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The Funds Dissemination Committee (FDC) makes recommendations about how to allocate Wikimedia movement funds to eligible entities. There are five positions on the committee being filled.
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I was patrolling anon edits earlier and stumbled across うしぬちー(ushi nu chī, literally “cow's milk”). The basic content was fine, requiring some formatting and templatizing. The issues raised were twofold:
How should Okinawan be romanized?
The Wikipedia article itself is confusing, suggesting in a table that Okinawan is romanized using some IPA symbols, such as ʔ to mark glottals before bare vowels. The body of the text pretty consistently uses Hepburn. Comments on the Wikipedia Talk page suggest that most real-world examples of romanized Okinawan (i.e. not in upper academia) use Hepburn, same as for mainland Japanese.
I'd like to propose that we use modified Hepburn, same as for Japanese.
Where should Okinawan lemmata go?
I see some conflicting trends, where Okinawan entries might be filed under the hiragana spelling, or alternately under the kanji spelling. It seems that kanji are still used to write Okinawan, so it seems to me that the lemmata should go there, with the hiragana entries serving as soft redirects, again sames as for Japanese.
I've already reworked the うしぬちー entry to use our modified Hepburn romanization. If the lemma should be under the kanji spelling, we'll have to stubbify the うしぬちー entry and move the content to 牛ぬ乳 (and/or possibly 牛乳, depending on whether the ぬ is always written out explicitly).
After the decease of User:Robert Ullmann someone has visited all the projects, where Ullmann's bot User:Interwicket had made contributions, proposing to remove the bot attribute from the Interwicket account. In many projects burocrats consented, so in the statistics this bot's contributions are ranked among the usual wiktionarians'. I think it should be reverted: Interwicket keeps being a bot even after its owner's death. --Al Silonov (talk) 10:17, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
I agree. I do think, however, that accounts and bots of deceased users should be permanently blocked so they can't be used if someone were to hack into them. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:46, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
This is something of a mess. I believe that there should be some coordination to avoid duplication of effort, the potential presentation of conflicting translations or interpretations, and other inconsistencies in content arising or likely to arise between projects. I propose a cross-wiki task force to review the materials contained in these three projects and to enforce some sence of coordination and communication between them. In my view, this is exactly the kind of opportunity to harness the energies that are going into three different, redundant pages, and build one thoroughly vetted page in a single place.
My inclination, quite frankly, is to say that we should do away with the Wikipedia list and the Wiktionary appendix entirely, and host the entire thing on Wikiquote, with the appropriate cross-wiki soft redirects from the other sites, and with links to the Wiktionary definitions for individual pages on specific proverbs. I am cross-posting this on all three projects, but I believe that the discussion should be kept in one place, and should probably be the Wikipedia Village Pump discussion because that is the highest-traffic project. Cheers! bd2412T01:59, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
I think you're extremely unlikely to achieve consensus among the editors of three different projects to do anything but keep the status quo. I also think Wikiquote is worst place to host a collection of proverbs, since most proverbs aren't quotes. In the world of dead-tree reference works, if I wanted to find out what a proverb meant, I would turn neither to a book of quotations nor to an encyclopedia but to a dictionary, so I'd say Wiktionary is the place for them. But mostly I think it's tilting at windmills to try to get Wikipedians, Wiktionarians, and Wikiquotidians (or whatever they're called) to agree to a one-project solution. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 08:27, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
I was hoping to keep the discussion in one place, but please note that I am not asking to get rid of Wiktionary entries on proverbs. The appendix of proverbs here is superflous. Also, in what way are proverbs not quotes? We have plenty of anonymous quotes, of unknown authorship and provenance, reported by their topic. bd2412T15:17, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
I knew you only meant the Appendix, not individual entries. Sorry for responding here rather than at WP. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:23, 9 May 2015 (UTC)
Redundancy in RFDs
Even after several months of reading and observing, I am having problems with wiktionary logic and process.
I, as a several month user, looked at Help:Disputing a definition to learn about what processes exist in wiktionary. From there, I followed the link to {{rfd-redundant}}. There I found that I should add {{rfd-redundant}} and add it to Wiktionary:Requests for deletion (RFD). That process is for a reason other than that the term cannot be attested (which reasonably includes terms which can be attested but have not yet been attested).
Curiously, this is also the page for requests to restore entries that may have been wrongly deleted. This, in itself promotes a faulty feedback process because the signals, about potential problems in the process, loop and are buried within the process with the potential problems. There is no separation of failure reporting, no analysis, and no corrective action – this system fails the community. If the community is not informed about a faulty process, the community will not correct a defect.
I was under the impression, during several months of reading in the community portal and help, that the result (i.e. the modified entry) of an RFD process must still meet both formal guidelines: documented in actual usage and idiomatic. This is not the case in practice. The current process fails to output modified entries that meet both of those formal guidelines. Over the weekend I read and commented on RFDs (see my contributions for 9 May 2015). What I saw were discussions about entries but few discussions about actual usage.
Is having an RFD process that usually fails to produce an entry meeting WT:CFI good enough, or does it cause more harm by arbitrary removal of perceived redundancy in content added in WT:AGF? —BoBoMisiu (talk) 19:05, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
The mistake I see you make is that attested does not mean 'has citations on the entry or its citations page'. CFI, header attestation line 3 says "use in permanently recorded media, conveying meaning, in at least three independent instances spanning at least a year (different requirements apply for certain languages)." (no mention of copying the citations onto Wiktionary)
Therefore, the word oven is attested in English and meets CFI, even though there aren't any citations on that page, CFI-meeting citations do exist. I hope this answers your question which frankly, I don't understand. Renard Migrant (talk) 20:39, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
The RFD that bothers me the most is Wiktionary:Requests for deletion#GeoServer. @Sae1962:, the contributor who created the entry, wrote on his user page that he has expertise in computer science. Knowing that, I am confident that he saw clearly widespread use of the term with no need to add three usage attributions. @Liliana-60:, the user who added {{rfd}} did not see Sae1962's contribution as about something with clearly widespread use but only the Name of a specific software product. Obviously in WT:AGF but with a limited technical vocabulary, @Equinox, BD2412: voted for delete because they also though it is Not enormously famous outside the GIS sphere and Needs to meet WT:BRAND. I then saw this RFD and though It is insane to delete something so ubiquitous. There is an obvious cognitive bias between two groups of people. If I, instead of adding objective attested usage, just complained, about what I perceive as obvious and widespread, I could not convince anyone otherwise. Even after documenting the usage, I don't think they grasp those concepts. @Renard Migrant: if the usage was not added into this entry, this same situation could occur again with the same term and to the detriment of wiktionary get deleted. The RFD process does not output modified entries that are objectively improved. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 23:37, 11 May 2015 (UTC)
First of all, Sae1962 has a long, long history of creating entries for just about every random combination of words he runs into in his line of work. You can't see the list of his deleted entries, but it's extremely long, going back a number of years. Assuming good faith doesn't work here, because he really doesn't understand what he's doing wrong- he has no lexicographic common sense at all. Secondly, what makes you think that no one here knows anything about computers? Granted, BD2412 is an attorney, and there are a couple of others in other lines of work such as mathematicians and economists, but my impression is that computer professions are heavily over-represented here. Even I have a programming degree, though it's a very low-level one from eons ago (my Fortran class was one of the last to use punch cards). Chuck Entz (talk) 03:27, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Entries need to be able to meet all criteria for inclusion, not just one. It's attested and idiomatic, not attested or idiomatic. Being in widespread use isn't an exemption from all the other criteria for inclusion. Or else we'd have green grass which is in very widespread use, but fails the idiomaticity criteria. Renard Migrant (talk) 15:37, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Oh my, @Chuck Entz, Equinox, BD2412: I did not mean to be insulting; I am sorry for that; I should have used more words. I mean that we all have a limited vocabulary and cultural knowledge. Even an expert in something has a limited vocabulary and cultural knowledge outside that expertise. That cultural, or maybe institutional, knowledge is not knowledge in books but in people that use that vocabulary. Chuck Entz, I didn't think that no one here knows anything about computers. @Renard Migrant: claiming clearly widespread use is one-of-two current ways of attesting usage. The term has become genericized; and I think, because it is the eponym it is idiomatic, even though it would be excluded by parts of WT:BRAND. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 10:51, 13 May 2015 (UTC) modified 11:13, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
Deleted entries can be seen at X!'s Tools. Delete entries are shown at the statistics at the top of the report, and also in the list of new entries. The report shows Sae1962 created 10420 entries in the mainspace, of which 212 were removed. coding conventions is an example of an entry that the report shows as deleted, if you press "More". Nice tool. --Dan Polansky (talk) 15:47, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
Change to CFI (vote incoming)
This is a courteous heads up: I plan to add a vote for changing the CFI for terms consisting only of words of one type (e.g. compound nouns) and names to attestation only. I will give my rationale there. It will be the first vote I will put up, so if anyone wishes to give me advice on the way or has a reason why that vote so hyper über obviously pointless that it shouldn't even be put up for discussion, share it here. Otherwise I'm looking forward to your contributions on the vote page. _Korn (talk) 18:23, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
ps: I'd be interested in hearing from the proponents of the idiomaticity criterion what detrimental effect they see in keeping words failing it. _Korn (talk) 18:33, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
If you mean single words won't de jure need to be idiomatic anymore, then good. It's a very silly loophole, albeit one nobody's successfully managed to use yet. Strictly speaking manlike doesn't meet CFI because the meaning's easily derived from the sum of its parts. Renard Migrant (talk) 21:17, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't understand your idea. But idiomaticity or widespread use should not be criteria, the only criterion should be is this a word? (word may have to be interpreted differently for different languages). For phrases, it should be is it a term belonging to the vocabulary of the language? (even if used by specialists only). Dictionaries are not used only to understand what you read: Wiktionary may be used to learn words you've never read nor heard. Our objective is to describe the whole vocabulary of all languages. Lmaltier (talk) 21:36, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't understand the idea, either. Are "compound nouns" those with spaces, hyphens, or neither? Will your change affect only English entries? (Obviously it would be silly to try to have every inflected or agglutinative form in e.g. Finnish or Hungarian.) Equinox◑21:49, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Per Equinox, can we get to the actual proposal, please? Very hard to make an informed comment on something that hasn't even been written yet. Renard Migrant (talk) 22:27, 12 May 2015 (UTC)
Actual proposal isn't fully phrased in my mind yet. The general idea is: 'Compound terms that only consist of words of one type, for example compound nouns that only consist of nouns (coal mine) and all names (personal, organisational), regardless of spelling (space/hyphen/one word), qualify for inclusion if they are attestable'. I'm not very educated about agglutinating languages. Please elaborate that point if you think it touches on this proposal. _Korn (talk) 09:20, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
Would comma-separated strings of adjectives and adverbs be in? (Would attestation that included and or or count or not?) Would the terms have to be constituents? Is standing start in "from a standing start" to be considered a noun-noun phrase (in), a verb-noun phrase (out), or an adjective-noun (out) phrase? Is red car a noun-noun phrase or an adjective-noun phrase? DCDuringTALK15:16, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
My name Martin Gardner would qualify then, wouldn't it? Because it's attestable as the name of a writer of mathematical puzzles. Just so happens I have the same name. From your wording, this would 100% qualify because "all names (personal, organisational), regardless of spelling (space/hyphen/one word), qualify for inclusion if they are attestable". Why do you want things like that to qualify, though? Renard Migrant (talk) 16:23, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
Now that I understand, I think that nobody would support it. A language dictionary describes terms of the language, and it's very easy fo find examples meeting your criterion and that would be pointless here (Martin Gardner or very quickly are good examples: nobody would consider very quickly as a single term, Martin Gardner might be considered as a term, but any linguistic information about it relates either to Martin or to Gardner). Think more about your idea. But I feel that no criterion based on this kind of automatic rule would be acceptable. Lmaltier (talk) 18:26, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
I just wrote a more detailed text block, but a slip on the mouse deleted it. Instead of going into detail again, I'll just touch on some points: I was only thinking about compound nouns and company names. I kept the wording general just in case I'd remember other useful cases. Red car, off the top of my head: It's not a compound term when one part can be changed without destroying reference to the object or entity. Black pepper dyed red is red black pepper, not red pepper. Martin Gardner would be included but highlights a problem of my proposal. For personal names there either needs to be a criterion à la 'citations be without a context which explains who the name refers to' or they need to simply be excluded from the rule I propose. Standing start would be includable since participles can function as nouns. Lastly, abridged rationale: My proposal is mainly to make the rules less convoluted. Most exceptions to the idiomaticity criterion we have already deal with compound nouns and company names, we are already highly inconsistent when it comes to it. I am not thinking that all the terms this would make eligible are a boon for a dictionary. But No Paper, they don't hurt us either and someone might want to look them up. Korn (talk) 18:44, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
We normally don't vote on things without having discussed them first. Since this is the first time this particular change is being discussed, it is too early to be creating a vote. And if the discussion reveals that no one supports this (as seems to be the case), then there is no point in going through the bureaucracy of voting. --WikiTiki8921:32, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
The point of this post is exactly to have this discussion. How would it have to happen before a vote is alright? I also thought the extent of support was supposed to be found out about at the actual vote. I'm coming mostly from the RFD page where SOP terms are voted for keeping left and right, not always consistently when you look at different terms and sometimes in very blatant disregard of the CFI. Cf. go away as an interjection and themseaufwärts, which are really as SOP as you can possibly get. Furthermore WT:coalmine is semi-random in that the rule itself is clear, but the effects basically depend on whether people have randomly decided spell it with a space or without. The exemption itself is an acknowledgement of the shortcoming of the CFI as coal mine and coalmine are the same word. It only seems logical to me that either a word is dictionary-worthy or not, independently from spaces. By the restricted CFI as laid out now, I'm not in favour of keeping either coal mine or coalmine. By the aim of this project, I'm in favour of keeping both. Hence I move to remove the restriction. Or said more bluntly: Instead of having a rule garnished with a semi-random exemption, whose enforcement depends on who happens to walk by RFD and what mood they're in that week, why not just do away with the rule at least within a limited scope. Unlike DCDuring I don't fear the great drivel as much. Rather I have to point to No Paper again and express my faith that a term which somebody took time to enter might be one that somebody else might want to look up. And I ask again: What actual harm is the current criterion preventing? _Korn (talk) 23:38, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
ps.: You'll understand how in my youthful optimism I'm not equating five people being against it here with 'nobody is for it' and instead assume (possibly wrongly, we cannot know at this point) that since there is at least one person who is for it (myself), there might be others on this page who, despite not speaking up here, share my side of the issue. _Korn (talk) 23:44, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
I disagree with your criterion, not with your idea: yes, a term which somebody took time to enter might be one that somebody else might want to look up. But it should be a term. I think that my own idea (explained above) is consistent with yours. Lmaltier (talk) 05:49, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
@Korn: thank you for sharing your opinion. I am for this change. I agree that the rules are convoluted and are paralyzed by a lack of both enforceable notability standards (for proper nouns) and enforceable reliability of content standards.
I don't see a problem with having both coal mine and coalmine, one is just an alternative spelling of the other and there is {{alternative spelling of}} or {{alternative form of}} for that. Its a variation of the single-space or double-space after a period squabble that happened when word processing software replaced typewriters — things can have different forms and it really doesn't matter either way since the space is just a convention that gets documented as usage. I think the shortcomings are a general lack of objective standards and documentation, and an enculturation of rigid thinking that does not permit organic growth and change.
I think wiktionary should document terms or phrases the way that they are found in attributable usage. In my opinion, the current process for sum of parts culling is both harmful and hypocritical. The standard should not be "unattributed mimicry of another dictionary" but "documented attestation of actual usage". —BoBoMisiu (talk) 13:05, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't think it matters whatsoever. As you say yourself, entries that fail CFI are getting kept on keep votes. I had a vote to make CFI trump voting, but it fails. It really is just voting, and it doesn't matter what changes to make to CFI as long as there's no rule saying you can't ignore it all together. Renard Migrant (talk) 16:05, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
@Renard Migrant: that is unfortunate, standards help every contributor and especially someone new, they also guide resolving disageements. Everything that gets contributed is at the mercy of the dictionary equivalent of a revolutionary council. My comment is general and not about what is happening now, in the past, or in the future. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 19:27, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
You can create a vote even while the discussion is ongoing, but that is suboptimal since this discussion shows there is going to be very little support. We don't want to include all English non-idiomatic noun-noun compounds, for example (computer buyer, computer seller, dictionary maker, discussion participant, etc.); I don't, and from what I have seen, most editors don't. --Dan Polansky (talk) 15:37, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
@Dan Polansky: I agree with you completely about the kind you provide examples of. They are obvious SOP and should not have entries. There also kinds that are not obviously SOP and become subjective choices of preference based on perceived usefulness. Its misleading to say that those are the consensus of the community when they are just the consensus of a couple people. There is no standard that everyone follows, just random changes take place, and any disagreement about the change is passive-aggressively ignored. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 17:05, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
Dan, you yourself argued to me to include all German non-idiomatic noun noun compounds like Computerkäufer, Computerverkäufer, Wörterbuchmacher, Diskussionsteilnehmer. That's racist. (Phrasing jocular, point serious. Please explain to me why it's fine in one language and bad in another.) _Korn (talk) 22:01, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
None of those words are noun-noun compounds; they may be nounnoun compounds, but that's different. As long as we're using jocular phrasing. That's egalitarian, to treat words without spaces uniformly.--Prosfilaes (talk) 06:02, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Well, the question posed by me is why it's different. I think Dan was the one to fear the great flood of drivel (Ew.) and yet he argued to open up a nice drivel pool for drivel if it's just presented the right way. (Without space.) scrolled up and it was During. Sorry, got confused by Talk:themseaufwärts discussion from my memory. _Korn (talk) 10:35, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Lemme step in here and say that I agree with Korn that CFI is overly restrictive and needs to either be formally reduced to a guideline, or additional criteria need to be added to allow more entries. In particular, the "lemmings" criteria (and I wish we wouldn't call it that, because that's such a negatively-charged term) needs to be adopted. Purplebackpack8914:19, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Acadian French
Given that we (correctly) don't consider Canadian French or Quebec French to be separate languages from European French, it's odd that the Canadian French dialect of Acadian French has its own code in Module:languages/datax. Perhaps it's a simple error by someone who forgot that etymology-only language codes belong in Module:etymology language/data. I would like to reclassify it as an etymology-only language, moving and changing its code (to fr-aca, which fits the usual naming scheme for etymology-only language codes) and updating the handful of entries which refer to it. Alternatively, we could downgrade it even further, to the level of Quebec French (which isn't even an etymology-only language, but just a regional context label.) - -sche(discuss)20:23, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
I think that any variety of a language that is referenced frequently enough in etymologies can have an entry in Module:etymology language/data. So the only question is how often is Acadian French referenced in etymologies? And for that matter, how often is Quebec French referenced in etymologies? --WikiTiki8920:31, 13 May 2015 (UTC)
Officially downgrade WT:CFI from a policy to a guideline
I would urge the community as an administrative matter to downgrade Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion from a policy to a guideline. Rationale, it's a de facto guideline as editors disregard it as much or as little as they see fit. Entries are kept or deleted according to a vote, not according to CFI. I call it an administrative issue because it's already not being implemented, so this just makes it official. Passing this vote (not yet drafted) is just an honesty matter. New editors otherwise may be misled into thinking we stick by CFI. Renard Migrant (talk) 19:37, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
I disagree with the proposal, but I think that if a vote is started on this, the only two options should be downgrade and enforce. You can't have your cake and eat it. —CodeCat19:44, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
If we downgrade it to a de jure guideline, then people will de facto completely ignore it. I much prefer it being a de jure policy and de facto guideline. --WikiTiki8919:52, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
I disagree. That doesn't make much sense. The reason that people treat CFI as a guideline is that they disagree with portions of it, not some inexplicable desire to break the rules. Purplebackpack8903:21, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
Entries are kept or deleted according to a vote, which itself is ideally in accordance with not according to CFI.
Just like you can't make a constitution a guideline just because there are opinion-based decision making happening (like courts) --Dixtosa (talk) 19:52, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Well, exactly. The problem is not that editors disregard CFI as they see fit, the problem is that some terms are considered idiomatic by some people and SOP by others. When people vote "keep" on a term that some people consider SOP, that doesn't mean the keep-voters are ignoring CFI, it merely means the keep-voters feel the term does meet CFI while the delete-voters feel it doesn't. That's not the fault of CFI, that's the fault of Wiktionary's being a democracy instead of a dictatorship. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:31, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes, I do dispute that. Plenty of people vote keep or delete based on their interpretation of CFI rather than yours. That isn't the same thing. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:51, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Then the problem is the RFD process. Keep/delete votes are not enough; there must also be a consensus on the rationale for keeping or deleting. —CodeCat22:02, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
I second Wikitiki89's point. The same principle is illustrated in this anecdote: where I was born, marijuana is illegal but the law regarding it is not enforced. This has the desired effect of discouraging it being smoked in public places and when it would be a nuisance. If the official stance were simply that smoking marijuana was discouraged, the government's recommendation would be ignored completely and people would smoke as much and wherever they want (not that I have a problem with that, but the government does). —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds20:52, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
There need to be rules, otherwise anyone can add anything, like Urban Dictionary. Changing the rules is fine (by vote): having basically no rules, only ignorable "guidelines", is disaster, as conflicts can never be resolved. Equinox◑22:28, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm sorry, I don't buy into the argument that guidelines aren't rules. Also, if the majority of editors commenting on a particular entry want the rules ignored, why shouldn't it? Do the creators of CFI get indefinite veto power? (And remember, I'm not as opposed to UD as you are; people use it a lot more than this project, so they must be doing SOMETHING right. It's also not as no-rules as you would claim). Purplebackpack8922:39, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Guidelines guide, and only recommend; rules dictate, and determine what happens. Definitely not the same. People do not use UD to find out seriously what a word means: it has no etymologies and no pronunciations, and most of the words are made up for a short-lived joke; you cannot even tell which ones are real, since it doesn't tell you. Who "uses" UD seriously? Show evidence or do not reply. Equinox◑22:42, 14 May 2015 (UTC)
Don't think you can tell me when to reply and when not to, Equinox. Regardless of whether I believe that rules "dictate", I don't believe that this is an area that should be "dictated", particularly "dictated" by something people don't really support anymore, at least in its entirety. As for your UD claim, you're coming way too close to making this project so serious that nobody will use it. You believe that there's some pervasive detriment in certain types of entries being kept. Guess what? There isn't! In most RfD cases, there's no harm in being more entries. Harm comes in RfV cases, because RfV is the venue we dispute whether or not the information in a particular area is factual. Purplebackpack8900:05, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
I weakly oppose downgrading, and strongly oppose allowing editing CFI without a vote. WT:CFI now says (entered without a vote but as a result of a related vote): "In rare cases, a phrase that is arguably unidiomatic may be included by the consensus of the community, based on the determination of editors that inclusion of the term is likely to be useful to readers." This gives much of the flexibility that was required. Also, WikiTiki89 makes an interesting point, although I am not sure I entirely agree with it. --Dan Polansky (talk) 14:58, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
First off: We're all here for a common goal, so always tell yourself that the person not sharing your opinion is only stupid and not evil and hence probably doesn't deserve vitriol. As for the actual topic, I'm mostly with our coding cat. Either the rules are adamant or they're nothing. Since I recently proposed easing the CFI, I'm tempted by just effectively doing away with them by demotion, but this is the internet and 'democracy' equals mob rule or dictatorship of the loudest minority. We try our best to rein that in in the voting process, but I think the RFD is too random already (as I said above). My preferred solution would be the creation of a binding CFI everyone can get behind. If that isn't possible, RFD-deniers should at least have to name a reason for ignoring the rules. (Only applying to cases when a term does violate the CFI.) Should the CFI be done away with (guideline), then we must install alternate rules for deletion; because the CFI are not only here to prevent bad entries but also to prevent bad deletions, and I recently saw comments boiling down to 'I wish I could delete that term but the CFI won't let me'. We mustn't give up our safety-measures to whims. We, the usual suspects, might each consider ourselves helpful and reasonable, but anyone could waltz in. Always consider the things you propose imagining that WT is suddenly overrun by the worst possible people. _Korn (talk) 20:37, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
The problem with making them adamant is that it's abundantly clear to me that a majority of users disagrees with them as written. If they are to be adamant, they should be fixed, and they should be fixed BEFORE they become adamant. Also, I'm not buying into the claim that you and Wikitiki and others have made that "either the rules are adamant or they're nothing." There's room for interpretation. Purplebackpack8921:44, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
Well, I thought I said that they should be fixed beforehand. And there shouldn't be room for interpretation. They should be absolutely unambiguous. Of course that makes it more difficult to cast them in a form everyone will feel perfectly comfortable with. But difficulty is a category different from need. _Korn (talk) 10:58, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
Dude, writing CFI that clear-cut is impossible. Besides, if we could do it, we wouldn't need RfD in the first place, because everything would be clear to everybody what's CFI and what isn't. Purplebackpack8922:53, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
I want to believe. Also, at least our general CFI at the moment is pretty close to being clear cut. I think Dan Polansky recently pointed out that it doesn't specifically say whether "separate" refers to the spelling or the words, but other than that there's not much left to the imagination about what "attested" and "idiomatic" mean. In theory our RFD should be mostly occupied with providing idiomatic usages for terms of which the requester wasn't aware. _Korn (talk) 14:21, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
I think the first two lines are a bit of a car crash: "A term should be included if it's likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means. This in turn leads to the somewhat more formal guideline of including a term if it is attested and idiomatic."
That does make it sounds like erm should be included if it's likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means and the whole attested and idiomatic bits are guidelines and therefore not mandatory. There's also no exemption in CFI for single words being unidiomatic. I mean, paintlike would fail for a couple of reasons. It's not idiomatic (the meaning is easily derived from the sum of its parts, i.e. like paint) and it's not likely someone would run across it and want to know what it means. And attested and idiomatic are only guidelines anyway. Renard Migrant (talk) 14:53, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose, this is a silly and frivolous proposal. I would say that User:Angr has it exactly right: "When people vote "keep" on a term that some people consider SOP, that doesn't mean the keep-voters are ignoring CFI, it merely means the keep-voters feel the term does meet CFI". As User:Dan Polansky point out, there is also now a provision within CFI that says: "In rare cases, a phrase that is arguably unidiomatic may be included by the consensus of the community, based on the determination of editors that inclusion of the term is likely to be useful to readers". With over four million entries in the dictionary, the few dozen that we argue about represent an exceedingly rare proportion of entries. The obvious purpose of CFI is to keep people from making shit up, i.e. inventing a new word or phrase that has never actually been used and stuffing it into the dictionary, and to keep people from making directory-like entries of names with no unique lexicographical value like Enos T. Throop. RfV and RfD are highly successful in getting rid of such things, and our practices are in fact completely consistent with CFI, as policy, as currently written. bd2412T15:49, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
You can't possibly believe that "When people vote "keep" on a term that some people consider SOP, that doesn't mean the keep-voters are ignoring CFI, it merely means the keep-voters feel the term does meet CFI". It's clearly not the case. Currently going on on RFD WT:RFD#wall hanging many people are saying keep per the lemming principle. The lemming principle is not in CFI, it is not mentioned at all. Just search 'lemming' on WT:RFD for other examples. Or search for 'keep outside of CFI'. I don't see how anyone could actually believe what you've said given the obvious contradictory evidence. Renard Migrant (talk) 15:59, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Then it is one of those aforementioned rare cases where it is nonetheless considered useful to the readers, as currently permitted by CFI. In any case, it has been pointed out in the discussion that there are things that could be called hangings that, when hung on a wall, would not be a "wall hanging". bd2412T16:09, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
That's not what I said at all. Why did you vote to keep snitch bitch? Why did you vote to keep sudden death? These are entries that at least one editor has asserted are SOP, so how can you disagree with that? bd2412T16:16, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm a bit baffled by as well, since, if my memory serves me right, there were the odd entries being kept despite being unanimously considered SOP. Or at least none of the voters expressed a different opinion, even when voting to keep it. Maybe, before discussing what to do with the CFI, we should start a debate on what the CFI are actually supposed to prevent? So far the three opinions seem to be: 1. Tons of low-value entries. 2. Made up things. 3. Bad deletions. _Korn (talk) 16:23, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Then you need to read both CFI and that discussion more carefully. For example, I stated in my rationale for keeping that uses exist where the phrase "does not seem particularly transparent"; ergo, it is idiomatic.I didn't think that I needed to spell that out. I see no editor saying, "this goes against CFI, but keep anyway", unlike your representation of the situation. In any case, you have also revived my interest in that particular discussion enough to get me to do some further searching, and to find that wallhanging is attested, and this entry therefore meets WT:COALMINE. Cheers! bd2412T19:03, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
With go away, yes, that is the "lemmings" principle that if other reputable dictionaries (i.e. not Urban Dictionary or others like it) tend to include a phrase, we should include it also. I'm pregnant is a "phrasebook" argument, which is that we should include certain phrases that are likely to be useful for translation purposes in an urgent situation. bd2412T22:03, 17 May 2015 (UTC)
Well, on first glance I rather dislike the lemmings principle then. Also, I'm with whoever proposed to move the phrasebook to an Appendix and further move to link to said appendix on the home page. A dictionary is not a phrasebook and I don't see anyone who was not specifically made aware that he has a phrasebook looking this up in one term rather than I (+ am) + pregnant. As it is now, passerbys probably aren't even aware that our phrasebook section exists. _Korn (talk) 10:40, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Yes. That seems logical. The ngrams are probably skewed a bit in favour of capitalised forms as they will frequently be the first word of a sentence. I'll try to move them and replace uncapped redirects with alternative forms of. SemperBlotto (talk) 15:29, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
When both are clearly acceptable, instead of making checks every single time, which is either causing somebody work or will just be another rule ignored, we should just decide on one which is overall more common. I don't see any benefit in this level on detail. Of course I won't stop you from taking that sorting work on yourself, it just feels less neat and tidy to me. _Korn (talk) 20:02, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
We already do this for every other type of alternative form, so why make an exception here? If we chose neo- as the standard, but one particular word is attested 90% of the time with Neo-, you would still have its main entry be at neo-? --WikiTiki8920:10, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
Yeah, I just prefer uniformity. Even when there is variation, it's still always the same prefix. But as said, I wouldn't stop you from putting that work onto yourself. _Korn (talk) 20:42, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm now finding pages which use {{IPAchar}} with a lang= parameter. But this parameter isn't actually used at all by the template, it's completely ignored. Should it be removed from pages, or does someone know a possible use for it? —CodeCat20:34, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
Do you still have a category for Dutch IPA entries that use invalid phonemes? If so, {{IPAchar|...|lang=nl}} could find things that need cleaning up. But otherwise, I can't think of a reason to have it. It's probably just there out of force of habit, since we add the language code in virtually every other template. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:25, 15 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm adding a couple of Bactrian words and this got me thinking about etymology stratification for Iranian languages.
It seems clear that Proto-Iranian and Proto-Indo-Iranian need to be distinguished, they're apart far enough. But would there be any point in creating competing full appendices for both — or, as I'm thinking, could we limit separate Proto-Iranian entries to words whose Indo-Iranian (or Indo-European) origin is not clear? If there is a Proto-Indo-Iranian entry for something (e.g. *ćata), we could continue to list also the Iranian descendants there, and for maintainability, we could redirect potential Proto-Iranian entries like *cata to these. Any opposition?
I looked thru everything we have under "Old Iranian", and about half of the time the label seems to be just a proxy for Proto-Iranian. I think I'll do a cleanup run of these later this weekend if I find the time. Middle Iranian might be a bit more work (and might require a slightly more detailed plan). ---Tropylium (talk) 01:38, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
As for Proto-Iranian appendices, I oppose redirecting them to the Proto-Indo-Iranian page. Duplication can be avoided by using {{see desc}} in the Proto-Indo-Iranian page. --Vahag (talk) 10:17, 16 May 2015 (UTC)
This sounds contradictory; the point of {{etyl}} is exactly to link things under separate categories like Category:Terms derived from Old Iranian. I also believe w:Proto-Iranian (which is at least a page of its own) would be generally more beneficial to link than w:Old Iranian (which is merely a redirect to w:Iranian languages), esp. on pages like 𐭮𐭯𐭠𐭧𐭯𐭲𐭩(spʾḥpty) that refer only to a reconstruction.
As for protolang maintenance: would you also oppose listing Indic descendants on PII pages? If so, is there a point in having a separate reconstruction level that only accommodates references to two other reconstruction levels? (Cf. how we do not have any Proto-West Germanic entries.) If not, why do Iranian and Indic need different treatment? Currently we only seem to have four Proto-Iranian and two Proto-Indo-Iranian entries, so there's plenty of room for growth — and for maintanability to get out of sync. --Tropylium (talk) 00:17, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Don't forget that there's more to a protolang entry than just the descendants list, thought that's certainly important. We shouldn't duplicate between parent and daughter protolang entries, but not every daughter protolang term can be reconstructed, and some that can may not be worth the bother, if there's only one or two descendants. We may want the descendants in either of the two places, but we should avoid having them in both, to avoid synchronization problems (there's also {{etymtree}}, but that has its own of set of tradeoffs). Chuck Entz (talk) 01:04, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
Intermediate protolang terms are always reconstructible, provided that the stage in general has been worked out. if we can track e.g. a word's development from an individual Germanic language back to PIE, or from an individual Finnic language back to Proto-Uralic, that already implies that we know what it looked like in Proto-Germanic or Proto-Finnic. The separation exists for the opposite case, where we have an e.g. Iranian-specific word and would not be able to claim that it existed at an older stage such as Proto-Indo-Iranian.
I am however not quite sure if the reconstruction of Proto-Iranian is in a good enough shape that we even could always create separate entries for it. I've seen wildly contrasting views on several matters, e.g. some claim the existence of fricatives *f *θ *x; some claim that, per some marginal languages, only aspirates *pʰ *tʰ *kʰ should be reconstructed; others yet claim retention of laryngeals, which seems to imply biphonemes *pH *tH *kH. (Tho this kind of matters might be better taken to Wiktionary talk:About Proto-Iranian.)
Anyway this ties back into the wider question of how to format protolang appendices. I continue to think that trying to enforce every page to cover only a "single term" in a "single language" is somewhat over-reductive, and it might be sometimes sensible to e.g. treat closely-separated subfamilies as subsections. In this case, say, Proto-Iranian and Proto-Indic entries as level-2 subsections of a Proto-Indo-Iranian entry, if it exists. --Tropylium (talk) 09:59, 18 May 2015 (UTC)
I do not oppose listing Indic descendants at the PII page. I think Proto-Iranian needs a different treatment, because it has many descendants and borrowings. Proto-Iranian pages can get pretty long, as in Appendix:Proto-Iranian/mauč- and Appendix:Proto-Iranian/baiwar-. Listing Indic descendants would make the pages even less usable. But this is not a fundamental problem that needs a policy. Depending on circumstances we could have everything on a PII page or use {{see desc}}, as appropriate. --Vahag (talk) 19:25, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
The problems with PII are manifold:
It's not yet properly reconstructed. I've read that Kümmel is writing a book on it but it doesn't seems to be released yet.
There are no dictionaries of it (yet). The reason for this is because Sanskrit serves as a perfectly proper replacement for Proto-Indo-Aryan (though with some differences, comparable to e.g. differences between OCS and Proto-Slavic), and for Proto-Iranian there are many old Iranian languages attested. There is no immediate "need" for PII since it's too easy to jump from Old Iranian and Sanskrit to PIE if there is a connection.
It's the oldest and most divergent existing IE branch containing many languages spanning some 4 millennia. The proper treatment of it would require extensive knowledge of various scripts and sound changes that basically no living person possesses. There is a huge amount of intra-branch borrowing and inspecting the literature just for that is a very daunting task.
Combining already present PIA and PI appendices into a PII page should be a piece of cake if we decide that. Currently there doesn't seem any need for that since there are too few entries. However, since the Proto-Iranian appendices demonstrate that the Iranian descendants lists (which should be in general smaller than Indo-Aryan descendants lists) can grow very large, it seems more proper to have them listed separately, and only combine them into a PII appendix for PII-specific treatment. This would be similar to treatment of Proto-Balto-Slavic terms (which have their own set of problems, but regardless Proto-Slavic descendants are not copied to PBSl. appendices when they are created, nor is that a proper place to list them). --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 00:24, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
The Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees is the ultimate governing authority of the Wikimedia Foundation, a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization registered in the United States. The Wikimedia Foundation manages many diverse projects such as Wikipedia and Commons.
The voting phase lasts from 00:00 UTC May 17 to 23:59 UTC May 31. Click here to vote. More information on the candidates and the elections can be found on the 2015 Board election page on Meta-Wiki.
I was reading/skimming the whole of 2006 thread User talk:Connel MacKenzie/Normalization of articles these days. They're those formatting rules that we see everywhere, like whitespaces, headers, etc. I'd like to create votes for some of those to officialize them. Few are controversial, one or two are outdated but I suppose most would just pass with unanimity or something. Even if we apparently don't have any bot like User:AutoFormat these days (Do we?) to enforce/apply the rules, I think that's besides the point of officializing them. Thoughts? --Daniel05:45, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Leave out the part about glosses needing to be sentences and I'll wave them through. No benefit in translating Bier as 'Beer.' rather than beer and it would be bound to make some translations needlessly clunky. Also: The fuck is wikification? _Korn (talk) 10:23, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
What is the difference between making wikimarkup normalization official and adding these wikimarkup site conventions into WT:MOS? @Korn: wikification is creating linked terms and replacing HTML elements with wikimarkup and templates. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 12:26, 19 May 2015 (UTC) modified 13:11, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
They need to be rewritten in much clearer language. Then I think they can just be added directly to WT:ELE (after seeing enough consensus in this discussion). There is no need for a vote. The one about glosses needing to be sentences is controversial and should be left out (and let's not start another debate here about it). --WikiTiki8912:49, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
I thought there was some consensus that English definitions (and Translingual entries such as the taxonomic ones) were supposed to be formatted as if they were sentences. I think the consensus opposed such formatting for FL entries and Translingual ones such as those for CJKV characters. DCDuringTALK16:38, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Use whatever is most natural. If the definition is just one word, like "broom", then just leave it as that. Turning it into "A broom." is silly and pointless.
@CodeCat: That seems to mean that there is not a complete consensus for the format of English definitions, so the normalization cannot include that. I nonetheless thought that there was some consensus on that point.
As to it being "pointless". Using the indefinite article is a marker of countability. As the use of labels is not nearly complete or accurate enough to allow normalization, we should enjoy any such marker that we find. DCDuringTALK18:33, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
Lua scripts should always be wrapped in templates. So {{#invoke:}} should only be in the template namespace. Keep in mind that that this proposal only describes our entries, and so only applies to the main namespace and to reconstructions in the appendix namespace. --WikiTiki8918:59, 19 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't think we need an official vote at all. We can just remove all the controversial ones and have an informal vote right here in the BP. --WikiTiki8914:33, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm of the opinion that formal votes is better than informal votes/discussions alone. Most of these points are already informally widely accepted on the community anyway. Or maybe one could argue that the fact User:AutoFormat was ever given the bot flag through a 2007 vote with wide support, already formalized the normalization of entries to some extent. --Daniel14:53, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
WT:ELE states at the top that "It should not be modified without discussion and consensus. Any substantial or contested changes require a VOTE." Our changes are not contested (once we remove the controversial ones), but I guess they are substantial. Anyway, I think that the reason WT:ELE is so out of date is specifically because we've been requiring votes in order to make substantial changes. --WikiTiki8915:05, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
(after edit conflict) @Daniel Carrero, Wikitiki89: Do you have in mind running this on a bot? If not, do we have anyone able and willing to run and maintain such a bot? Should this be a guideline that any bot would need to follow as it inserted or revised entry content? If it is not mandatory for either bots or humans, it certainly would not need a vote. If we would like to actually get it implemented, then we need to consider whether a vote is useful. I, for one, think such a vote would be useful, even if the guidelines were only mandatory for bots. DCDuringTALK14:59, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
The idea is that these rules that are independent of how they are enforced. So running a formatting bot is a completely independent issue from these changes. Of course, any formatting bot would have to conform to the new rules. I personally do not plan on running this bot, but I cannot speak for anyone else. --WikiTiki8915:05, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I also personally do not plan on running this on a bot. I propose that, if people support these rules, then it should be mandatory for bots and a guideline for people. If someone forgets to add a space after ---- between languages, it does not harm how people see the entry, but that's not generally how the code looks like. It could be a separate policy page, tentative name: Wiktionary:Normalization of entries (WT:NORM). --Daniel16:37, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
An alternative / addition to a bot could be a client-side script / extension which verifies the content before submitting it to Wiktionary. -- Jberkel (talk) 16:22, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
All whitespace or non-printing characters other than space and newline must be encoded as HTML entities, such as or <r;.
No other HTML entities allowed, these should be converted to UTF-8. & -- > &
Is it accurate? I don't remember using nbsp in any entries myself, even though I do remember using it in templatized tables. Can I see one or more examples of entries with nbsp, ltr and the like? The search box seems unhelpful for that. --Daniel17:31, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
See Aves#Hypernyms for many instances of There are numerous such examples in Translingual entries with Hypernyms sections and others in Translingual entries with Coordinate terms and Hyponyms headers.
I am creating a few pools for more controversial items.
Poll 1
Poll with no policy value. About this norm:
"All whitespace or non-printing characters other than space and newline must be encoded as HTML entities, such as or <r;. No other HTML entities allowed, these should be converted to UTF-8. & -- > &"
Support The reason I added that norm was to avoid invisible characters sneaking in and causing problems. We've had that problem before. By making it immediately obvious when such characters are present, they can presumably be noticed faster. —CodeCat20:40, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose
Oppose On one hand, we sometimes need non-printing characters to appear literally. For example, in Persian orthography, the zero-width non-joiner (U+200C) is used to connect compounds and certain morphemes, such as کفشها(kafš-hâ). It would be pretty silly to have to write this as {{m|fa|کفش‌ها}} instead of {{m|fa|کفشها}}. On the other hand, this overlooks the fact that & may be necessary to display what we want. I will oppose this unless it is significantly reworded to take these and other things into account. --WikiTiki8915:31, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose sometimes Help:Hidden text, i.e. <!-- annotation --> is the best way to annotate; reading poll 1 again, I think it would exclude this type of useful annotation. I support stripping duplicate spaces, tab → space, HTML character names → glyph, etc. This <!-- annotation --> is a habit for some programmers like myself. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:16, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose, partly perWikitiki89. Whilst Unicode glyphs are generally to be prefered, a blanket ban on most HTML entities is too wide-reaching and may have numerous undesirable unintended consequences. — I.S.M.E.T.A.00:42, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
Abstain I don't personally remember using nbsp and ltr outside templates and probably would prefer having a template for single uses like {{nbsp}}. But I see there are other people using nbsp and the like so I abstain. --Daniel16:00, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain I don't think it matters. I prefer to use the HTML character names ( ) because they are mnemonic and Unicode values are not. On wiktionary I usually just select a special character from the edit dropdown. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:25, 23 May 2015 (UTC) modified 20:16, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain I'm not sure whether U+1039 (MYANMAR SIGN VIRAMA) is considered a nonprinting character or not, but I definitely agree with Wikitiki that I'd rather write {{m|my|ဗုဒ္ဓ}} than {{m|my|ဗုဒ္ဓ}}. And when I do write the latter, the automatic transliteration breaks: {{m|my|ဗုဒ္ဓ}} renders as ဗုဒ္ဓ(buddha.) instead of ဗုဒ္ဓ(buddha.). —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 21:44, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Comment: Not sure I have a definite position on this (given that it doesn't really affect me), but would we want to include combining characters? They can be difficult to make out in the editor (especially if there are more than one of them.) —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 22:53, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
Poll 2
Poll with no policy value. About this norm:
"Definition lines should begin with a capital letter and end with a period if they are sentences; they should begin with a lowercase letter and end without a period otherwise."
Support
Support Sounds good enough, but I'd be interested in hearing alternate ideas or possible problems with that, if any. --Daniel16:00, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
# Support for All English and Translingual definitions and full FL definitions (ie, don't care about FL one-word glosses) — This unsigned comment was added by DCDuring (talk • contribs). I misread the proposal and strongly disagree. I would support it only with the removal of everything after the first "period". DCDuringTALK20:20, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
Support it currently has a patchwork of capitalization and I think it would be to much work to normalize. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:33, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose I disagree that some definitions of English terms should start with a capital letter and some not; that is going to create poorly looking typography, and is a deviation from any lexicographical practice to be seen online, AFAIK. Furthermore, we have almost no definitions that are sentences; the phrasing probably wanted to distinguish a definition consisting of multiple words, often of the genus-differentia format, from a definition that uses a synonym. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:57, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose Very bad idea for a dictionary. If it could be confined to definitions only (and therefore only to English entries), and not to translations, and if the definition is long enough, it is usually (but not always) clear that the capitalization is only because it begins a sentence. But people will generalize and start capitalizing translations as well, and it will often be difficult or impossible to tell whether the capitalization is required in the orthography (as in a proper noun), or simply sentence case. I have used a few bilingual dictionaries that capitalized the start of each translation (e.g., January -> Janvier), and you cannot tell if it’s sentence case or required orthographically. Encyclopedias almost always use full sentences, and usually paragraphs, so initial caps are a requirement. In dictionaries, OTOH, it is frequently confusing and leads to mistakes and misunderstandings. Terrible idea for a dictionary. —Stephen(Talk)18:17, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
I would not recommend this for any FL definition that was not a full definition. Frankly, I don't much care how FL entries are formatted. DCDuringTALK
I agree that FL entries shouldn't be capitalized, especially since most of them are less than three words long. English entries, on the other hand, are frequently longer to more accurately define the word, which is what I hope to see in a dictionary. I can't think of any instances where capitalization would create any ambiguity that wouldn't be solved by linking to the correct page (assuming the first word was linked, that is). JodianWarrior (talk) 19:49, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose As in all other dictionaries, definitions must be formatted consistently across the project, for English words, but also for words from other languages: either capitalized or not, I don't mind. Even single word definitions (e.g. psychoanalyst as the definition of psychanalyste) are (and must be) true definitions: they must make the meaning of the word very clear. This is easily forgotten if they are not viewed as definitions. In any case, I would add a rule: a single definition should neer be composed of several sentences. Lmaltier (talk) 20:30, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
Oppose I very much oppose having only sentences capitalized, since this creates ugly inconsistency. I strongly support having every single definition (of English words) capitalized and with a period at the end. When I first started using Wiktionary, the first problem I noticed was with the inconsistency of capitalization and punctuation (which was the norm, but not universal). That is, in fact, what started me editing, because I so badly wanted to fix as much of that as I could to make Wiktionary look a bit more professional. Perhaps a poll should be created regarding about capitalizing/punctuating all English definitions, since we seem to be opposing this poll for perhaps opposite reasons. (Apologies if not just any editor is allowed to vote--a quick look at the help page didn't answer that question.) JodianWarrior (talk) 19:04, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose Dictionary definitions of words should never be in the form of sentences, except where the term being defined is a sentence. Ideally definition should be substitutable for the term being defined. Thus a verb's definition is normally a verb or verb phrase, a noun's is a noun or noun phrase, etc. Having a supplemental sentence is usually an indicator of an encyclopedic definition. Thus this proposal, IMO, is tantamount to no capitalization, with which I strongly disagree. DCDuringTALK20:17, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose I feel like the best solution is to have English entries be sentences, because it looks more professional to my eyes; whereas translations into English should be sentence fragments, because sentences look awkward there. That said, I'm sure that exceptions will arise in both cases, and I only work with translations. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 22:53, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
Abstain
Abstain I somewhat support the suggestion, but I don't like the inconsistent typography that this creates. At the same time, I don't really know a sensible way to make it look nice either. The problem is that it looks silly to turn a single word into a sentence, but we can't avoid that some definitions are sentences, and we also have some consisting of multiple sentences. If we are going to have multiple sentences, we must use a full stop out of necessity. —CodeCat20:44, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain Can someone point me to an example of a definition line that's a sentence? I don't think I've ever seen one. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:34, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Poll with no policy value.
Proposal: Not having any module invocations ({{#invoke:) in the mainspace.
Rationale: Modules would always be wrapped up in templates.
Frankly, the advantage of keeping #invoke out of the mainspace seems to me just to be that it makes template names shorter (probably)—whereas the disadvantage is this creates extra templates. I'm not sure which outweighs the other. —ObsequiousNewt (εἴρηκα|πεποίηκα) 22:53, 3 July 2015 (UTC)
Poll 4
Poll with no policy value.
Proposal: About whether these rules are mandatory or guidelines, proposed wording:
"These norms are mandatory for bots. When they do not make any difference to how a user sees the page, they can be treated as guidelines. When they do make a difference, such as the presence of ---- and non-linking of language names in translation sections, they are mandatory for everyone."
Support But we should treat it as a bad edit if someone turns good formatting in existing content into bad formatting. That is, you're allowed to correct the format, but not "un-correct" it. —CodeCat20:47, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Support the more rules we enforce, the easier will be the transition to a structured / semantic version of Wiktionary -- Jberkel (talk) 16:18, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose because, I think that the wording, "When they do not make any difference to how a user sees the page, they can be treated as guidelines", conflicts with mainspace module invocation wrap in Poll 3. I support the rest of proposal 4. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:44, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain
Abstain I would like to make them mandatory, but I know exceptional cases will show up and an annoying admin would try to enforce a rule that was broken for a legitimate reason. --WikiTiki8915:31, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Comments why not make it mandatory always? Also, what does 'mandatory' imply? Like, we can legitimately yell at the user if they add an unformatted content? Dixtosa (talk) 07:18, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Well, users are already blocked and their pages deleted if they add completely unformatted content, aren't they?
But for really minor things like most of what is being discussed here, like failing to put a space after # before definitions, I assume no one is going to yell at anybody. For this minor example, I suppose most of the time no one is going to notice even if someone makes an habit of creating many entries without the space. Yes, we could just make them mandatory always like you said. On a side note, I hope someone makes a bot for these things again eventually. --Daniel07:47, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Poll 5
Poll with no policy value. Option 1: Having these rules as a separate page. Possible name: Wiktionary:Normalization of entries. Shortcut: WT:NORM. Option 2: Ammending ELE with all the rules.
I'd argue these can be kept separate as they are mostly just a list of minor details. I'd argue that WT:ELE is for new users, it explain things like what is a context label and what is a headword line. These rules are worded in a way that assumes people already know what we are talking about. --Daniel16:00, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Support for things that affect the appearance of the page, such as the ---- between sections. These are part of entry layout as much as anything else on that page is. —CodeCat20:48, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Poll with no policy value. About right-aligned content. Option 1:
"One blank line before all headings, including between two headings, except for before the first language heading.
Right-aligned content such as {{wikipedia}} or images count as blank lines for this purpose."
Example:
Option 2:
"One blank line before all headings, including between two headings, except for before the first language heading.
Right-aligned content such as {{wikipedia}} or images can be placed below a heading; after that, one blank line."
Example:
The extra vertical space only appears if we use a broken template with extra newlines at the end of the code before <includeonly/>, I presume? five second rule has an image and feminism has an image+{{wikipedia}}, both of which using the option 2 rule, none of those has extra vertical spaces appearing on the page. --Daniel16:15, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain This depends on the outcome of Poll 4, since the presence or absence of a blank line after such templates does not affect display. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:36, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain I agree with Acronym in this case. {{wikipedia}} has always seemed kludgy to me.
Poll 7
Poll with no policy value. About this norm:
"For templates, newlines are allowed for clarity."
I don't remember any specific templates that would require using newlines in the mainspace, maybe some conjugation tables?--Daniel16:04, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain I don't know what this means. Is saying that, if adding a template into an entry, then a new line is the preferred location for that template? —BoBoMisiu (talk) 19:53, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Poll with no policy value. These are alternatives to what was proposed in poll 2, concerning English sections.
Option 1:
"In English sections, senses should not be capitalized (i.e., they should begin with a lowercase letter unless the definition starts with a proper noun, for example) and they should end without a period."
If there's a possibility of standardizing capitalization/periods for English definitions, this one looks simpler than the alternatives and also seem to match the FL sections which normally aren't capitalized or end with a period. --Daniel18:17, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Support I don't like the look of capitalization, which also requires cumbersome piped links (] ]. vs. ] ]) in many cases. I am also against the period at the end, because these are not "sentences". --WikiTiki8918:48, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Support I’ve been using option 2 in order to avoid controversy, but I prefer not using capitalisation for the reasons Wikitiki mentioned. — Ungoliant(falai)15:07, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Support option 2
Support This is, I think, how most definitions in English entries and in Translingual taxonomic entries are now. Proper use of articles and determiners eliminates most of the need for pipes. Pipes, capitalization and terminal periods could be inserted by a bot like Autoformat if we ever find someone able and willing to take responsibility for it. DCDuringTALK22:56, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Support It looks so much neater this way, particularly with longer definitions (and if longer definitions are like that, all definitions should be), not to mention that the vast majority of English definitions are already like this. In full agreement with DCDuring. JodianWarrior (talk) 19:57, 2 July 2015 (UTC)
Oppose The more I think about this, I wonder if its just another way to beat down new contributors or revert their contributions. But, I agree with DCDuring, in poll 8, option 2, about use of articles and determiners and bots. I disagree with Wikitiki89 about sentences, I think some definitions need to be detailed and granular in a way that is best understood as one or more sentences. I think poll 8, option 1, could unintentionally promote creation of dumbed down definitions. I think poll 8, option 3, is like poll 2 which I support. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 19:44, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
A sentence would be "This word means ..."; the "..." by itself is not a sentence no matter how much detail or granularity it contains. --WikiTiki8919:48, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain
Poll 9
Poll with no policy value. About this norm:
"POS sections may contain at most one headword line and one definition list. Thus, entries like this or this are not correct."
Oppose unless rewritten to allow multiple headword lines in sequence for Arabic. As written, doesn't work for Arabic, where there are examples like بريطاني or وحد where it's a lot more convenient to list two or more headword lines and one set of definitions. Benwing (talk) 06:30, 10 July 2015 (UTC)
Abstain
Abstain Inclined to vote support, is there any reason why we can't use {{context|plural x}} or additional POS sections in these two example entries? Pending convincing arguments. --Daniel17:23, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Using {{context|plural x}} creates too much clutter and makes it very difficult for languages that have lots of things in the headword line. Adding an addition POS header is the preferred solution. --WikiTiki8919:47, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Poll 10
Poll with no policy value. About this norm: Option 1:
"Floating boxes like {{wikipedia}} can appear on a line between POS header and headword line." Example:
Option 2:
"Floating boxes like {{wikipedia}} should not appear on a line between POS header and headword line, they could be somewhere else where applicable." Examples:
I have demonstrated in WT:SANDBOX (permanent link]) why this physically won't work. If you put {{wikipedia}} on the same line, it breaks the formatting. If you put it on an otherwise blank line between definitions, it breaks the numbers and resets it back to 1. However you can still link to Wikipedia using {{w}}, you just can't use {{wikipedia}}. Renard Migrant (talk) 15:25, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
@Renard Migrant: But it does work for {{pedia}} on that page. Probably we would want it to appear of the right hand side rather than immediately to the right of the definition, but someone with good CSS skills could probably make that happen optionally. DCDuringTALK17:15, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Support I tend to put {{wikipedia}} below the language header as in the example, otherwise we have vertical blank space between the language section and the Wikipedia box. Granted, probably terms with multiple POS sections with separate Wikipedia articles could benefit with the alternate proposal, as long as there are not already separate Etymology sections to put the Wikipedia boxes in. --Daniel17:23, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Support I favor putting {{wikipedia}} as high up as possible as long as it is clear which meaning it is for. Usually this means under the language header, rarely under an Etymology header, but sometimes under a POS header. Thus, there should not be restrictions. --WikiTiki8919:51, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain I think that best practices we actually follow are more complicated than any of those expressed. The scope of the Wikipedia article linked could be at any of several levels, including even above any L2 header, as when the WP article is a disambiguation page referring to meanings for which we do not have any definition in English, but may have one in another language. At the other extreme the scope could be at the level of a noun (usually a particular definition of a noun) for which there may be no superior Etymology header, in which case option 1 may not give a satisfactory result. IOW, the ideal placement could be:
above the first L2;
immediately below the first L2;
below an Etymology header (where there are multiple etymologies and no PoS is excluded from the WP article's coverage;
immediately below a PoS header; or
adjoining a specific definition in a longer series of definitions.
If we forego right-hand side placement in any but the simplest of cases (which are also the most numerous), some of the above can be handled by the use of External links, supplemented by bold explanatory headings begun with a semicolon. But I still doubt that there will not be exceptions which should not be overridden by bots. DCDuringTALK16:11, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Poll with no policy value. About tables. Option 1
"All tables in the mainspace should be templatized. There should be no wikitables or HTML tables." Option 2
"All tables in the mainspace should be either templates or wikitables. There should be no HTML tables." Option 3
"Tables in the mainspace can freely be templates, wikitables or HTML tables."
Support option 1
Support Seems to be the status quo, all inflection/conjugation/declension/pronouns/etc tables that I remember are wrappep up in templates. Correct me if I'm wrong. --Daniel17:23, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Occasionally you'll encounter tables in the entries themselves, especially for one-off inflection patterns. --WikiTiki8919:53, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Then I suggest we modify this poll to cover only ad hoc tables like the one at depth (so, excluding inflection tables and the like).
Also, if the ugliness of entries is a concern and the inspiration of this poll, then we first should find a new place for quotations and then we can discuss ad hoc tables, which I think are much more rare and less ugly.
BTW, why does this poll implicitly prefer wikitables over HTML? Does anyone really think wikitables are nicer than html? --Dixtosa (talk) 16:33, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Support I would like to see a policy that states that wikitables are allowed but templates are preferred and encouraged. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 02:22, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Support option 3
Support for now, in the absence of any discussion. — This unsigned comment was added by DCDuring (talk • contribs).
Support, although templates are to be preferred to wikitables, and wikitables are to be preferred to HTML tables; none of them should be banned, however. — I.S.M.E.T.A.00:42, 13 June 2015 (UTC)
Oppose
Abstain
Abstain I feel like we shoulda talked this out a little more before creating eleven polls. One or two, sure. Eleven? Nah! Purplebackpack8920:24, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
I see no harm in having this number of polls because there were multiple topics to be discussed. I even left some of those out of the vote for being controversial. --Daniel07:52, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Poll 12
Poll with no policy value.
Proposal: Not having any template invocations in the mainspace that:
either are hosted in the user namespace directly
or depend on the templates that are hosted in the user namespace.
Support, except that it should be acceptable in short-term situations such as debugging, testing new functionality or when the template is still a prototype. — Ungoliant(falai)15:18, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Should we restrict invocations in the Appendix entries too that host reconstructed terms?
I think this poll should also include module invocations, which makes this and #Poll 3 almost identical. I am down with merging these two. --Dixtosa (talk) 12:19, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
Poll with no policy value.
This is an alternative to poll 4, which proposed making all the norms discussed here mandatory for bots but a guideline for humans except when it does make a difference to how the page is displayed to users.
Proposal:
It's not necessary to mention at the policy any distinction between bots and humans.
Rationale:
Assuming these norms pass a vote and become policy, then they would be mandatory like any rule we find on WT:CFI and WT:ELE. It's just that some norms make a difference like the non-linking of language names (which is already mentioned at ELE) and the ---- between language sections, so they are probably going to be reverted/fixed more readily if/when someone fails to follow these rules. On the other hand, minor things like forgetting the space after # perhaps would go unnoticed or people won't bother fixing them most of the time (or better yet, they would be automatically fixed by a bot when one comes up), but presumably having the space is still what we think as best for our entries.
Support It is already part of our bot policy that bots can only make uncontroversial edits, which essentially makes guidelines like this a hard requirement for them. There is no need to repeat our bot policy on page unrelated to bots. --WikiTiki8918:04, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose Compelling bots to apply the rules will get us toward implementation quickly without getting in the way of human contributions to entries. To put our hopes in the reincarnation of Autoformat seems foolish. DCDuringTALK18:00, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Following continued abuse of the administrator privileges by this user, I have requested that he be de-sysopped. As with other de-sysop votes, the vote begins immediately and extends for two weeks. Purplebackpack8914:11, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I have removed an image from penis twice but @Prosfilaes was quick to revert me, asserting that looking up penis is the same as looking at a real image of penis, which is false obviously.
The link to wiki is enough. Generally, if someone ended up here rather than wiki it means they seek definitions not images.
We have discussed this before. I am in favor of limiting explicit images to where they are necessary. I am even favor of collapsing them with a NSFW warning. Other editors seem to feel that this is censorship and that penises should be displayed on every entry. I think that that is an immature opinion. --WikiTiki8917:34, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Support collapsing them with a NSFW warning or something, I think it's better to remove the picture. In any event, I added a {{commons}} box to the entry. --Daniel17:41, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
One of the legitimate issues that was brought up before was how we can decide what needs to be collapsed and what does not need to be. --WikiTiki8917:49, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
That could be emergent rather than explicit, if contributors collapsed whatever they felt needed collapsing. That will lead to disagreement, which will lead to discussion, which will lead to best practices. Trying to define it from the outset would be nigh impossible, but finding out what the community does would be easy. - TheDaveRoss17:53, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm of the faction that doesn't see a difference between a penis and a house. Both images are equally useful or useless to their entries. Just collapse all images. That way nothing gets lost and maybe it even saves people with a slow connection some bandwidth usage. _Korn (talk) 17:55, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Enforcing wrapping explicit images within a template is a must-do. No need to discuss that. (if I remember correctly English Wikipedia already does this so we can learn from them).
As for removing them, censorship argument is just throwing the buzzword in hope to be plausible, which seems to have been effective :/. Oh those pity images of penises, how dare we censor them? No, seriously, censorship is about someone's rights being violated.
Also, if censorship is bad, then niggerfaggot is racist both of them are bad. No?--Dixtosa (talk) 18:03, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't see Wikipedia collapsing any explicit images at w:human penis, they show up just fine to me. About deciding what needs to be collapsed and what does not need to be: If anything needs to be collapsed, probably penis does. In the past I've added non-explicit images to foreplay, sexual intercourse, handbra and pornography, which I think look good and are informative enough. I don't know exactly if other people would want the same for penis, or that it can even be done in the first place, i.e. leaving only a non-explicit image if there is any, just for educative purposes. Educative purposes meaning, I don't know if this can be taken seriously or not: <sarcasm>We'd need in case a reader is not exactly aware of what a penis is or where it is located, which I'd argue a dictionary would help by defining it and an image (a drawing or something) could help to illustrate.</sarcasm> Also, I fear that Wiktionary might get blocked in schools or something. But so would be Wikipedia? I didn't seek any information about school-blocking so it could just as easily be a moot point. --Daniel18:09, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
The image currently at penis is relevant and nonprurient. I see no reason to remove it or hide it, though if a drawing instead of a photograph would be acceptable (vulva has a drawing), I wouldn't object to that either. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:05, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
People coming to an entry on penis should not be surprised to see a photograph of a penis. If the same picture were at kitten (or even at cock, Johnson, schlong, pecker, or dick) it would be more of a problem. That said, I have no strong objection to collapsing the image. bd2412T19:33, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Because they are looking up "penis" on a platform amenable to hosting images. We have many entries with images, and hopefully in time will have many more. bd2412T19:57, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
That makes me wonder about a dogmatic question: What's our target audience? We always assume to write for fluent speakers of English, right? _Korn (talk) 09:42, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
We assume that we are writing for people who speak English well enough to search for and find dictionary entries written in English. This may be a rudimentary level, but it's hard to imagine a person searching for penis who doesn't have the foggiest idea what it means. bd2412T15:49, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
And yet, we have a definition for it. We also have definitions for far more basic terms like the and sun. If we're going to assume that users know these words, why have definitions? —CodeCat15:58, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
@BD2412 If I came across a term which is perhaps more obviously lewd (assuming that it was at least vaguely understood before search) such as Cleveland steamer should I expect there to be a picture or video on that page as well? I would very quickly stop using a dictionary which required me to view content which is generally considered to be graphic whether I wished to or not. I think that penis is too close to the bubble to be the primary example. - TheDaveRoss19:25, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
I think there's a very different issue with phrases like that because even a typically literate English speaker is not likely to know the meaning of a phrase that sounds innocuous by its components (there being nothing particularly lewd about Cleveland or steamer individually, nor for the sake of argument about donkey or punch, or hot or carl). We are perfectly capable of discerning what definitions should reasonably be expected to contain sexual content by the reader who speaks English well enough to use an English dictionary, and what words (or phrases) are likely to surprise readers who would not inherently expect them to contain sexual content. Compare, for example, our entry on anal sex. The reasonably literate reader will know that this is a sexual term, and should not be surprised to find images along the lines of those already contained at w:Anal sex. bd2412T19:39, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
@BD2412 I think that is the crux of the matter, we are already making subjective decisions about such things. We don't need to make assumptions about what any particular user might or might not understand, we don't need to make assumptions about which terms they may or may not want to see an image for. Instead we can include the images and allow the user to make the decision for themselves as to whether they wish to view them. An added benefit here is they get to make the decision after they have had a chance to read the definition. This solution would also be likely to expand the range of "tolerable" images for many editors. - TheDaveRoss18:16, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
That's the problem. It is relevant and useful, but is also "not safe for work" and many other places where we don't want to discourage Wiktionary from being used. --WikiTiki8921:13, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
Is there any evidence that the present image makes the page "not safe for work", whatever that means? Does it apply only to some countries? --Dan Polansky (talk) 21:29, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm not sure what kind of jobs you work, but the Czech Republic is not that much of an outlier here that you can believably pretend not to know what we're talking about. --WikiTiki8915:11, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
I am reasonably certain that my boss would be quite displeased if he were to look over my shoulder and see an image of genitalia, prurient or otherwise. I might also incur the displeasure of my coworkers, who might have reason to notify my boss.
I am certain enough of this that I do not wish to experimentally confirm the follow-on effects of viewing such images on my work computer.
By way of context, I work in a company in the electronics and entertainment industry, in a capacity for which pictures of genitalia are clearly not relevant to my work duties. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig22:59, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
No, but as someone commonly handling Japanese, I or one of my colleagues might have occasion to look up ちんこ(chinko). (I happen to know this word and wouldn't look it up, in part to avoid any possible images.) In addition, there is the Special:Random link on the left-side toolbar, which could conceivably land someone on an entry with a problematic image. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig23:53, 20 May 2015 (UTC)
I am struggling to come up with a scenario where someone is at work, and is legitimately sitting there clicking the "Random entry" button on Wiktionary. bd2412T15:47, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
We should definitely have more explicit (specific, clear, or detailed) images on Wiktionary. Could we perhaps have a video of kittens - there must be some somewhere on the Internet. SemperBlotto (talk) 06:36, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
I was all for giving end users control over image display Wikimedia-wide, but that proposal generated a lot of heat and failed. As was pointed out, the Wikipedia article does have images that appear promptly on loading.
If your work is going to blow up over the appearance of a penis on a Wiktionary page about penises, then you might want to consider turning off images on Wikis altogether, given that there is no editorial control over where images of penises will show up.
What's explicit? I believe that Germans would find that picture on penis a lot more acceptable then the picture on swastika.
There are a number of dictionaries that use images to define words instead of more words, and few dictionaries that don't use images at all. (I don't honestly think there are many people who could need to look up penis who would find a definition in formal English useful in the least.) One of Wiktionary's advantages is that we aren't space-limited to what's absolutely necessary, that we can afford to illustrate every single article if we choose. So yes, I do think illustrating penis is absolutely dictionary-like, and in fact more useful as a definition then the definition itself.--Prosfilaes (talk) 16:08, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Remember, this isn’t just about the entry for penis. It’s about general policy. Recently somebody thought that the entry ejaculation needed an illustration File:Ejaculation educational ani short reboot.webm. I removed it because of several reasons. First, I think the written definition is clear and that the graphic image added nothing of value. Second, a lot of people (especially older Americans) would find such an illustration extremely offensive. Third, for anyone who needs more information and content than we as a dictionary would naturally offer, Wikipedia is only a click away. Fourth, while there are some picture dictionaries around, such dictionaries usually confine themselves to more mundane and uncontroversial terms, and I would never expect a picture dictionary to have a photo image of a penis or ejaculation. If a picture dictionary were found to offer the word penis, I’m certain that the picture would only be a rough drawing, a sketch (but I would be very surprised if any picture dictionary had the word penis or ejaculation in it at all). And fifth, in my long experienced with dead tree American dictionaries and encyclopedias, it’s only the encyclopedias that have pictures of penises.
I think that if a definition is not sufficiently clear (as in the case of articles of clothing worn by other cultures: burqa, hijab, dashiki, sarong, sari), then illustrations are important. Many words simply are not very compatible with illustration (e.g., verbs such as go or consider). Most words are easily defined with words alone, and images are really not needed. And a lot of people feel that some words (such as many of those involved in sex acts or bodily functions) are offensive enough to see in print, and would be horrified to see photos or videos of them.
As I said, this isn’t just about the word penis. Opening this up to all sorts of images for any entry could turn some of the words we define into pornography. I don’t think we need these kinds of images, and a link to Wikipedia should be more than sufficient. —Stephen(Talk)17:18, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
I think that we can take into account the propensity for words to have more than one meaning, and to have most common meanings. I would agree that the illustration in question is a bit much for ejaculation, in no small part because the word has a long history as having a non-sexual meaning equivalent to exclamation. Penis, on the other hand, overwhelmingly primarily means the sex organ. Words like penis, vagina, testicle, vulva, vas deferens, foreskin, clitoris, and so on, should not reasonably be expected to have any primary connotation other than the sex organ, and should be every bit as well illustrated as elbow, orangutan, or piano. bd2412T18:22, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Points to note:
There are multiple ways to land on any given entry page.
Non-English entries may also have images.
Ergo, we cannot assume that the user landing on any given page knew what they were about to see when they clicked the link.
I am unsure why there seems to be such resistance to the idea of having collapsible divs for images. bd2412, in your replies to me, you appear to be voicing opposition. Can you (or anyone else) articulate why? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig20:45, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
I believe that we should strive to provide illustrations for things to the greatest degree reasonably possible, since illustrations can be highly informative, and our having them is a quality that sets us apart from both paper dictionaries (which tend to be sparsely illustrated, if at all) and from other online dictionaries. Even mirrors that scrape Wiktionary tend not to copy our images. I respect that we should not shock readers by, for example, including a picture of a penis at rod or cock or a picture of buttocks at bum. However, for terms for which the clear and overwhelmingly primary meaning is a part of the human anatomy, we should illustrate them accordingly, and should not place barriers of censorship to readers looking up these entries. bd2412T21:01, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
I agree with your sentiment that we should avoid censoring.
That said, I don't think that collapsible divs equate to censorship. The image is still there on the page, just not displayed until the user opts to display it.
I'm also concerned about the apparent assumption that a user already knows the meaning of a term before clicking through to the entry, and that the user should therefore not be surprised by any images in that entry. I don't think these are safe assumptions. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig21:35, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Someone could encounter a word spelled penis in a foreign language text and want to look it up to see what it means. This person might be a native English speaker and thus familiar with the word's meaning in English. Furthermore, this person might even suspect that this foreign word has the same meaning. But this person still might not want to see an image of a penis. I don't buy any argument that says that just because you know what a word means that you would be expecting to see an image of it. Can someone explain to me how collapsing the image of a penis would be detrimental to Wiktionary? --WikiTiki8921:41, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Why stop at penises, then? There are some cultures where other body parts are taboo, like the elbows, the feet, the top of the head. In some cultures the picture I just added to forehead would be bound to offend someone. Some people are bound to be offended by the picture at bikini. The pictures at steak and hot dog, or even at cocaine, may be more offensive or upsetting to some people than a picture of a penis. When we collapse an image we put ourselves in the business of deciding whether there is something broadly and inherently offensive about the image. I don't think we want to get into that business. bd2412T22:22, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
“Why stop at penises, then?” I'm not sure why this is a problem. If someone finds an image objectionable, they can add a collapsible div around it. That also answers your concern in saying “I don't think we want to get into that business” -- this is an open wiki, so anyone can edit, so the "we" here is anybody: there is no onus on you or me to decide by fiat what is "acceptable". That can be an emergent and evolving judgment call that is left to the user / editor community. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig01:11, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
1) This is about images, not words, so how we handle objectionable words isn't entirely relevant. 2) In this collapsible div proposal, nothing is removed. This is about on-page layout. I'm not sure how that's POV any more than providing different CSS for high contrast or larger font sizes. 3) We already make culture-based judgments in defining terms (proscribed, profane, derogatory, etc.). 4) Would you object to instead offering a user-configurable way for *all* images to be collapsed until the user clicks on them? This would moot any possibility of subjectivity regarding which images are affected. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig01:23, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
“There are some cultures where other body parts are taboo...” BD2412, this is the ENGLISH Wiktionary. The Chinese, Russians, and the rest can manage their linguistic taboos however they like on their own wiktionaries. In fact, the Russian Wiktionary puts a warning banner at the top of pages that might be offensive to Russian readers. Here we only have to consider the cultural taboos of the English-speaking nations. —Stephen(Talk)01:41, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
The "cultural taboos of the English-speaking nations" covers a lot of ground, and at least some members of most of the cultures of the world. How, exactly, are we supposed to decide what cultural taboos are widespread enough to require special treatment? bd2412T01:46, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
I disagree. What countries are you counting? I think we’re only talking about the U.S., Great Britain, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa, and Australia. As far as I know, we share the same linguistic taboos, with very few exceptions. The main difference is in degree. Countries such as India have their own wiktionaries and wikipedias for the various languages spoken there...we do not have to be concerned about their elbows. —Stephen(Talk)01:57, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
Firstly, I would say that virtually every culture in the world is represented by communities living in the United States. Secondly, the fact that countries like India have various languages does not remove English from being among the languages spoken there. bd2412T02:47, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
First, our definition of pornography is amazingly broad; Wikipedia starts with "Pornography ... is the portrayal of sexual subject matter for the purpose of sexual arousal" and that last clause seems crucial to the meaning. Illustrating every page in the dictionary could not turn it into pornography. Nor, frankly, is anything we're likely to put up likely to be pornographic in practice.
I see that for all the concern about offensiveness, nobody has responded to the depiction of the swastika, despite that possibly being so offensive to be illegal in some countries. Nor did you respond to my point that a definition in formal English of penis is basically useless for any English speaker; either you know the word already, or you need it defined in other terms (wee-wee, ding-dong, cock) or you need an illustration.
I am retreating to complete removal of them in favor of collapsible divs. These div's can be made hidden by css or a gadget. It seems this is how far we can get...--Dixtosa (talk) 22:13, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Support selective collapsing with NSFW warning. I could imagine that we might want other warnings for some images. DCDuringTALK23:37, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm really late to this party but I oppose censorship. This does not mean that explicit images should always be used. They should just go by the same rules as non-explicit images. The one at penis first of all isn't explicit, it's just a picture of a human penis, and it doesn't interfere with any text or templates, so keep it. I say remove images when they add no value or interfere with text and/or templates. Definitions have to come before images. Renard Migrant (talk) 21:20, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
Within this thread, there appear to be two main ideas under discussion: removing possibly explicit images, and keeping the images but adding collapsible divs. Renard, would the addition of collapsible divs constitute “censorship” by your definition? (Honest question in search of clear understanding.) ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig22:15, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
Are we going to collapse the image at pencil because some people might be taken aback to see a picture of a penis at penis? How are we going to inform the reader of the presence of the collapsed image on the page, without making it intrusive? Create new section header for ====Images====? bd2412T04:03, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Why not? We're collapsing the image at penis because someone might be taken aback by a picture of a penis. (Yes, yes, I'm well aware that for many users a penis isn't a pencil. I pointed out above that I'm in the camp which sees no difference.) I think it's the best course for everybody's blood pressure, to treat all images equally to prevent discussions and animosity over the different levels of offendedness. _Korn (talk) 09:42, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘I think a collapsed image is also a safety feature. An image of a penis that is just a depiction of nudity is not obscene in my opinion; other images of a penis that depict more than nudity could be obscene in my opinion. So what do you do when someone edits the image source into an image hotlinking from a porn site. Can that happen? While the voting in both the open RFD and open RFV about pedophilia seem to think otherwise, various acts and depictions of pedophilia are criminal in the Western world. Even if the criminal sense of pedophilia is excluded by the wiktionary community from the entry, any depiction of pedophilia would still be criminal. I hope these penis discussions are not a slippery slope to one day promoting images of different kinds of pedophilia on wiktionary as depicting feelings of pedophilia. Some depictions even without nudity should categorically be excluded. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 15:44, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
According to Wikipedia, "n logic and critical thinking, a slippery slope is a logical device, but it is usually known under its fallacious form, in which a person asserts that some event must inevitably follow from another without any rational argument or demonstrable mechanism for the inevitability of the event in question". This is an example of such a logical fallacy. bd2412T19:47, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
@BD2412: do you think my first premise is false? This is a discussion about all explicit images and not just a particular depiction of a penis. Yes/no? —BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:09, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
We are not going to include images that are broadly illegal, and we are not going to include images that are not germane to the term being defined. bd2412T20:49, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
I am not writing clearly again, sorry. I think the particular depiction found in the penis entry is not obscene but should be collapsed. Some depictions of penis are obscene and criminal, for example, depictions of penis which are pedophilia. In my opinion, any pedophilia depiction, in any entry, is unacceptable even if it is germane to term being defined and legal. Separately, some depictions (of an allegorical feeling of pedophilia for example) even without nudity should categorically be excluded because they are obscene regardless of open RFDs and open RFVs about the the criminal sense of pedophilia. In other words, I am saying any depictions (explicit and not explicit) of pedophilia are unconscionable for me – even if the criminal sense of pedophilia is excluded by the wiktionary community, even if the depiction is germane, even if the depiction is legal. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 22:28, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
With respect to pedophilia, then, it would not matter whether an image was collapsed or not, would it? You would agree, I think, that we should not have an image illustrating pedophilia even if all the images in the dictionary are collapsed, from pencil to penis? bd2412T00:01, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
As I said, any depictions (explicit and not explicit) of pedophilia are unconscionable for me even if the depictions are germane and legal, and I think the particular depiction found in the penis entry is not obscene but should be collapsed. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 00:48, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Having an image of an actual human genitalia could affect rating of the entire wiktionary.org domain by parental control/web protection/government filter software. Just the other day Internet pornography was banned in Egypt by a court. Billions of people and potential ESL learners live in countries where Web is a carefully monitored platform. This can easily be solved by replacing the disputed image with the one of a drawn penis. Wikimedia projects are not a political platform for advocating free speech (which doesn't exist in most countries anyway). The priority must be given to spreading information. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 23:50, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
By that token it seems we ought to remove mentions of Taiwan and Tibet, to stop us getting banned in China. Equinox◑23:59, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Mentions of Taiwan and Tibet are not banned in China. For disputed regions/countries both viewpoints can easily be balanced in definitions. For images the issue *is* black and white (it's a classification problem), so the lowest common denominator must be followed. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 00:33, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
But nobody cares about swastika and South Korea (half of a nation that covers all of the Korean Peninsula; on this, North and South Korea agree). The lowest common denominator is not acceptable in any way; we are not blocking out all pictures of women on Wiktionary.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:39, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
By "lowest common denominator" I meant this: a single page with an explicit image can ruin the rating of the entire website. The question is simply: is the website safe or not. That's how filters work. Not sure what you meant by "blocking out all picture of women", this only pertains to explicit images. The technology to filter individual images by their detected content is only available to Google and similar who have powerful datacenters that can analyze them on the fly. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 22:08, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
We are not the Chinese Wiktionary, we are the English Wiktionary. We are not here for China. If China wishes to ban us, it’s their loss, it does not affect us. We should not be concerned about how governments of countries whose main language is not English think of us. —Stephen(Talk)15:08, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
We are here for anyone wanting to use us; right now, that's restricted to the people of Earth, but there's no need to restrict it further. If China bans us, it does affect our users and editors. And as a response to me, ban or no ban, illustrations can be clearer then photos, especially when there's a bunch of labels.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:33, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
I have no strong objection to using an illustration rather than a photograph at penis; that said, however, the photo currently there is labelled, and there's no technical reason why we could not have both (see flower for example). bd2412T02:49, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
I completely agree with Ivan on this. We are here to provide definitions of words to as many people as we can, not to spread free speech propaganda (even if we all support free speech). --WikiTiki8915:44, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
I too agree with Ivan. We are not losing only ESL learners (every language can have images, right?)
Hitting a user with an explicit image unexpectedly is so unthinkable. When I read the discussion I kinda get a feeling that general opinion about explicit images is actually not that they are gross to many. I personally use Wiktionary as a primary dictionary and if I were not a contributor and got welcomed with this kind of image even only once, I would switch to any other online dictionary.
The very similar problem was put in front of Google. Polluting the very first page of Google has been thought to be risky I guess. See for yourself: finger, hand, head and elbow all have images, while neither penis nor vagina have any.
The Taiwan and Swastika examples are poor parallels, because they do not depict anything gross.
This is a Wikimedia project, not a Google project; Google has no mission to educate readers; it is merely a for-profit service that provides search results as a way to get consumer eyes on the advertisements of its paying customers. Compare your Google results for "penis" with the Wikipedia pages for w:Penis and w:Human penis in particular. Also, feeling that a penis is "gross" is a subjective value judgment. There are plenty of people who would find the swastika to be more "gross" than the penis. I personally find the eggplant to be more "gross". bd2412T17:23, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Heh, I feel like I've travelled back in time to the Victorian era, when body parts were disgusting. Equinox◑17:24, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@BD2412, This is a Wiktionary project, not a Wikipedia project. BTW, you missed the point. The point was that only conscious clicks should lead to gross stuff. For example, going to Google images is a conscious click.
What's your stance on the entry of ejaculation? I'll add the aforementioned video on both ejaculation and cum. Is that OK? --Dixtosa (talk) 18:01, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
I've read that. I am asking you again because your arguments are outdated - you talked expectations, which I think we have already been through: we can't assume anything about the user. --Dixtosa (talk) 18:16, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Nonsense, we know a lot about the user. We know that the user has a computer and knows how to get on the Internet, and speaks English well enough to either search English Wiktionary for something, or to search Google (or a comparable search engine) and click on a result that takes them to an English Wiktionary page. We also know that our user has enough interest in the word they are looking up to bother looking it up (unless they are clicking for random pages, in which case I have little sympathy for their hitting the one-in-four-million chance of landing on a page that offends them). Based on this analysis, my response with respect to ejaculation still stands. bd2412T18:57, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
No. We know that the user owns a device, speaks any language as native, understands English (but not necessarily), seeks definitions (but not necessarily), looks up any term in any language. --Dixtosa (talk) 19:21, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
If they don't speak English well enough to have both the ability and the motivation to look up terms in an English dictionary, then they are outside our scope. bd2412T19:31, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Someone might want to see synonyms only. This does not need English. But I understand that this is rare and this is why I put it in that way.
So, excluding the part where English is not assumed, you agree with me? Then which part of it makes you think the user knows the major context where it is used? --Dixtosa (talk) 19:56, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
For terms of sexual anatomy (penis, vagina, testicle, clitoris), there tends to only be one context. In fact, if you look down the page at penis, you will see that in virtually every language out of the 21 languages on the page, penis only means the male sex organ (the only exceptions that I can see are an Esperanto conjugation, and Latin, which has the sex organ among a few other meanings). bd2412T20:18, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ You have lost me somewhere. What is the major context of ჩუკენო(čuḳeno)? You don't know, just like I do not know the context of cum. --Dixtosa (talk) 21:32, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
If I have lost you somewhere, then there is no point in continuing this line of discussion. I will say, however, that cum is Latin for "with", and has many other meanings in many other languages, so it is far easier to conceive of arriving at that page with no context for any one specific meaning. bd2412T22:12, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
I am so glad that a piece of anatomy shared by half of humanity is upsetting to you and the symbol of an organization that murdered 10 million people just because is not. Some people disagree. An American newspaper removed Hillary Clinton from a photo because it's not appropriate to print photos of women. Your standards of "gross" and "explicit" are not universal.
Taiwan was used as an example of something that could get us blocked. If we're not concerned about that, that changes a lot of the justification for doing this.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:01, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Another thing to keep in mind is that scientific terms for genitalia and parts thereof are also used as defining terms for a countless number of their vulgar and polite counterparts, most of which in every language have at least half a dozen figurative meanings and rank very high in frequency of usage. You could easily land on the page for penis if you're translating texts ranging from a poem, newspaper article or a youtube comment. Displaying an embedded Wiktionary definition for some of the upstream projects merely requires hovering a mouse over a word. Some (like GoldenDict) even auto-expand collapsible boxes. --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 22:25, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
As an advocate in general of free-speech and of ostensive definition, which usually means images, I am loath to prohibit any class of images. In this case, however, I agree with Ivan. Providing the opponents of free speech a pretext for blocking Wiktionary that many parents and others would agree with seems counter to the free-speech cause as well as the purpose of Wiktionary. I had thought that hiding images by default would be sufficient, but I doubt that is true. I'd agree with limiting some pages to drawings or even just to links to WikiCommons. That even these could be used as a pretext to block Wiktionary is true, but I think fewer would agree that the pretext was legitimate for, say, labelled drawings and links. I could imagine some photos with labeled components being acceptable. I think there will have to be judgment applied, despite the laborious procedure for reaching a decision on this kind of thing. DCDuringTALK22:48, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
If you're translating texts from a YouTube comment, you're exposing yourself to material that's much worse then any picture we could possibly use. Gross, offensive, and sometimes even more explicit. I don't think we can worry about some program that auto-expands collapsible boxes; if someone wants to shoot themselves in the foot, we can't stop them.--Prosfilaes (talk) 23:01, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
For the sake of opinion gathering, here's mine: I agree with the shooting in the foot thing. Also, there are 7 billion in 200 countries. If we try to please everyone, we'll end up cutting our own flesh sooner or later. While the topic of nudy pics might not be a slippery slope, the path of 'we must do everything in our might to prevent losing readers' certainly is one. Where would you draw the line for our appeasement of the men at the red buttons? Korn (talk) 23:30, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
I'd be interested in which clothing-wearing cultures have mainstreams that favor pedophilia (pre-pubescent children) and sex education for pre-pubescent children. Parents that are liberal enough to normally permit children to have access to WP and Wiktionary are not necessarily supportive of having the children get their sex education from Mediawiki projects. (I wonder what they would say if they know about Wikicommons.) DCDuringTALK23:41, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Paidaeia is most important function of most mammalian societies, so I think we could stand to give it some consideration.
I think the judgment we make is how legitimate-looking a pretext do we provide to authorities willing and able to block access to Wiktionary relative to the utility of the image. I'm sorry that the judgment I propose cannot be made on logical deduction from first principles, but few important judgments can be so made. DCDuringTALK00:11, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
I think that any authority willing to block us for having an image of a penis on penis should block us for potentially having an image of a penis on dog. We're a wiki that lets anonymous users insert images from Wikimedia Commons, and has a bunch of links to Wikimedia Commons for users to find any number of offensive images.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:29, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Quite honestly, who sends their pre-pubescent children to Wiktionary? Besides BD2412's concerns, look at dog--"See also: DOG and dög", a lengthy table of contents,
Alternative forms darg, dawg (dialectal); doggie, doggy (childish)
Etymology From Middle English dogge, from Old English docga (“hound, powerful breed of dog”), a pet-form diminutive of Old English *docce (“muscle”) (found in compound fingerdocce (“finger-muscle”) with suffix -ga (compare frocga (“frog”), picga (“pig”)). Cognate with Scots dug (“dog”). The true origin is unknown, but one possibility is from Proto-Germanic *dukkǭ (“power, strength, muscle”), though this may just be confusion with dock. In the 16th century, it superseded Old English hund and was adopted by several continental European languages.
and finally a definition
A mammal, Canis lupus familiaris, that has been domesticated for thousands of years, of highly variable appearance due to human breeding.
which is stunningly helpful for any young child looking things up. I'm not sure we're not driving away adults; I certainly wouldn't send my second-grader here.--Prosfilaes (talk) 00:23, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Paedophilia and sex education for the prepubescent have exactly one thing in common: prepubescent children, perceived threats to whom engender most ferocious responses from outraged parent-citizens and some authorities.
IMO, it's not a question of sending a child here, or even of the effect of a child seeing the images; it's a question of providing a pretext for blocking access to Wiktionary from a public library or a school, say a middle or high school (grades 5-12 in US), or at a place of work. DCDuringTALK01:14, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
In my opinion, if you're going to object to penis having a picture of a penis, then us being a wiki editable by anonymous individuals who can add pictures of penis to any random page should be enough of a pretext. Maybe it would be different if we installed accepted revisions like de.WP and others do, but we haven't.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:37, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
FWIW, on de.Wikt de:Hakenkreuz does not contain an image of a Nazi swastika, but de:Eichel does contain illustrations of all of its senses, namely "acorn" (the primary sense), "glans penis", and "clitoris". de:Taiwan ad de:Südkorea contain flags and maps. de:Mann and de:Frau contain a drawing of a naked man and woman, respectively. de:Anus contains a picture of an anus, but the picture is too zoomed in to be useful IMO (it doesn't help to clarify where the anus is). - -sche(discuss)00:14, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
@BD2412 you are conflating this discussion. It is about images and not about potentially offensive words. Most people expect words in dictionaries and, in my opinion, most people do not expect explicit images in dictionaries. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 03:26, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
@DCDuring, Prosfilaes allowing a child to use wiktionary would be a poor choice for any parent – I will never recommend it because contributors impose their values through removal of senses with well attested usage (e.g. pedophilia) that they disagree with. A parent shouldn't trust it for that single example of intolerant censorship alone, in my opinion. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 03:26, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
@Dixtosa, BD2412 people learn by clicking links to terms they want to understand especially if they have no idea what that term means until they land on the page. Those people are interested in the text – to learn from the text. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 03:26, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
@BoBoMisiu We can't entirely assume that any supervisor of children (a parent, teacher, librarian, or governmental authority) has perfect control of them. The use case that concerns me is not the case where a child is successfully prevented by some supervisor from using Wiktionary, but rather the one where they are not prevented until the supervisor gets wind of gratuitously inappropriate content and eliminates access to Wiktionary entirely for the supervised group.
We can make sure that the most likely entries for placing inappropriate content are patrolled and even put limits on editing them. We can use filters to draw attention to commons or external links and included image files. DCDuringTALK04:47, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
As long as a totally natural, biological, evolved thing that I was born with, and had no choice over, is "gratuitously inappropriate content", I will support it until my dying breath. Seeing a picture of a dick won't kill a child. Equinox◑01:16, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I understand your position is staunchly held, albeit unreasoned. It also failed to note that my concern is not for the welfare of children of any age exposed to the images, but for the reaction of those who have or claim to have responsibility for them to any images that they deem inappropriate and which may cause them to place limits on access to Wiktionary. My concern is for the welfare of Wiktionary. DCDuringTALK03:06, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
What about the people who will deem the image at bikini inappropriate, or the images at areola, gluteal cleft, lingerie, bra, and navel? Why would we give any more consideration to people objecting to images than to definitions? I would also note that I paged through my print copy of Webster's dictionary, and found that there was an image or two every few pages throughout the book. Images are useful in defining terms, and other dictionaries lack them precisely because they are on paper, or have inherited the traditions of paper dictionaries. I also have a "visual dictionary", which, in the anatomy section, provides illustrations of the penis and vagina. We are not breaking new ground here, we are just covering it more thoroughly. bd2412T03:45, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
People who want to censor things can use censorware. People who want to learn, understand, read, and study things can use this wiki. DCDuring, who obviously has some terror of the penis, is welcome to put it in a fucking collapsible box. Human beings will continue to be born with penes long after he has died. Hopefully, the shit we have spent years writing on Wiktionary will also continue to be used long after we have all died. Sorry. I wasn't consulted. Sorry about having a penis. Equinox◑04:21, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Again, we're a wiki with no protection against the edits of anonymous editors. Should someone feel that a photo on penis page is worth blocking us over, they should block us, because we can't guarantee that dog won't have worse.--Prosfilaes (talk) 14:22, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
I've read this whole, pretty inconclusive discussion, and have finally come to an opinion. I propose that we include all pertinent images, collapsed by default, with an easy tie-in for censorware so that it can block all images with one simple option. I think that this is the best compromise position. I am happy to justify my opinion to those who disagree. — I.S.M.E.T.A.09:23, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Yay, someone took my stance. I'd also like to mention that conservative Jews and Muslims are likely probably block us for having an image at woman. Dem slopes can be slippery. Korn (talk) 10:09, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
@Korn: Yes, that Chassidic newspaper was an eye-opening example. It isn't just a theoretical difficulty that we face in deciding just which images will be used as blocking pretexts. Making it easy for a censor to block all images would probably appease most people concerned about the possibility of explicit (with whichever definition) images appearing (having blanket blockability also means that no one can sneak in an uncensored explicit image by vandalism onto the page for, say, apple). — I.S.M.E.T.A.10:20, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
It is easy already to not show any picture with a little css (via a gadget): .thumb { display:none; }. It would also be really easy to have a show/hide button for all pictures. — Dakdada13:07, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I would suggest as a compromise that we default to showing images, and hide only those images that the community determines by consensus could reasonably be objectionable. I am willing to go along with the suggestion by Equinox above to "put it in a fucking collapsible box" if it's really that much of a problem. However, I certainly don't want to put readers to the task of finding and clicking a "show" button to see a serviceberry, an armadillo, or a baglamas. bd2412T13:54, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I think this has been argued to death, but the simple truth is that Wikimedia projects aren't censored, and we can't be in the position of deciding what is an inappropriate image. After all, some Muslims would object to any depictions of deities or of anything that might be considered a deity, which is why there's lots of historical Muslim architecture with nothing but abstract ornamentation. If we want to hide things, we should hide everything, with an option in preferences to display everything, and a link on the collapse-box to an explanation of the policy. There's lots of content in Wiktionary that I dislike, but we can't be truly descriptive if we don't include it. Images are less critical to our mission, but we shouldn't be deciding about them based on our personal feelings (of course, we should avoid unnecessarily provocative content that doesn't serve the needs of the entry- but then, I've removed images added by a vandal obsessed with ceiling fans, too). Chuck Entz (talk) 14:07, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I completely disagree that Wikimedia projects aren't censored, they are rigorously censored. There is a reason we don't have an image of Goatse on the page for shock site, and that Wikipedia doesn't have such an image on their page for Goatse. It would be very illustrative, but we have made the determination that it would not be of benefit to the project as a whole (even if we have done so tacitly. In my mind this isn't a question of censorship on the grounds of dictating our morality, it is a question about making the project the most useful to the most people. The project becomes useless to anyone who sees something objectionable to them and never returns, or to those who have the project blocked due to content which some blocking service finds objectionable. I don't want to change the policy about which images are included, I think we do a good job there; I do want to give the users more control over which images they see by default. - TheDaveRoss14:55, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
@TheDaveRoss I agree with you and add that the wiktionary community excludes criminal senses of terms that some contributors find objectionable (e.g. that pedophilia is a crime). Also an explicit depiction is not just about nudity or a sexual subject – it is also about violence, for example beheading and other forms of murder. Every coworker I asked today said they block wiktionary completely at work for those kinds of depictions collapsed or not. Like I said before, an informed consumer will do what websites balk at doing and block the entire site because anything else is just too much work to filter. Once wiktionary gets added into proxy or firewall host files and such it will never be seen again on connecting device. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 16:50, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
@Darkdadaah: I agree re the show/hide button for images (something akin to the toggles for quotations, translations, derived terms, etc. currently in the sidebar?). Is that CSS trick auto-implementable by external censorware?
@BD2412: I think it has been demonstrated pretty conclusively that we are unlikely to be able to come to consensus on these issues. Moreover, I doubt that our little community is sufficiently diverse to antecipate the full array of images that have potential to cause offence.
@Chuck Entz: I completely agree with your statement "If we want to hide things, we should hide everything, with an option in preferences to display everything, and a link on the collapse-box to an explanation of the policy."
@TheDaveRoss: On top of collapsing all images by default, it would probably be a good idea to include in the captions for explicit images a template such as {{explicitimage}} which would mark that collapsed image with some kind of obvious warning message.
@BoBoMisiu: We're obviously not going to host illegal content. That is an irrelevant non-issue.
@I'm so meta even this acronym, BD2412 The discussion is not about whether you host illegal content but whether you display explicit content – these are two different concepts. An image search shows that there certainly is even legal public domain content depicting violence and beheading. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 17:48, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
—This comment is out of chronological order: @BoBoMisiu:, regarding your contention that "pedophilia is a crime", please show me one jurisdiction that has a statute defining the word "pedophilia" as a crime, distinct from specific crimes like sexual assault and child endangerment. I searched and couldn't find any, so if I have missed one, please enlighten me. bd2412T18:35, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
—This comment is out of chronological order: @BD2412: No, that is not the way I see other terms being defined in wiktionary. They are descriptions of usage — they show the living language. I added many examples of usage in Citations:pedophilia. Which examples that I added showing a criminal sense do you want to discuss? —BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:00, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
—This comment is out of chronological order: @I'm so meta even this acronym: No, I'm not going to link to these offending examples, lets discuss the general concept (explicit images of violence, e.g. beheading) which is neither vague nor overgeneralized. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:00, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I concede that we have no interest in any censorship except that in accord with the few remaining prejudices we regular contributors have. We are poor judges of what others may find offensive, are unwilling to allow the opinions of those others to influence us, and are incapable of finding footing on a slope of even the most slope and slip. DCDuringTALK18:14, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
@I'm so meta even this acronym no, I'm not going to reduce a general idea to a specific example or deny the correlative. Policies are general ideas not special pleadings. Most people think beheading is violence and don't need a specific example. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 18:34, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
@DCDuring I know that most people will look at and react to an image first and then decide if they want to read text. The entries in wiktionary should be accurate and precise enough so the consumer understands meaning then they can judge for themselves. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 18:34, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
@BoBoMisiu: You wrote "An image search shows that there certainly is even legal public domain content depicting violence and beheading." There's no such thing at beheading, so where are these images? — I.S.M.E.T.A.19:08, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘@I'm so meta even this acronym: No, you are conflating two different things:
I first wrote: an explicit depiction is not just about nudity or a sexual subject – it is also about violence, for example beheading and other forms of murder. I did not write that such a depiction is found in the beheading entry.
Then I responded to your statement about not going to host illegal content – I pointed out that this discussion is not about whether you 'host illegal content' but whether you display explicit content – these are two different concepts. An image search shows that there certainly is even legal public domain content depicting violence and beheading. I should have used a term like Google image search to be clear. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:00, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
At this point we are talking in circles, going off on tangents, and achieving nothing close to a consensus. I propose that this discussion either be closed, or that a properly formatted vote on a specific proposal (or set of options) be started at Wiktionary:Votes. bd2412T20:32, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I agree that we will never reach a consensus if something is not changed. We have to structurize the flow of discussion somehow, because ideally there shouldn't be any unanswered arguments. I am thinking of breaking the problem down into subproblems so that we can locate the controversial matter. It is easier to argue if something is gross or not, rather than whether images should be collapsible. A vote is just useless at this point. --Dixtosa (talk) 20:50, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
What proposals shall we vote on? I suggest:
hide all images by default, for example in collapsible boxes which users can choose to expand (i.e. users can opt out of having images be hidden)
continue to show images by default, but provide users with an opt-in gadget that will hide all images
hide images (or just photographs, allowing drawings?) of genitalia (and breasts and anuses?)
do not include images (or just photographs, allowing drawings?) of genitalia (and breasts and anuses?) at all
do not include any images at all
There are certainly other possibilities (e.g. hide all images of women to appease ultraconservative Jews and Muslims), but I don't think anyone here has seriously entertained them, so I haven't listed them. - -sche(discuss)20:56, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Straw polls
Several important points to take into account:
A word can mean something that is not explicit in nature but the entry might still contain explicit content. E.g. cum which in Latin means "with".
We can not completely evade subjectivity altogether anyways: we still have to decide/debate
which entries deserve a picture (as mentioned in the discussion ejaculate might not be the best target for the corresponding video)
We should please the majority rather than ourselves being happy about the idea of having no censorship
Wiktionary can have its rules.
Images being collapsed might not be sufficient to avoid being blocked in a software-controlled machine/browser.
NOTE: if we make collapsed images load dynamically then this will trick the software.
Wiktionary is a dictionary and our sister projects exist for a reason. (like Commons and Wikipedia)
Deciding which images to hide might be problematic. (if selective censorship wins)
The detriment caused by explicit content is more devastating than that of caused by collapsing them.
All images should be shown
Any image that is relevant and useful (for the purpose of defining or identifying a term) should be displayed uncollapsed.
Support
Support. Of course, we can always further discuss which image is the most appropriate and most effective for such a purpose. bd2412T21:27, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose I think this provides excessive protection for any image whatsoever and creates problems in many settings at home, at work, and in public spaces for adults. DCDuringTALK23:44, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose, priority should go to words, not to images. Images should not be used in case where it would compromise the use of words. Renard Migrant (talk) 20:56, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
All images, even though they are relevant and useful, should be collapsed regardless of content, so that viewers can choose what they would like to see.
Support
Support Prevents arguing amongst the editors and hence saves everyone time. No consensus is ever going to fit every individual user anyway. Korn (talk) 22:04, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Support I think this also focuses attention on all that eloquent text in the entries to dazzle the consumer. Crawling bots will still see the various collapsed image file names in the source code and possibly follow to the image and analyze the content. All of this only affects the presentation of the page to a human viewer and not the content of the page. I don't think collapsed images will affect the page load time at all. I also don't think it will have any affect on filtering since those will see both the page title, image label, etc. contains a trigger string (e.g. penis or beheading) and will funnel for that alone. Collapsing the images only affects what a human viewer initially sees. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 02:38, 29 May 2015 (UTC) modified 16:19, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Support — This: 1) speeds up page-loading time; 2) perKorn, saves a lot of time on RFD-style arguing; 3) is likely to appease concerned censors; 4) allows an image-blocking tie-in; 5) conforms with current treatment of quotations, translations, etc.; and, 6) is, IMO, the only practicable response in the light of the demonstrated variety of causes for visual offence that exists. — I.S.M.E.T.A.09:50, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
(1) You mean rendering time? images will still be loaded. (2) We don't know yet. (5) Hm... kinda appealing argument.--Dixtosa (talk) 14:05, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
I can't think of a solution that does not use js. this js and this template together can make this work though.
But remember images are not generally large. For example, the image in my sandbox is ~10KB but the whole sandbox is ~300KB. The only benefit is that we trick parenting softwares and hopefully do not get blocked right away. BTW, I am not completely sure that parenting softwares and work proxies work like this but anyways this is the best we can do. --Dixtosa (talk) 15:11, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
@Dixtosa: The reduction in loading time may not often be very great, but things like maps, which need to have a high resolution, present a greater loading burden; in those cases, the difference could well be noticeable. In any case, this Javascript trick should be used for whatever images we decide to collapse, if that's what we indeed decide. — I.S.M.E.T.A.17:30, 30 May 2015 (UTC)
@Dixtosa: This is a bad way to implement this because the <img> element already has a srcset attribute. In such cases, common practice is to use the src attribute only as a fallback for old browsers. Using js will break responsive features. It is not good web design to bypass responsive features of HTML5 and CSS such as responsive image sizes. Your way still has a <div> element containing a data-img-src attribute that is visible in the source code. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 19:31, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
@BoBoMisiu, my solution consists of following steps: you first wrap an existing usage of a file in the template, which makes an empty div with the attribute data-img-src. Then js inserts a button into the div. Then after clicking it the whole div is replaced with the html that software would have produced if the file had not been wrapped. Note, that data-img-src does not and cannot contain the actual link.--Dixtosa (talk) 20:03, 1 June 2015 (UTC)
@Dixtosa: I understand the json loaded empty div but look at how srcset is used in current wikipedia pages that contain images, you will see the responsive image sizes. You could use the existing class="mw-collapsible mw-collapsed" without scripting. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 02:31, 3 June 2015 (UTC)
@Dixtosa I agree with you, yes, an image is preemptively downloaded. But, it does not matter if it in memory or not, a collapsed element is not visible to the user and the image that is downloaded is the appropriate size for the device, i.e. mobile gets different size, tablet gets different size, etc. No custom markup is required. Even without knowing how the responsive images are served, srcset is the better choice because of improved efficiency over a single size image via src. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 20:01, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
Oppose There is no need to subject the reader to an extra step, particularly when the vast majority of images are completely non-controversial. bd2412T21:28, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose Per BD and DC. In particular, I hate having to take an extra step and I predict that I would rather not see the image than taking the trouble to un-collapse it. --Daniel09:27, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Some images, even though they are relevant and useful, should be collapsed if their content is likely to be offend, disturb, embarrass, or inconvenience viewers, at least in certain environments, such as the workplace or around children.
Support I would support the collapsing of images that relate to only one of several senses of a term, and that might shock someone looking for another sense. bd2412T21:33, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Weak Oppose. Let us find images or graphics and drawings that do not create the need to collapse them in the first place. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:29, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Some images should be removed
Some images, even though they are relevant and useful, are so obscene, offensive, or disturbing that we do not want them to appear on Wiktionary at all.
I would remove images of someone defecating, copulating, etc. If American broadcast TV (free over the air) wouldn’t broadcast it, I don’t think we should have it here.—Stephen(Talk)22:46, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Support I suppose that would mean voted in each case, which means many images offensive to some will be included. DCDuringTALK23:49, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Support I never thought of wiktionary as a picture book. While depictions make a page look attractive, I would deemphasize all of them to have a page that encourages the consumer to read the text instead of looking at the depictions. I don't think images are a selling point. Separately, I don't even think wiktionary cultivates a perception that senses in entries are not censored (or as believe, as long as they don't contradict the personal beliefs of administrators). I have not read anything about a process for a contributor to challenge a perceived case of censorship. Even if one of the USPs is non-censorship it is not put into practice from my non-administrator perspective. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 02:39, 29 May 2015 (UTC) modified 23:47, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Support. Not each image that is borderline useful and relevant needs to be kept in a Wiktionary entry. However, the discussion needs to be had per specific image. To give an idea, most images from Commons:Category:Penile-vaginal intercourse (don't look if you are sensitive) should be kept away from Wiktionary sex and coitus entries, I think. I am a male, and my measure is how strong felt hormonal response the image produces in me. If the response is strong, I think an alternative image producing smaller response should be sought. The purpose is, at least, not to distract the reader from the core lexicographical content by triggering human subsystems that are quite distinct from those subsystems that most of the lexicographical material is intended to address. I don't intend to prevent people from getting response from seeing images; it's just that if they went to a dictionary to get these sorts of images, they chose the wrong place. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:29, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose I oppose this generally, but I do think that images that would shock the reader because they appear in an entry with many substantial meanings unrelated to the surprising context should be collapsed, or limited to pages with only that meaning. bd2412T21:31, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose The question should be, in every case, what images are most helpful to the reader understanding the meaning of the term. Also, as with flower, there is no reason we can't have both photo and a graphic, if each provides different information. bd2412T23:07, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I have had some success in the past dialing down conflicts by imposing interaction bans between the disputants (even where one of them was an admin). I therefore propose a six month interaction ban between User:Purplebackpack89 and User:Kephir. The conditions of the ban would be as follows:
No posting on the talk page of the other.
No reverting the other, nor making edits that effectively revert the other, nor taking any sort of editing (or administrative) action directed at the other.
No posting comments directed to the other or responding directly to the other in any discussion, in any forum anywhere in Wiktionary.
No posting comments about the other in any discussion, in any forum anywhere in Wiktionary. This includes encouraging other editors to engage in disputes with the other. That also includes complaining that so-and-so is violating the interaction ban. This also means no loaded questions like "is it a violation of the interaction ban to do this" while pointing at something the other is doing.
No contacting other editors/admins by e-mail or off-wiki to complain about the other.
Breach of the interaction ban will result in quickly escalating blocks. One day for the first offense; one week for the second; one month for the third.
You may independently participate in the same discussion of a proposal made in one of the community portals, in RfV, RfD, etc., but your comments there should be addressed to the issue at hand, never to the other (and no sneaking in ambiguous jabs like "some editors say..." with a comment directed to what the other has said; stick to the issue).
The interaction ban will be reviewed by the community six months after imposition.
Based on my experience with similar conflicts, I think that this should wrap up this headache. bd2412T18:12, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Support, though I don't think "No contacting other editors/admins by e-mail or off-wiki to complain about the other." is on all fours with the others. Off-wiki communication not visible to the other party would not inflame the other party to the conflict and might lead to education of the participating party. If the recipient of the communication didn't like to be a recipient email software can effectively filter out the emails. I don't think that off-wiki lobbying of newbies is highly likely. DCDuringTALK23:26, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
My issue with the e-mail/off-wiki contact also derives from the experience of not having done that in the past, when it would have saved some annoyance. bd2412T02:55, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
I agree with DCDuring that that particular condition is problematic. It's kind of unenforcable (how would people know about personal e-mails or WebChat personal threads), it's pointless (how does off-wiki chatter harm the creation of entries?), and it's in general not needed. Purplebackpack8910:22, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
I will gladly amend that to "No contacting User:BD2412 by e-mail or off-wiki to complain about the other". If other editors want to deal with such complaints, that's their business. bd2412T13:26, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
Rather than seeking such a privilege, why not just apply an email filter to the sender if they send you an email you don't like? DCDuringTALK13:41, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
Technical question: That means if either of them genuinely makes a mistake that creates falsehood in an entry, the other one - should he see it - just have to bite it down and hope somebody else sees it to? _Korn (talk) 22:26, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose, controversially? As much as I respect BD's opinion (and I believe he's some kind of lawyer, so must have a clue about dispute resolution) I don't think this is a thing to be encouraged. At the end of the day, wikis are community-based projects and people have got to get along with each other in some way. I'm not perfect about this either, and sometimes get into squabbles, and not everybody loves me, but I don't think there should be these artificial barriers put up. People have gotta get along with people, to some extent. Equinox◑23:38, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Not really particularly excited about it. Look, Kephir's bullshit blocks have to stop, but do we really want to set a precedent that if one editor doesn't like another editor, he can claim anything the editor does is vandalism or harassment, and be rewarded with that editor not being allowed to interact with him? Purplebackpack8923:46, 21 May 2015 (UTC)
Look, there were a great many legit concerns that I posted to Kephir's page. Like the time he went around refactoring everybody's signatures. Or the time he removed comments I made on another user's talk page. It's perfectly acceptable to be concerned about those things. Asking Kephir to stop those things was not disruptive, it wasn't vandalism, it was wrong of Kephir to claim it was, and there's no reason to stop them. And if you look at the number of times I've posted to Kephir's page in the last year or so; it's not very often: probably less than 30 times (perhaps a great deal less; it's hard to tell due to deleted contributions and talk-page threading), a number of which were me (rightfully so) being frustrated at Kephir's claim that other things I posted were tagged as vandalism. I refuse to believe that the principal problem here is anything but Kephir's bullshit blocks stemming from a belief that it is paramount that I leave the Wiktionary community, the execution of which has led to him bending or breaking rules to make it happen. The only things that need to be prevented are the bullshit blocks, the tagging of comments as vandalism and the removal of comments on third-party noticeboards; the first two of which are better achieved by removal of rights rather than this interaction ban. You're also somewhat ignoring the precedent this could set. To a certain extent, this amounts to editor A throwing a huge hissy fit about editor B, but still getting exactly what he wants (an interaction ban with editor B), and in effect the claim that things editor B did were as bad or worse as what editor A did. Purplebackpack8909:02, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
Just to clarify: can you confirm that, of all of your ten previous blocks, you had done nothing bad ever, and they were all mistakes by admins? Equinox◑10:01, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
For starters, that's a complete red herring, because this discussion should solely be confined to my interaction with Kephir. It's also ridiculous, as all editors (including you) have done "something bad"; just most of the time, the "something bad" isn't serious enough to warrant a block. It's also inaccurate, as I just checked my block log, and there were only seven. Of those, three occurred three or more years ago, and the remaining four were all undone within 24 hours (this counting Liliana's reduction of a block first to three days, and later in the day to a complete unblock). And, yes, I would consider the last three blocks "mistakes by admins": the two by Kephir and one last year by you. One should not be blocked for making non-vandalism comments on a user's talk page, nor should a blocking summary be a personal attack (as yours was) or contain the word "silliness". But I would again note that that is irrelevant to this discussion. Purplebackpack8910:22, 22 May 2015 (UTC)
This has gone without comment for a week, and I believe the consensus is clear. Would an uninvolved admin please close this accordingly? Cheers! bd2412T19:08, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
There is presently a discussion going on between Kephir and I in regards to Template:archive-top. That discussion should probably be allowed to run its course before the interaction ban takes effect. Purplebackpack8914:52, 7 June 2015 (UTC)
Please excuse the length.
Given the current circumstances (a storm in a teacup over a silly template, to which nobody responds due to a technicality), I disbelieve that this proposal is going to do any good. This discussion would probably languish here for the next six months, and at some point become irrelevant. You have probably noticed this happen to many other discussions on this project: someone makes a proposal, a few people say "support", Polansky says "oppose", and it goes nowhere, and not even because of Polansky, but because nobody actually attempts to bring it into being. Even if this proposal succeeds, I predict that this ban will turn into a pathetic game of who is going to find a better loophole to indirectly irritate the other party, or outright violate the ban conditions without anyone noticing. If you want to know how that looks like, look no further than at w:User talk:Eric Corbett: Jimbo Wales makes some comment, Corbett writes "boo, Jimbo!" on his talk page, their respective armies of supporters clash, someone blocks someone else, later the block is lifted, and ultimately nothing happens. It has been going on for years, and no resolution is in sight. Seriously, if I were not so deeply entangled in this, I would find it quite amusing that someone actually thinks that Wikipedia does anything well with respect to dispute resolution (or any other matter, in fact, but that is another rant).
So consider this instead. Block Purplebackpack89 indefinitely, with no talk page access. And while he is blocked, start a discussion on what to do next in this situation — whether to unblock him, impose some sanctions, or formally ban him. And do not lift the block until there is clear consensus or a vote passes to do so. Why block him? Because otherwise his habit of spouting his entitled diatribes on every talk page he can think of, which by now you surely have noticed (and I think you find just as irritating as I do), will make the discussion unmanageable. This is the only way the discussion could approach any kind of rationality. (Though please notice how rare it is for a situation to arise in which this type of caveat is applicable; the closest situation I recall is the "write down" spammer, documented at CodeCat's talk page and Tea room.) Why indefinitely? So that his supporters will make sure that the discussion reaches a definite resolution instead of languishing like they do all the time. Why not block me? Well, if you really buy into this false balance narrative he is trying to impose here, then sure, block me as well for all I care. I could use a break. I have a few other things to do with my life. It will calm my nerves not to think about this issue for a while. But I recall there being a vote recently in which some people expressed the opinion that revoking my access to tools, which right now are still at my disposal, is a rather poor idea.
So here it is. I think this alternative proposal has a slightly larger chance of accomplishing anything and will save us from needless irritation in the long term. — Keφr16:41, 8 June 2015 (UTC)
Indef block without talk page access? That's completely ridiculous. You proposed that awhile back, and no one supported it. You've tried to block me without talk page access, and you've been undone. There's clearly no consensus to block me for any length of time, nor is there any rationale to do so. You base your argument for blocking on comments I've made on talk pages and Wiktionary pages. The comments have done no harm and violate no policy.
Also, it's appalling that you act like you have done little or nothing wrong. You've been trying to HOUND me off this Wiktionary, and have edit-warred and misused your admin tools to do so. And, for doing this, you think I should be indeffed? Dah fuck? Purplebackpack8901:49, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
What a clever attempt to push your opinion. But unfortunately, it seems no one replied to this section so far. So, where is all that support you're claiming to have? -- Liliana•23:19, 9 June 2015 (UTC)
People only post when they disagree with something. So I'm going to disagree with you and say that I agree with Kephir, and so do most admins. --WikiTiki8901:04, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
Regardless of the fact that there's nothing in recent memory to justify a block or ban of any length, or sanctions aside of this interaction ban (BTW, why has nobody bothered to close this?), it is unfair to discuss banning an editor without allowing him/her to comment in his/her defense. Purplebackpack8901:22, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
The next step would probably be blocking the offending party or parties. I assume that this is an attempt to avoid outright immediate blocks, desysopping etc. I would say that right now, without anyone "closing" this, an admin who observed an infraction would find a great deal of support for unilaterally banning the offending party. The only thing that "closing" this might possibly do is start the clock ticking toward termination of the ban. I, for one, am not in any rush to see the end of the ban, so I am in no rush to start the formal ban as the current informal ban is a good start. DCDuringTALK02:30, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
I herewith enact the interaction ban, governed by the rules specified at the top of this thread, to start tomorrow on 11 June 2015, 00:01 UTC and end on 11 December 2015, 23:59 UTC as per the above cosensus. Supporters: bd2412, Stephen, WikiTiki89, Eiríkr Útlendi, I.S.M.E.T.A., Angr, DCDuring. Boldface opposers: Equinox. Maybe opposers: Purplebackpack89, Kephir. 20 days have elapsed from the start of the discussion. --Dan Polansky (talk) 05:44, 10 June 2015 (UTC)
You people don’t seem to be taking this issue seriously. Why shouldn’t this category be shrunken? Why don’t you care?
As already said, the verbal forms don’t add any value to this category. They just make it very tedious to crawl through. I want to find regionalisms that are lemma, I don’t give a toss about the thousands of verb forms that clog up this category. You can create a subcategory for them if you desire, or you can not. I don’t mind either way. Just please, for the love of hell, shrink this thing.
Support The {{es-verb form of}} template should not categorize any of the regional parameters. I remember that Spanish verb forms didn't show up in regional categories previously. It seems that someone changed the template to call {{label}} without thinking about the consequences. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 14:57, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
I've now moved all the verb forms into Category:European Spanish verb forms. But the higher-level category is harder to move because it's filled by the context label "Spain". If I changed the category on that, there might be other languages that also use the label, and those would also be affected. We wouldn't want to end up with Category:European Basque or something like that. —CodeCat00:56, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Thanks for recategorizing the verb forms. As for the context label itself: I think it's fine for "Spain" to categorize things into "Spanish _" rather than "European _". At least, Category:Spanish Spanish is no stranger than Category:French French, Category:English English or the currently nonexistent but plausible Category:German German (for terms used in Germany proper as opposed to Switzerland, Austria, etc). - -sche(discuss) 01:15, 24 May 2015
We could also consider changing how we name the categories. For example, we could use "Spanish in Spain" instead. —CodeCat01:36, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
That's a good idea. A placename-noun- rather than adjective-based naming scheme would be better in other cases, too. The Swiss categories are already named "Switzerland French" etc because "Swiss German" was deemed too ambiguous. And it would enable the DR Congo and R Congo to be distinguished — there aren't many Congolese French words that are limited to only one Congo, but if fr.Wikt is to be believed, there are a few. - -sche(discuss)03:01, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
I say stick with European. There aren't that many languages spoken in Spain and I don't think that Occitan, Galician, Catalon and Basque are really divided along such a political border or would use such a label rather than a dialectal name. Korn (talk) 20:25, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Well, I would call the variety of the language spoken in Spain "Spanish", and similarly "French" the language spoken in France (rather than Canada etc) and "English" the language spoken (and spelled) in England (rather than the US, OZ etc). I would only give the non-standard varieties different names (Swiss Italian, Canadian French, Australian English, Brazilian Portuguese) etc. SemperBlotto (talk) 07:12, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Your usage of 'non-standard' there might offend some people. Brazilian Portuguese is the standard in Brazil, after all. Also: Do you really propose to call English English 'English' only? Because that'd be hella confusing. _Korn (talk) 09:56, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Isn't there a term called "Castilian" for this dialect? Shouldn't we perhaps consider renaming Spanish Spanish to Castilian Spanish? Purplebackpack8920:08, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
The term Castilian is ambiguous; although it sometimes does main all varieties of Spanish spoken in Spain, it is often used to exclude the dialects of southern Spain (Andalusian, Canarian, etc.), and in Spanish itself, castellano is often a simple synonym of español and refers to the entire language in all countries (though I don't think the English word Castilian is used that way very often at all). —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:20, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Not only that, but I'm fairly sure it is sometimes used to refer to all dialects of Spanish (including Latin American). --WikiTiki8920:44, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
OK, just throw that out there. Seems as though you guys were looking for a word other than "Spanish" to use in that category; I thought "Castilian" might be that word. But, if there are multiple dialects of Spanish in Spain, perhaps it might be a good idea to further disambiguate words by region. Purplebackpack8920:49, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Amend CFI so that single words don't have to be idiomatic
Strictly speaking, though we don't enforce it, single words don't bypass the 'idiomatic' criterion of WT:CFI. Current example: helikoptercrash which if we looked at CFI verbatim is a straight-forward delete. What CFI says about idiomaticity is "An expression is idiomatic if its full meaning cannot be easily derived from the meaning of its separate components." Well we have the components helikopter and crash.
The proposal is to rewrite WT:CFI#General rule so that single words not having to be idiomatic is in the criteria rather than just a convention among editors (a good convention I should add). I can't imagine anyone disagreeing with me on the principle, though I can easily imagine people disagreeing over the drafting. I'm not proposing a draft amendment at this stage as I thought I'd give someone else first crack at it. Renard Migrant (talk) 14:09, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
I think that's too vague. A better criterium is to explicitly say that terms, in which it's not obvious to a non-speaker where to split the parts, should be included. That way we don't get hung up on what a word is. We should also consider the consequences for languages which routinely add many morphemes to words. Zulu, for example, inflects verbs for both subject and object. —CodeCat14:19, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
I was thinking of leaving the definition of 'word' open to debate because I thought any narrow definition of 'word' would get voted down. It's not always about what the best solution is, but about what's the best solution that will pass a vote. Renard Migrant (talk) 14:27, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
'scuse me, but how's that different from what I wanted? And follow up question: Do English speakers really consider 'coalmine' to be one word but 'coal mine' to be two words? Isn't there some semantical feature which defines what a 'single word' is?_Korn (talk) 16:24, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Then it might help to look at how it's considered in languages that don't write spaces, such as Chinese. What is considered a word in Chinese? Also, speaking of that, I believe that in Japanese, many words have multiple pronunciations or "readings" of the characters. It's quite likely that a compound in Japanese uses only one of these pronunciations (someone who knows Japanese should confirm). That would mean, then, that if we omitted an entry for the compound on idiomaticity grounds, then users would not longer be able to figure out how to pronounce it. Other languages with non-phonemic orthography like English also have this problem. Is a record player a /ˈɹɛkɔɹd ˌpleɪəɹ/ or a /ɹɪˈkɔɹd ˌpleɪəɹ/? I think this is an important argument that there are more considerations than "can it be understood from its parts", but also whether other aspects of the compound can be predicted. —CodeCat16:44, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
I wouldn't put it like that. Kanji can have different readings and these readings are words. Kanji are just glyphs. Sometimes kanji are applied to words because of the semantics of the characters (熟字訓), even though the characters have no readings on their own which fits the word in question, and vice versa, kanjis can be assigned to words on phonetic basis while the characters have no semantic connection to the word (当て字). So kanji can either represent a semantic concept, which is connected with several words, which in turn define the reading of the kanji, or kanji can represent a single word, which itself might have several alternative kanji spellings. The basis for our consideration should be the spoken language alone and everything else we should just treat as a graphical representation of the word our entry deals with. (By the way, we fail to list kana spellings as 'alternative spelling of'.) One of those representations we then choose as an anchor for users who want to look up the lemma. _Korn (talk) 19:10, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Still, my question is, can someone tell how to pronounce a compound consisting of kanji, if they know all possible pronunciations of each kanji individually? —CodeCat19:39, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Short answer: No. But a compound of kanjis is not necessarily a compound of the words the kanjis represent individually. It's like Javascript. Having and doesn't automatically create or . They are completely independent, they just happen to use the same strings. Kanjis are like the strings of variables in that regard. _Korn (talk) 20:37, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Not reliably, but kanji compounds usually use "on" (Chinese-origin) readings, so choosing the main (or only) "on" readings for each kanji is usually a good guess (though admittedly there are also somewhat unpredictable "rendaku" sound changes to apply). I think the more everyday or idiomatic the combination, and the more common the kanji characters, the more exceptions there are (e.g. use of "kun" readings or existence of multiple common on/kun readings). Some kanji compounds are pronounced in a way completely unrelated to the individual characters' readings, but these are very much the exception. 109.153.226.213:46, 29 June 2015 (UTC)
The 1st sentence of CFI states that Wiktionary is intended to include “all words in all languages”. Other criteria should be consistent with this basic principle. Lmaltier (talk) 17:42, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm just repeating myself (but I don't think anyone's replied to it) but why not leave the definition of word for editors to discuss on a case-by-case basis on WT:RFD instead of putting it in CFI itself. Such an amendment is much less likely to be voted down, because all definitions of 'word' can be put forward in a debate without CFI backing up only one of them. Renard Migrant (talk) 21:00, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
"All words in all languages" is a very broad mandate; I would suggest that it inherently suggests a broad and inclusive definition of "word". bd2412T03:22, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't have much of an opinion on how we handle German and Dutch words. I do oppose this strongly for English; accepting strings of characters delineated by spaces or punctuation is an incredibly convenient bright line for English, and it maps fairly well to what English speakers think of as words.--Prosfilaes (talk) 01:34, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
“The definitions are the most fundamental piece of dictionary information but do not have their own header. They are simply added in one big block, line after line, each beginning with a number sign (#).”
Setting aside debate over whether we should have subsenses, current policy (and overwhelming practice) is to not have subsenses, and thus uses are inconsistent (hence jarring to readers, and unsupported by software). Thus should we:
Explicitly ban them in ELE?
…possibly with exceptions for very complex cases?
Flatten existing usage?
…excepting exceptions?
For the record, the sides appears to be:
Yay subsenses (nested)
Better organized, reflects reality of language – senses are related, and a flat list destroys this structure, and is unwieldy for long entries.
More readable – grouping 25 senses into 5 groups of 5 is more readable, and avoids the unevenness of “sense, very similar sense, very similar sense, completely different sense”.
Industry practice – professional dictionaries group senses.
Helps with translations – translations are often grouped by subsenses (perhaps they shouldn’t be, with several (glossed) subsenses corresponding to a single English sense?).
Nay subsenses (flat)
Complicated – harder to use for readers and tools.
Less readable – nesting adds complexity, parent senses are often abstract and unreadable.
Prone to abuse – easy to add unnecessary layers for minor shades of meaning. (Do we want “foo, fooish, foo-like” to become 3 subsenses??)
Largely unnecessary – some complex entries benefit from it, but most entries don’t: grouping 4 senses into 2 groups of 2 just adds overhead. Thus layout for complex entries is different from that for simple entries, adding inconsistency.
Personally I’ve a bias towards meta:Separatism, so I’d tend to prefer nested grouping, which could be flattened by tools for display (either make one entry for each leaf, or merge all leaves into the parent), but in practice this doesn’t currently exist, so flat for now seems prudent.
(This came up when I was working on pony, in the sense of “small unit of alcohol”, which has specific subsenses: 140 ml glass in Australia, 7 fl oz ≈ 210 ml bottle in the US.)
I’ve proposed wording to suggest grouping similar definitions but not nesting at ELE/Editable#Definitions (diff); what sayeth the parlour?
It's worth it, especially for words with tons of senses, some of which are hyponymous (look at "set"). The abuse that I've seen, though, has been creating artificial group headers that aren't in themselves senses, like: "(senses relating to motion)". I find that too vague and ugly; but something like "To move in a specified manner", followed by the various subsenses, seems potentially helpful. Equinox◑21:30, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
@Equinox: As you know, we are more or less forced by the wiki software to have a sense above every subsense. Other print and online dictionaries that have subsenses (and subsubsenses, even subsubsubsenses) do not face that constraint. If we could use a template and JS to suppress the vacuous hypernym, we would be able to duplicate a presentation that some editors (and other dictionaries) find worthwhile. DCDuringTALK23:08, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
I suspect this is going to need a vote, given previously expressed strong support and strong opposition, but we should hash out opinions and options here first.
(And n/p I.S., I don’t have strong opinions on this, but would like some discussion and policy, whichever way.)
Oppose with the power of Old Spice Man. I refer you all once more to the entry be. How can that possibly become even less readable by indentions and proper grouping? _Korn (talk) 22:31, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose. IMO any entry with more than three definitions is a candidate for improved intelligibility using subsenses, though it is not vital unless there are more definitions. DCDuringTALK22:56, 24 May 2015 (UTC)
I think subsenses are useful in many cases, and oppose banning them. I don't interpret the current ELE as banning them. Go contains a block of definitions, one after the other (line after line), each with a line that begins with a #. Some lines follow that # with another #, but that isn't prohibited, it's starting a definition line with * or 1. that's prohibited, by my ken. - -sche(discuss)00:30, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose per the above. I agree with editors who say that we should have more of this, not less. bd2412T03:23, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
I know I'm beating against the grain here, but it's not something I'd ever avail myself of (either in a new entry or one that is being rewritten), nor is it a way I prefer to read dictionaries. I have to agree with the drawbacks posted by the OP, and I'd also note that, while many professional dictionaries subgroup, general-use dictionaries often do not. While I'd discourage the practice, not sure I'd forbid it, though. Purplebackpack8905:35, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
@Wikitiki89@BD2412 Maybe we want more rather than less, but can we at least agree that there are quite a few pages in which nesting is not necessary and perhaps even confusing or detrimental? For example, any entry with three or fewer definitions? Or an entry with more definitions than that, but definitions so distinct there's no logical way to group them? Purplebackpack8919:12, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
If there is no logical way to group them, then obviously they are not subsenses. No one is advocating grouping unrelated senses. bd2412T19:19, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
I don't think there is anything that we can decide for the general case. Each entry is different and should be nested (or not nested) however best suits that particular entry. --WikiTiki8919:30, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
I think we might be able to agree that the grouping should be for semantic reasons, not solely for, say, similarity of usage context, topic, or register. DCDuringTALK23:04, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose. Sense nesting needs to be used more often, except in Ancient Greek entries where it is used a bit more often than necessary. — Ungoliant(falai)22:39, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose. Sense nesting is a good idea to make definitions more readable. We should however clearly mark (maybe with a template) non-definition, mere header sense-lines. Otherwise machine readability will get worse. We should also amend ELE to explain how sense nesting is supposed to work. Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 09:19, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain Subsenses should be used only with great care. Sense groups that are not attested as a sense in its own right need to be clearly so marked. Let me note that while I see dictionary practice of sense grouping, I do not see the practice of treating the sense groups as definitions in their own right. There has been a lot of abuse of subsensing in the English Wiktionary, by multiple editors with almost no idea of how subsensing and hyponymy works. Because of all the abuse, I would be almost inclined to ban subsensing, but I do admit that it can be useful if done right. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:37, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Abstain First of all, wiktionary does not output semantically correct HTML definitions. It is fundamentally flawed page structure because the headline is an <h4> followed by an ordered list (<ol>) containing one list item (<li>) containing each sense. What looks weird to me is that it doesn't use the semantically correct <dl> element for definitions. I think wiktionary should using the correct elements and then see how to nest sense clusters in <dd> elements which can contain a <header> element. All these so called complex cases then become trivial. —BoBoMisiu (talk) 19:44, 31 May 2015 (UTC)
Transylvanian Saxon
How should we handle Transylvanian Saxon? Despite its name, it is not a variety of Saxon (sxu) but rather a variety of Moselle Franconian, like Luxembourgish (lb). It needs an etymology code at a minimum because it has loaned Romanian words quite separate from Standard German, but it could be considered a full language as distinct from Standard German as Luxembourgish. In practice, treating it as de would have the effect of excluding it by subjecting it to WT:WDL standards although durable-but-internet-accessible documentation of it is in fact limited. Here are some text samples:
T. Saxon: Wae kâum dier Duit? Hie brâch mech nider. // Mer wallen blewen wot mer sen, Gott healf äs (or: hälf as) enzt uch engden.
Luxembourgish: Wéi koum den Doud? Hien (?hat mech nidder gebrach?). // Mer wëllen bleiwen wat mer sinn, Gott hëllef eis elo an ëmmer.
Standard German: Wie kam der Tod? Er brach mich nieder. // Wir wollen blieben was wir sind, Gott hilf uns jetzt und immer.
English: How did Death come? He laid me low. // We want to remain what we are, God help us now and always.
ps.: If they don't, let them. German dialects (as opposed to regional variants and accents of standard German) are sufficiently individual to merit an L2, I think. They should be at least as far apart as Rigsdansk and Bokmål. Korn (talk) 22:16, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Bavarian and Alemannic have their own L2s because they aren't dialects of German, they're separate descendants of MHG if not OHG which are not mutually intelligible with modern German. But note that e.g. Walser, which is mutually intelligible with other Alemannic varieties, is accordingly handled under ==Alemannic==, and Gottscheerisch is currently handled under ==Bavarian==. I think Transylvanian Saxon is probably as distinct from German as e.g. Luxembourgish, and so merits its own L2, but not all High German lects do, especially because many of them exist in continua which it wouldn't make sense to give codes to every individual step of. (You may or may not be aware of the controversy that surrounds whether or not en.Wikt should consider Bokmal and Nynorsk to be separate languages from Norwegian, and how it should handle dialectal Norwegian and Riksmal if there is no Norwegian language but only a Bokmal and a Nynorsk language.) - -sche(discuss)22:41, 25 May 2015 (UTC)
Isn't "separate descendant from Middle High German with restricted mutual intelligibility" the very definition of a German dialect? Korn (talk) 13:52, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
The way 'dialect' is usually defined, in my experience — sense 1 of ] and the first sense w:Dialect describes, which seems to be the sense WT:CFI#Languages_to_include and most discussions centred on it use when saying only languages and not dialects are to be included — mutual intelligibility is a defining feature. You must be using sense 3, which I hadn't realized was an actual sense; my apologies. The question remains: is Transylvanian Saxon different enough from the other things it could be compared to (German, Luxembourgish, other Moselle Franconian) to merit its own L2? Seeing no opposition to the idea that it is, I've given it the code gmw-tsx. - -sche(discuss)17:28, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
I'm very much talking about dialects sense 1. I'm also not at all convinced that mutual intelligibility is a requirement rather than a hint. How much one understands depends on one's own intelligence and education; and even comparably minor phonetical changes (/huːs/ > /hɔʊs/; /nd/ > /ng/) and even smaller changes in the syntax or lexicon can seriously disrupt understanding for an idiotic (as in only knowing one's own form) person already. Then again, this discussion is a bit moot since the international nomenclature of language variants is massively inconsistent and mainly based on political grounds. I maintain that Bavarian is a dialect of the same language as standard German since the differences aren't that huge, but it's still far enough apart to deserve an L2. The same is true for Thurungian, Swabian and Ripuarian. The group knwon as Alemannic is another thing altogether since parts of it to this day never even left their Old High German stage. Point being: Yeah, give it an L2. Korn (talk) 18:40, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Vietnamese entries on Han/Nôm characters pages
@Wyang, Atitarev In modern-day Vietnam, the Han script is practically dead. No one ever uses it in any practical way, not in any sort of normal writing. It's sad, but in fact, the Han script is used solely for the sake of decoration. It's not like in Korea, where Hanja is still used to some extent ("half-dead") to distinguish a few confusing words. Should we even include a "Vietnamese" entry on a Han character/word page? ばかFumiko￥talk03:33, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
Wiktionary does cover historical usage as well as current usage — hence we have a whole category of English words that are dead and no longer used. If Vietnamese has been written with Han characters, and there are (old) Vietnamese documents written in Han characters that someone might be reading and trying to decipher, then it would seem that we should include Vietnamese sections on Han character pages. But those sections could have minimal content and serve simply to direct people to Latin-script entries. - -sche(discuss)03:59, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
@-sche It sounds just fair to document Vietnamese obsolete, or even archaic, terms, too. I'm talking about the script. I think it's better to call the entries "Middle Vietnamese" or something, rather than "Vietnamese". ばかFumiko￥talk10:50, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
If they are used and understood today, they're current, no matter how little and what for they are used, even for noodle decoration. Korn (talk) 14:00, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
No they are not. If you're not a scholar majored in Han characters, they look just like a bunch of doodles. ばかFumiko￥talk10:27, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
How long ago did the Vietnamese stop using Han characters? If they stopped using them around (or before) the same time that Middle Vietnamese is thought to have transitioned to Vietnamese, it would make sense to treat them as Middle Vietnamese. But Wikipedia suggests Latin script only displaced Chữ nôm in the 1900s, which sounds like obsolete (but not "Middle") Vietnamese. - -sche(discuss)17:34, 26 May 2015 (UTC)
You got a point. Although things were quite complicated back in the 1900s, 'cause there were 3 different languages (Vietnamese, French and literary Chinese) and 4 different scripts (French Latin, Vietnamese Latin, Han and Nom), none of which were considered standard, and the Vietnamese alphabet were only accepted as the official script in 1945. I guess the Nom script can be called obsolete. ばかFumiko￥talk10:27, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘
@Fumiko Take: So every chữ Nôm entry would transclude {{label|vi|archaic}}, yes? — I.S.M.E.T.A.11:16, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
@Fumiko Take: I see. Perhaps a dedicated template would be desirable in this case; something that generated "Chữ Nôm spelling of wởrd." and which autocategorised the entry. What do you say? — I.S.M.E.T.A.11:28, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Since it has been established that Min Nan must be written in either Han characters or in Pe̍h-ōe-jī, I propose the following method of transcribing the tones of loanwords presented in the MOE Dictionary of Frequently-Used Taiwan Minnan into POJ:
According to Help:Citations, quotations, references the only difference between a citation and a quotation is the namespace. In WT:RFV we tend to call them citations no matter what namespace they're in. Isn't it a bit outdated to have two separate, long WT: pages for two things that are essentially the same thing? I'd've thought redirecting one to the other and explaining about the citations namespace would take hardly any time at all. Renard Migrant (talk) 17:43, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
Support Sure, that's what I always thought of these two, they should be merged eventually. I think I even brought it up at some point but I don't remember the details. --Daniel17:55, 27 May 2015 (UTC)
My understanding is that Citations needn't have the translation and transliteration, while Quotations do, because they appear in the mainspace--Dixtosa (talk) 07:40, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Whether these will be merged or not, I want quotations moved from between definitions as quotations tend to be large and include links and quickly get huge hotchpotch which makes recognizing actual defs difficult. Only some kind of link (using {{jump}} or something) should be left there I think. Who agrees?--Dixtosa (talk) 16:28, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
I have somewhat boldly merged the pages. Along the way, I removed some redundant information and updated other information. - -sche(discuss)18:08, 28 May 2015 (UTC)
Though I would've merged the other way because we use the term 'citation' on WT:RFV and other WT: pages. I'm not going to dispute something that makes such little difference. Renard Migrant (talk) 21:30, 29 May 2015 (UTC)
Perhaps related: is there a clear distinction between quotations and usage examples, other than the source? If quotations are collapsed, why are usage examples not if both serve to illustrate usage? —CodeCat20:44, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
Quotations are generally longer, since they need more text to show enough context. Usage examples are intentionally crafted to be concise and also do not need the extra citation line. --WikiTiki8921:13, 24 June 2015 (UTC)
Support DCDuring TALK 16:24, 23 May 2015 (UTC)
Oppose On one hand, we sometimes need non-printing characters to appear literally. For example, in Persian orthography, the zero-width non-joiner (U+200C) is used to connect compounds and certain morphemes, such as کفشها (kafš-hâ). It would be pretty silly to have to write this as 
Abstain I don't personally remember using nbsp and ltr outside templates and probably would prefer having a template for single uses like 
Support for All English and Translingual definitions and full FL definitions (ie, don't care about FL one-word glosses) — This unsigned comment was added by DCDuring (talk • contribs).
