Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2018-02/Allow retronyms

Voting on: amending Criteria for Inclusion to expressly allow retronyms Add the following text to CFI: "Terms that are retronyms may be included even if they are 'sum-of-parts'." Schedule:

• Vote starts: 21:35, 13 March 2018 (UTC)
• Vote ends: 23:59, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
• Vote created: John Cross (talk) 22:45, 22 February 2018 (UTC)

Discussion:

• Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2018-02/Allow retronyms
• Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2018/March#Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2018-02/Allow retronyms

1. Support DonnanZ (talk) 08:48, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

   I had better qualify my support. Metaknowledge points out that no proviso for common sense is incorporated in the vote, and seems to fear the floodgates will be opened. I sympathise with that. But I feel there should be allowance made for more commonsense retronyms, manual gearbox springs to mind. The problem is, as before, where to draw the line to prevent entries made in good faith and with good intentions ending up in RFD. DonnanZ (talk) 17:37, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

2. Support - I think terms such as acoustic guitar are useful to our users. SemperBlotto (talk) 16:55, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

   @SemperBlotto: We already have that entry, so this vote wouldn't change anything. Do you think paper book would be useful to our readers? —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:43, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

   Yes. I'm going to add it. SemperBlotto (talk) 11:14, 16 March 2018 (UTC)

3. Support - I think they are useful terms. There may have been a better form of words I could have used for this change but I could not think of one. John Cross (talk) 21:37, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

   That's what happens when you create a vote without prior discussion. --WikiTiki89 21:40, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

   @Wikitiki89: You did take part in the discussion. DonnanZ (talk) 21:51, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

   That discussion was started after this vote was created. --WikiTiki89 21:52, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

4. Support -Xbony2 (talk) 01:00, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
5. Support. "Paper book," if e-books, etc. didn't exist, might be taken to mean a paperback book, or a book made entirely of paper. As with many retronyms, the term would likely have been confusing had it been introduced before other types of books were introduced. For the uneducated, retronyms might seem to refer to be making a distinction that they aren't (e.g. between "books" and "paper books" rather than between "paper books" and "electronic books"), and it could be quite helpful to include them. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:48, 17 March 2018 (UTC)
6. Support, although I do think that the wording could be tightened up a bit. The vote is asking that retronyms are not to be discarded on the basis of being SOP. Very importantly in my view, attestation and the rest of WT:CFI are still required. That seems a reasonable stance to me. From CFI: "In rare cases, a phrase that is arguably unidiomatic may be included by the consensus of the community, based on the determination of editors that inclusion of the term is likely to be useful to readers." I think it is useful to a reader (especially one that is not a native speaker of English) to be able to cross-refer from an entry like e-book and find the coordinate retronym term that disambiguates the hypernym book. It may seem transparently SOP to an English reader, but knowing which is the generally accepted common term out of examples such as "paper book", "printed book", or "physical book" is not obvious. This is similar to having an entry for the accepted common terms analogue clock/analog clock but not mechanical clock or clockwork clock. -Stelio (talk) 21:01, 24 March 2018 (UTC)
7. Support as long as other CFI are met. Finsternish (talk) 21:24, 12 April 2018 (UTC)

1. Oppose --WikiTiki89 15:15, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
2. Oppose. Quite simply, I think that paper book is a useless entry, and I am glad that we don't have it. This is the kind of entry that this vote would allow. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:24, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

   I seem to remember my very first book was a cloth book, I agree paper book is a bit extreme, but I would like to see allowance made for commonsense entries. DonnanZ (talk) 16:41, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

   @Donnanz: It doesn't work like that. This vote would allow all retronyms, and there is no clause about common sense getting in the way. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:48, 14 March 2018 (UTC)

3. Oppose Underdiscussed. I don't want to delete all retronyms (Blotto's acoustic guitar is fine) but I don't want to include all either. Equinox ◑ 17:02, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
4. Oppose. The existing RFD process seems to handle keeping the worthwhile ones and excluding the chaff moderately well. I don't think that all retronyms as a class are inherently entry-worthy; some, like snail mail, are obviously idiomatic, but others, like paper book, are rather useless. (And, as others have pointed out, this vote as it is worded would seem to allow retronyms regardless of attestation.) - -sche (discuss) 17:43, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
5. Oppose, per Equinox's explanation. --Robbie SWE (talk) 20:31, 14 March 2018 (UTC)
6. Oppose: ditto to above. --Victar (talk) 13:58, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
7. Oppose per -sche, Equinox, Metaknowledge. --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 14:20, 15 March 2018 (UTC)
8. Oppose For the aforestated reasons. --SanctMinimalicen (talk) 01:35, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
9. Oppose. I support better protection for retronyms, but this rule is too broad imo. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 12:58, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
10. Oppose —Aryaman^{A (मुझसे बात करें • योगदान)} 00:54, 30 March 2018 (UTC)
11. Oppose —Mahāgaja (formerly Angr) · talk 20:43, 5 April 2018 (UTC)

1. Abstain I am not sure how to read the "may" in "Terms that are retronyms may be included even if they are 'sum-of-parts'." If "may" means "may but do not have to", then this is what I would support, that is, take into consideration that a term is a retronym, but keep flexibility/override. An inflexible policy text would use "should" or, formally, even "shall", reserving "should" for mere recommendations. In any case, the use of "may" gives enough lawyering room that I do not have to oppose. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:27, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

   As to the complaint that there was not enough discussion: created on 22 February 2018, started on 14 March 2018. The vote was listed on Wiktionary:Votes/Active via diff on March 6. There was more than enough time to discuss the wording of the vote; the problem is people chose not to post specific reasons for opposing or wording amendment proposals before the vote started. On another note, the vote already achieved a portion of its objective: it collected a feedback from relatively many people on a particular proposal. The votes that have no comment did almost nothing to futher that objective, but that's life. Thank you for the vote. People on the talk page complained how there was not enough discussion, but once the vote was postponed, they did not discuss the vote subject matter. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:47, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

   A bit of discussion for the proposal itself. retronym is "A new word or phrase coined for an old object or concept whose original name has become used for something else or is no longer unique." We have and apparently want acoustic guitar; what prevents the entry from being deleted as a sum of parts, as a matter of policy? We have in acoustic inter alia the following sense: "Naturally producing or produced by an instrument without electrical amplification, as an acoustic guitar or acoustic piano." And here we are, in the land of Talk:free variable, and acoustic guitar can be deleted as sum of parts. It may be protected by the lemming heuristic via Collins, yet not via M-W and AHD, it seems. We do not have acoustic piano. We have analogue clock, and so does Collins. We have optical mouse (not a retronym), which is in Collins; its antonym mechanical mouse is now in RFD. magnetic compass is in RFD, and also in Collins and M-W. paper book has been cited as an item undesirably allowed via the proposal, yet the term has a legal sense and will be probably kept thereby. biological mouse was mentioned as another undesirable sneaker. One should not try to sneak in the terms of the form "classical X", I guess. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:25, 17 March 2018 (UTC)

2. Abstain PseudoSkull (talk) 17:12, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Fails 7–11–2. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:49, 16 April 2018 (UTC)