Talk:Kappa

RFV discussion: June–July 2019

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Kappa

A name for a symbol used on Amazon's Twitch.tv, presumably a noun.

Contributor claims Kappa to be a symbol (ie, under Symbol PoS header)

The evidence (Citations:Kappa) shows it being used as a kind of instruction to site-specific software running on Twitch to substitute a proprietary image for Kappa. If it is, in effect, only a command we would not include it AFAICT.

Can we find attestation of it being used as a noun? As a subsidiary question, is it a Proper noun because it refers to a unique image, ie, not because it has an initial capital letter. DCDuring (talk) 12:28, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

@DCDuring, hi, thank you for this rfv. i would strongly suggest anyone else interested also read my response to dcduring's rfc at Wiktionary:Requests_for_cleanup#Kappa and my discussion about uploading the image at Wiktionary:Grease_pit/2019/June#request_for_fair_use_non-free_image_upload_for_Kappa.

Kappa is definitely a symbol, but i am not sure if we should also add a noun sense. dcduring added two citations for a noun sense which you can see on Citations:Kappa, but i am concerned that these two citations are "mention-nouns" implicit in every word definition rather than needing a separate dictionary entry. for example, even though supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is only listed as an adjective, you might say "my friends sent me messages with supercalifragilisticexpialidocious and exclamation marks" or you might say "Mary Poppins' favorite phrase is supercalifragilisticexpialidocious" -- in both cases you use the adjective as a noun, but you can use every word that way so it does not have a noun entry. i think kappa should not have a noun entry either, for that reason.

i also disagree with the characterization of Kappa being only a command. i'll copy my explanation from the rfc here:

• when using the symbol, most people do not click on a special button or drag and drop like emojis (though that is possible to set up) -- they just type the word "Kappa" in the middle of a sentence which is then rendered as the 25x28px face by Twitch and various other free software apps/sites like chatty.
• due to this, i think the word "Kappa" and the symbol are actually the same thing -- they are completely interchangeable in all cases, though the symbol should be considered the primary representation. in part because wiktionary forces us to use a unicode title, it makes sense to use the latin-script name for the page title to define both the image and the word that refers to it. maybe this is similar to a word rendered in two different fonts? as you could imagine people using the "A" symbol interchangeably with the "peace sign" that it represents in Wingdings, even in a non-Wingdings font -- sort of like that.

Kappa is not a command because all it does is tell the computer to render the Kappa symbol -- it would be like saying pressing the smiley button on a phones keyboard is a "command" because it tells the computer to render ☺, or that typing &#9786 ; (without the space) is a command for ☺ even though in reality it is just another representation of the same thing. even if the symbol was a command which i disagree with, wiktionary still has entries for commands like cat#Etymology_3 so i think we should include it either way. --Habst (talk) 15:00, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

We don't include computer commands just because they're computer commands. For instance, we have no entry for the APL command ⍙, nor do I think we should. [[cat#Etymology_3]] exists as an add-on to [[cat#Etymology_1]]. If [[cat#Etymology_3]] were the only sense of the word cat, we wouldn't include it (as I understand current policy anyway).

That said, the citations suggest that we may have enough to meet WT:CFI, regardless of the computer command argument. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │^{Tala við mig} 16:38, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

The two citations that I have added at Citations:Kappa for the noun are one short of what is required for the noun. I don't see that any citation is possible for the "Symbol" because that PoS section is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what a symbol is. DCDuring (talk) 16:45, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

hi @Eirikr, thank you for your clarification on commands, though i always thought that every etymology of a word was required to meet criteria for inclusion regardless of whether or not unrelated etymologies already existed. either way, i think Kappa is not a command -- one thing i forgot to add earlier is that the Kappa face is rendered in-line with text like any other symbol right after it is typed, so i really do think it is analogous to using a code like &#9786 ; to represent a smiley face ☺.

and @DCDuring, i think kappa is a symbol both in the colloquial sense and in the wiktionary sense. i think the "noun" sense is just people mentioning the word/symbol itself without actually using it in a sentence, as can be done with any word in language, so i don't think it necessarily warrants a separate noun header as with the supercalifragilisticexpialidocious example i mentioned earlier. i don't think it is a fundamental misunderstanding, wiktionary defines a lot of varying symbols. --Habst (talk) 17:00, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

The part of speech is wrong: Kappa is a symbol, but the text Kappa is not itself the symbol. (A horse is an animal but the word horse is not an animal. Compare smiley, a noun.) By the same token it should not have a Description header, which is for describing actual symbols. Equinox ◑ 19:40, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

BTW I am a bit sceptical about the "Twitch-speak" gloss and category: will there be enough such terms that meet CFI to merit such a category? Maybe good old "Internet slang" would be better, since this is also used on Twitter etc. I gather. Equinox ◑ 19:44, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

hi @Equinox, thanks for your points. just to be clear about the symbol headword, i do plan on replacing the text "Kappa" under "Symbol" with the actual Kappa symbol once my request for its upload is completed. (i can create a modified headword template if this isn't technically possible with {{en-symbol}} yet.)

i think there are at least a few dozen twitch-speak terms that are well-attested enough to meet CFI. i know that the tracker by itself doesn't count as durably archived, but just as an example according to streamelements there are more than a dozen twitch-specific emotes with over 100 million uses each since 2016, for which i am sure i can find ample durable attestations online. because these terms are specific to twitch, i think twitch-speak would be the best way to characterize them, which itself is a subcat of Category:English internet slang. --Habst (talk) 22:00, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

as for the horse analogy -- i think this situation is a little different, because Kappa is not just the name of the symbol but also the "code" used to write the symbol (with no colons or other punctuation necessary) -- by contrast just writing "smiley" in a chat client would not actually produce a . given that we cannot use the Kappa image itself as the page title for technical reasons, and moving it to Appendix:Unsupported titles seems unnecessary, i think using the ascii string "Kappa" as the page title makes the most sense. --Habst (talk) 22:00, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

I am acquainted with the term, from chats bearing no relation to Twitch, and I have always deemed it and deem it an interjection, and as such it is quoted already on Citations:Kappa. It is like not!. An additional sense of course would be a noun referring to this interjection, as with every interjection, like there are nots and ayes and goodbyes. “Kappa” or “kappa”, however you like to capitalize it, is not written-only for an image, but is pronounced so in speech. It is pronounced [ˈkʰapʰa] when used in German (perhaps it is “Translingual” even). It’s also used in the meatspace, however by people who use rofl and lol in actual conversation. Fay Freak (talk) 22:44, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

hi @Fay Freak, thanks, it is good to hear from someone acquainted with the term. i like the idea of an interjection more than the noun idea previously proposed, but at the same time i still think it's ultimately a symbol, a picture used inline with text like other emojis that are already classified as symbols. maybe we should list it under both? by the way, i think the specific capitalization of "Kappa" is important, because a lowercase "kappa" would not cause the emote to render on Twitch so i think that form is far less common to see (both in and out of twitch).

i was also considering listing it as translingual, but being a native English speaker i am not sure if i have the expertise to find appropriate citations in non-English languages so i decided to start with english and if someone can find more diverse citations then they can change it to translingual. --Habst (talk) 23:32, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

I would say we have an interjection (when the word is used instead of the symbol) and a noun (the name of the symbol). Both are cited on the citations page. Kiwima (talk) 04:20, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

hi @Kiwima, i agree there should be an interjection part of speech -- but i think the interjection should be secondary to the symbol part of speech. the simple fact is that Kappa (the symbol, not the word) has been used, estimating conservatively based on streamelements stats, at least one billion times on Twitch, and on other sites people use the word instead of the image only because it's not an emoji that can be easily typed inline (there are some exceptions like this fivethirtyeight article though.)

also, thanks a lot for your help with the Citations:Kappa page. i just restructured it again to separate the symbol uses from the interjection uses to help point them out. if archived stream chats from e.g. major global championship competitions can be used for attestation, i think we could find thousands more. i just hope that my image upload request can be handled soon to make the page much more clear. --Habst (talk) 07:38, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

@DCDuring, Eirikr, Equinox, Fay Freak -- hi, i think we had a lot of good discussion here. i updated Kappa to have a symbol, interjection, and noun POS, all well-supported by Citations:Kappa. if it's okay with you all, i'm removing the rfv template now, because this solution carries some of all of your ideas, and i think there are no doubts that the existing parts of speech meet cfi. feel free to reply if there are any other things to think about. --Habst (talk) 14:45, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

oh, i also wanted to add that as soon as my image upload request is done i plan on replacing the Kappa symbol headword with the actual Kappa symbol to eliminate confusion, and be more like existing emoji symbols on wiktionary. but i think closing the existing rfc and rfv on Kappa would expedite that process. --Habst (talk) 14:50, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

i read @Equinox's edit summary comments and i agreed that the noun POS should be removed as it was only a "used to refer to X" definition implicit in every word, so it was removed. but the symbol POS should stay at Kappa, because "Kappa" (that literal ascii string) is the most widely used encoding for the Kappa symbol, so it is the most appropriate page title to contain the symbol definition. --Habst (talk) 16:34, 24 June 2019 (UTC)

How is Kappa an "encoding" in a sense different from how White House is an "encoding" for the famous building at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue? Would that be because it functions as an invocation to site-specific code at Twitch.tv? DCDuring (talk) 13:16, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

hi DCDuring, i think my sense of "encoding" is different than the white house example, because typing "White House" in my paragraph here is not contextually equivalent to the idea of having the actual White House building in my paragraph -- it is only equivalent to having a reference to the White House building. however, in many examples provided in Citations:Kappa both inside and outside of Twitch, typing "Kappa" (case sensitive) can be, meaning-wise, contextually equivalent to having the actual Kappa image inline replacing the "Kappa" text. i think it boils down to the classic w:sense and reference concept in linguistics.

my question is, assuming the symbol part-of-speech is well-attested which i believe it is, under which page title do you think it should go under? is there any solution better than "Kappa" as it stands? --Habst (talk) 23:29, 27 June 2019 (UTC)

Kappa (proper noun)

Rfv-sense: Proper noun. Unambiguous cites placed on the mainspace page under the definition to avoid confusion. DCDuring (talk) 20:15, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

hi @DCDuring, before i try to respond to these three new rfvs, can you please explain your message body here? you say "unambiguous cites placed on the mainspace page" but i don't see any cites on Kappa ever since we moved them to Citations:Kappa six days ago? or is it a request for me to copy the most unambiguous ones to the mainspace before responding? apologies if i'm being thick, i'm still trying to learn some proper etiquette with wiki discussions. --Habst (talk) 20:46, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes. Please don't bother pinging me. I watch this page and join this particular discussion as often as I can tolerate it.

I was and remain skeptical that any of the citations on the Citations page are good fits for any part of speech. You yourself have said that several are citations of a "Symbol" part of speech for Wiktionary purposes, which presupposes that Kappa is a symbol, which does not seem plausible, given the entities that are now in our category for symbols. You have also pointed out that Kappa can function to cause Twitch.tv's software to insert an image. That is not unlike something we do at Wiktionary: using {{done}} to cause the symbol or image  Done to appear. We wouldn't allow such a thing to be an entry here, except perhaps in the most unusual circumstances. But we should give each potential part of speech and each citation or class of citations due attention.

One way to move forward is to find cites that are as uncontroversial as possible for these other "parts of speech". As I recall there was even a single citation for a verb, though that may have been for the lower-case form. Given how widely used the term Kappa seems to be on Twitch.tv (itself not a durably archived medium, being under the sole control of Amazon), there should be some reference to it and, better, use of it in running text in durably archived media. There will be some question as to whether a given citation of the term is a use or a mention, but we have often accepted 'mentiony' citations. DCDuring (talk) 21:31, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

DCDuring, okay, i will not ping you.

i think the citations under the "Symbol" header of Citations:Kappa are a good match for the symbol pos (if you click through, all of those cites are of the actual symbol and not the word itself). there are over 1 million attestations, including in my opinion some of good enough quality to meet cfi. i think Kappa, when used inline as cited, is used very similarly to other symbols we already have on wiktionary, like 😂 or many of the other emoji in Appendix:Unicode.

i think it is different than {{done}}, because it is used millions of times more often, it is cited in durable media, and most importantly of all it conveys meaning like the phrase not!.

i also disagree that a medium can be labeled not durably archived simply because it's typically viewed on the website of a large company. as i understand it, chat messages are owned by the users that post them, and there are numerous decentralized logging projects (including on archive.org) that archive Twitch messages containing Kappa. twitch chats are only IRC channels under the hood, which is an open protocol -- they can be accessed and participated in (and frequently are) with any freely licensed IRC client instead of using the website, and there are a few IRC-specific terms on wiktionary already like sense #11 of part#Verb.

i just added two more unique cites to Citations:Kappa. i am most interested in the symbol pos, because i believe it is the primary part of speech for Kappa. this header, though, is for a different part of speech, i was only responding to the questions you asked about symbols above. i think it would be misleading to have other parts of speech but not the primary part. --Habst (talk) 18:23, 29 June 2019 (UTC)

Kappa (common noun)

Rfv-sense: noun. Unambiguous cites placed on the mainspace page under the definition to avoid confusion. DCDuring (talk) 20:16, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

Kappa (interjection)

Rfv-sense: Interjection. Unambiguous cites placed on the mainspace page under the definition to avoid confusion. DCDuring (talk) 20:17, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

I am calling this RFV-passed. There seem to be sufficient cites. Let the RFC and RFD deal with the remaining issues. Kiwima (talk) 21:40, 10 July 2019 (UTC)

RFV discussion: June–July 2019

See Talk:Kappa#RFV discussion: June–July 2019.

RFD discussion: July 2019–April 2020

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process (permalink).

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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Kappa

Kappa may turn out to be attestable as a noun, a proper noun, an "interjection", but it is not what we would call a symbol any more than Pieta is a symbol of the famous sculpture (w:Pieta). DCDuring (talk) 19:06, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Delete the "symbol" bit. Equinox ◑ 19:15, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Keep hi, i think that the Kappa symbol is by far the most widely attested part-of-speech of Kappa — much more than the noun, the proper noun, and the interjection combined — and it should not be deleted.

since its creation, Kappa has been hit with almost every mechanism possible on wiktionary — an RFC, four RFVs, a GP discussion, and now an RFD — and none have reached any conclusion. this Pieta example seems identical to the "white house" example that DCDuring brought up on june 27th, which i refuted in Special:Diff/53470517 to no response.

to rephrase myself — the Kappa symbol is used inline with text and refers to a clearly defined image like 😂, and this specific part of speech is attested more than enough times on Citations:Kappa along with a link to over one million archived attestations of the Kappa symbol being used in sentences. unlike any random image of the White House or an image of Pieta, Kappa is a specific symbol that conveys meaning (that is, to negate the meaning of a sentence or to indicate trolling) and is not simply a reference to Josh DeSeno — most people using Kappa probably do not know who Josh DeSeno is. images of the WH or Pieta are only references to the objects they depict, without conveying any contextual meaning like the Kappa symbol does. in fact, "Kappa" is most widely referred to as a symbol in the Wiktionary sense of the term (as in an emote, like the hundreds of emoji already listed on wiktionary as symbols), while "Pieta" is almost never referred to as such.

just because Wiktionary doesn't allow us to have non-Unicode images in titles doesn't mean that these terms don't belong on Wiktionary. i think twitch emotes should be treated Ancient Egyptian or sign languages on Wiktionary — terms like sḏꜣ appear in the title like the latin characters "SD3" in my encoding, but the word actually represented on that page is a picture of a cylinder seal. i don't see why we can't do the same for terms like Kappa, and i would be willing to edit pages like MediaWiki:UnsupportedTitles.js to achieve whatever the community decides is the optimal user presentation for terms like these.

my biggest fear is losing the most important sense of Kappa — that is, this picture. i am open to new ideas that offer an alternative, such as a new page to move this sense to, but so far no alternative has been offered to keep this sense on Wiktionary, despite a number of derivatives (the latin-text forms) being allowed to stay. if we can't find any alternatives but agree the symbol part-of-speech is by far well-enough attested, then why remove it? --Habst (talk) 19:52, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

Kappa has been hit with many requests for cleanup, deletion, and verification because it is a highly problematic entry. So pull up your socks, make cogent arguments, and act like a Wiktionarian instead of a POV entry advocate.

The way we deal with words that are used as the name of symbols is the way we deal with hash and kappa. If the symbol does not have a Unicode representation, then we try to find an image of the symbol. If that is not possible, then we verbally characterize or describe the symbol and its function. Kappa seems obviously to be the name of a symbol, but maybe not.

I'd be surprised if there wasn't some PoS heading that was appropriate, but we have a limited number available. Is it a Proper noun, the name of a unique work, ie, a specific image of a certain person? (We don't usually allow titles of works.) Is it a (common) Noun? (What does it refer to?) It seems to have been (rarely) used as a Verb. It seems to function on Twitch in much the same way as a template like our {{done}}. (We don't include such computer (or oither device) commands.) When used elsewhere it seems intended to be a metonym, evoking among the cognescenti the sarcasm-/irony-/falsehood-signalling function of the image that it causes to be inserted on Twitch. It certainly isn't an interjection (sensu stricto). Though I personally think we overuse the PoS header Interjection, that header might be appropriate. Another possibility is that we could call it a Particle. Could it be an Adverb indicating sarcasm, irony, and falsehood, in the manner of a sentence adverb? It can't be a conjunction, determiner, preposition, or an adjective. DCDuring (talk) 20:41, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

DCDuring, yes, Kappa is one of many entries that is controversial, but not in my opinion problematic. similar to how the English phrasebook and its entries have been contested so many times over the years — just because it is contested, does not mean it should be deleted. and those arguing in favor of the phrasebook entries aren't POV entry advocates, but fellow good-faith wiktionarians trying to improve Wiktionary. the vast majority of my edits have been on improving the dictionary's coverage of Swahili and have nothing at all to do with Kappa.

the difference between the Kappa symbol and hash/kappa is that hash and kappa are only used as references to objects, and they do not convey any contextual meaning, per w:sense and reference. the Kappa symbol is much more like 😂 than it is hash or kappa, because it is a symbol that has semantic meaning and a function when used inline with text -- you can't say the same with hash or kappa, which are like saying "The White House" or "Pieta".

there may be other parts-of-speech appropriate for the word Kappa, but for the Kappa symbol, there is only one that is appropriate as i see it, the symbol part-of-speech like we use for emoji. as for the comparison with {{done}}, i agree it is worth considering because it looks similar at first, but again i explained why the two are different on june 29th here Special:Diff/53481216 to no response. {{done}} is a wiki-specific term that certainly does not pass any tests for attestation like the Kappa symbol does, and we would not create a Wiki entry for {{done}} because it would be rightly deleted. as i explained before, Kappa is not a command but a symbol — but even if it was a command, there are commands on wiktionary like cat#Etymology 3. in fact, based on web searches it appears Kappa is referred to as a symbol far more often than a command, and wiktionary as a descriptive dictionary should reflect that.

i think the reason we are having so much trouble finding an alternative part-of-speech header for the Kappa symbol is because it is a symbol and that is the most appropriate header to use. i'm not 100% attached to using the Kappa page name as the house of the symbol part-of-speech per see, but without some site back-end work it is the best place to put it, just like sḏꜣ is the best place to put the Egyptian hieroglyph because we can't have Wiktionary titles that are e.g. en.wiktionary.org/wiki/<picture of cylinder seal>. this discussion is really good but we do need to work these things out to find the best home for the Kappa symbol on Wiktionary. --Habst (talk) 21:56, 9 July 2019 (UTC)

If I was completely new to Wiktionary, I would probably overturn all the known rules of parts of speech and do a ton of wiki-lawyering. Just to make sure they liked me. God, can we ban this joker already? Equinox ◑ 13:01, 11 July 2019 (UTC)

I had a look at the citations. Seems in most cases that "kappa" is added to indicate sarcasm. The cites have some noun and verb uses, and some attributive noun uses. Can't really see that it is an interjection though, as that part of speech refers to spoken words (unless, of course, people actually say "kappa" out loud to indicate sarcasm, which the evidence offered does not support, so I doubt it). I don't know if Wiktionary excludes symbols or includes them. They aren't "words" in a language, strictly speaking, but they increasingly function like words on social media, and other places. Language is changing and so perhaps Wiktionary needs to keep up to date with that. Mostly the entry seems okay to me, but needs a bit of a clean up and probably just the noun sense is worth keep (and maybe the symbol one, if that is allowable according to Wiktionary's dictates). - Sonofcawdrey (talk) 08:51, 13 July 2019 (UTC)

thank you for your input, sonofcawdrew and equinox. i agree with your assessment of Kappa, and especially your comments about wiktionary adapting to changing language. when i created the entry, i only added a symbol part-of-speech because i thought it was the most appropriate PoS, all of the others were added later. symbols are allowed on wiktionary and that's what i modeled the entry after -- for an example of an uncontested symbol entry see 😂 or you can look in the symbol categories. the word "Kappa" is indeed often spoken aloud by Twitch streamers (keep in mind many of these people stream themselves speaking and reading Twitch chat for 4+ hours per day so this is just a consequence of it being commonly used in twitch chat) or at gaming-related conventions and the like, but you're right that the spoken usage is less common than the written symbol usage. i'm not sure the best way to indicate spoken usage on Citations:Kappa -- i've found some CC-BY YouTube videos that use Kappa, so maybe i should try transferring them over to Commons to be cited?

i'm very appreciative of equinox's contributions here at wiktionary and all the times he has helped with my entries, but i'm confused about his response here. around the same time equinox's comment was posted here, i got a notification that i was "thanked" by equinox for an embarrassing edit i made over 7 years ago on the english wikipedia when i was still learning how to edit, even though to my knowledge we've never interacted on wikipedia before. if these two actions weren't so close together i would have laughed it off, but in combination with this comment calling me a joker it makes me feel like i am being targeted. i also don't see how i've ever done anything wrong or worthy of a ban -- even though some of the topics i edit are entertainment-related i'm not a "joker" and i'm here to edit in good faith, and that includes working with Equinox who for the most part i tend to agree with. --Habst (talk) 17:58, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Oh well, technically in linguistics “symbol” or letter aren’t parts of speech, right, we only include “letter”s and “symbol”s because historically there was lacking regulation and people just added all they could and nobody has yet moved them even though the letter entries eat up the RAM and as I remember at least therefore there is consensus they need to get out of the mainspace. We also had the header “abbreviation” but they now should be “noun”, “verb” and so on. Maybe your Kappa symbol is of the same category like the emojis, in fact I truly deem it just a proprietary variety of it, but the problem is that it is proprietary and not encoded in Unicode, so you took a substitute. You include “Kappa” as a symbol while you actually want to include the face of Josh DeSeno as a dictionary entry. I have to inform you that the exact thing that you actually want is not possible. Though “Kappa” is also a an interjection as spoken, this is a separate phenomenon. Fay Freak (talk) 21:02, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

hi Fay Freak, thanks for your response. i had heard abut the "abbreviation" PoS controversy and i agree that in the long run we should assign things like that to more appropriate categories like noun, verb, etc. while also denoting that they are abbreviations in their definitions. if we can denote the "symbol-ness" of Kappa in the definition, i think that would be the best thing to do for symbol entries like Kappa as well.

however, according to a petscan count of Category:Symbols by language, it looks like there are over 100,000 symbol pages on wiktionary right now, so evidently reaching that goal with symbols might be very hard and long. and i couldn't find any proscription of the Symbol PoS on any of its official templates or categories. so if we're going to go about converting symbols to other parts of speech, we should first of all officially note that templates like {{en-symbol}} are deprecated or proscribed and make notes of it both on and off the mainspace.

aside from this issue, if what you are saying is that it isn't technically possible with MediaWiki to create a page for the Kappa symbol itself due to the fact that it isn't in Unicode -- isn't that exactly what Appendix:Unsupported titles is supposed to be about? and surely it would be possible to edit MediaWiki:UnsupportedTitles.js so that the Kappa symbol displays as the page title, if that is the desired outcome? --Habst (talk) 21:56, 15 July 2019 (UTC)

Delete the symbol. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 08:19, 3 September 2019 (UTC)

Deleted - TheDaveRoss 19:23, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

RFC discussion: June 2019–April 2022

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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Kappa

This entry seems to consist of type errors AFAICT.

1. Kappa is asserted to be a symbol; but it is the name of a symbol.
2. The Etymology section concerns the origin of the symbol, not its name.
3. Some of the citations are of the name, others of the purported symbol.
4. The purported symbol is an image of a smirking person. I don't think that, say, a photograph of a church is a "symbol" of Christianity in our use of symbol as a PoS header.

I had never heard of "twitchspeak", so I don't think I should clean it up myself. DCDuring (talk) 12:56, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

Also the citations seem to be variously of the purported symbol, of its name (ie, a noun), and a verb ("kappa-ing"). DCDuring (talk) 13:04, 15 June 2019 (UTC)

hi @DCDuring, i'll try to add some context to help understand:

• when using the symbol, most people do not click on a special button or drag and drop like emojis (though that is possible to set up) -- they just type the word "Kappa" in the middle of a sentence which is then rendered as the face by Twitch and various other apps/sites like chatty.
• due to this, i think the word "Kappa" and the symbol [1] are actually the same thing -- they are completely interchangeable in all cases, though the symbol should be considered the primary representation. in part because wiktionary forces us to use a unicode title, it makes sense to use the latin-script name for the page title to define both the image [2] and the word that refers to it. maybe this is similar to a word rendered in two different fonts? as you could imagine people using the "A" symbol interchangeably with the "peace sign" that it represents in Wingdings, even in a non-Wingdings font -- sort of like that.

as for the etymology, i agree that both the name and image etymology should be explained, so i added both to that section with a reference. the name is taken from the name of the Kappa creature in Japanese folklore, which lured children into lakes by "tricking" them hence the current usage.

as for whether or not it classifies as a symbol, i think it does despite looking semi-photo-realistic. many of the more recently-added emojis are surprisingly detailed and would certainly classify as symbols under wiktionary rules. similarly the church emoji ⛪ has a page on wiktionary to represent churches, and an eggplant picture 🍆 has a page on wiktionary that describes it as being used to mean a phallus even though it is not the "obvious" meaning of that image.

what do you think? i am interested in helping to improve wiktionary to be more readable for symbol coverage, and i think adding frequently-used Twitch emotes is a good step in that direction -- according to stream elements Kappa has been used nearly 500 million times on twitch alone since 2016, probably over a billion times total, so i think it is actually one of the most used words that hasn't made it to wiktionary yet. --Habst (talk) 01:27, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

I don't see why Wiktionary should ignore the meaning of symbol by conflating a symbol and its name, just to memorialize some artifact of Twitch.tv. Two (noun) is the same of a symbol 2; Aries is the name of the symbol ♈. Thus Kappa may prove to attestably be the name of a symbol, an image of which you seek to upload here, though we'd rather prefer uploading via Commons because they are set up to handle the licensing issues. The use of a symbol on proprietary software like Twitch is not really compelling as an argument here. Also we don't have entries for ~~~~ and other wikitext elements that are decoded by wiki software and for computer instructions generally. If Kappa is not used as a noun, but only as an instruction to Twitch.tv software I don't think we would include it.

If you want to 'improve' Wiktionary's symbol coverage, it would help if you recognized the difference between a symbol and its name. You might also examine how we present symbols now. DCDuring (talk) 04:30, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

I have moved the purported citations to CItations:Kappa so that their suitability for attestation can be conveniently commented on. DCDuring (talk) 04:54, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

hi @DCDuring, thank you for your response. i think Kappa can serve as the name of the symbol (for which it would need a separate noun entry like at two) but it can also serve as a one-to-one replacement for the symbol itself. more often, it is used as the symbol rather than as the name of the symbol. i understand this is a unique case, which is why i think it is important to discuss.

also, twitch is not proprietary software because it is a website. the website is actually just a javascript front-end to millions of IRC channels, which can be accessed with any free software IRC client or a twitch-specific free software client like chatty to render the emotes like Kappa, which i do. i do resent that there is nonfree javascript on the official website, but such nonfree software is optional to read and participate in chats.

also, i wanted to clarify that it is impossible to upload the kappa image to commons because non-free images are not allowed on commons at all, even under fair use. that's why it needs to be uploaded to wiktionary, i am not just trying to upload it to wiktionary because it's allowed, i'm doing it because it is unfortunately the only option.

most of my edits have been focused on swahili words with some other symbol edits, but i think it is important to add some symbols from these corners of the internet as well because i think they are underrepresented on wiktionary.

thank you, --Habst (talk) 05:01, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

• We may as well get started on the RfV, while we are at it. DCDuring (talk) 12:03, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

Kappa functions as a command interpreted by site-specific software to substitute Twitch.tv's proprietary image for Kappa. We do not include commands. See WT:RFVE#Kappa. DCDuring (talk) 12:40, 20 June 2019 (UTC)

thanks, i responded on your rfv. i disagree that Kappa is a command though, and either way i disagree that commands are not allowed on wiktionary per examples like cat#Etymology_3. i responded with my reasoning on the rfv. --Habst (talk) 03:22, 21 June 2019 (UTC)

Yes, this is a real mess. Habst, I had corrected the part of speech and you screwed it up again...? Maybe I'm more inclined to argue for deletion if this entry is going to be a mess. Equinox ◑ 18:30, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

hi @Equinox, thanks for your response. you're one of the most experienced editors i know here, i greatly respect the work you've done here and you've helped a lot with the article and i (honestly) appreciate that a lot. i'm confused about the tone of this message though, why the harsh word to describe the effect of my edits? i'm trying my best to improve the article, and i'm well-acquainted with the symbol part-of-speech usage of this term (which i know to be more well-attested than the interjection part of speech as shown on Citations:Kappa).

you removed the noun sense and the greek-letter sense because it only had a "used to refer to X" meaning, and i agreed with your reasoning so i left those removed. the only sense i re-added was the symbol sense, which i had a reason for that i explained in the edit summary. if this is the only point of contention, let's try to resolve it through discussion here. as there is no identical precedent on wiktionary for symbols like this, i think it is not a black-and-white issue.

if you think that Kappa is not the appropriate page title for the symbol part of speech, where do you think it should go instead? i am open to new ideas, but without any alternative lined up i did not want to remove the symbol part-of-speech from Kappa because there would be no clear place to move it. "Kappa" is what you type to render the emote on most platforms where it is used -- i view it as similar to typing "a" to render the "a" glyph. because Kappa does not have a Unicode endpoint, we can't just make the page title the Kappa symbol itself on wiktionary due to technical reasons. so i think "Kappa" is the best that we can do. --Habst (talk) 18:59, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

The image should be in WikiCommons as there is no Unicode or multi-character representation, like the original emojis. There it would join a large number of other symbols. The symbol named Kappa has the edge on many of this in that it actually has a name. If the image called Kappa is in fact the unique (and copyrighted) image used on Twitch.tv, then its name, Kappa, is a proper noun. DCDuring (talk) 20:08, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

hi @DCDuring, the image cannot be on Wikimedia Commons because Wikimedia Commons does not accept fair use images. therefore, we have to upload the image to wiktionary directly, a process which i initiated on june 11th here: Wiktionary:Grease_pit/2019/June#request_for_fair_use_non-free_image_upload_for_Kappa

given that the symbol part-of-speech is well-attested and certainly meets CFI (with over 1 million archived uses), where do you think it should be placed? i think that until we can answer that question adequately, the appropriate answer should be at the Kappa page, which is the encoding for the symbol.

keep in mind that, at least in theory, we do have to decide this before uploading the Kappa image to wiktionary, because fair use images must be in use on an article and can't stay unused in the file namespace for long.

i see your reasoning for adding a proper noun sense, and i think i agree. because images do not have implied text-based names for humans, i think the case is different than that of, for example, saying supercalifragilisticexpialidocious to refer to the word without using it as a word. so if you add that sense i would agree with it. but i'm most concerned about the symbol part-of-speech right now.

i think it is reasonable to keep the symbol part-of-speech on the Kappa page until someone can propose an alternative place to put it. --Habst (talk) 20:38, 26 June 2019 (UTC)

This looks suitably cleaned up. @Habst, do you happen to know how this emote came to be called Kappa? That info would be appropriate for inclusion in the etymology section of this entry. This, that and the other (talk) 10:17, 21 April 2022 (UTC)