Wiktionary talk:Votes/2025-02/Retiring the English verb conjugation table

@Mihia Perhaps I should speak for myself, but I am not convinced you'll find a lot of support for a proposal that isn't totally clear on what it's proposing. I think we need some more detail on what the "feature to show archaic, obsolete and other verb forms" could look like. "Feature" is a broad and vague term. I'm sure you have a concept in your head - are you imagining a table or box of some kind? This, that and the other (talk) 00:14, 15 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

Yeah, probably drop-down box, list, something like that. I can add a "such as" if it will help. There's no point designing anything in detail unless there is support in principle. If I did, then people may oppose because they want a table rather than a list, or something like that that is really not the point at this stage. Mihia (talk) 00:21, 15 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

FWIW, I agree with TTO, a vote for a (semi-)blank check rather than some concrete action feels ... unsupportable. I also don't really see the point in replacing the collapsed conjugation tables with ... a collapsed table (er, collapsed "box") of conjugated forms. What is the expected improvement over the existing table? Can we not just improve the existing table/template? - -sche (discuss) 04:07, 16 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

The point is: What is the purpose of the table? At the moment, the purpose of the table is to show verb conjugation. The archaic and obsolete forms are there too, incidentally, as it appears. My proposal is that we do not need a conjugation table for (99.9% of) English verbs, such as "clarify", because all the parts are in the headword anyway. What we do need is just a way to link to the obsolete and archaic forms. I have added some more words to the second paragraph. Please see it this helps. Mihia (talk) 12:08, 16 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Mihia: maybe the proposal could be better phrased as modifying {{en-conj}} to display only archaic forms of verbs where appropriate rather than "retiring" it completely, which threw me at first until I reread the proposal. — Sgconlaw (talk) 11:43, 20 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

My assumption (as I mentioned on the vote page) is that we will have to keep "en-conj" unchanged for certain special cases, notably "be" (there may be others, not sure). It seems easiest to me to have a separate template, let's say "en-additional-verb-forms", or whatever shorter name someone can think of, for the cut-down version that will (if agreed) apply to the vast majority of verbs. It's not as if the coding effort is likely to be enormous, I wouldn't think. Then over time, as people have the time and inclination, "en-conj" can be swapped over to the new template case by case, and this will also mean that each verb gets an individual look, rather than a global modification of "en-conj" that might unexpectedly break things or produce sub-optimal results. Mihia (talk) 15:18, 20 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

Having said that, I was hoping that we could first just agree on the principle of what we were trying to achieve, without worrying about the implementation, though others have cast doubt on this, and I do agree that the title "retiring" does in itself make certain implications about implementation. Anyway I extended the discussion period so that these things can hopefully be ironed out. Mihia (talk) 15:30, 20 February 2025 (UTC)Reply

@Mihia: has this vote started? It is showing up in the "Planned, running and recent votes" box on watchlists has having started on 27 February 2025, but on the page itself the "This vote has not yet started" box is still displayed. — Sgconlaw (talk) 18:58, 12 March 2025 (UTC)Reply