Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2022-07/Stubifying alternative forms
Stubifying alternative forms
Voting on: Changing the section WT:EL#Alternative_forms as follows:
Proposal 1
Replace
Some variations of the same word kept in multiple pages include:
with
Some variations of lemmas kept in multiple pages include:
- regional variations: color, colour; center, centre
- dialectal variations/pronunciation spellings: e'rything (everything); mah (my)
- eye dialect: sumthing (something)
- archaic and obsolete spellings: musick (music), swound (swoon)
- typographical variations: anæmia, anaemia; coördinate, coordinate
- hyphenization/compounds: tea cup, tea-cup, teacup
- style variation: naiveté, naïveté
- differing capitalization: laser, LASER
- misspellings: occurence (unintentional misspelling of occurrence), teh (intentional misspelling of the)
- censored spellings: f*** (fuck)
- different scripts: genki (genki), げんき, 元気 (Japanese for "healthy, lively"); реч, reč (Serbo-Croatian for "word")
Such variations shall in general be defined using the appropriate form-of template, though exceptions may apply where a contrary consensus has been established (for instance, the Cyrillic and Latin spellings of Serbo-Croatian lemmas are treated as equals and thus neither shall be defined as a form of the other).
Proposal 2
Add the following text to the end of WT:EL#Alternative_forms:
Lemma senses that are defined as forms of other lemmas per the above regulation may only come with the bare minimum of information in order to prevent redundancy. Typically, in a group of forms that are alternative forms of one another, one form shall be chosen as the primary form, containing the complete range of lexicographic information, while all the other forms should be defined as stub senses, containing only a limited range of entry elements. For instance, English naïveté is the primary form whereas its alternative forms naivete, naïvete, naiveté, naivety, naïvety, and naivite are stub senses.
A stub sense may only be defined using a definition line that consists of a suitable form-of template. Quotations may be provided, but other information such as synonyms or example sentences shall be omitted and placed at the primary form's entry instead. Context labels shall only be used to the extent that they differ from the primary form.
If a particular language section or etymology section in an entry consists only of stub senses, that language section or etymology section shall have only the following entry elements associated with it (headers in bold):
- Description
- Glyph origin
- The part of speech header
- The headword line
- Stub sense definition line (as set out above)
- Inflection, Declension or Conjugation
- Mutation
- References
- Further reading
- Anagrams
- Syntactical categories
Further, if any of the following elements differ between the stub sense and the primary form, information which differs and only applies to the stub sense may also be included in association with the stub sense:
A language section or etymology section consisting only of stub senses shall not include entry elements that do not appear in either of the above lists, including but not limited to all other headers, topical categories, images, and translations.
- ^ Note that this means that not all form-of definitions fall under the purview of this part of the policy, only those described in the above text. Particularly,
{{synonym of}},{{diminutive of}},{{clipping of}},{{ellipsis of}}and similar are exempt. - ^ For instance, in the group of forms anemia, anaemia, anæmia, the primary form is situated at anemia and has the labels (American spelling), (uncountable), (countable), and (pathology). However, the stub senses at anaemia, and anæmia may only have the (British spelling) label, not (uncountable), (countable), and (pathology) because these latter three labels are applicable to all forms in this group.
- ^ The Etymology header may also be included in association with a stub sense if the header needs to be numbered. This will be the case if the entry contains additional senses derived from other etymological sources. If included only for this reason, the stub sense's etymology section must be empty, meaning there must be nothing but whitespaces between the Etymology n header and the following header.
Rationale
- The vote originally only consisted of proposal 2 but it has been rightly pointed out that the section to which the text is to be appended is itself not 100% clear and may diverge from the currently de-facto followed procedure. Proposal 1 therefore consists of some uncontroversial amendments to the existing section.
- As for proposal 2, the status quo is untenable in the long run. Maintaining multiple full entries with all bells and whistles invariably leads to divergence after some time. Not every editor that makes a change to one article thinks about making it to the other ones as well, not least because in many cases the alternative forms are already stubs so there would be nothing to change anyway. And even if it doesn't lead to divergence, the upkeep requires a lot of effort on the part of editors to make sure that every detail is present in both entries, effort that is better spent elsewhere. Many editors are actually already aware of this and thus regularly stubify alternative forms already even in absence of binding policy. This is however not followed by everybody. For example, compare fiber and fibre: the Old French form is absent in the latter as is sense 3 and the nyms of the first mathematics sense. The category theory sense is also defined slightly differently as are the derived/related terms (they're actually all called derived in the former entry but related in the latter). This vote hopes to establish a community consensus that we don't want to have this kind of redundancy in our articles.
This vote has not yet started. It has been created to solicit advice on wording and fitness to purpose. Feedback and new ideas are highly encouraged! If you have not done so, please follow the discussion links for a better understanding of the topic. However, do not vote for any options at this time, as any premature votes may be struck. On the other hand, if the discussion is stagnant and there are no recent changes, anyone may choose to start this vote by properly listing it. Once the starting date has arrived, this banner may be ignored or removed.
Schedule:
- Vote starts: indeterminate
- Vote ends: indeterminate
- Vote created: — Fytcha〈 T | L | C 〉 13:35, 4 July 2022 (UTC)
Discussion:
Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/June § Translations of Alternative Forms- Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/July § Should alternative forms be in topical categories?
- Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2022-07/Stubifying alternative forms
