Wiktionary talk:About French

Hello. I'd like to have a clearer picture of the current pool of French contributors; maybe we could unite our efforts and progress in a more systematic way? I've only interacted with @Jerome Charles Potts, @Adelpine and @Jberkel, but I suppose there are others? --Barytonesis (talk) 15:48, 6 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Do you have anything specific in mind? One of the things I wanted to look at is how we can steal reuse some of the amazing data from Wiktionnaire. – Jberkel (talk) 17:59, 6 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Hello. Nowadays I'm collaborating on the English and German Wiktionaries. I'd like to contribute to the French wikis after that (next year).--Adelpine (talk) 21:33, 6 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Jberkel: Well, it's still a bit vague, but I'd chiefly like to work on the "depth" of our entries, on consolidating them (by adding synonyms, antonyms, related terms, the whole gamut; by adding labels such as "nonstandard", "proscribed", "rare" whenever necessary)

I'm not particularly interested in creating tons of new entries. Well, that depends; I have a fondness for obsolete words like moise that are inherited from Latin, and I think we're still missing a lot of common multiword expressions; but although it would be nice to blue everything in Wiktionary:Requested_entries_(French)/t (for example), there are a lot of uninteresting words in there.

• Become a good translation dictionary, especially for slang terms (foutu), idioms (faire le malin), etc.
• Make a more systematic use of categories, topical as well as grammatical
• Present reflexive/pronominal verbs in a systematic way
• Complete Category:French verbs taking être as auxiliary (I see you want to do the same for Italian)
• Categorise compounds such as ouvre-boîte, casse-noisette, etc. (cf. this discussion); and take the opportunity to mention systematically the pre-1990 spelling if we only have the post-1990 one, and conversely
• work on Category:French conjunctions, Category:French prepositions, create Category:French conjunctive adverbs (cf. Category:English conjunctive adverbs; there are many interesting categories in Category:English adverbs, actually)
• use fr:Catégorie:Termes vulgaires en français to complete Category:French vulgarities
• maybe create Appendix:French doublets (we already have Category:French doublets, but a table might be clearer)

Maintenance:

• empty Category:etyl cleanup/fr
• empty Category:French idioms, which doesn't add any value
• split Category:French words suffixed with -ment (cf. this)
• I've also found this list of French similes; I created the ones I knew, but there are still a fair amount of them (quotations would be good, though, because a lot of them I've never even read)

What about you? What would you like to reuse from fr.wikt? --Barytonesis (talk) 16:04, 7 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Agreed on the "depth" aspect, I'm also interested in slang terms – there are so many in French. I initially wasn't interested in categories but now find them to be valuable, especially "sizeable" categories listing grammatical oddities. What's the problem with Category:French idioms? As a learner I find it useful.

I'm also interested in adding synonyms and usage examples. Maybe that's something we could take from Wiktionnaire. However they seem to mostly use citations which are often quite wordy and not necessarily the best illustration for a word.

Other things I'd like to focus on are verbs in general: adding transitive/intransitive labels, and use standardized annotations for prepositions. For example {{indtr}} which I've often used in Portuguese entries.

I noticed that you've started revising Wiktionary:About French, which is great, it's a bit rudimentary at the moment. – Jberkel (talk) 17:34, 7 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Jberkel: " I initially wasn't interested in categories but now find them to be valuable, especially "sizeable" categories listing grammatical oddities" > so we should get along quite well :p

• Re CAT:French idioms: firstly, it's redundant in itself: if a word weren't idiomatic, we wouldn't have an entry for it. Secondly, I think putting things there is the lazy man's way of saying "this is an interesting word, but I won't bother to tell you why/how". So you've got similes, proverbs, and all kinds of parts of speech all bundled together. It does bother me, however, that an entry like faire les courses isn't categorised in anything else than CAT:French verbs. But as I said, I don't think CAT:French idioms is a good solution.
• Re transitivity and use of prepositions: I wholeheartedly agree! I didn't know about {{indtr}} at all, I've just been using {{lb}}, but it has always seemed messy to me to mix grammatical, topical and register labels together...
• I also use {{lb}} to give info about the preposition, but there it's not only messy, it's even ugly (look at the last sense of défaire...). There's {{+preo}} which I've seen used on a few AGr. entries, but it's been lying in an experimental state for three years so I'm a bit reluctant to use it. It could be interesting as well to have verbs categorised by the preposition they require, actually.
• Re synonyms: yes. When I add them, I often feel like I'm wasting my time doing a job that's already been done. Among other things, maybe we could start using links to entries of the fr:Thésaurus to avoid reduplication of content. As I've said elsewhere, I don't think we should start creating French thesaurus entries on en.wikt as it's, IMO, outside of scope.
• Another minor problem that I'd like to settle is how we should handle different lemmatizations between fr.wikt and en.wikt. I think we should be quite strict on our way of lemmatisation, and I often don't agree with the way it's done on fr.wikt. When I created faire une croix sur, I was very tempted to put it at faire une croix instead, but at the same time I didn't want the French entry to be hidden from view. --Barytonesis (talk) 10:12, 8 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

Re idiomatic, I see you point, but the information is often not obvious to somebody learning the language (is it just a weird, rare, literary turn of phrase, or commonly understood?) It might be lazy, but still better than no information at all. Maybe it could first be tagged as "idiomatic" and later be bucketed in a more detailed category.

About the synonyms, linking to fr.wikt might be a good idea. I think for a given sense it's often good enough to have one or two really strong synonyms inline. As you get more proficient in the language you can then just look at the synonyms, skipping the English definition altogether.

About the lemmatizations, I haven't really thought about it. Do they have guidelines on fr.wikt? i.e. always include prepositions, is it consistent? Maybe redirects could be a solution, if they are used for cross-wiki links. – Jberkel (talk) 10:50, 8 November 2017 (UTC)Reply

@Jberkel: Frohes neues Jahr! I've changed my mind about CAT:French idioms, which I think is useful (it's still be good to split it by POS, though); I'm only opposed to {{lb|idiomatic}}. --Per utramque cavernam (talk) 23:57, 8 January 2018 (UTC)Reply

https://en.wiktionary.orghttps://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=%C3%A0_nouveau&type=revision&diff=50934192&oldid=48631987 — This unsigned comment was added by 82.81.239.131 (talk) at 12:50, 17 December 2018 (UTC).Reply