as Dan calls it) before such a parameter is added. Jan Kameníček (talk) 18:30, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-05/Normalization of entries failed. See also at the end of the vote my comments about the result of the vote, which I'm cool with, since the affected policy is still imperfect. The vote proposed having Wiktionary:Normalization of entries (WT:NORM) as an official policy alongside WT:CFI and WT:ELE. WT:NORM deals with aspects of formatting that are invisible to the user but are expected to be standardized nonetheless, such as whitespaces, spaces between == ==, the placement of interwikis at the end of the page and the placement of categories at the end of the language section.
The list of items currently in the policy was developed from this extensive 2006 thread, which shaped the wiki code of our entries as we know to this date with the major role of User:AutoFormat (2007–2010) and I proposed to be officialized through this discussion from May 2015 with 13 polls. Controversial, outdated or undiscussed items were removed from the list and moved to here. Continuing from where the previous discussion left off, I thought of 2 more polls to address issues that were raised in the vote. I feel it's a good idea to keep asking questions until the policy is just right. --Daniel Carrero (talk)
Poll 14
Proposal:
Having WT:NORM only with rules that affect the wiki code of the entry and are invisible to the readers.
Rationale:
Currently, most rules listed in WT:NORM are invisible, (such as whitespace, line breaks, spaces between == ==, spaces after * and interwikis at the end of the list), so it does not matter if the rules are followed or not by editors, the page would look the same to readers. If there are any rules that affect the layout of the pages, they should be kept in WT:ELE, not WT:NORM. Use the comments of this poll to discuss exactly rules can be affected by this poll.
Comments I believe the rules that exist in the current version of WT:NORM and can be removed for affecting the layout of the entries are, specifically:
Language names should not be linked
Translation sections: Markup such as gender should be provided within the {{t}}/{{t+}} template, except for qualifiers, which should use {{qualifier}}
---- before each language heading except the first
Hi Daniel. I'm unclear as to what you mean exactly by "invisible to the reader". Can you spell out which rules aren't invisible? As I mentioned, I had two objections. One concerns the insistence that categories need to be put at the end of the language section instead of at the end of an etymology subsection; I assume this is "invisible to the reader"? The other is about only one headword line per section, which simply doesn't work well for some Arabic entries. I assume this is "visible to the reader"? Benwing (talk) 08:14, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
Hi Benwing. After you sent this message, since no one besides myself had voted for this poll yet, I've changed the whole text of the poll; maybe it does look clearer now?
After you gave your reasons for opposing both rules of "only one headword line per section" and "categories need to be put at the end of the language section", I simply removed them from WT:NORM and added them to Wiktionary_talk:Normalization_of_entries#Removed_items until further discussion. But, since following these rules does affect how the entry look like to readers, I'd say these are "visible" rules and thus I don't think they should be applicable in WT:NORM anyway. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:35, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
I'm striking this poll. I edited WT:NORM so that all rules of this policy concern whitespace, blank lines, etc. and removed everything else that changes the layout of the entry, thus is "visible" to the reader of the entry. I don't think there's any reason to leave any rules at WT:NORM if they can be placed in WT:ELE instead. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 17:48, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
Poll 15
Proposal: WT:NORM should be mandatory for bots only.
Support With the two issues I object to removed, I have no problem supporting this and I already try to follow rules of this sort in any case in my bot changes. Benwing (talk) 09:42, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose
Abstain
Comments
I assume that we are not compelling every bot to implement all aspects of WT:NORM, but only to make its changes in conformity with it, so that the immediate neighborhood of each of its changes conforms. DCDuringTALK20:57, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
Between an image and content that follows, should there be a blank line or not?
Examples with blank line:
==English==
]
===Alternative forms===
]
* form1
* form2
===Etymology===
]
{{term|example|lang=en}} + {{term|example|lang=en}}
===Pronunciation===
]
* {{a|foo}} {{IPA|/example/|lang=en}}
* {{audio|en|example.ogg|a=US}}
===Noun===
]
{{en-noun}}
====Synonyms====
]
* synonym1
====Usage notes====
]
In all examples, this example is exemplified by a process of exemplification.
===See also===
]
* something
Examples without blank line:
==English==
]
===Alternative forms===
]
* form1
* form2
===Etymology===
]
{{term|example|lang=en}} + {{term|example|lang=en}}
===Pronunciation===
]
* {{a|foo}} {{IPA|/example/|lang=en}}
* {{audio|en|example.ogg|a=US}}
===Noun===
]
{{en-noun}}
====Synonyms====
]
* synonym1
====Usage notes====
]
In all examples, this example is exemplified by a process of exemplification.
===See also===
]
* something
Poll 16 - Comments
Rather than having support/oppose/abstain options, I would like to discuss what looks better in each case.
Personally, my opinions are:
Yes - I believe it's especially important that we do insert a blank line between the image and a new section that follows below the image (===Noun===, for example), because if there were no image, a blank line would precede the new section anyway.
No - don't insert a blank line between the image and a headword template. (in cases where the image is between ===Noun=== and {{en-noun}}, for example, just don't insert a blank line anywhere) That because, in my mind, the headword template is sort of the extension of the POS heading.
In all other cases, I'd probably be fine either way, but I'm leaning towards: yes, have the space in all situations, it looks better and a bit easier to read, by properly separating one type of content from the other.
@DCDuring No, not that I'm aware of. I tested both versions of the whole code that I used as an example for this poll and the presence or lack of spaces did not change anything in the appearance of the entry. In addition, the poll 6 from May 2015 was specifically about having a image or a {{wikipedia}} box between two headings. In that poll, I addressed a similar question about spaces changing the appearance of the page. My reply was: "xtra vertical space only appears if we use a broken template with extra newlines at the end of the code before <includeonly/>, I presume? " and I mentioned five second rule and feminism as two entries which use images with spacing without breaking anything. Also, the results of the poll I mentioned were 0-6-0-2, meaning 6 votes supporting the spacing, no votes supporting the space-less version; no opposes and 2 abstains. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 19:42, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Someone added German Weltnetz and Zwischennetz to the "Translations" section of Internet: see diff.
These words are hardly used, and the usual German word for Internet is simply Internet.
The presence of these words in the "Translations" section suggests that they are normal German translations of the English term Internet.
What should one do with them?
Delete them? As English to German translations they are useless and misleading.
Delete them. Due to the crammed nature of translation tables, it’s not worth presenting information of such limited usefulness. — Ungoliant(falai)14:47, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
Some native speakers may prefer such terms to recent-vintage borrowed terms. Is one of the German terms noticeably more common? DCDuringTALK15:08, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
I agree about deleting. I present archaic, dialectal, colloquial, uncommon forms in the main FL entry, under ===Synonyms===. --Vahag (talk) 15:10, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
Thank you, everybody! I will remove these "translations" from now on, or move them to the foreign language entry, as Vahagn suggested.
I would like to add this suggestion to Wiktionary:Translations. Does one need a formal poll or decision for this? --MaEr (talk) 17:52, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
My reasoning, for a Beer parlour discussion: ISBN is visual noise, and makes the user experience worse for people like me. It is inessential for identification. It is inessential for search purposes. It is not used in the references sections of multiple English books that I own and that I checked. I prefer that the use of ISBN in reference templates is avoided. I also prefer that it is avoided in attesting quotations, but that is less urgent since these are hidden in the mainspace by default. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:53, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
What we could do is create an appendix with references. The reference template would link to a location in the appendix, like Appendix:References#Rejzek_2015. That location would provide more extensive information, including the ISBN, and maybe multiple relevant searches, and links related to the reference, including one to Wikipedia. Book identifiers other than ISBN could be provided as well, if wished. Thus, we could keep the appearance of the reference template in the mainspace short and simple, while providing extensive detail to those readers who need or want it. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:22, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
An ISBN uniquely identifies a particular book, in theory and usually in practice. I fail to see how a few extra characters makes that much difference, but it does make searching a hundred times easier. As Dan Polansky points out, one can type in http://www.google.com/search?q=2015+%C4%8Cesk%C3%BD+etymologick%C3%BD+slovn%C3%ADk+Rejzek; or as I point out, one can click on the ISBN which Wikimedia helpfully links to various book sites, no guessing what values to feed into Google.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:37, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
I think the ISBN should be included when possible. It's essential information, and the comment about visual noise is just moot. —CodeCat12:25, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
I have always felt the ISBN parameter as noise wherever it occurs on content pages. When I accidentally click on it, I wish I hadn't and I curse those who made it possible for a time-waste (waiting for the linked-to site to allow the back button to take effect in a controlled way) like that to occur. It is also misleading when it refers to a specific binding and edition of a work that is available in numerous forms. When the reference is to something that at least provides something like full text, the noise is worth it. Otherwise, kill with fire. DCDuringTALK12:39, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
"When the reference is to something that at least provides something like full text, the noise is worth it." If I understood this correctly, despite your criticism of ISBN, when citation is linked to the visualization on Google Books it's okay? --Daniel Carrero (talk) 13:04, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
On mature reflection, I think I'd rather have a link from the repetition of the headword or from a page number. DCDuringTALK13:37, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
I think it's useful information to have, but I agree it's "visual noise". Might be good to have a little hyperlink (to some standard ISBN lookup location? Wikipedia uses one, IIRC) but not to display the actual number on screen. Equinox◑13:40, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Great idea, IMHO. Having the text "ISBN" there with a hyperlink to IBSN look up location would be a huge improvement. And it would make all sides relatively happy, wouldn't it? In case of Rejzek, it would look like this: ISBN. When you click that link, it takes you to what is transparently marked up as Special:BookSources/9788073353933. No one can possibly argue that the IBSN was not provided to the readers who want to search by it. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:36, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
I, too, think Equinox's idea is grand, but the link text probably should be something other than "ISBN". After all, the running text "1997, John Smith, Some Book Title, ISBN, page 37" doesn't really make much sense. Arguably the link should be from the book title itself (as I think someone suggested above); the only problem with that is that we sometimes link to the book's w: article from the book title. Or, arguably the link should be from the page number (as DCD suggested above); but we often link to bgc from the page number (directly to the right page, which special:booksources does not). I'm just spelling out some issues; I don't have a good solution, I'm afraid.—msh210℠ (talk) 16:04, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
ISBN is only for most books published since 1970 (1967 with some conversion adjustments). It is not the same as EAN, though it can be converted to EAN. It is most relevant for those who would purchase a book, as libraries don't always make it easy to find book from its ISBN.
The ISBN is overly specific in that it specifies particular stock-keeping units for book retailers, not specific texts, which may be available in multiple ISBNs.
It is the display of "ISBN" followed by the ISBN number that is my core problem. Can we not have less clutter while achieving the same link as a result?
I would much prefer that we standardize on the display of desired links, of which I can think only of two at the moment. The more desirable of the two is a link to a particular page of the reference work (or database) available online. The second is the special:booksources link. For the link to text available online: page xx or a display of the headword or other term linked to; and something analogous for the link to special:booksource. One possibility is that we link to special:booksources using the the title of the work and link to any WP article via "WP" or something similar. DCDuringTALK18:00, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
I don't consider this extension legitimate. It seems like bullying over the result, with the effect of cowing editors to change positions in order to achieve a different result. bd2412T18:01, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
I'd be surprised if anyone changed position on this. The problem is the process not the result. But to accept the result is to accept the fruit of a poisoned tree. DCDuringTALK18:08, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
One editor already has. Unfortunately, this tells us nothing about the merits of providing more information as a dictionary, and everything about keeping up appearances. The 2/3 bean-counting requirement is not set in stone in any case. Where the question is one of presenting a more informative lexicon, a vocal minority opposing for no reason or based on factually flawed premises should not prevail. bd2412T18:24, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Do you think that oppose votes with no rationale should be disqualified? Or were you thinking of something more nuanced? —CodeCat18:27, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose votes with no rationale should certainly be given less weight. Otherwise, we open the process up to opposition by rote, rather than for a reason. bd2412T18:38, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
I don't think it's a good idea for users to start trying to discount votes that they don't like just because the voters didn't spell out explicitly "I do not agree with the rational offered for doing what this vote proposes to do; I oppose doing it". If you do want to suggest such disqualifications with any veneer of propriety, you'll have to also discount support votes that offer no rational, like Stephen's old support vote, Saltmarsh's, or SemperBlotto's. - -sche(discuss)18:43, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose votes without rationale come across as "I just don't like it"; there's no recourse for editors to come to a consensus except by discussing more (which vote pages are not really meant/good for). Wikipedia even has a page w:WP:I just don't like it suggesting that such argumentation should be avoided. So can we really take a vote seriously if everyone is just voting for preference without substantiating anything? For political voting that works, but not for a community based on consensus. We have no coalition and opposition here, nor should we. If each side just uses "I don't like it" to the other side, that isn't consensus, that's just tyranny of the majority and grudging acceptance by the minority. —CodeCat18:53, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
A user who favoured the passage of the vote didn't mind extending it repeatedly for as long as it took to obtain the appearance of a majority in favour of the vote, but now objects to extending the vote any further than that because he thinks the further extension will result in it being clear that there isn't a (passage-sufficient) majority in favour of the proposal after all. And he suggests changing the customary threshold for passage or disqualifying "oppose" votes so that the vote could still pass without consensus. Hmm... can you see why people are suspicious of the legitimacy of the vote? In the past (for years, videWiktionary:Votes/Timeline), when a vote showed that there was no consensus for something, the vote was closed at the scheduled time as "no consensus" (or simply as "fails", because votes require consensus to pass). If necessary/desired, another vote was held later after further discussion and advertisement. - -sche(discuss)18:32, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Requiring consensus to delete is a position that favors the inclusion of more information in the dictionary, unless there is a strong sense that the information should be excluded. The vote at issue here is also to include more information in the dictionary - reliably attested information found in books in print (although one opposer would prefer to limit inclusion because those books don't come from "a publishing house that has published writings of eminent Indologists", and another is solely concerned with the possibility that we will rely on uses from websites, which is not this proposal at all). bd2412T18:58, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
It is NOT any Wiktionary policy to "favor the inclusion of more information in the dictionary" without limit. That may be your desire and you may feel that History is on your side and therefore you are justified in using any means you choose to achieve your desire, but not everyone agrees with your views and certainly not with the use of any means, whatever principles of fairness or "due process" they violate. DCDuringTALK19:11, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
What are you talking about? BD2412 was just observing that the way RFD works, it skews Wiktionary's preference in favour of keeping. A supermajority is required to delete, therefore purely by statistics, content is easier to keep than to delete, and will naturally lead to keeping more than deleting. It has nothing to do with any explicit Wiktionary policy, only a consequence of our existing ones (insofar as RFD's rules are policy). —CodeCat19:21, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
@DCDuring We had a vote on whether to default to excluding romanizations. That vote failed. The consequence is that anyone can enter any transliteration, and whether it is kept or not is up to the whims of RfD (or VfD, if it is entered without citations). My proposal would avoid those disputes for a limited class of transliterations. bd2412T19:40, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Again, I am concerned about process. BD has no trouble closing RfDs, which have no time limit, rather than keeping them open because he apparently likes the result. When it comes time to close a vote, which has a definite time limit he has no objection to extending the vote, apparently because he prefers to see a positive outcome. The common element is the process selected is one that favors his desired outcome. An effort to mount a principled needs to overcome the indisputable appearance of the manipulation of process. I don't doubt that all participants believe that the manipulation of process is justified. I find it hard to believe that they don't think the process is being manipulated. I think that is betrayed by the proposal that someone should to assume the role of a judge and throw out the result of a vote based on no policy or practice. It seems that the idea is to achieve one's objective by any means necessary and practical. DCDuringTALK19:54, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
Your premises are factually wrong. From WT:RFD: "Time and expiration: Entries and senses should not normally be deleted in less than seven days after nomination. When there is no consensus after some time, the template {{look}} should be added to the bottom of the discussion. If there is no consensus for more than a month, the entry should be kept as a 'no consensus'". I have always abided by those time limits. I have often closed votes as against my own stated preference; no one has ever asserted otherwise. Can you show me a single instance where I closed a vote early because I 'liked the result'? bd2412T19:59, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
I considered the repeated extensions, starting with the first one on this second incarnation (at which the vote was 5-5-1), to be worse than poor taste, to be manipulative of the process. The proposal had failed once before. Why not just end it? DCDuringTALK21:11, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
1) If you deemed it worse than poor taste, it was your moral duty to say so, which you did not do. You even voted after the 1st extension (diff), although you could have abstained with the comment "I object to the extension" or the like. You did not do that. 3) All I am saying is give votes a chance. Give them a better chance. Recent experience shows that more people do come to votes when they are extended. Recent experience with multiple extensions of votes is a positive one, as far as I am concerned. --Dan Polansky (talk) 22:06, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
That only shows that YOUR VIEW on the principle over your preference in an individual case. How many times have you exercised discretion to delete something not patently garbage? — This unsigned comment was added by DCDuring (talk • contribs).
As I noted on your talk page, there is no discretion involved. If there is consensus to delete, I delete. If not, I close as no consensus, as required by the page instructions. There are also several occasions where I have deleted an entry, per consensus, where I would have preferred to keep it. For example, Talk:dolemite. bd2412T22:33, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
I never paid attention to the extensions until after the vote was properly closed and they were raised as an issue; however, the latest one has only yielded opposition based on an apparent misunderstanding of the proposal itself, which is actually much more limited then the new opposition suggests. Currently, well-attested Sanskrit transliterations are included as words in English, and that is absurd, and the point of allowing those transliterations to be called Sanskrit. Opposition at this point seems like an excuse to bash the procedure, not deal with the responsibility of informing readers. bd2412T18:44, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
I extended the vote again since I consider the closing illegitimate and irregular, and I said so on the day of the closure on the talk page of the closer. This discussion and previous ones confirm that multiple editors see this the same way I did. I repeatedly extended the vote knowing that I must not stop as soon as a threshold is reached since that would create accusations of selection bias; and it did create such accusations. Notice that, based on my preference and my cast vote, my preferred outcome would result from keeping the vote closed and not interfering. It must be obvious that I do not act so as to convince more people to oppose; I wish more people to support, as I did. I act on principle, as best as I can. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:13, 20 July 2015 (UTC)
This is not the first time that Polansky is pushing his version of justice. Any vote must be expire when it was started, otherwise all of the voters should be informed of an extension. Extending the vote just before the expiry is retroactively changing the rules. If there are doubts as to whether the vote is legitimate, or whether it reflects a consensus of the relevant community, it can be restarted again in the future. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 11:55, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
If understood as a description of the actual practice, the above is untrue: There is an uncontested precedent of extending votes, as I documented at Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-07/Disallowing extending of votes. On an alternative reading, the above is a set of prescriptions (not descriptions) that is probably not supported by consensus of editors. Especially "Extending the vote just before the expiry is retroactively changing the rules" is wrong. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:03, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
No LDL for sign languages?
Is there any particular reason that LDL is restricted to spoken languages? It seems strange that sign languages can't be cited that way, after all they're languages as well and there really aren't that many texts written in sign language. -- Liliana•08:53, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
WT:CFI#Number of citations says, "For all other spoken languages that are living, only one use or mention is adequate, subject to the following requirements:". Perhaps whoever wrote that meant "natural languages", since constructed languages are subject to their own CFI. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:55, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
I purposefully left sign languages out of the LDL because they have their own rules for inclusion as shown in the CFI, which references the sign CFI Wiktionary:About sign languages.
The sign language CFI says: 'Unlike spoken languages, sign languages are rarely written outside of reference materials and academic publications. Thus, the "clearly widespread use" condition of Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion (CFI) is considered to be met by any sign that is used by multiple independent deaf communities, and the "usage in permanently recorded media" condition includes any visual media that has been widely distributed, including DVDs, broadcast television, and sign language dictionaries.' I have not been active on Wiktionary for some time, so I might be out of date, but I would not be in favor of adding sign languages to the LDL.
A very picky follow-up WRT to Angr's point. The number of citations requirement says: "For languages well documented on the Internet, three citations in which a term is used is the minimum number for inclusion in Wiktionary. For terms in extinct languages, one use in a contemporaneous source is the minimum, or one mention is adequate subject to the below requirements. For all other spoken languages that are living, only one use or mention is adequate, subject to the following requirements:" Somebody might argue that a spoken, living constructed language that is not in the list of "languages well documented on the Internet" therefore requires only one use or mention. However, constructed languages are specifically addressed later on the page, so I don't think this is an issue of concern. -BB12 (talk) 00:31, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
A suggestion about Category:place names
Category:Place_names should have "Place names by territorial entities" not directly "► Place names of England" in it, because otherwise specific categories will easily overshadow other meaningful subcategories.
Also, it could have "Hydronyms" as a subcategory containing categories like lakes, rivers, seas and entries directly that are neither of these.--Dixtosa (talk) 16:46, 21 July 2015 (UTC)
The main page of the Wiktionary app just shows the (English-language) Word of the Day. Can/should it also display the Foreign Word of the Day? If so, how do we implement that? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 05:16, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
Hmm, that says that anything appearing on the mobile main page should be tagged with mf-XXX, but when I look at the code of our main page, not even the (English) Word of the Day has that tag, so I can't figure out how the mobile main page knows to show it. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:58, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
Right click on the page and select View Page Source. Search for mf- and you will see that the word of the day has an id=mf-wotd next to it. I'm not sure why this is not visible on the edit screen. --Panda10 (talk) 14:46, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
I figured it out: the id=mf-wotd is in Template:WOTD, not directly in the Main Page. However, since {{WOTD}} and {{FWOTD}} have totally different setups, I can't figure out where to put the id=mf-wotd to get the Foreign Word of the Day tagged correctly. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 15:16, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
Nothing, I guess. I just checked both my phone and my tablet and it looks good on both. Thanks! —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:36, 23 July 2015 (UTC)
Proposal to create PNG thumbnails of static GIF images
The thumbnail of this gif is of really bad quality.How a PNG thumb of this GIF would look like
There is a proposal at the Commons Village Pump requesting feedback about the thumbnails of static GIF images: It states that static GIF files should have their thumbnails created in PNG. The advantages of PNG over GIF would be visible especially with GIF images using an alpha channel. (compare the thumbnails on the side)
I created {{huh}}here because {{cleanup}} would not adequately explain the problem; the way wikipedia uses {{huh}} would have explained what I wanted to convey. I suggest making a template similar to the way it is used on Wikipedia.68.148.186.9300:12, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
We operate differently here from Wikipedia. If you feel like {{cleanup}} is inadequate, it's better to start a new discussion about the term in question at the Tea room. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 08:23, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
@LlywelynII has pointed out that Wiktionary's idiosyncratic automatic transliteration of Ξ as ks should be changed to x; I support this, as it is how every other authority I can find on Greek transliterates the character (viz ELOT, UN, ISO 843, ALA-LC, BGN/PCGN). It is also how other etymological dictionaries transliterate the character (look at the etymology of climax in Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, Collins, and OxfordDictionaries). - -sche(discuss)17:56, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
I don't take your point. ⟨ps⟩ is the standard transliteration and always has been. ⟨ks⟩ isn't and never has been. It's not even useful since ⟨x⟩ simply is a /ks/ sound; indeed, it's actively misleading since ⟨κσ⟩ is actually ⟨ks⟩.
Now, I'm fully on board keeping ⟨χ⟩ as ⟨kh⟩ because it has nothing to do with English's /t͡ʃ/ noise and even support treating ⟨φ⟩ differently once other scholars do as well. But it's not a biggie either way. We can quickly link to a full Greek entry and the Greek pronunciation template does a good job presenting the changing pronunciations over time. — LlywelynII23:00, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
If there hadn't been any standards, I would have preferred ks. Now we just have to decide between being less confusing or following the standards. --WikiTiki8918:43, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
Why? English has a letter for the sound /ks/ and it's ⟨x⟩. What do you think is confusing about it? The transliteration is into English, not IPA. Further, how do you feel that it isn't confusing to use an idiosyncratic standard which conflates ⟨ξ⟩ and ⟨κσ⟩? — LlywelynII23:00, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
Because transliterations don't only go by English. For example, we use x to transliterate Russian /x/ and Persian /χ/. Not to mention that it looks too much like the Greek χ. --WikiTiki8913:32, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
Obviously, I support the change, even though it is somewhat off-topic to talk about romanization schemes for modern Greek (ELOT & al.) when dealing with ancient Greek. (All the romanization schemes for ancient Greek also use ⟨x⟩, though, so it's no biggie.)
I'll take the opportunity, though, to note that once you saw every single transliteration scheme backed me up there was absolutely nothing helpful in maintaining broken transliterations by repeatedly reverting my proper corrections. If Wiktionary doesn't have a wp:iar analogue, you need one. We're here to improve the entries, not just make ourselves feel big by screwing with people and maintaining errors on procedural grounds. There isn't even a policy that the term template must always be used in every etymology section. You just felt like that. It's nuts. — LlywelynII23:00, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
Yes, we're here to improve the entries, but reasonable people can disagree about how to achieve that, and reasonable people can do things for other reasons than to "make ourselves feel big by screwing with people". There's a difference between argumentation and argumentativeness, between logic and ad hominem. Please try to stay on the right side of it. You're very sure you're right, and you want everyone to let you do things your own way, but then, the same could be said of this guy. He would have said it was all about improving the entries, too.
Now, to the merits: there are reasons for the current transliteration scheme that have nothing to do with anyone being dropped on their head when they were little. X is open to confusion: not only does it look like χ, but it's been used to represent it, for instance in beta code. There's no doubt about what "ks" represents. It's also a matter of being consistent in using digraphs for both the consonant + s series and the aspirated consonant series. Your way has merit, but it's not the only way that makes sense. Chuck Entz (talk) 06:46, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
@LlywelynII please note that it took a single edit to change not just the entry you were screaming bloody murder over, but every single entry that uses a template to link to any Ancient Greek word with that letter in it anywhere on Wiktionary, and every link using the templates that will ever be added to Wiktionary as long as the module is in its current state. Someone will have to check all the entries with Ξ in them, though, because other people may have done what you wanted to do and hard-coded the transliterations. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:20, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
One should not be confused about the status quo ante at Module:grc-translit, which was created on 8 September 2013 by User:ZxxZxxZ. The decisive thing should be the status quo in the manually entered transliterations that were used in Ancient Greek entries before the module was created. I recall User:Atelaes had some cards in Ancient Greek transliteration. I don't have enough energy to do this, but someone should investigate what the mainspace transliteration was back then, and then either keep the -sche change to the module or revert it as not yet supported by consensus. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:53, 8 August 2015 (UTC)
Derivation categories for multiple homonymous morphemes
Many languages have morphemes that are spelled and/or pronounced the same, but have different origins and different uses. An example is the English -er: it has a variety of unrelated uses. Currently, {{suffix}}, {{affix}} and family would put words in the same category even if they are derived from different underlying suffixes. Consequently, the categories are a bit of a mess, just see Category:English words suffixed with -er. The same is now also happening with PIE root categories; some roots are actually two distinct but homonymic roots, and it's necessary to distinguish which of them a word came from. I think this should be fixed somehow, but I'm not sure in what way. —CodeCat21:24, 28 July 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps we could put a disambiguation suffix on the category names so that different homonyms go to different categories (maybe ] or ]?). That would require adding a parameter to the affix templates to specify the disambiguator. It would also require adding the same parameter to the catboilers so they could accommodate the suffixes. The catboilers would need to add the unsuffixed category so the suffixed categories would show up as subcategories in the unsuffixed categories. It would also be a good idea to add a parameter for a sense ID or similar anchor to the catboilers so that they could add the anchor to the url in the same way that catfix adds the language tag. It might make it easier if the anchor and the parameters/suffixes were all the same.
The difficult part would be keeping the unsuffixed category empty: I don't really see a way to inform people who add the affix templates to etymologies about whether the morpheme they're adding has suffixed categories- they would have to check. I suppose you could have the catboilers check for both suffixed subcategories and entries being present at the same time, and adding the unsuffixed categories to a maintenance category. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:51, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
I was thinking of numbers as well at first, but you mentioned senseid. If we're going to be using senseid (which we should) then why not use the senseid itself as the disambiguator? We'd have something like Category:English words suffixed with -er (agent noun), and the page -er itself would have {{senseid|en|agent noun}}.
This does bring up a shortcoming of senseid though. It's designed and intended for tagging individual senses. But what if we want to tag whole etymologies or parts of speech? Do we need a new template, or should we just continue using the existing senseid? —CodeCat12:37, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
How about using the part of speech in the category name? English nouns suffixed with -xyz? This would require a pos= parameter in the template call, though. --Panda10 (talk) 13:09, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
That's not going to work if many have the same part of speech. Part of speech is not enough to uniquely separate them. Consider for example bystander versus bylaw. Moreover, it doesn't work at all with the PIE root categories or any other case where POS is not relevant. —CodeCat13:33, 2 August 2015 (UTC)
I have been trying to rewrite Wiktionary:About Greek for some time (years), the current page is at least 5 years out of date and has not been revised to reflect changes. Since a picture is worth a thousand words I'm thinking of creating model pages to illustrate how entries should be structured - obviating the need to update About Greek very often. These would be protected, categorised, and limited in number to a bare minimum. I would welcome any comments. — Saltmarshσυζήτηση-talk10:42, 29 July 2015 (UTC)
I'd say that all the regular -ar verbs are conjugated fine. A few other ones might be tricky. I changed a couple things on one template, which suggests that there could be more errors in others. Also, I'm gonna make a few more missing voseo categories. I'll let you know. --A230rjfowe (talk) 14:19, 31 July 2015 (UTC)
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Support --Daniel 00:52, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose That's a lousy drawing.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:35, 5 July 2015 (UTC)
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