Wiktionnaire:Actualités/023-février-2017/en

Wiktionnaire:Actualités is a monthly periodical about French Wiktionary, dictionaries and words, published online since April 2015. Everyone is welcome to contribute to it. You can sign in to be noticed of future issues, read old issues and participate to the draft of the next edition. You can also have a look at Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia. If you have any comments, critics or suggestions, our talk page is open!

Actualités - Numéro 23 - février 2017

• Are you fond of Assyrian? A Babylonian-lover? The Chicago Assyrian Dictionary Project FINALLY came up after 90 years. Well, it costs 1.400 euros to have its 21 volumes on your shelves... But don't worry, it is also freely available online.

• The 7,000 pages of the Glossaire des patois de la Suisse romande has been released online by the Haute école de Gestion Arc of Neuchâtel.

Detail of a painting showing the artist Abul Hasan and the Shah Abbas, uploaded by Eugene a, selected as a feature picture in February 2017.

Focus this month on the status of the contributors in French Wiktionary. Besides the differences exposed here, contributors are all equals on editorial authority over content and structure. Differences are only on tools peer-given to check recent modifications. It is not a hierarchy nor a race to acknowledgement or merit, but a distribution of trust between contributors.

Main status

• Non-registered users: when someone modifies a page without any user account, IP address of his computer is logged in order to distinguish from other non-registered users. This allows to check all modifications done by one person.
• Registered users: Registration, free and possibly anonymous, allows to follow modifications and communicate in a perennial way, whatever the device from which the person connects to the Wiktionary. It allows as well the user to have his own watchlist and draft pages.
• Patrollers: they are contributors who agree to take time to proofread the modifications made by others, and who get specific tools through a vote organised between people who already got these tools.
• Autopatroller: when someone contributes positively, following the rules of the Wiktionary, patrollers talks together and then modify the status of this contributor so that his modifications are not marked anymore in recent changes. Thus patrollers can focus on modifications that needs more proofreading.
• Administrators: they are patrollers that got additional tools, especially one to hide a modification in the history page, for cases where someone gives personal information. They can also disable, temporary, the possibility to edit to a user, registered or not.
• Bureaucrats: in addition of administrators tools, they can modify the status of others, except the one of other bureaucrats.
• Stewards: they are contributors on several projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. In case of conflicts between administrators or bureaucrats, they mediate and can remove the status of bureaucrats to a user.

Minor status

• AbuseFilter controllers: this is an automatic tool to control edits, this is mostly used by bureaucrat but the access can also be given separately.
• Importers: manage the movement of content from another project, such as Wikipedia, to not loose the history.
• Translator admin: to check translations on multilingual pages. In French Wiktionary, it is only used to translate Actualités!

Voilà! A short description of the different status. You can learn more about it by reading this page.

From mid-January to mid-February (from 01/20/2017 to 02/20/2017)

• French have 17,948 new entries. This language reaches 348,578 lemmas and 508,570 definitions.
• The three other languages which most progressed are English (+ 9,963 entries), Sami (same du Nord, + 2,464 entries) and Italian (+ 417 entries).
• New languages this month are (with French names here): talossan (+3) and kirundi (+1).
• 32,429 pages for at least 71 languages were extented this month!
• A new language code in the project was added for talossan (code: tzl).

Miscellanous

• There is 30,972 illustrative pictures in French Wiktionary, 325 added since last month.
• February 2017, French Wiktionary offer 260 thesauri in French. Three more than last month, and a bot is adding links to thesauri in million pages!

Last month words

This month, no story on stats for words, because stats pages are too good, and hard to comments cleverly. So, you can have a look at:

• Pages the most improved
• Pages the most viewed
• Pages modified by the most people

New lexicons

• French lexicon of catch rise a fist.
• French lexicon of stereochemistry was configurate.

GIZAC, Diccionario Flora y Fauna Guarasu, 2015, Leipzig University.

This dictionary is almost more interesting for the work made for his publication than for his content. It was made by two linguists, Swintha Danielsen and Lena Sell, and fund by The Endangered Language Fund, a structure that help to produce material for endangered languages. Guarasu, or Pauserna, is a small language spoken in the frontier of Bolivia and Brasil, by less than ten people. The linguists was willing to investigate this language because there is very few data about it and the speaker history. But political leaders were not accepting them in the community, in part because they may reveal that the political figure do not speak very well the language, and then menace their authority and right to deforest the Guarasugwe territory.

Determinate, they compile available data and several word list collected by anthropologist to produce a dictionary with 300 plant names and 250 animal names. This small book was made to help them to prove they do not want to destroy traditional culture or leadership but to study the language and produce pedagogical material. This later one can also be used by politician to illustrate the vitality of the language and the need for a specific land.

This dictionary is for sell in Bolivia, for less than 6 euros. It aims to patrimonialize a language that will probably disappear soon, despite the efforts of this duo of linguists. This is the story of many languages, and collaborative tools might participate to those attempts to protect diversity, or became tools for revitalization of languages, becoming attractive for the new generations. — a chronicle by Noé

As announced last month, French Wiktionary was presented at the languages and linguistics Museum Mundolingua in Paris on February 16th. Thanks to intervention of 13okouran, the two main authors of Actualités, Lyokoï and Noé were invited for one of the monthly conferences. For about one hour and a half, they presented the different kinds of content of the Wiktionary to a mindful and curious audience, who then asked accurate and interesting questions. Some employees of Wikimedia France, the local association were presents and Jules Xénard wrote a nice story of the conference after he came back home. The discussions also enabled to connect the museum with the KoToPo, an associative venue where the monthly Wiktionary meetings in Lyon take place (free and open to all, every first Thursday of the month).

LexiSession on fever

Powered by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group, the LexiSessions aim to suggest monthly themes to put all Wiktionaries on the same page.

The seventh LexiSession was about fever and drive to the creation of the thesaurus on fever in French, made by four contributors: Lyokoï, Rapaloux, Lmaltier et Cbyd !

The contributions on other Wiktionaries are difficult to measure as the communities are diverse and the feedbacks rare. The LexiSession of March will focus on french loan words, these french words that you can find in other languages, with a meaning sometimes very far from the original one !

This rubric reviews videos about linguistics and French published during the month.

• The C’est Pas Sourcé channel published two episodes about Odin through historical sources. The second one cites french and english wiktionaries several times, as well as french and english Wikipedia.
• A short video to show that regional languages are still taught at school! At least in Wallonia!
• Elles comme Linguistes : this month, the linguists duo talks about the Minions language, Love and why we gesticulate while we speak!
• Linguisticae : a new video to deal with volapük and a video of rhetorical analysis on the apostrophe (Emmanuel Macron).
• Code Mu : a new and very energetic video about antonomases that have nothing to do with their original meaning!
• Mycéliums proposes an interesting video about the abusive use of technical jargon.

Part of a picture porposed by Kora27 during the Monthly Photo Challenge of February.

Games New game ! A game developped by a Lyonese from the local community of free softwares called Bonjour le mot. Two modes are proposed: Find a word (often rare) from a definition. Find the corresponding definition amongst three for a word. These words mainly come from TLFi (wrongly credited CNRTL) and sometimes from the Larousse. The probable encounter of this developper at the Free Software Days or at a monthly Wiktionary meeting in Lyon may boost the content of this nice game! Multilingual Scrabble The contributors of the english Wiktionary are currently organizing a tremendous game of multilingual Scrabble! Each day a new set of letters. The word propositions have to be sent by e-mail and only the best one is put on the grid. Words of all languages accepted, as long as they exist in the english wiktionary ! Bouche cousue, February scores! Bouche cousue is a fantastic game with words in French. There is two modes: random word and word of the week. In both, words are to be guessed with several attempts of words. For each try, the game give how many letters are correct and placed but not which ones. Have a try! For the word of the week, the number of try before the correct answer is recorded. Here are the best results for this month's words! 1st to 8th February 8th to 15th 15th to 22th 22th to 28th fronde nareux santal uriner 1e Lmaltier (7) Lmaltier (10) poisson (12) Noé (13) 2e Clément et Classicardinal (11) Noé (11) Noé (14) Lyokoï (16) 3e le mur (12) Clément (17) saluer (16)

Fun facts Do you know that many languages have no numbers? Impossible to count to ten! If the history of the zero is interesting, description of languages with no words to design quantities is intriguingly not tied with the history of mathematics. Lexical and grammatical structures appears to fill an expressive or cultural needs. When a culture do not need numerical exchanges, why create a numeric system? In some languages, there is a way to distinguish a small group or a bigger one, to point a single unity or a pair, to indicate it is impair so almost three...but those words are not numerals! There are quantifiers. This grammatical category has been established for those languages, but we can also find a dozen of those in French: tas, groupe, meute, troupe, collection, palanquée, volée (de marches ), foule, brassée, chiée, flopée, tripotée, ribambelle, etc. And if you want to read more examples, here is the best resource! Eugene Chan is leading a project to document numeral systems and he already have collected more than 4.000 systems! If you know some that are missing, please contact him! — a chronicle by Noé