Is there / should there be a usage subsection for each definition ( for which it would be worthwhile). I'm thinking Fowler - Modern English usagem abd & Partridge, Usage and Abusage. --Tagishsimon
Well, we sometimes add a usage note underneath a definition; often like this
See, for two examples, Scotch SemperBlotto 16:54, 16 Apr 2005 (UTC)
<Jun-Dai 06:46, 6 May 2005 (UTC)> I'm beginning to feel pretty strongly that we should have "articles" for multi-word usage issues, rather than merely usage notes, so that we can nail the usage description without restricting ourselves to information relevant to only one of the articles. This is especially so for synonyms or words with similar, overlapping, or hierarchical meanings. We really ought to have articles, for example, to compare the usage of book, tome, volume, text, manuscript, etc. Such an article could never be adequately addressed on the pages of one of the words, and it would be silly to reproduce the whole article on all of them. But before I do this, I want to see what others think, and I want to develop a consistent approach for doing this, particularly in the article naming (anything that involves article namespace needs communal discussion). dictionary.com's (really American Heritage's) approach is to put the usage not at one of the articles, and put a "see usage note at" on each of the other articles. I think it would be better, however, to give separate articles (which bartleby.com's version of American Heritage does). We could, in the example above, have an article named something like Usage notes:Types of books, or we could go a little better and do something like Usage notes:Words for bound texts. Or just Usage:
Any thoughts? </Jun-Dai>
<Jun-Dai 11:28, 7 May 2005 (UTC)> I'm happy with the fairly positive response here, so I decided to set out with English usage:Dieresis. I realized that there was no value in merging all the various-language usage notes into a single namespace, and it does leave the possibility of confusion. I fully expect y'all to make edits to my beautiful new stub, and in case there is disagreement with the name, or with its existence altogether, I held off on implementing links to it across the board. I restrained myself by touching only a few. Does this seem like a good start?
Note to Connel: I'm not really intending this as an ESL resource, which is why I expect that, for a perfect Wiktionary, there would be many more such usage articles for any given foreign language than there would be for English. This is mainly to clear up confusing issues that affect more than one word—issues that need more space than would comfortably fit in the section of a word.
It is not possible, for example, to have a clear understanding of the distinction between coöperate and cooperate (i.e., it's not just a spelling variant, it's part of a system) based on the definitions there, and most of the information provided to that effect would have to be reprinted on reëxamine, reëlect, and the others. On a smaller scale, there is an important usage note to be created that will cover the terms they, them, their, and themself, regarding their use as a gender-unspecific third-person pronoun collection. You could put a usage note under they, and say "see usage note at they", but that seems inelegant when we can have an article for it and link to the article. Additionally, you can make references to usage articles with relevant information (in this case, an article on the use of he as a pronoun for someone of unspecified gender would be highly relevant), which would seem excessive on a word article.
As for synonyms, I think it's very hard to capture the difference, particularly in usage, between the various words that have overlapping meanings in a small word definition (small in the sense of at most a couple lines). This is by no means restricted to people learning English. I'm sure there are many native speakers of English that would be enlightened by a quality article on the differences between use, utilize, employ, and put to use. The article format is even more appropriate for such difficult and contentious groups of terms as tsunami and tidal wave or opera, oratorio, and musical. As no three people can agree on the distinction between an opera and a musical, and most people upon learning the word oratorio would have a hard time differentiating it from opera (there exist oratori that are performed with costumes and acting, and operas that are not. There are also secular oratori and religious operas). In such cases it becomes necessary to frame various arguments (some would say Evita is an opera. Others would say it is not) and speak of senses (oratorio is generally used for religious-themed, unacted works, but there are cases where this is not true, particularly in times when it was a dominant form. It is very rare, on the other hand for an opera to be written with the intention that it not be acted. On the whole, the term used is likely to be based on the composer's preference, or at least what he wrote on the top of the score, unless the composer is Andrew Lloyd Webber). Such articles hardly belong in the main entries, and yet they are entirely suitable for the Wiktionary.</Jun-Dai>
WikiSaurus is there for you to group words with similar meanings. You could have an entry WikiSaurus:Book. The content of a WikiSaurus entry is not rigidly defined. Often words, in the list of similar words in a WikiSaurus entry, have a note against them to indicate specific usage.--Richardb 10:11, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
My understanding is that we are limited to having 16 namespaces, without any prospect of upping this number. I looked into it a bit after using WikiSaurus as a pseudo namespace.
Why not just use sub-pages ? Eg: a page called Dieresis/usage notes, with the sub-page title of "usage notes" being used consistently for any extended usage notes associated with a word. --Richardb 10:21, 22 May 2005 (UTC)
A naming scheme was established in 2014, see Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2014/June#Naming_scheme_for_templatized_usage_notes. - -sche (discuss) 17:53, 13 January 2018 (UTC)