Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2025/June

@Theknightwho Hey ... since you went ahead and disabled the functioning of allow_self_links in full_link(), can you help implement what we discussed over Discord a few months ago, which is that there should be a way of controlling whether self-links are bold, and it should probably default to off? @0DF rightfully complained about all the unnecessary bolding in e.g. Mykolaiv and in our discussion you said you'd fix it, but it's still not done. {{place}} in particular should not bold its self-links; we only really want such bolding for inflection tables. Benwing2 (talk) 07:47, 1 June 2025 (UTC)

When is a country no longer the same country? I am trying to clean up the handling of this. We now have various ways of distinguishing situations in {{place}}, e.g. former countries vs. former names of countries vs. former official names of countries vs. official names of former countries, etc. So for example, East Germany is clearly a former country and its official name was the German Democratic Republic. (I'm likewise treating West Germany as a former country even though its official name, Federal Republic of Germany, is the same as the modern Germany and AFAIK there were no real constitutional changes when Germany reunified, because there were major border changes; see below.) I'm treating Zaire as the former name of Democratic Republic of the Congo rather than saying Zaire was a former country, first and foremost because the borders didn't change when the government changed. Wikipedia is little help, as for example it treats the Polish People's Republic as a former country and not the same country as modern Poland, even though (a) there were no border changes, (b) the Polish People's Republic ended in 1989 but the 1952 constitution stayed in force until 1997. There seems to be a Western bias here; Wikipedia is more likely to treat form-of-government changes of Western countries as country changes whereas if something similar happens in Africa it's merely a name change: e.g. when Zaire was reverted to the Democratic Republic of the Congo, it also went from a one-party totalitarian state to a (nominally) multiparty democracy, yet Wikipedia says Zaire is merely the former name of the DRC. So I'd like to define Polish People's Republic as something like {{place|en|@former official name of:Poland|country|r/Central Europe|;|used from 1947–1989 when the country had a Marxist-Leninist government}} rather than e.g. {{place|en|@official name of:Poland|a <<former>> Marxist-Leninist <<country>> in <<r/Central Europe>> existing from 1947–1989}} or similar; the two categorize differently. The general criterion I'm trying to follow is that if there were significant border changes, it's usually a country change, esp. if the form of government changed simultaneously, but if the borders stayed the same, it's a name change. The concept of "successor country" doesn't really help here because e.g. Russia is the successor of the Soviet Union but I think it's better to treat the USSR -> Russia change as a country change not a name change, since there were major border changes and 15 countries emerged out of the Soviet Union. The main exception I think to the "border" rule is when a colony or dependent territory becomes independent without border changes, because a colony is not a country at all. Thoughts? Benwing2 (talk) 19:23, 2 June 2025 (UTC)

No reply yet but I'm even more convinced that "former country" should not be used when the regime and form of government changes without significant border changes. Cf. Albania, which went from a parliamentary democracy in 1912 to a constitutional monarchy/principality in 1913 to a totalitarian republic in 1925 to a kingdom in 1928 to a Marxist-Leninist one-party state in 1946 and back to a parliamentary democracy in 1991. Each change of government form was accompanied by a change in official name (sometimes with further name changes in the middle, e.g. in 1976 the People's Republic of Albania become the People's Socialist Republic of Albania), but the borders have remained stable since 1913. Logically this is not 6 different countries (even though Wikipedia refers to the People's Socialist Republic of Albania, for example, as a former state) but only one. Benwing2 (talk) 02:48, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

@-sche Pinging you because I see you created a very similar BP discussion a couple of years ago here: Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2023/July#Do_territorial_changes_make_new_definitions_of_countries?. Benwing2 (talk) 04:31, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

I largely agree with you. I agree that "West Germany" is a "former country" (now absorbed into "Germany"). OTOH, how should we treat Federal Republic of Germany? Or People's Republic of China, or United States of America? It seems at least a little bit weird to me that we seem to be treating "Federal Republic of Germany" like either a "former country" or at least a "former name of the Federal Republic of Germany, used prior to 1990". (Maybe it seems less weird to other people?) To me, it raises the question, is the "People's Republic of China" also the former name of a country, and/or a former country, that existed (outside of Hong Kong) until 1997, and then became a different country (and a different # Definition) in 1997 when Hong Kong unified with it? Should we have a bunch of senses at United States of America for each time new states joined? (It's a thorny question.) Perhaps different names which at times have denoted the same entity, but at times haven't, can be treated differently, so e.g. "West Germany" is a former country, but "Federal Republic of Germany" is a continuous country? (Or does that lead to other problems?) - -sche (discuss) 17:48, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

Yeah my instinct is that China is the same country before and after 1997; it would be strange just because it gained Hong Kong (without changing its name or form of government) that it somehow became different. For the matter, on the logic of Albania changing its government without its borders substantially changing, China pre and post-1949 are also the same country, in fact probably the same going back to at least the 1600's when the Manchus conquered China (and maybe before?). Similarly it would seem strange to separate the US into a multitude of different chronological countries with a new country every time the country expanded. By that logic, I suppose we must treat West Germany and Germany as the same country (and in fact our current definitions do so). As for West Germany vs. Federal Republic of Germany, I am loath to give official names of countries independent existences; if we follow that logic, the "Republic of China" pre-1949 would be the same country as Taiwan today even though they occupy drastically different borders. I would rather say that Taiwan is a country that came into existence in 1949 and took the name and some government structures of pre-1949 China, while China merely changed governments but is the same country. I dunno if that ultimately makes sense but in general this is a circle that's hard to square. Benwing2 (talk) 18:21, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

Theres a really good example of "same name different borders" on the Fujian entry. I'm not sure if what I did there was right, please feel free to mess with that entry. Esentially I saw three Fujians: PRC Fujian, ROC Fujian and historical Fujian. 22:14, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

@Ultimateria asked me to see about running a script to convert long raw bulleted lists to {{col}}. The original post was:

Hi, since you worked on column templates (also pinging @This, that and the other) I was wondering if you'd be interested in converting certain bulleted lists to column templates. The target I have in mind is Derived terms and Related terms sections with 6 or more lines in a row beginning with asterisks. I've seen others express that 5 is their preferred max height for bulleted lists, and I agree. I'd exclude See also's because they tend to be less uniform in their contents.

In other words, lists with 5 or fewer raw items would be left alone and the remainder converted to use {{col}} when possible, using the same algorithm that previously converted raw bulleted lists between {{top2}}/{{bottom}}, {{top3}}/{{bottom}}, etc. and {{col-top}}/{{col-bottom}} to use {{col}}. I've been testing this and there are 13,206 pages containing one or more "long" raw list (where "long" means 6 or more items), with an average of 1.022 such lists per page (meaning the vast majority of pages have only a single such list). Of these my script could convert 11,532 or about 87% of them; the ones that couldn't be converted had something weird about them, e.g. using {{desc}}, which causes an immediate rejection of the whole section, or using {{vern}} or {{taxfmt}}, which nearly always result in the section getting rejected. The only potentially sticky issue is lists that should remain unsorted, which will require me to go over the output manually (presumably with a check to see if they're already sorted or almost-sorted, and only checking the ones that aren't).

An example of a section that gets converted is this:

====Derived terms====
* {{l|sv|A-traktor}}
* {{l|sv|EPA-traktor}}
* {{l|sv|jordbrukstraktor}}
* {{l|sv|skogstraktor}}
* {{l|sv|traktordäck}}
* {{l|sv|traktordragen}}
* {{l|sv|traktorfabrik}}
* {{l|sv|traktorgrävare}}
* {{l|sv|traktorkort}}
* {{l|sv|traktormärke}}
* {{l|sv|traktormatning}}
* {{l|sv|traktormodell}}
* {{l|sv|traktormuseum}}
* {{l|sv|traktorpulling}}
* {{l|sv|traktortillverkare}}
* {{l|sv|traktortillverkning}}

which becomes this:

====Derived terms====
{{col|sv
|A-traktor
|EPA-traktor
|jordbrukstraktor
|skogstraktor
|traktordäck
|traktordragen
|traktorfabrik
|traktorgrävare
|traktorkort
|traktormärke
|traktormatning
|traktormodell
|traktormuseum
|traktorpulling
|traktortillverkare
|traktortillverkning
}}

Another slightly more complex example of a section that gets converted is this:

====Derived terms====
* {{l|fa|بچه قورباغه|tr=bačče-qurbâġe}}
* {{l|fa|بچه کونی|tr=bačče-kuni}}
* {{l|fa|بچگی|tr=baččegi}}
* {{l|fa|بچگانه|tr=baččegâne}}
* {{l|fa|دختربچه|tr=doxtar-bačče|t=little girl}}
* {{l|fa|پسربچه|tr=pesar-bačče|t=little boy}}

which becomes

====Derived terms====
{{col|fa
|بچه قورباغه<tr:bačče-qurbâġe>
|بچه کونی<tr:bačče-kuni>
|بچگی<tr:baččegi>
|بچگانه<tr:baččegâne>
|دختربچه<tr:doxtar-bačče><t:little girl>
|پسربچه<tr:pesar-bačče><t:little boy>
}}

Any thoughts? Benwing2 (talk) 03:22, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: My only concern would be about such a change's effect on lists that are intended to be in some order besides alphabetical, which you've already mentioned. For lists whose order would be unchanged by conversion to using {{col}}, I see no downside and one definite upside (columns!), so I'd support that change. 0DF (talk) 12:30, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

Generally support. Vininn126 (talk) 12:36, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

Strong support — Fenakhay ^{(حيطي · مساهماتي)} 04:39, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

Support This, that and the other (talk) 23:14, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

Support, but why only for lists of 6 and more? I would support this change for all raw bullet lists under the given headers.

Stujul (talk) 13:35, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

Support, including limiting this to lists of 6 or more. I find the blue background unnecessary when there's no actual table there. — Sgconlaw (talk) 22:12, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

Currently running. There was overall strong support and no complaints. @Stujul wanted it done for lists of any length but some people wanted to keep the restriction to >= 6 elements so for the moment I'm only converting those. I manually went through all 11,200+ lists to be converted and picked out the ones that looked like they needed sorting turned off, and had the bot script add |sort=0 to those lists to turn off sorting. There may be a few that I missed, particularly if the list was in some weird language I can't read (esp. in a script I also can't read, e.g. Ge'ez, Georgian, Tibetan) and didn't include any English glosses that would clue me into the fact that the list is describing entities with an inherent order (e.g. days of the week, numerals, months of the year, etc.). I spot checked several of these and didn't find any that needed sorting turned off, and the order is preserved in the Wikitext, so if anyone finds any such list, just add |sort=0 to the {{col}} call and sorting will be disabled. Note also that among these were several thousand Russian terms that I created some years ago, and several hundred more Bulgarian terms created mostly by someone else, where the Related terms had a vague logical order, trying to list the most related terms first. I made a judgment call for these that it wasn't worth preserving the unsorted order, as the logic is often not apparent to a reader and it may just make things more confusing to keep them unsorted. But if we want to make these all unsorted, it's not too hard to do by bot. Also about 7% of the potentially convertible lists couldn't actually be converted due to weird formatting, use of {{desc}} or some other issue. Benwing2 (talk) 05:29, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: The bot run so far has recoded lists properly, judging by the entries on my watchlist that have been affected. Good job, Benwing! 0DF (talk) 13:21, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

If I use the template {{sw-IPA}} on the page ng'ombe, it throws an error that seems due to {{PAGENAME}} passing on the string ng'ombe instead of ng'ombe. I could patch up the module to correct this, but it’s a nuisance. Is this a known bug/feature? MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 03:40, 3 June 2025 (UTC)

Talk:swoop#Police_swooped_down_on_dozens_of_apartments. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:E554:283:652D:79BD 23:00, 4 June 2025 (UTC)

Mmmm, and you are posting this here for what reason? — Sgconlaw (talk) 12:42, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

Sense - One who is or exists 90.160.97.109 17:33, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

I would say "none", since "Beer Parlor" is a misspelling... Chuck Entz (talk) 01:48, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

IMO those two terms are synonymous with and less clear than By surface analysis... (more common and templated) and should be deprecated. IIRC @Polomo47 has said surface analysis should be used only if the the term was formed in an ancestor language, but its definition doesn't say this, and I've seen it used for words formed differently. Davi6596 (talk) 11:56, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

I said that based on our Glossary definition of the term. I wonder which definition is correct... Polomo47 (talk) 12:28, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

The entry's definition is more practical (for being easily derived from the term's components in Wiktionary's context) and broader. By surface analysis doesn't contain a technical term, unlike "Morphologically", and isn't as vague as Equivalent to. Davi6596 (talk) 12:44, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

We've had this discussion a few times, and at the moment it seems like the wording used by {{surf}} ("By surface analysis") has the broadest support. (Note that "analysable as" has also been used in some entries.) — Sgconlaw (talk) 13:11, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

What Davi is talking about is different. We’re asking what the definition of a {{surface analysis}} is. Polomo47 (talk) 13:20, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

@Polomo47: the title of the discussion is "Getting rid of 'Equivalent to' and 'Morphologically'", so I assume @Davi6596 is proposing changing the wording in entries. — Sgconlaw (talk) 13:26, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

To use exclusively {{surf}}, not to stop using {{surf}}. But then we need to know what a surface analysis is, because the Glossary disagrees with the entry. Polomo47 (talk) 14:50, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

Would replacing all of those with "Analyzable as" be an issue? Some, even those who support "surface analysis", complain about the word "surface" possibly having a negative connotation. Davi6596 (talk) 14:10, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

@Davi6596: that was my suggestion, but there didn't seem to be a lot of support for it at the time. — Sgconlaw (talk) 15:04, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

I just created a vote for this topic. Davi6596 (talk) 18:15, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

I’d probably vote in favour, in the interest of standardization and all. I still prefer ‘synchronically’, but oh well. Nicodene (talk) 18:35, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

I'd like to get editors' views on the following issues relating to the formatting of the "Pronunciation" sections in entries.

Issue 1: Where there are several audio files in the same accent, whether it is acceptable to arrange them like this:

* {{audio|en|LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-sozology.wav|a=GA}}{{audio|en|En-us-sozology.oga|-}}

• Audio (General American):

  (file)

  (file)

rather than like this:

* {{audio|en|LL-Q1860 (eng)-Naomi Persephone Amethyst (NaomiAmethyst)-sozology.wav|a=GA}}
* {{audio|en|En-us-sozology.oga|a=GA}}

• Audio (General American):

  (file)

• Audio (General American):

  (file)

I'm of the view that the first format saves a bit of space and avoids the redundant text "Audio (General American)". @Fenakhay says "That's not how we format audios". "Wiktionary:Entry layout" and "Wiktionary:Pronunciation" are silent on this issue. Note that this only applies when the multiple audio files relate to the same accent. Files of different accents should of course be on different lines.

Issue 2: Should the line containing the audio file be indented with two asterisks rather than one? I follow "Wiktionary:Entry layout" and "Wiktionary:Pronunciation" in only using one (and think an additional indent is unnecessary for readability), but I have noticed some editors adding an additional indent.

Issue 3: Should full stops always be added as syllable markers in IPA transcriptions, or only in cases where the transcription could be ambiguous, or where the {{IPA}} template counts the number of syllables incorrectly (usually when the cluster /-iəs/ occurs, which the template interprets as one syllable instead of two)? My preference is only to use syllable markers in the latter case.

Issue 4: If an entry has an irregular plural form (one other than a word ending in -s or -es), should we add the pronunciation of that form on the entry page for ease of reference, in addition to the pronunciation appearing on the page of the plural itself?

Thanks for your views. If a consensus is reached and there are no objections, I propose that "Wiktionary:Entry layout" and "Wiktionary:Pronunciation" be updated. (Would a formal vote be advisable?) — Sgconlaw (talk) 13:23, 5 June 2025 (UTC)

I think there is also a case for heteronym entries where a single pronunciation headers may host several pronunciations, the manner of designating parts of speech is in this case entirely up to the editor.

I find either:

adjective

• {{IPA|...}}

verb

• {{IPA|...}}

or:

(adjective):

• {{IPA|...}}

(verb):

• {{IPA|...}}

I personally go for bold, way more eye-catching and better fits the black of bullet points. — Saumache (talk) 21:06, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

My two cents: 1) same line, 2) weak support for deeper indents to distinguish accents, 3) only when there's ambiguity, 4) on the page itself, bonus) bold. Ultimateria (talk) 01:59, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

1) I agree, the same line is better. 2) Deeper indents for accents is definitely better; particularly when there are national accents under which more regional accents can be included - like on the page for and with transcriptions for Ireland and Dublin. In future, we will only have more accents, so it would be a good convention to establish. 3) All entries should have syllable breaks. 4) Yes.

|

What are everybody's thoughts on narrow IPA transcriptions for pronunciation sections? I find myself guilty of mixing broad and narrow all the time. Pvanp7 (talk) 07:17, 4 July 2025 (UTC)

Too many users have been adding random topics to the topic pages. I believe that all additions to topics should be prior-cleared at the Beer parlour; otherwise we just end up with a mess of randomness. I have followed this practice myself when proposing adding new topics. For this reason I upped the protection of all topic pages to autopatroller; previously it was set to autoconfirmed for almost all of the pages, which is just too lax. Benwing2 (talk) 02:06, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

I'd have upped it to “template editors and administrators”, since any additions should be reviewed beforehand through a request page like WT:Category tree requests. — Fenakhay ^{(حيطي · مساهماتي)} 04:14, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

That's a good idea. Let's see what others have to say, but unless there are objections, I'll create that page along with some instructions. Benwing2 (talk) 04:19, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

No objection. — Sgconlaw (talk) 04:48, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

Makes sense to have a request page for category tree changes. – wpi (talk) 17:23, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

@Fenakhay: Would template editors and administrators also be bound to follow that request process? 0DF (talk) 11:27, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

I would say yes, following the spirit of the law. It is the same with WT:Language treatment requests. There may need to be technical changes made that don't affect the underlying semantics, which usually won't require consensus, but additions of new categories (topics, especially) should in general follow the same process. Benwing2 (talk) 18:22, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: That seems fair and agreeable. 0DF (talk) 13:06, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: I suggest we add a notice in a box at the top of "Module:labels/data/topical" and similar pages stating that substantive changes should be discussed on a specified Wiktionary request page. — Sgconlaw (talk) 19:11, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

@Sgconlaw Sounds good. Should we have a separate request page for category tree and label requests, or combine them? Benwing2 (talk) 19:23, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: I'd say have them on the same page. It may be confusing to have too many separate request pages. — Sgconlaw (talk) 20:03, 6 June 2025 (UTC)

OK, I created WT:Category and label treatment requests, shortcut WT:CLTR. Benwing2 (talk) 08:08, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

Should previous discussions in RFM and RFDO relating to categories and labels also be moved to CLTR? – wpi (talk) 10:42, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

@Wpi Yes that would be a good idea. If you could help with this it would be great. Benwing2 (talk) 22:01, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

In Categories: Regional varieties of a language, at the moment, only 'label' languages appear. But there may be also autonomous dialect Sectors with their own code for which the reader is unaware. Example: Category:Varieties of Greek, i.e. Modern Greek. Its subcat Category:Regional Greek includes various idioms (created with labels). The reader is not informed of the major modern regional dialects of the language; I had to add them manually on top of the page. Is this a problem with many languages? Could it be fixed? Thank you ‑‑Sarri.greek ^♫ I 07:33, 7 June 2025 (UTC)

I just changed Module:links to use the same expanded set of POS aliases that {{head}} has been using; see the small set in Module:links/data vs. the expanded set in Module:headword/data. Hopefully nothing will break. The only breakage I can see ensuing is if people are (ab)using pos= for non-glosses to avoid the quoting of t=. IMO we should really add a separate param for this, something like ng=. Benwing2 (talk) 02:54, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

I'd be inclined to follow the OED's wont of not adding pronunciation informations to obsolete words/word forms. Historical pronunciation could well be added but only propped by substantial sources; I'd also have audio files formally dismissed for credibility. Have we any guideline on the subject, if not could something be written at Wiktionary:Pronunciation?

P.S. While I'm here, in heteronymic entries, should I write Pronunciation 1 anyway if there is no Pronunciation 2-n in the entry? Saumache (talk) 14:17, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

This is something that should probably be handled on a lect-by-lect basis. For Polish, I don't see the issue including some audio for obsolete standard words, but not dialectal, for example. When it comes to say Middle Polish, then never. Vininn126 (talk) 14:33, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

I wasn't precise enough, I'm thinking of pre-Great Vowel Shift/Early Modern English, maybe a little further up the 18th century but I'm afraid I am not learned enough in English phonological history. Saumache (talk) 14:53, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

We don't do historical pronunciations for terms in current use, so having them just for obsolete ones would be deceptive. A word with perfectly normal pronunciation for the time which was homophonous or rhymed with others that have since changed their pronunciation would seem more unusual than it really was. Then there's the matter of terms that were more important in earlier times, but survived long enough to change their pronunciation- do we show the pronunciations from their heyday, or from when they were just obscure archaisms? Just about everything that was around throughout the Early Modern English period has different pronunciations for different periods, including a lot of modern English. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:37, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Indeed, so cut them off short? Here's the (very bad) edit from an editor I later found to be non other than Wonderfool that made me ask this. Saumache (talk) 15:49, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Maybe the IPA or stray syntax was confusing, but the second pronunciation (for the verb) seems to not be with /-ət/. Hftf (talk) 16:15, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

I know and had left it lacking when recently editing the page, bearing the self same convictions I bore when starting this one thread; he himself put /-ət/ "instead of" /-eɪt/, but it was to be deleted regardless. Saumache (talk) 16:57, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Er, we do list historical pronunciations for terms in current use, e.g. great, one, hoarse — in general, as far as I have seen, if we have the references to show certain pronunciation information, we (can) show it. (That also solves the question "do we show the pronunciations from their heyday, or from when they were just obscure": whatever references let us be sure of, labelled appropriately.) Similarly, the last time I recall someone proposing to not list pronunciations for obsolete words, it happened that the obsolete word that prompted the discussion and which they doubted had a knowable pronunciation (it was Wikitiki re proditor), had its pronunciation given in various old and new dictionaries, and was also used as the name of a character in an old play (still studied and probably sometimes performed) and still encountered today. In general a Procrustean prohibition on listing any "obsolete" (words') pronunciations is a bad idea. If there's no way to know what a certain pronunciation is or was, then it doesn't matter whether it's an obsolete word or pronunciation, or whether some IP has claimed /pu/ to be the pronunciation of pho presently used in the Forest of Dean — if we can't verify it, remove it; OTOH, many old words' pronunciations are as knowable as their definitions or anything else. - -sche (discuss) 16:10, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks for the replies, the page I had in mind definitely does not fall into the category of proditor. Now for the formatting query? Saumache (talk) 17:01, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

@Saumache There is generally no need for Pronunciation 1 under any circumstances. If there are different pronunciations per Etymology section, put the Pronunciation section under the corresponding Etymology section. If a single Etymology section has two pronunciations, identify them using qualifiers e.g. {{q|noun}}, {{q|adjective}} or whatever. Benwing2 (talk) 17:11, 8 June 2025 (UTC)

Pinging @Ardahan Karabağ @Bartanaqa @Blueskies006 @BurakD53 @Rttle1 @Xenos melophilos @Yorınçga573 @몽골어_물리 (ping more if you know other people who can help)

Proto-Turkic and Old Turkic entries (still) do not have a uniform system of transcription. These two questions come to mind:

1. What letters should we use to represent the sounds /ɛ/ and /e/?
   • Here are the current transcription trends:
   1. ä v. e (umlaut a and e; most Orkhon Turkic pages, some other Old Turkic pages)
   2. e v. é (two e's distinguished by an acute; most Old Uyghur and Yenisei Kyrgyz pages, some other Old Turkic pages)
   3. e v. ẹ (two e's distinguished by a dot; chiefly Proto-Turkic pages)
2. What letters should we use to represent the sounds that the velar unvoiced and voiced stops, /k/ and /g/, before back vowels /a/, /ɯ/, /o/ and /u/?
   • In this case, there is not really a noteworthy trend, but more often than not one of these four is implemented:
   1. ka & ga (left unchanged; almost all Proto-Turkic pages)
   2. qa & ɣa (pseudo-phonetic transcription; seen frequently in Orkhon/Yenisei T pages)
   3. ḳa & ġa (dots implanted; all Old Uyghur pages, rarely also some other Old Turkic pages)
   4. qa & γa (forked from the pseudo-phonetic transcription using Greek gamma, rarest of all four)

Not as dire as these two, but we might also need to come to a consensus on these additional questions:

1. Should Proto-Turkic pages use *h- for the cases where it is preserved in Khalaj?
   • See *ürüŋ >< hürün; *ȫl >< hö̂l
2. Should the suffixes follow traditional Turcologist transcriptions and denote vowels that abide by vowel harmony in capital letters, or should a default vowel be assumed?
   • Should it be *-lig, *-lXg or *-li⁴g?
3. Should we use + instead of - for suffixes that append to nouns, as is common in Turcologist transcription?
   • Compare *-iŋ (second person plural imperative verbal suffix) and +iŋ (positive genitive nominal case suffix)

AmaçsızBirKişi (talk) 20:29, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

I propose we follow this scheme:

1. We should use ä v. e, as is most common in dictionaries and works on Turkic languages
2. We should use ḳa & ġa, as we are not perfectly sure about the phonetic qualities of the phonemes k- and g- before back vowels. Using q- and ɣ- might give the impression of an uvular place of articulation, and leaving them bare like k- and g- might cause confusion. These were not the same sounds, most likely, after all.
3. Initial *h- for such reconstructed lemmas.
4. I'm fine with either one.
5. Same as above.

If you think I've missed something, mention it in this thread.

AmaçsızBirKişi (talk) 20:45, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

Can we also add ḏ - δ, x - χ - ḫ - ḥ while were at it Bartanaqa (talk) 21:22, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

For those, I propose ð, x and ḥ.

It would look something like this: aðaḳ, axïr, burḥan.

Using Greek letters is really unnecessary when we already have Latin script equivalents, plus the ḥ (another sound we are not a 100% sure about) would go alongside ḳ and ġ both aesthetically and logically.

AmaçsızBirKişi (talk) 21:44, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

1. e - ẹ to be alligned w proto turkic pages + ä feels like /æ/ instead of /ɛ/ and i fear it looks lowkey ugly. Ottoman turkish and oat pages also use e for /ɛ/ and it js looks better, also most turcologists use "e" for that.

2.q and ğ or ġ. q is the only logical way to transcribe ق and it also lines up with its value on IPA. I don't know the value of غ but idrm if its ğ or ġ, but i js think ġ looks cooler.

3. Even tho its probably *h- theres js not enough descendants other than khalaj to make sure it was in fact *h-

4. current one is the best i think -lXg -li⁴g etc. are js confusing

5. - is fine

• Also for the extra ones i added:
  • ذ - ḏ to line up w current arabic pages and clauson (also i just think this looks better)
  • خ - x is fine
  • I dont know what ḥ is in old uyghur but its usually used for ح (ḥ) which is a breathy h.

So overall speaking purely for Karakhanid things should look like اَذَقْ (/⁠aḏaq⁠/), خُمارُو (/⁠xumaru⁠/), اَغٖيرْ (/⁠aġï̄r⁠/), یُلُغْ (/⁠yoluġ⁠/), كِرْتُو (/⁠kẹrtü⁠/). Bartanaqa (talk) 23:44, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

I don’t want to come across as anti-innovation here. If I were to support anything, I would support the use of ḏ. However, except for suffixes, there is no instance where a d appears without representing what ḏ represents. So the presence of ḏ doesn’t indicate anything else. Still, it’s the most reasonable letter to be added, but even then, it’s unnecessary. The use of q and ğ is completely unnecessary. There is no word in Proto-Turkic without vowel harmony that would require a separate letter for such sounds. In the Orkhon script, every consonant has both a soft and a hard form. Are we now going to assign a separate letter for each one? Of course not. It’s already determined by vowel harmony. Even words borrowed from foreign languages were subjected to vowel harmony, they were adapted. In other words, nothing beyond the treatment applied to later Arabic and Persian loanwords has been done. So it’s not reasonable to talk about a need for q, ğ, or their derivatives in Proto-Turkic. BurakD53 (talk) 00:50, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Also, unless you prove the existence of ḥ in the Proto-Turkic language, you cannot justify it with a reasonable basis. If it did exist, why was it absent in Orkhon Turkic? Why were the ones found in later periods only secondary? BurakD53 (talk) 00:56, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

In Proto-Turkic, what a letter represents in IPA has nothing to do with what it represents in writing. We don’t change the letters of all lemmas just because some letters look similar. This is Wiktionary, we can't just replace one letter with another simply because it looks bad or supposedly looks better this way, without providing a rational explanation. Whatever letter was used at the time had a reason behind it, and if you want to change it now, you need a rational reason, not a visual one. BurakD53 (talk) 01:02, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Also FYI we are talking about attested older turkic languages when we r talking about ذ ح خ ق غ etc since proto turkic yk wasnt attested Bartanaqa (talk) 01:13, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

If, say, we were going to reconstruct Proto-Bulgar or another language, we already use those letters anyway. But here, we’re talking about adding ġ and ḳ or ğ and q to Proto-Turkic. I still don’t fully understand why that’s necessary. There's also a suggestion to replace e with ä. There are 942 Proto-Turkic lemmas on the site. More than half of them include these letters. You need to convince me that changing all of these lemmas is reasonable and necessary. BurakD53 (talk) 01:26, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

I dont think anyone here is talking about q ğ/e ä in proto turkic we are talking about standardizing the older turkic (old uyghur, orkhon turkic, karakhanid) languages which have separate letters for q-ğ. I think no one here is offering to reconstruct *aḏaq we are tryna make it so that people do not transliterate the same attested word as aδaq/aðaḳ/aḏaḳ etc Bartanaqa (talk) 01:35, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

There are too many topics here one after another. I focused more on the Proto-Turkic parts, sorry. Standardization might be necessary for Orkhon Turkic, Old Uyghur and Karakhanid Turkic. However, which specific letter is used doesn’t matter to me. All of these are okay for me. BurakD53 (talk) 01:52, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

Sure, what a letter represents in IPA has nothing to do with what we write, but I believe there were already more than enough justifications for using ḳ & ġ - and we may be better off scraping different sources for conflicting transcriptions and come up with our own. When was the most recent (sizable) reconstruction of Proto-Turkic again?

Our current scheme of combining both k's and g's come from EDAL. Other works on Turkic separates these two, why shouldn't we?

Same argument applies to ä/e/é and the additional sounds found in Old Uyghur and Karakhanid.

AmaçsızBirKişi (talk) 16:47, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

For the record, q is the only correct way to transcribe ق (q) idrc about what yall do with old turkic and old uyghur Bartanaqa (talk) 17:24, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

speaking purely for Karakhanid

—me above

Bartanaqa (talk) 01:05, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

1. I think we can use ä

2. ḳa & ġa is ok for me, since I find it more appropriate for PT, OTK and OUI.

3. Even though I support an initial *h-, I am not sure if we should change the PT entries even it is preserved in Khalaj. We can't know though if it is indeed a Khalaj innovation.

4. I don't mind it tbh, we can keep it the same. It doesn't really matter. The alternative forms are already seen in the table.

5. - is fine for all types of affixes. Ardahan Karabağ (talk) 21:31, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

I'll remain a status quo supporter on this matter. I believe the current system should be preserved. We don't need additional consonants and current vowel spelling is also okay. In the structuring of four- and two-form suffixes, capital letters may be used. Suffixes attached to nouns and those attached to verbs can also be separated with + and -. This is highly academic. I support that but I think here is too complicated, we can start another discuss for it. Oppose BurakD53 (talk) 22:13, 9 June 2025 (UTC)

1. It is very difficult to find the letter e with dot under it on the keyboard. It is not available on either the English or Turkish keyboards. The change would make our job easier. ä and e or e and é use, both okay. But I would prefer e and é because that's the symbol we use for palatal r and l and, it's easier to move. Support

2. It is not economic. Oppose

3. Controversial. But maybe we can add h in parenthesis. Abstain

4. Support

5. Support BurakD53 (talk) 12:23, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

1. I support ä-e, since it's more understandable for the readers.

2. I think it's better to keep it as k and g (as in PT pages), because q and ğ were only allophones of the same phoneme. There likely was also l-ɫ allophony, as in modern Turkic languages.

3. As far as I know Khalaj h- can also be innovated. Maybe we should take Proto-Tungusic and Proto-Mongolic into account, since it seems that h- often corresponds to Proto-Tungusic p- and Proto-Mongolic h- (see "A Grammar of Old Turkic", p. 102)? For example see *ur-. In that case we can be more sure about the reconstruction.

4. I'd like to keep it as it is, but I don't mind if you change it.

5. I'm fine with either one, but I haven't seen + on wiktionary yet, so wouldn't - be more consistent with other wiktionary systems? Rttle1 (talk) 08:06, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

7. Support 몽골어 물리 (talk)

According to the majority consensus, e will be rendered as ä, and ẹ as e. Reasons:

1. The difficulty of typing the character ẹ on standard keyboards.
2. The frequent use of the letter ä for the open e sound in the written forms of Turkic languages (in almost all that use the Latin alphabet).
3. The use of the ä character for the same purpose in other reconstructed languages on Wiktionary. (Proto-Finnic)
4. The shared view of Wiktionary’s Proto-Turkic contributors on this (e - ä) matter, if there is no opposition. (Got 5 supports out of 6? Supported by 몽골어 물리, Bartanaqa, Rttle1, AmaçsızBirKişi, Ardahan Karabağ) BurakD53 (talk) 18:46, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Can everyone wrtie their support or oppose in one word. @Yorınçga573, @Surjection, @Blueskies006, @Itidal, @Allahverdi Verdizade, @Allahverdi Verdizade a.k.a. Verdi, @Allahverdi Verdizade on a flying visit, @allahverdi, @Keleci, @Əkrəm, @Ryungja – BurakD53 (talk) 19:01, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Like this.

Support for e é

Abstain for ä e

– BurakD53 (talk) 19:03, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Support for ä-e.

Kinda unrelated, but guess the velar transcription can be done on a case-by-case basis. I don't think we could be able to get everyone on board for a uniform transcription of k/g.

AmaçsızBirKişi (talk) 19:08, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Support e - é Bartanaqa (talk) 04:57, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

Support for e é Ardahan Karabağ (talk) 20:26, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

abstain for all; all due respect, i don't think i'm knowledgeable enough to have a say in such a topic :3 əkrəm. 14:26, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

Support for ä-e Yorınçga573 (talk) 18:09, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

Is initial *h based on anything other than Khalaj? Allahverdi Verdizade on a flying visit (talk) 01:01, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

Mongolic borrowings seem to imply its existence, for example öküz > hökür, and we know mongolic *h- develops from earlier *p- via Para-Mongolic languages such as Khitan (Khitan pon vs Mongolic hon for example), outside of external families though, there really isn't internal evidence. Yorınçga573 (talk) 19:50, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

interesting. Allahverdi Verdizade on a flying visit (talk) 07:03, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

So theoretically, there is a possibility that we could reconstruct *h- for pCommon Turkic, and that the Mongolic borrowings are thence. Allahverdi Verdizade on a flying visit (talk) 09:20, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Support for e/é

Trimpulot (talk) 04:59, 3 July 2025 (UTC)

I've only ever dealt with Orkhon Turkic, so I don't know how significant my contribution can be, but I'm going to propose what system I personally like to use for it: as for the velars/dorsals plosives, I'd say there is no need to write them any differently before back vowel sounds, since they aren't separate phonemes, so k and g are enough. As for the vowels, any of ä/e or e/é are fine, though given how rare /e/ is compared to /ɛ/, I'd rather the latter method. I'd also like to propose other changes in transcription, to be more aligned with general Turkic spelling conventions, like swapping č for ç (or c, as is done for Kyrgyz), ï for ı, š for ş, ŋ for ñ. For example: 𐰸𐰆𐰪 (q̊¹uń /⁠koń or maybe koň⁠/), 𐰲 (č /⁠aç- or ac-⁠/) etc.

Trimpulot (talk) 10:23, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

I've added form-of directives to {{place}} for categorization purposes, but I'm not totally satisfied with the way they look. Originally I had this (using FYROM for an example):

Acronym of former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, former long form of North Macedonia, a country in Southeast Europe on the Balkan Peninsula.

But the mixture of italics, bold and upright seemed weird, so I asked at Discord, and based on feedback (granted, it was only one person), I removed the italics and bolding, leading to this:

Acronym of former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, former long form of North Macedonia, a country in Southeast Europe on the Balkan Peninsula.

OTOH This looks rather spare to me, and it conflicts with the current handling of form-of templates. So:

1. How should we display this?
2. What's the general principle here, if any?

Benwing2 (talk) 05:17, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

We should keep at least the italics, because they mark that the definition is not a gloss ("FYROM" doesn't mean "acronym of ...", it is an acronym of...). It'd probably look somewhat better if there was a semicolon between the italic and non-italic parts. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 18:03, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

Thanks. How do these look?

Acronym of former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, former long form of North Macedonia: a country in Southeast Europe on the Balkan Peninsula.

or

Acronym of former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, former long form of North Macedonia: a country in Southeast Europe on the Balkan Peninsula.

I used a colon instead of a semicolon because it seems to look better that way. Benwing2 (talk) 20:47, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

Colons are also OK. I don't really have an opinion regarding the bolding, but I always assumed that is how mentions appear in otherwise italic text (since mentions are italic by default, which would make them indistinguishable). — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 19:40, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

OK thanks. I will go with the first look for now, with bolding, and we can always change it later if necessary. Benwing2 (talk) 19:45, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

To reiterate my message at Template talk:place § Italics for nicknames (which started this discussion), I agree with Surjection that we should use italics for non-gloss parts, as is standard. J3133 (talk) 06:40, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

Do you have any thoughts on bold vs. non-bold? I have been waiting on further input before implementing. Benwing2 (talk) 06:48, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: This was implemented but the (e.g., “Ellipsis of the People's Republic of China”) should not be in italics. J3133 (talk) 01:47, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

@J3133 I struggled with this. Originally as I implemented this, it had Ellipsis of the People's Republic of China, which looked weird to me, so I tried Ellipsis of the People's Republic of China, which also looked weird, so I finally settled on what we have. Why do you believe that "the" should not be in italics, and @Surjection do you have any thoughts? Benwing2 (talk) 02:12, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: It is part of the gloss; I assume this was also your reason for the original implementation. J3133 (talk) 02:14, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

Yes, but if by "gloss" you mean the term following the directive ellipsis of, it kind-of is, and kind-of isn't part of the gloss. And do you recommend boldface or no boldface? Benwing2 (talk) 02:28, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

(moved to WT:CLTR)

2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:F51C:47C9:D2A4:F374 19:45, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

This is because exteacher (sans hyphen) is attested, so ex-teacher gets included on account of the coal mine test. This institutional self-contradiction should be resolved by removing ex-teacher as an example from the final paragraph of Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion#Idiomaticity (as well as moving the preceding and to between green-haired, and harsh-sounding); three examples of excluded hyphenated compounds are sufficient. 0DF (talk) 21:09, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

I think an ex- example is good to have, as it uses a prefix, unlike the other examples. 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:F51C:47C9:D2A4:F374 21:12, 10 June 2025 (UTC)

How about "ex-shoemaker"? Or maybe something with "anti-" or "non-". CitationsFreak (talk) 10:07, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

ex-xenagogue?  ​‑‑Lambiam 17:24, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Noticing this edit today, and this similar edit in 2024, I wonder if we have a standard letter for transliterating this...? Conversely, would people prefer to always transliterate ע with the same symbol regardless of whether it's representing /ɣ~ʁ/ or /ʕ/, and just mention which of those it is using words, like the first edit does, whenever that's relevant (as it seems to be in this case and would also be here, to explain why the descendants have g sounds)? - -sche (discuss) 02:34, 11 June 2025 (UTC)

I would support using ġ like this. More generally, however, our transliteration of Hebrew is an utter mess, with a random mixture of Biblical-type and modern Israeli-type transliterations. I think at this point we're overdue for a rethink, and possibly support for listing multiple transliterations, as I don't see how using just one or the other consistently is going to satisfy anyone. Benwing2 (talk) 20:52, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

Should the user User:Purplebackpackonthetrail be blocked, in line with User:Purplebackpack89? 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:CEA:192D:11B6:D5E6 23:01, 12 June 2025 (UTC)

• Nah. We've allowed other people to have, like, unlimited accounts. I can't remember who, though... Lfellet (talk) 22:13, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

At stehen auf at the moment, we only have a conjugation of aufstehen. But "stehen auf" in German is also a phrasal verb - "ich stehe auf dich" means "I fancy you". We define this instead at stehen - "(intransitive, colloquial) to have a thing for, to fancy ".

Is there something we can put at stehen auf that directs people to this sense? It's not automatically bad we treat German phrasal verbs differently to English ones (we have an entry for stand for, but its direct German equivalent "stehen für" is a sense at stehen), but I'm not sure where a user would expect to find the definition of "ich stehe auf dich". Smurrayinchester (talk) 09:49, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

I don't think it should be listed on stehen auf, but rather auf jemanden stehen (the preposition usually comes first), as a redirect. See for example https://www.dwds.de/wb/stehen#d-1-17. I'm not sure if this makes it more findable, though. (Alternatively, a "see also" section with link directly to the sense at stehen). Jberkel 23:59, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

A few weeks ago, @Saph used a bot to replace the usage of {{#babel}} extension with the {{babel}} template. Not only the instances of using the extension were replaced with the template, using the extension was made completely impossible by an AbuseFilter.

I edit the English Wiktionary quite often, but I rarely participate in policy discussions. This was apparently done according to a discussion at Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2025/February#Babel rework. I wasn't aware of it, but I acknowledge that it was not done totally out of the blue.

It is, nevertheless, problematic. Some immediate issues:

1. It forks the English Wiktionary's implementation of the Babel boxes without a very good reason. In software engineering, forking is not always wrong, but there should be a good reason for it. In this case, it looks like there wasn't. For example, what if the features that the English Wiktionary community adds are also useful to the French or Dutch Wiktionary, or to Wikipedia, Wikisource, Wikidata, or Commons? They can, in theory, copy the template's code, but this is much less robust than doing it for everyone in one place in the extension.
2. I find a lot of value in being able to use the same syntax for Babel boxes in all the wikis, and I'm quite sure that I'm not alone.
3. Other English Wiktionary users, like @ɶLerman, find the extension valuable for other reasons.

If the English Wiktionary community wants certain features in the Babel extension, it is okay to request them on Phabricator or to submit a patch (although it will have to be in PHP and not in Lua). I might be wrong, but as far as I can tell, the English Wiktionary community didn't even try to request these features.

At the very least, I am asking to remove the AbuseFiter that prohibits to use the extension. Evidently, there is no 100% consensus for it, and there is no truly good reason to prohibit it so strictly. As far as I can see, the usage of the template on my user page doesn't do anything significantly differently from the extension, and I'd love to be able to use the extension's syntax.

And I sincerely invite the deeply-involved participants of the English Wiktionary community to bring up the problems that they find in the extension. Despite rumors to the contrary, it is quite possible to at least try to fix those problems in the extension for everyone's benefit.

For more discussion on this, see User:Saph#About inactive Babel categories and User:Saph#Unconstructive edits by your bot.

Full disclosure: I also happen to be a staff member of the Wikimedia Foundation. In that role, I was involved in developing the Babel extension a little but, but I haven't done anything about it for several years. This message has nothing to do with my staff role, and I'm writing purely as a volunteer English Wiktionary editor and a user of its software platform. Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 21:21, 13 June 2025 (UTC)

First of all, I find your framing a little dishonest. It was just you and Lerman that objected, no "other Wiktionary users" plural. This wasn't something tons of people objected to. Second, since we're having this discussion again, I'm just going to rehash the same things I said on my talk page plus a few other issues:

1. Phabricator tickets take a notoriously long time to complete and working to add all the features from Module:Babel to the extension seems like it would be a ridiculously drawn out process for no real benefit to this project.
2. It's easier to host translations here on Wiktionary where there isn't as high a bar of entry as TranslateWiki.
3. The languages MediaWiki recognises and the languages Module:languages recognises are not the same.
4. Similarly, if we were to add support for script boxes, like the ones that already exist in the module, they would somehow have to be integrated with Module:scripts.
5. While the extension does support a |nocat=1 flag, the consensus per WT:Beer parlour/2025/April#Disabling Babel categorisation for inactive users was to add inactive users to categories like Category:User en (inactive), which the extension does not support, to my knowledge.

Saph (talk) 00:02, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

Well, you asked to bring it up here, so I've just done that.

1. Phabricator tickets may take a long time, and it may seem like it would be a ridiculously drawn out process, but you haven't even tried. And there would be benefit: better code reuse, collaboration, and standardization across wikis.
2. I'm not sure what are you talking about when you say "high a bar of entry as TranslateWiki" (by the way, it's usually spelled "translatewiki" in all small letters). All extension messages are translated there. Add your messages to the extension, and that's it. What's the high bar?
3. "The languages MediaWiki recognises and the languages Module:languages recognises are not the same." - this can probably be easily fixed, even if the list as long. The Babel extension recognizes more than core MediaWiki. I've been investing a lot of time in the last year or so to clean up language code support everywhere, and the road is still long, but it's getting better. Just show an example of something that doesn't work in the Babel extension, and it can be fixed (although for that you should probably remove the AbuseFilter).
4. This sounds to me like a great new feature for the Babel extension. It would be useful for a lot of wikis, and easy to add, too.
5. This can be fixed, too.

Points 1 and 2 are meta-issues; 1 is sometimes true, but it doesn't mean that you shouldn't try, and 2 just seems not true.

It would be great if you could file points 3, 4, and 5 as Phabricator tasks, with examples of how it works in the template. (I would do it myself, but you probably have more context.) Amir E. Aharoni (talk) 02:20, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

By a high bar of entry I mean you have to get approved as a translator to do anything, unless something has changed since I signed up there. Most of the Babel data modules here just require you to be autoconfirmed.

I'm not sure what it takes for a language to get added to MediaWiki or when it needs to, but I would assume reconstructed languages like ine-pro wouldn't get added, right? Either way, I'm concerned about keeping the two in sync, and I have the same concern about scripts, but I guess it wouldn't be too much of an issue practically since not all of the languages that get added here are going to be translated.

Anyway, if the extension can be modified to be able to do all the same things as the module, then I have no problem with it. I can make a Phab ticket later about adding an |inactive=1 flag and then the AbuseFilter can probably be disabled, but as for the rest, I'm not sure I'm familiar enough with Phabricator to even know where to start. Saph (talk) 03:45, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

I've created the task for adding |inactive=1. phab:T396916 Saph (talk) 08:49, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

Hasn't been touched for a month, lol. Proving my point. Saph (talk) 20:42, 11 July 2025 (UTC)

Regarding translatewiki: as of 2015, when problems with the Greenlandic templates were reported, and 2023, when issues with #babel were discussed again, and 2025 when I tried again now, I and other users found ourselves unable to log into and/or edit translatewiki—so translatewiki's Greenlandic #babel levels 1-5 are still not Greenlandic. (After I raised the issue on en.WP, someone fixed only kl-0.)
Re the languages MediaWiki recognizes and the languages Module:languages recognizes being different: as noted in the 2023 discussion, it is not just that en.Wiktionary recognizes additional languages, which someone could potentially agree to auto-add into the #babel system, it is also that the #babel system splits some things that we recognize as single languages. I would not assume that every time one community (say en.Wiktionary) reaches a decision, e.g. about whether to treat a lect as a separate language or as a subvariety of something else, other communities made up of somewhat different people (e.g. on translatewiki or phabricator) will always agree on the same decision. So, if en.Wiktionary is maintaining itself—its own L2s and categories like "Foo nouns"—but a different community is making decisions about what our "User lang foo" categories are, the two will not be in sync the way that they can be if we maintain both. I concede we could probably deal with "#babel splitting things that we lump" by categorizing, i.e. let "CAT:User hbo 4" exist but categorize it into "CAT:User he 4" so that someone who sees a he entry with a problem can find who to ping; how to deal with "#babel lumps together things we regard as separate languages" is less obvious (in 2023 I did consider making the "lumper" categories, e.g. "CAT:User eml-4", into subcategories of the "split" categories, "CAT:User egl-4" and "CAT:User rgn-4"). - -sche (discuss) 05:19, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

I agree with what @Saph has done. I am a software engineer, and I understand the issue with forking but it is sometimes necessary when the upstream code is not under your control and you can't trust the owners of the upstream code to work with you in a timely fashion to fix things you need fixed. This was precisely the reason why the Graph extension was disabled by MediaWiki and rewritten in-house as the Chart extension; I presume as a staff member of the Wikimedia Foundation you are aware of this issue. Also, the Babel extension overall is not terribly complex in the scheme of things, so it's not like the forking and rewriting is duplicating a massive amount of effort. You write "I find a lot of value in being able to use the same syntax for Babel boxes in all the wikis, and I'm quite sure that I'm not alone", but AFAIK, Saph made a point of preserving the same syntax, modulo the trivial differences in invoking it using {{Babel|...}} instead of {{#babel|...}}. Benwing2 (talk) 19:43, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

Frankly, issues such as the memory errors being fixed only after six years (T165935), the debacle with MobileFrontend expanding all sections automatically on mobile (T376446) and the main search page on wiktionary.org being broken for several days (T391297) has given this community an entirely justified distrust that anything will ever get done when requested through the Phabricator. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 16:30, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

As a sidenote, my initial guess on T391297 that it would take several months for the proposed feature replacement to be introduced turned out to be rather accurate, despite some calling it pessimistic when I first made it. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 16:32, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

It's worth noting that I took it upon myself to shepherd the search box fix into production, because nobody else seemed very interested in progressing it... This, that and the other (talk) 23:48, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

Other honourable mentions include the stale per-category collation patch (T30397) (yes, T30397, not a typo; it was old back in 2015, and extremely extremely old by now), renaming ill-formatted CSS classes affecting page appearance after only seven months (T337741), and WMF developers removing a gadget earlier this month without understanding/asking what it actually does (despite the description clearly saying "disable at your own risk") simply because it "is clearly severely impacting reader experience", and severely broke the mobile view (T396005) instead. – wpi (talk) 18:43, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

• Gosh, UCOC really does love its bureaucracy. I still hope that there's a section stating that on-wiki sarcasm is prohibited, unless it ends with the UCoC-validated sarcasm emoji, which is the eggplant.... Lfellet (talk) 22:20, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

  Since the appropriate emoji is missing, I can only assume that this comment is not intended to be sarcastic.  ​‑‑Lambiam 17:18, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

The etymology of like it or not reads

Ellipsis of whether you like it or not. JMGN (talk) 19:14, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

These sorts of uses should be fixed to link the individual words, since the full expression is SOP. Benwing2 (talk) 19:52, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2 Where shall we request it? JMGN (talk) 20:04, 14 June 2025 (UTC)

Somebody already fixed it. (The larger phrase won't be getting an entry because it is SoP.) Quercus solaris (talk) 22:58, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

@Quercus solaris That's exactly why it makes no sense? We even have like it or not, which cannot show up as a lexical chunk because of this... JMGN (talk) 23:10, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

Ah, I see. Thus (by that argument) both like it or not and believe it or not, plus many other phrases, would be put up for RfD. Perhaps there is an argument invoking WT:THUB and WT:Phrasebook (for ESL) to save some of them, including these ones. Godspeed to anyone who wants to work on it. The way to request a deletion is by placing an RfD tag to prompt a discussion of each one. Quercus solaris (talk) 23:16, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

(Withdrawn own comment.) 17:14, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

Why must this be corrected "immediately"? Wikipedia, for example, uses "Xinjiang" and "Guangxi" as the common names of the autonomous regions. We are not the PRC, we can do what we want, and adding "Uyghur" to the name isn't going to make the PRC treat the Uyghurs any better. Benwing2 (talk) 18:18, 15 June 2025 (UTC)

@Geographyinitiative I don't understand why you "withdrew" (i.e. deleted) your own comment. What is uncivil about it? I don't like the precedent being set, whatever it is. Benwing2 (talk) 21:12, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Geographyinitiative does a lot of good work, but they tend to overdramatize things: they see ordinary things people say or do as outrageously good or bad, and they post things they consider to be Very Important!!!, only to decide later that they are instead Unspeakably Awful!!! and they retract them. I hope they learn to see things as good or bad, but mostly boring- like the rest of us. Chuck Entz (talk) 22:00, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

As in not only … but also. Shouldn't ellipses follow the first term without any intervening space? JMGN (talk) 09:40, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

At least in English, that orthographic detail depends on whose style guide you're following, as it is not universally standardized. (As for en.wikt's own, I glanced there for handling of the ellipsis and didn't see it, but I didn't look hard.) Quercus solaris (talk) 20:34, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

Looking at the translations, the "..." represents a word, and the spacing indicates whether a space would appear in that position between the word and whatever conjunctions and particles are attached to it. Look at the Arabic and Korean translations at both … and, for example, where a prefix or suffix is used in this construction in those languages and the space disappears. There is a (small) linguistic value to keeping the space. Smurrayinchester (talk) 07:57, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

More languages • Please help translate to your language

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MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 17:44, 17 June 2025 (UTC)

I made this a decade ago after discussions like Talk:vp and Talk:euery, for situations like that where something that is now a different letter (like v) was used as the shape of another letter (like u). Many entries using it today are Norwegian entries like lugt and smoug that should use "obsolete spelling of" instead (or "obsolete form of" if the pronunciation differs). Another big set of uses: æ and œ spellings, which a tiny 2020 discussion did agree should use (something like) this rather than a "spelling of" template.
Since there are only <400 entries using it, I'm considering going through them all with AWB to find and fix ones like smoug that should be "obsolete spelling of" instead. Before I do, I want to check:

1. What kind of entries should use this template? Should preanæsthetic? (The tiny 2020 discussion said yes, but IDK.) Should højr? (AFAICT, no.)
2. Do you think it's still useful to have this template at all, or should everything just be "obsolete spelling of"?
3. Can you think of a better name for it? (In 2012 and 2020, it was noted that the current name has room for improvement.)

(We also have Template:alternative typography of.) - -sche (discuss) 07:06, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

I'm a little confused about what "obsolete typography" exactly means, but I think the obsolete spellings with œ and æ should probably use this template. It could be argued that spellings like coöperate should also use a template of this nature, but then we'd need {{dated typography of}} or something, since these have spellings have mostly been changed to use {{dated spelling of}} or {{dated form of}} (IMO they should usually use the former, but maybe the latter in the case of aëro-, where I assume a different pronunciation is intended than for aero-, and likewise for spellings like cocaïne). Maybe instead they should use a more general template along with a value of |from= that is specific to the particular type of obsoleteness, so they get categorized appropriately (e.g. use of ligatures like æ and œ could be categorized differently from diaresis spellings like coöperate — and see the discussion above about doing exactly this — and different from u/v-type spellings). Benwing2 (talk) 08:27, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

Certainly, anything with what I constantly read as "f", but is ſ ("Long s") is obsolete typography. Do we have entries for all of these, at least the ones used in our citations? . Why don't we have such entries? There are more that 5,000 entries that use ſ, often in citations, usually with multiple instances per page. Perhaps hoverlinks/hoverboxes. They seem more inscrutable to me than the ligatures. Searching for muſick leads to music via musick, but that yields no explanation of ſ. And clicking on muſick invites the creation of an entry. DCDuring (talk) 11:02, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

Because this is a positional variant of the same letter, like سـ (s-) and ـس (-s) which looks different due to complex text rendering, or on the other hand ـي (-y) and ـى of which historically often—until the mid-20th century—only one or the other was used, or in the Maghreb—until the mid-20th century—one liked to point ڢ (f) and ڧ (q) instead of present ف (f) and ق (q). Whether or not something is encoded just gives people some mysterious bias to parse it mentally as a “spelling”. We have to rationalize the presentation of the word, abstracting from instance-level representation. There are some rules in reading a text that cannot or should not be mirrored. Fay Freak (talk) 13:37, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

• This is a lame discussion, for sure. FWIW, Wonderfool made Template:long s, surely the most esthetically pleasing template on the website. You could track that template to see how many times ſ is used, if you have nothing better to do... Lfellet (talk) 22:28, 19 June 2025 (UTC)

• Does the OED use the long s in its citations, in any edition? DCDuring (talk) 00:59, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

This has recently been updated, if anyone cares. Congrats to those who made the top 30. @Benwing2, not good enough, frankly... Worm spail (talk) 13:10, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

I'm inching closer to 200,000... Vininn126 (talk) 13:23, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Huh, who knew such a page existed. — Sgconlaw (talk) 13:29, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

How are edits counted? If I do a new entry and save it 10 times as I make incremental changes and corrections over 15 minutes, is that one edit, ten, or something in between? I'm guessing it's ten. Do typo corrections count? Nul edits count? DCDuring (talk) 14:39, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

@DCDuring: I'm guessing simply from the edit count on each editor's user contributions page. — Sgconlaw (talk) 15:13, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

@Sgconlaw @DCDuring Yes, you're correct. It simply matches the edit count found on the user contribution page. Tc14Hd (aka Marc) (talk) 20:43, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

This begs the question: How is the edit count on the user contributions page determined? Is it really just the count of each item on those pages? I feel bad that my edit count could be seen as inflated. I do frequent saves of entries, eg, when adding derived terms, I might save after each additional term added and after each major reordering (alphabetization, combining alt forms). DCDuring (talk) 23:32, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

So, nul edits don't count, AFAICT, but everything else does. I don't know what it would take to make a better single measurement, mostly because I don't know what "better" would mean. Maybe ChatGPT or similar has some ideas. DCDuring (talk) 23:32, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

@DCDuring Yeah, there are many ways to inflate your edit count. I also thought about a better measurement, but such a measurement will probably be much more expensive to calculate and utimately arbitrary. So I just went with the easy and least arbitrary solution. But if I ever come up with some algorithm, it will probably involve taking the edit distance between revisions and summing these distances to a total. Tc14Hd (aka Marc) (talk) 00:07, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

@User:Tc14Hd I suppose we wouldn't want to give contributors the wrong incentives, though such things don't seem to motivate most contributors or contributions. OTOH, focused redlink lists and cleanup lists, either community-derived or created by a contributor for their own use, seem to be motivating, certainly for me and, seemingly, also for others. DCDuring (talk) 00:39, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

If you're looking for something less demanding and foreign to the usual concept of edit count (because any edit distance-based metric will produce drastically different results from normal ones) you might simply compress repeated saves to the same page within a certain period of time, esp. if the edit summaries are blank or (less likely) are all the same. Some people like me do their work either entirely offline or in a separate userspace page and push one big(gish) working change, which is in general good practice, esp. for modules; some people however push lots of little edits one after the other, usually with no changelog message. IMO this is generally a sign of someone who doesn't know what they're doing, and it makes it impossible to figure out what actually was done without doing a diff from the first to the last edit and examining the actual (wiki)code. One thing you could do that is less expensive than edit distance is to sum up the number of bytes that changed (esp. if this is available in the dumps according to whatever algorithm MediaWiki uses), compressing repeated saves as above and applying some sort of (maybe) soft thresholding function to the bytes so that someone who copy-pastes an enormous page doesn't get a huge amount of credit for doing this. Finally, irrespective of everything else, a count of editors by pages created would be super-useful as page creations are harder and often more impactful than page edits. Benwing2 (talk) 00:41, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

Feel free to play the system, Mr. (5th place) During. Also, minor trolling counts as an edit. But blocking users doesn't. Worm spail (talk) 15:23, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

How did I know I could count on you to make a complaining comment on this? Vininn126 (talk) 15:39, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

Are you talking to me? DCDuring (talk) 23:32, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

You need to count all the WingerBot edits that say "manually assisted" since that's how I do most of my editing. Benwing2 (talk) 17:48, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2 I already thought about adding the ~34,000 edits from your Benwing account. However, I didn't know that you also use WingerBot manually. I will see what I can do. Btw, if somebody else has some "special situation" going on with their edit count, just tell me. Tc14Hd (aka Marc) (talk) 20:54, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2 I just checked the database dump and damn, I found more than 2.1 million WingerBot edits containing "manually assisted". If we decide to count them all, you would top the leaderboard, by a lot. How "manual" are these edits? Do you actually make them through the web interface? Tc14Hd (aka Marc) (talk) 22:37, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

@Tc14Hd "manually assisted" means I load the pages into a text file, edit the text file manually and push using pywikibot. Sometimes the edits mostly involve regex replacements, sometimes they involve a lot more work; it depends. Benwing2 (talk) 22:44, 21 June 2025 (UTC)

@Tc14Hd: combining data from multiple accounts could get tricky. There are several accounts on this list that aren't the user's only account. In some cases, they got off to a bad start and created a new account to make a clean break (that arguably applies to the single case of one person with two accounts on the list, though it was more about offwiki considerations). In others, there was abuse of multiple accounts where the community and the abuser came to an understanding. In others, someone made a dramatic exit, then came back under a new account in order to keep a lower profile. In at least one case, the user lost their password and had to create a new account (User:Nadando/User:DTLHS, who continued to operate User:NadandoBot- so we don't have to guess if they're the same person). There's also a huge amount of anonymous editing we now know was by the same people as various logged-in users. It ranges from totally routine and innocent, to lots of embarrasing high drama. To do this right, you would have to get permission from all of the duplicates to associate their accounts, and in a few cases, just asking might get touchy (not to mention those who are long gone). Another complication: what about someone whose edits as a sock were systematically deleted and reverted to discourage them from coming back- how do those edits get counted.? Chuck Entz (talk) 00:20, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz Yeah, I knew that this could get political. I probably won't combine the edit counts of any accounts until the owner explicitly asks me to do it (I only did it for Wonderfool so far). But that still leaves the question what to do with Benwing2's semi-automated edits. Maybe we need a vote to establish an edit counting policy... Tc14Hd (aka Marc) (talk) 02:50, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

Honestly it's not that important to me. If you want to do something about this, either compile a separate list of bot account contributions or include my semi-manual contributions in the list with an asterisk; or put an asterisk by my name saying "+ 2.1 million semi-automated edits" or whatever. Benwing2 (talk) 02:54, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2 Seems like a good idea. I wanted to create a bot ranking anyway. Tc14Hd (aka Marc) (talk) 23:55, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

fwiw there is this page, m:Global statistics/Rank data/enwiktionary əkrəm. 12:39, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

heya!! :3

a while ago we had a not-very-detailed convo with @Blueskies006 on discord about whether predicative inflections in turkic languages (azerbaijani, in that case) should have their own entries or not. i kinda agreed with what he said (i.e. they don't deserve an entry) but now i'm kinda skeptical (and indecisive), so i think it'd be good to hear some other opinions as well :3

fwiw, this actually matters as i'm planning to mass-create inflection forms for azerbaijani using a bot and the consensus here will decide whether predicative form entries will be created or not :3 əkrəm. 14:24, 22 June 2025 (UTC)

No, as a rule we don’t create entries (soft redirects) for agglutinative forms. If we did, Rwanda–Rundi would have like a million soft redirects for every verbal root. People who read agglutinating languages need to have enough knowledge of the language for basic parsing, or they won’t get anywhere anyway. I do think we make an exception for irregular forms, forms that are homographs of other words/forms, and for forms that see a lot of use (like many Turkish nominative plural unpossessed forms have been created). MuDavid 栘𩿠 (talk) 07:14, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

@MuDavid, "as a rule we don't" — is this a policy, or just a common practice (i.e. a convention)? əkrəm. 08:00, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

For example, see Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2022/January#Should_we_have_entries_for_Turkish_predicative_forms?, Wiktionary:About_Turkish, Talk:taklit_etmemek, Talk:aşar aşmaz. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 12:50, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

Undecided/in limbo: WT:RFDN#abajurlu, abajursuz, WT:RFDN#kapı yapmamak, WT:RFDN#önümüzdeki.  ​‑‑Lambiam 11:57, 24 June 2025 (UTC)

I have recently been having a breakthrough in making up likely pronunciations of Mandarin-derived words in English based off a pattern of pronunciations for words from a gazetteer. This is of tremendous value because it will shed light not merely on geographical terms but also other loan words from Mandarin to English. Please review Category:en:Places_in_China especially D through H and Z to see if you have suggestions for me. My goal is to provide all pronunciation data, from "accurate" to "hyperforeign". --Geographyinitiative (talk) 00:39, 23 June 2025 (UTC)

I have been mulling it over, and now that I think I can give at least a rudimentary pronunciation for almost any word in English derived from Mandarin (see above), it is appropriate that I should also try to seek out internet video clips showing examples of actual attempted pronunciations for readers to see, which will serve a dual function as WT:Citations, and also as a historical marker of an actual attempt to say the word, as well as something for a reader to review and compare to their own pronunciation. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 00:01, 9 July 2025 (UTC)

The Glossary currently seems unclear on the precise definitions of adapted borrowing and unadapted borrowing. I have quoted the relevant Glossary entries below for convenient reference, followed by my explanation of the issues as I see them.

adapted borrowing

A loanword formed with the addition of an affix to conform the term to the normal morphology of the language, e.g. Polish normatywny, borrowed from French normatif and adapted with Polish -ny. Contrast unadapted borrowings.

unadapted borrowing

A loanword that has not been conformed to the morpho-syntactic, phonological and/or phonotactical rules of the target language. For example, English cubiculum is an unadapted borrowing from Latin cubiculum, while English cubicle is a standard borrowing from the same Latin word. Unadapted borrowings are often learned ones; see learned borrowing. Contrast adapted borrowings.

loanword

A word that was adopted (borrowed) from another language, rather than formed within the language or inherited from a more ancient form of the same language. Such a word may be adapted or unadapted. Loanwords may still be recognisably foreign (having non-native spelling or unusual pronunciation) (unadapted), or they may have become completely assimilated into the language (no longer perceived as foreign). For example, in English, schadenfreude is still recognisably German, whereas cellar is fully assimilated and no longer recognisably Latin (from cellārium). Sometimes a naturalized loanword can be both fully assimilated and still recognised as having foreign origin (e.g. taco, burrito). Compare loan translation (calque).

Based on loanword’s definition (unless the word "may" is meant to imply another, unspecified classification) a borrowing is either 'adapted' or 'unadapted'. An adapted borrowing would appear then to be any loanword that has "become completely assimilated into the language (no longer perceived as foreign)." Additionally, the definition of unadapted borrowing notes to "contrast adapted borrowings". This seems to indicate that the categories adapted borrowing and unadapted borrowing are inverses of each other, in which case an adapted borrowing must be one that " been conformed to the...rules of the target language."

All of this seemingly contradicts the Glossary definition of adapted borrowing, which states that an added affix is a necessary criterion, or else an unadapted borrowing would necessarily be defined by the lack of an added affix.

I am left with these questions:

1. Are all borrowings either 'adapted' or 'unadapted', or is there a third category?
2. Is the addition of an affix a necessary criterion for a borrowing to be considered 'adapted', or the lack of an added affix a necessary criterion for unadapted borrowing?
3. Is there a substantive distinction between a 'borrowing that has been adapted' and an adapted borrowing?

Ideally, I would hope to get the glossary amended to clarify and/or reconcile these issues.

I have reposted this topic (originally posted in talk:Glossary) to try to get more eyes on it

Thanks! Pangur Bán & I (talk) 18:07, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

In my opinion, "adapted borrowing" is a really confusing term and its definition is semantically vacuous. I think it should be completely redesigned; I wouldn't be opposed to getting rid of it altogether. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 20:16, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

I am the one who proposed it. Would you mind being more specific about how it's confusing? Vininn126 (talk) 20:19, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

"Adaptation" is polysemic. Here it's probably supposed to mean morphological adaptation (which I'm not convinced even serves a meaningful distinction), but there is also phonological adaptation, semantic adaptation... even folk etymologies count as 'adaptation'. This discussion was also started because an editor was confused by the term. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 20:41, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

It does serve a meaningful distinction in some languages - Kashubian and Slovincian and to a lesser extent Polish display indeclinable unadapted adjectives but also morphologically adapted ones - this is also something I have seen in literature, especially Polish linguistic literature, also notable the Routledge series mentions such adapted borrowings.

It would differ from other borrowing as basically we treat "borrowed from" for phonologically adapted borrowings as the default.

As to the confusion, I don't mind changing the wording, but there's a certain level of checking the glossary and the definition. If we want to reword the definition to emphasize the morphological aspect, I'd be fine with that. Vininn126 (talk) 20:44, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

I don't think so. Finnish has something which I think is very similar - compare e.g. akuutti and akuuttinen, the two set apart by the latter having -inen, commonly seen in adjectives. I have never thought of distinguishing the two by some kind of category. Adaptation is also a gradient; you can as well argue that adding a final vowel counts not only as phonological, but also morphological, adaptation, especially if e.g. adding a final vowel by analogy with some other similar borrowing. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 20:47, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

This was a discussion before between you me and @Thadh if I recall correctly where there were etymologies with both {{bor}} and {{af}} and many others chimed in they should be considered borrowings.

Just because a gradient exists doesn't mean that a line shouldn't be drawn for useful categories. Vininn126 (talk) 20:50, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

The problem is that nobody can agree on where the line should be drawn, nor is there anything to suggest where it should be drawn. Something like that is usually a sign - though not necessarily a foolproof one - that a categorization isn't valid. There are other issues too, such as the fact that basically every verb borrowed from one language to another (unless they have very similar verbal morphologies) would count as an "adapted borrowing", which is hardly useful. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 20:52, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

"nobody" seems to be a strong statement to make based on a few statements thus far. There is indeed disagreement, but we should ask more people what they think before concluding such things.

This still doesn't address the cases I mentioned above between adapted and non-adapted adjectives. Vininn126 (talk) 20:55, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

I did talk about the adjectives earlier. As for me using "nobody", it seems evident to me just glancing at Category:Adapted borrowings by language that those who use this template are likewise confused about what exactly it is supposed to be used for. The only Finnish example (slaidata) does not count under a "morphologically adapted borrowing", as I understand it (or try to, anyway). The same applies to at least some of the French entries (extrémité), Italian entries (Cancellieri), Manx entries (etlan) and Tajik entries (ҳутел (hutel)). All members of Category:Serbo-Croatian adapted borrowings from German are verbs, where, as I mentioned, morphological adaptation is necessary. These are just five languages I picked at random. I would say the confusion is rather widespread. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 21:04, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

You said "I don't think so". I don't really find that a satisfactory response, sorry. As to the categories - it's relatively new, sometimes it takes a while for editors to make a change to something or to consolidate. I also mentioned that it's not my fault people don't check the glossary definition and make assumptions. Finally, I said I wouldn't mind placing more emphasis on the morphological aspect to avoid this confusion. Vininn126 (talk) 21:06, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

To me personally, saying that people are confused only because the category is new comes across as trying to sweep the elephant-sized problem under the rug.

Let me elaborate. I've already explained why the term "adapted borrowing" is confusing, but let's say that we change it to e.g. "morphologically adapted borrowing". What then is going to stop people from adding semantically or phonologically adapted borrowings as distinct categories? At that point, we will have an endless series of arguments about what counts as adaptation or not.

One of the main reasons we have the unadapted borrowing category is because, as stated below, adaptation is the norm. The lack of adaptation is what is noteworthy, not the adaptation itself. This is especially true if adaptation is the majority of the time determined by the language and the part of speech. We don't have separate categories for parts of speech by borrowing, because it atomizes the categories way too much, and you can obtain similar results simply by taking intersections of already existing categories.

Even if we assumed none of this was an issue, I still don't see why the category is needed in the first place. I feel this is the stage where the burden of proof should rest on those who want this categorization to exist, not on those who want it gone.

To me, it is perfectly sufficient to use the morphological templates like {{affix}} and their |langN= parameters. This categorizes the entries only under "X terms derived from Y", which is one of the two main reasons these categories exist in the first place (the other being indirect borrowings). If one insists, one could easily add a new set of categories (hopefully with a better name than "adapted borrowings") for cases where these templates use a |langN= parameter. This would be, in my view, preferable in every single conceivable way to the current "adapted borrowing" situation, which is untenable, and I realize that it is even more so every time I think more about it. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 06:06, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

I don't even recall ever seeing any discussion for creating "adapted borrowings" as a category. Was it really only created because one person or two people decided to do so? — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 06:15, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

I'll also ping @Benwing2 as the person I cooperated with in this to see what he thinks. Vininn126 (talk) 21:12, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

I am also of the same opinion. The adaptation of borrowings (phonologically, morphologically, you name it) is the default, and is the main (only?) way of distinguishing it from codeswitching. Yes, some words can be adapted more than others, but this could be any number of categories. Thadh (talk) 20:52, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

Just to be clear, have you changed your view on having an adapted borrowing category, contrary to your suggestion of including it? Vininn126 (talk) 20:56, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

@Vininn126: I don't think I was ever in favour of an "adapted borrowing" category, was I? Must have been one rough night before that. Thadh (talk) 23:48, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

Yeah, it is a false dichotomy, of no distinct descriptive value, even if in individual etymological relations the wording makes a point. There was actually a more complicated foreignism chart people can't handle. In the end practical linguists adapt everyday language for whatever. I think the real word for the non-default is xenism, assuming we deem it inclusible at all, vs. loan words, as two categories in lexical borrowing, vs. loan coinages, but you don't learn that in linguistics class, the definitions all around are as amateurish as is common practice—it is worthy of thesis by publication at this point. Fay Freak (talk) 22:30, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

Whether or not the consensus is to do away with the category, I'd still prefer to have such words mentioned as both borrowed and with the corresponding morpheme, to which I'm open to suggestions on how to handle this (this issue arose many years ago when, if I recall correctly, some objected to having both {{bor}} and {{af}} on the same line). Vininn126 (talk) 22:53, 25 June 2025 (UTC)

@Thadh @Surjection @Vininn126 Personally I see a certain value in a three-way distinction between "unadapted borrowings" that preserve foreign endings, "plain borrowings" that drop foreign endings and add only the minimally required endings for a given language, and "adapted borrowings" that add some other ending like -ize or -ate in English, or -ировать or similar in Russian. Originally I added |lang1= to {{af}} to handle "adapted borrowings" into Russian that added endings like -ова́ть or -и́ровать; later, the lang prefix was added as a shortcut, and |lang1= still works but is deprecated. Originally in this case, the term was indicated as borrowed from the source language, but someone complained and so now the term is just listed as derived. An "adapted borrowing" could be an intermediate category for these cases that would square the circle of straight borrowing vs. derivation. Obviously there is some judgment here, but IMO it should be possible to draw a line by considering what would be the minimal reasonable morphological adaptation and consider that a "straight" or "plain" borrowing, and any additional morpheme would qualify as an adapted borrowing. The only reasonable alternative I can think of is to dispense with the three-way distinction in favor of a 2-way distinction, and change {{af}} + lang prefix back to categorizing as "borrowed from the source language" if there are only suffixes following the lang-prefixed term. Benwing2 (talk) 02:25, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

What is the issue with just categorizing these under "X terms derived from Y"? As I stated above, my understanding has always been that the derived categories exist for two main reasons: (1) for cases like these and (2) for indirect borrowings. If we need to distinguish the two, then have a separate category for only the former case, but name it something better than "adapted borrowing", and get rid of the glossary entry as well as the "adapted borrowing" templates. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 19:51, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

They are accepted as borrowings, but there just happens to be a morpheme (found in other words) to allow for declension. Vininn126 (talk) 20:27, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

As for the naming, these could be called "hybrid borrowings" or "loanblends". The en.wikt def for loanblend appears to be slightly wrong; partial calques are a type of loanblend, but e.g. replacing a foreign suffix with a native one also counts as a loanblend. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 20:35, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

I am okay with something like that. Vininn126 (talk) 20:41, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

How about simply "affixed borrowings"? IMO that makes clear exactly what they are. Benwing2 (talk) 21:09, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

That's probably the best option. Vininn126 (talk) 21:16, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

If we decide that this is indeed a necessary category, may I instead suggest "affixive borrowing", as "affixed" makes it sound like the loanword itself is the affix. Pangur Bán & I (talk) 21:30, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

To be honest I'm not sure how. Using the passive participle would mean "a borrowing that has been affixed". Vininn126 (talk) 21:44, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

True, but it is also the preterite form because both the agent and recipient are left implied, it can just as easily mean "a borrowing that has been affixed ", as "a borrowing that has been affixed ". It wouldn't be the end of the world; it's just a little awkward and "affixive" would entirely eliminate the ambiguity. Pangur Bán & I (talk) 22:34, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

What about compounds or blends or the many other categories? — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 21:17, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

I’m a bit surprised at how much attention this has received so quickly. My goal was just to get the glossary entries to be less ambiguous and agree with each other, but I have become steadily convinced that "adapted borrowing" isn’t a sound category due to the numerous types and degrees of "adaptation". Either it’s vague and confusing or the door is opened for excessive category proliferation. That said, I’d still be quite happy just to have the glossary definitions disambiguated. Pangur Bán & I (talk) 07:09, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

W:Sayre's law is certainly at play here. Vininn126 (talk) 07:46, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

In the process of trying to clean up uses of {{short for}} (which IMO should not exist), I created {{clipped compound of}} to handle cases like sus chord, mag tape, phone line, syscall, pro wrestling, lat. dorsi and similar terms where part of the original compound has been clipped and the rest (at least one word) left as a full word. This is meant to be distinguished from {{syllabic abbreviation of}} for cases where all parts are clipped to a syllable each (or sometimes several syllables, as in Russian универма́г (univermág, “department store”) from универса́льный магази́н (universálʹnyj magazín, literally “universal store”)). Syllabic abbreviations in English are not as common as in Russian, Indonesian and the like but still exist, viz. SoHo, Delmarva, Benelux, sci-fi/scifi/sci fi, hi-fi, Wi-Fi, sysadmin, etc. But then I discovered that Wikipedia's entry on clipped compound gives Delmarva and sci-fi as examples of clipped compounds, which it seems not to distinguish clearly from syllabic abbreviations. Many of the examples given under Wikipedia's clipped compound entry are open compounds, but as shown by sci-fi vs. scifi vs. sci fi, the same term can sometimes be written either open, closed or with a hyphen, so this should obviously not be a relevant factor. What do people think? Should I

1. Keep things as-is, and just add a glossary entry documenting our definition of clipped compound?
2. Rename "clipped compound" to something like "partly clipped compound" to clarify that some of the words are left alone (otherwise you get a syllabic abbreviation)?
3. Do (2) but also rename "syllabic abbreviation" to "clipped compound" to harmonize with Wikipedia? (Although I note that the Wikipedia article is not self-consistent and even describes ellipses as a type of clipped compound.) I kind of like "syllabic abbreviation" because it emphasizes that syllables rather than individual letters are clipped from each word; IMO if the resulting abbreviation has a combination of syllables and individual letters from the original term, it's just an acronym, as in Gulag from Russian Гла́вное управле́ние (исправи́тельно-трудовы́х) лагере́й (Glávnoje upravlénije (ispravítelʹno-trudovýx) lagjeréj, literally “Main Directorate of (Correctional Labor) Camps”), which is structurally G-U-LAG. But for consistency's sake, it might make more sense to have separate categories "clipped compound" and "partly clipped compound", as we have "calque" and "partial calque", rather than "syllabic abbreviation" and "partly clipped compound".

Pinging @-sche who always has thoughtful responses, and @Quercus solaris who recently edited the clipped compound Wikipedia article. Benwing2 (talk) 03:03, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

To be honest, I am no expert on any established linguistic ontologies for these phenomena, but my gut is convinced that nonlinguists have mostly just failed entirely to develop any rational and informed analytic ontologies for them at all, let alone any standard universal one. I'm not sure, at the moment, how to explain better what I mean without devolving into a digression. I have made some efforts at WT and WP to at least treat the occurrences of them rationally instead of irrationally or unthinkingly like many people do. Yes, part of what's involved in these phenomena is the fact that in English compound nouns, the junction of the constituents (i.e., open, hyphenated, or solid) is orthographically artifactual (on the layer above morphological essence) in a way that I would argue most English speakers emically don't recognize properly. As it occurs to me at the moment, I might define a clipped compound as any compound in which one or more of the constituent words is a clipping. Thus both lab tech and lab technician. I'm not sure at the moment whether or not the ones in which all constituents are clipped can be cleanly dichotomized separately from the others. Just as sci fi, sci-fi, and scifi (or el-hi and elhi) are the same phenomenon written in different ways, I'm not yet sure that Delmarva and lab tech (or Benelux and exam prep) are of different kinds in a way that truly matters, versus speciously/superficially and artifactually. I might eventually sign on to a belief about that (i.e., yes or no, and why or why not), after learning more and/or thinking more. All I'm fairly certain of, so far, is that prevailing layperson metalanguage and the ontology that underlies it have no frickin clue of the answer to that question nor even of the notion that one might ask it at all, except that they would rotely assume that there must be an important distinction because (as they conceive things) the solid-versus-open difference wouldn't exist if there weren't some reason for it that experts already know . In other words, a failure of epistemology-of-language. Anyway sorry that I digressed despite hoping not to, but TLDR, I can probably get on board, practically and operationally, for some classification such as "clipped compound" and "partly clipped compound" (comparable to "calque" and "partial calque"), even if it turns out later to be artifactual, because (speaking of practical facts) it could always be fairly easily revised later (for example, change the words used to label the classes, or move some members from one class to another, or merge classes), and in the meantime it is much better than the nothingness and lack of thought that is its default alternative. Sorry if these thoughts aren't crystalized well enough right now, and maybe I'll improve upon them later. Quercus solaris (talk) 03:53, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

@Quercus solaris Thanks for your thoughts! In fact originally I treated things like pro wrestling and sus chord as no different from syllabic abbreviations like Delmarva or Tribeca, but something didn't feel right about that, which is why I wanted to make the distinction. There does seem to be a continuum between clear one-wordisms like Tribeca and terms like lab tech that feel like two clipped words, but the examples of sci-fi and sysadmin show that it's hard to make any sort of clear line between them, if such a line even exists. Things get even more muddied by Indonesian, where the syllabic abbreviations are often formed from syllables that aren't the first, e.g. kapolsek (“chief of police”) from kepala kepolisian sektor, which I think is literally "chief of the police sector". Cases like this are often made easier to parse by the fact that e.g. kepala is routinely abbreviated as ka-, and polsek also exists as a syllabic abbreviation of kepolisian sektor, as well as the fact that kepolisian is formed from polisi "police", of which the first syllable is indeed being used. But I'm not sure all such syllabic abbreviations in Indonesian can be analyzed so cleanly. Benwing2 (talk) 04:11, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

It feels like we already have more templates for slightly different kinds of shortening than people are in practice able to maintain consistent distinctions between. (If you look through the Wiktionary-namespace results in the Whatlinkshere for these various templates, many of the discussions seem to be asking what the distinctions are.) I'm unsure that adding two more slightly different kinds of shortening ({{clipped compound of}} and {{syllabic abbreviation of}}) is the solution to that; I wonder if we could instead group some of these different kinds of shortening together...? (Also, I wonder where the cutoff is for considering something a shortening. Given that e.g. phone exists as a well-established word, it's possible that modern users of "phone line" are just combing the existing words "phone" and "line" and are not shortening anything at all. Is pea soup a shortening? Etymologically, yes, it used to be longer, but...) - -sche (discuss) 01:18, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

IMO {{short for}} should not exist. All uses should be recategorized as some more specific type of shortening, and if there are cases that don't fit in any of our existing types, either we should create a new type or just use {{abbreviation of}}. I propose an abuse filter that warns people not to use {{short for}}, which includes a link to a page (maybe the {{short for}} doc page) that explains clearly how to decide which type of shortening should apply. The abuse filter would not completely block people from adding {{short for}}, but it would warn against it and add some friction so that new users are aware that it should not be used, and existing users who tend to use it out of laziness (ahem @Donnanz and others) will at least reconsider their use before saving. Benwing2 (talk) 04:23, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: hmmm, what are all the “correct” templates to use? For example, is tabloid a “clipping” of tabloid cruiser? This is the sort of entry I’m likely to use {{short for}} in. — Sgconlaw (talk) 04:57, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

tabloid is an ellipsis of tabloid cruiser. Clippings truncate down to parts of words, like guac for guacamole. The problem with {{short for}} is it's a catch-all that tells you nothing about what sort of shortening is actually happening. Benwing2 (talk) 05:06, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: I feel like we’ll need to have a page explaining what are the better templates to use. — Sgconlaw (talk) 05:12, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

See my intro in this section, that's exactly what I said ... Benwing2 (talk) 05:14, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

@Benwing2: Is this not an American term? For me, it's completely natural to use it, and shorter than {{abbreviation of}}. The template already existed before I found it. IMO, it's better than {{clipping of}} and {{ellipsis of}}, which I abhor. DonnanZ (talk) 09:31, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

Regrettably, {{ellipsis of}} has been applied: see Calstone. DonnanZ (talk) 16:57, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

Agreed, I've never used it "out of laziness" but because I felt it was the best fit. Assume good faith? 2A00:23C5:FE1C:3701:69A7:27BB:472A:63D0 09:34, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

Not everything is down to region and Americans, in this case it is linguistic jargon. Vininn126 (talk) 17:04, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

I agree. I won't assume it was used out of laziness, but that doesn't mean it should be used. We should be more specific when we can! Vininn126 (talk) 09:45, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

As I suspected, a native speaker of American English. Thanks for that information. DonnanZ (talk) 05:14, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

This comes across incredibly offensive, or weird. What's the point? Vininn126 (talk) 07:32, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

No offence meant. I could be wrong, but my impression is {{short for}} is more common in British English. DonnanZ (talk) 10:23, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

It's more colloquial and would be used in America as well. As I said, it's not about regional differences, but linguistic jargon. This is checkable in Google NGram viewer. It would behoove you to check your assumptions. Vininn126 (talk) 10:26, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

I already have. It appears in the Oxford Dictionary of English - an abbreviation or nickname for: I'm Robbie - short for Roberta. It isn't regarded as colloquial by Oxford. DonnanZ (talk) 10:41, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

By "colloquial" I mean "common" or "everyday" in contrast to "specialist" or "jargonistic". This is all entirely beside the point. Vininn126 (talk) 10:49, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

Agreed, more information and descriptive categorization is always better. User:Trooper57 recently emptied out ], and I thought that was neat. Polomo47 (talk) 00:28, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

OK, WF already has dozens of accounts, used indiscriminately. And User:Wonderfool was specifically unblocked for the sake of making them stick to one single account. But, WF would like User:Vealhurl unblocked. It is WF's audio-file account for Lingualibre, and it's awkward to dually edit under 2 usernames when one is blocked TypeO889 (talk) 17:55, 26 June 2025 (UTC)

I would strongly urge this user to limit themselves to one account. As a newer project member, I honestly really don't find account-switching games funny (same for Exuinox playing dumb IP games), rather it's very annoying. The idea of contributors having one account is (1) to know who is contributing and what contributions they are responsible for, and (2) to communicate with a contributor. Of course there's room for the apparently inevitable eccentricity of Wiktionary editors without special treatment that negatively affects the most basic of collaboration needs within the project. Hftf (talk) 03:57, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

This website was created when the internet was still relatively free compared to today's technofeudalism. At that time, it was obvious that, if a person wanted to create more than one account, they absolutely could do so. The insane modern-day taboos of having one account to "know who is contributing and what contributions they are responsible for" is a later-day tool of enforcing totalitarianism, not a genuine rule. In fact, the real rule is diametrically the opposite; read it and weep: Wiktionary:Accounts. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 09:56, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Wanting to know e.g. how often a specific contributor's rfd nominations pass or fail, how many times they have been banned or blocked, etc., and not by wasting time looking up every alternate account or IP they have used to aggregate an accurate total across them, is very directly relevant to this project's basic daily affairs and really has nothing to do with totalitarianism, technofeudalism, nor is it actually "diametrically opposite" to the vague and open-to-interpretation policy you referred to. Specially treated users are playing very annoying, stupid games at the expense of everyone else's sanity, which, to me, is clearly an abuse. Thanks Hftf (talk) 10:08, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Maintainence of your state of sanity or lack thereof is your own affair. You just don't have some kind of right to conveniently get data on other users on demand. It's not an abuse of you when someone else is free to do what they are allowed to do. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 10:17, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Type0889 is WF, but I don't object to unblocking an audio account. Can "rubbish" audio be removed? DonnanZ (talk) 05:29, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

Yes, rubbish ones can be removed, or better still, tagged. There's a bit in {{audio}}, I don't remember what, that allows flagging for shittiness TypeO889 (talk) 08:23, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

I'm impressed you remember the password. Anyway, in light of the vote, the original block reason for Vealhurl no longer applies, so I unblocked it. One can easily confirm that this is WF's account for uploading audio to Commons. This, that and the other (talk) 09:23, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

Dear Wikimedia Community,

The Community Affairs Committee (CAC) of the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees assigned the Sister Projects Task Force (SPTF) to update and implement a procedure for assessing the lifecycle of Sister Projects – wiki projects supported by Wikimedia Foundation (WMF).

A vision of relevant, accessible, and impactful free knowledge has always guided the Wikimedia Movement. As the ecosystem of Wikimedia projects continues to evolve, it is crucial that we periodically review existing projects to ensure they still align with our goals and community capacity.

Despite their noble intent, some projects may no longer effectively serve their original purpose. Reviewing such projects is not about giving up – it's about responsible stewardship of shared resources. Volunteer time, staff support, infrastructure, and community attention are finite, and the non-technical costs tend to grow significantly as our ecosystem has entered a different age of the internet than the one we were founded in. Supporting inactive projects or projects that didn't meet our ambitions can unintentionally divert these resources from areas with more potential impact.

Moreover, maintaining projects that no longer reflect the quality and reliability of the Wikimedia name stands for, involves a reputational risk. An abandoned or less reliable project affects trust in the Wikimedia movement.

Lastly, failing to sunset or reimagine projects that are no longer working can make it much harder to start new ones. When the community feels bound to every past decision – no matter how outdated – we risk stagnation. A healthy ecosystem must allow for evolution, adaptation, and, when necessary, letting go. If we create the expectation that every project must exist indefinitely, we limit our ability to experiment and innovate.

Because of this, SPTF reviewed two requests concerning the lifecycle of the Sister Projects to work through and demonstrate the review process. We chose Wikispore as a case study for a possible new Sister Project opening and Wikinews as a case study for a review of an existing project. Preliminary findings were discussed with the CAC, and a community consultation on both proposals was recommended.

The application to consider Wikispore was submitted in 2019. SPTF decided to review this request in more depth because rather than being concentrated on a specific topic, as most of the proposals for the new Sister Projects are, Wikispore has the potential to nurture multiple start-up Sister Projects.

After careful consideration, the SPTF has decided not to recommend Wikispore as a Wikimedia Sister Project. Considering the current activity level, the current arrangement allows better flexibility and experimentation while WMF provides core infrastructural support.

We acknowledge the initiative's potential and seek community input on what would constitute a sufficient level of activity and engagement to reconsider its status in the future.

As part of the process, we shared the decision with the Wikispore community and invited one of its leaders, Pharos, to an SPTF meeting.

Currently, we especially invite feedback on measurable criteria indicating the project's readiness, such as contributor numbers, content volume, and sustained community support. This would clarify the criteria sufficient for opening a new Sister Project, including possible future Wikispore re-application. However, the numbers will always be a guide because any number can be gamed.

We chose to review Wikinews among existing Sister Projects because it is the one for which we have observed the highest level of concern in multiple ways.

Since the SPTF was convened in 2023, its members have asked for the community's opinions during conferences and community calls about Sister Projects that did not fulfil their promise in the Wikimedia movement. Wikinews was the leading candidate for an evaluation because people from multiple language communities proposed it. Additionally, by most measures, it is the least active Sister Project, with the greatest drop in activity over the years.

While the Language Committee routinely opens and closes language versions of the Sister Projects in small languages, there has never been a valid proposal to close Wikipedia in major languages or any project in English. This is not true for Wikinews, where there was a proposal to close English Wikinews, which gained some traction but did not result in any action, see section 5 as well as a draft proposal to close all languages of Wikinews.

Initial metrics compiled by WMF staff also support the community's concerns about Wikinews.

Based on this report, SPTF recommends a community reevaluation of Wikinews. We conclude that its current structure and activity levels are the lowest among the existing sister projects. SPTF also recommends pausing the opening of new language editions while the consultation runs.

SPTF brings this analysis to a discussion and welcomes discussions of alternative outcomes, including potential restructuring efforts or integration with other Wikimedia initiatives.

Options mentioned so far (which might be applied to just low-activity languages or all languages) include but are not limited to:

• Restructure how Wikinews works and is linked to other current events efforts on the projects,
• Merge the content of Wikinews into the relevant language Wikipedias, possibly in a new namespace,
• Merge content into compatibly licensed external projects,
• Archive Wikinews projects.

Your insights and perspectives are invaluable in shaping the future of these projects. We encourage all interested community members to share their thoughts on the relevant discussion pages or through other designated feedback channels.

We'd be grateful if you want to take part in a conversation on the future of these projects and the review process. We are setting up two different project pages: Public consultation about Wikispore and Public consultation about Wikinews. Please participate between 27 June 2025 and 27 July 2025, after which we will summarize the discussion to move forward. You can write in your own language.

I will also host a community conversation 16th July Wednesday 11.00 UTC and 17th July Thursday 17.00 UTC (call links to follow shortly) and will be around at Wikimania for more discussions.

-- Victoria on behalf of the Sister Project Task Force, 20:57, 27 June 2025 (UTC)

I have been collecting a bunch of examples of Nondifferentiation and Confusion of -n and -ng of words derived from Mandarin at Talk:Kuomingtang. I have come up with the following usage note for Kuomingtang, Xingjiang, Singkiang, Jingsha, and potentially other similarly situated words, see if you have any thoughts for me:
* Nondifferentiation and confusion of -n and -ng, which is a common phenomenon in oral Mandarin Chinese, is also a common error when a Mandarin language-derived word is spelled in the Roman alphabet, likely leading to this misspelling.
Geographyinitiative (talk) 22:43, 29 June 2025 (UTC)

The language seems excessive. What about "This spelling demonstrates confusion between -n and -ng, which is also a common phenomenon in spoken Mandarin Chinese." Hftf (talk) 01:44, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Okay, very good, I will adopt that usage note. --Geographyinitiative (talk) 09:37, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

Per https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44415289. This was a site that I used way back int he day, so it's sad to see but also something we need to strike from this site or at least replace it with archived links. I'm inclined to the latter and motivated to do this sooner rather than later to keep from directing our users to junk. Any thoughts? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:11, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

@Koavf: I agree that we should either remove all the links or try to replace them in some way. Unfortunately we didn’t templatize the link, which means they will have to be replaced individually. Did you see if the original website was archived by the Internet Archive? — Sgconlaw (talk) 05:05, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

I did not. Ultimately, many of these are very trivial citations or not very helpful links, really. :/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:13, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

@Koavf: are there many Referencecom links? If not, maybe delete all the useless ones and then assess the others? — Sgconlaw (talk) 14:15, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

The link I have above with "strike from this site" shows c. 1000 links in the main namespace. Mostly they are Further readings, but sometimes citations. One was a citation to an article, but it was something like a two paragraph, spammy one that had little details. So I have not just indiscriminately removed them, but I have taken out twenty-some or thirty-some so far and not noticed anything that really reduces the quality of our dictionary. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 15:20, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

@Koavf: hmmm, maybe we should just bite the bullet and nuke them all. The alternative is similar to what we did for {{R:Lexico}}—use a bot to append https://web.archive.org/... to the URLs. This will cause the Internet Archive Wayback Machine to try to display the latest archived version of a website. However, such URLs still need to be manually checked as the latest archived version can be a 404 or similar page, or simply not exist. I usually check {{R:Lexico}} links when I come across them; if the latest archived version is inaccessible but an earlier archived version exists I substitute that, and if none exists I remove the link. — Sgconlaw (talk) 16:17, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

I am pro-nuke. I think there's minimal value and this was not necessarily a reliable source in Wikipedia parlance. It would be a different story if this had been an established print dictionary put online that went dark, but it's just a mid-2000s website that was great and then turned into SEO spam nonsense, tragically. :/

I think the longer-term solution is to definitely template-ize further reading and external links sections as much as possible. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:29, 30 June 2025 (UTC)

@Koavf: well, I have no objections if you think that nuking is the best option. — Sgconlaw (talk) 17:47, 30 June 2025 (UTC)