User:West London Dweller~enwiktionary

My main account is on Wikipedia. Please see here.

Some pages pertaining to the transwiki of idioms from Wikipedia:

List of idioms in the English language

A propos "Mass Interwiki migration?", the w:List of idioms in the English language was recently split into one article per starting letter - and subsequently, the article dealing with those starting with the letter 'A' have been AfDed with the result of 'Delete'. (The closed debate for A is here [1], and the currently open debate for B (and others) is here [2]). I'm trying to save the content and transwiki it to Wiktionary, so I'll be adding a fair number of idioms when I get the time to do so. Could some kind soul point me at a template where I can include the 'where used' information? Thank-you. West London Dweller 12:41, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Hello, and welcome. Category:Regional templates seems to be what you are looking for? I (and others) have a pet project of getting everything currently tagged with {{UK}} subdivided by region appropriately. There is no official policy yet, but for a list of what we're aiming for, see WT:RFDO#Category:British English. Generally, these thats are placed after the "#", often as {{cattag|idiom|Australian}} for example.

Initially, you may not need to worry about that, as the result of the transwiki should probably just be moved to the Appendix: namespace. --Connel MacKenzie 16:58, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

Thank-you for the welcome on my talk page. I've got a lot to learn regarding the correct way of writing an entry, so I'll apologise in advance for any mistakes I make. With regard to the usage of English idioms, some are use pretty much exclusively in the USA, others in USA, Canada and Australia, others in UK, India and New Zealand and yet others possibly 'globally'. This was dealt with in the Wikipedia articles by listing the countries of usage (with occaisional further explanatory text, especially if they were regionalisms). Is there an equivalent field/section for Wiktionary entries or if not, should an entry be categorised into the appropriate countries of use e.g. USA Idiom/UK Idiom/India Idiom/New Zealand Idiom? I don't have any automatic means of copying the information across from my Wikipedia userspace, so I'd like to get it right without generating a lot of re-work. Uncle G seems to think there is already provision in Wiktionary for the recording of usage information - I just don't know how at present. West London Dweller 20:21, 1 December 2006 (UTC)

I do have Special:Import, but I haven't tried it on a user sub-page before. Your comment made me visit Wikipedia today (this is happening more and more often...I should probably do something about that.) Anyway, I do not know how long my request for a deletion review of that, will take.

The way I'd label an idiom I knew to be for US, Canada and Australia would be to put "{{cattag|idiom|US|Canada|Australia}}" on the definition line, immediately after the "#". Citations of the term in use are much more helpful than secondary sources. Entry layout explained has more details on the specific format. --Connel MacKenzie 09:00, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks, especially for the Entry layout explained link. The original article on Wikipedia is sorely lacking citations, which is, I suspect, one of the reasons for it being regarded as not of encyclopaedic quality. Is there a 'perfect' idiom Wiktionary entry that I could copy? I'm not experienced enough to evaluate current idiom entries to know which best passes muster. West London Dweller 11:54, 2 December 2006 (UTC)

For no reason I can think of, no one has asked for that before now. BTW, yesterday's transwiki run seems to have captured all 26 lists. Do you have all you need now, to get started? --Connel MacKenzie 22:49, 3 December 2006 (UTC)

Mostly - thank-you very much for transwiki-ing the articles. I'm looking through the category of English idioms to get a feel for how the entry for an idiom should be laid out. I may be unlucky, but so far, none of the idioms I've seen have citations. From reading around, I think I'm correct in saying that you accept a link into Google Groups as an example of usage, so an awful lot of these can rapidly get a citation of usage. A lot of formal writing avoids the use of idioms, so being able effectively to use usenet as a citeable resource (which is a good corpus of informal writing) is very useful. One area I'm unsure of at present is how to handle variants - for example, "champ at the bit" and "chomp at the bit"; and where the same idiom can be listed in more than one way e.g. should "a month of Sundays" be entered under "a month of Sundays"; or "month of Sundays", or even "month" or "Sunday", or all of these options, and is this a case where using a redirect may come in useful? So many questions - sorry. I'm not going to be able to make much progress right now, as my partner has had bad family news, which we are dealing with at present. Family does come before Wiki-projects. West London Dweller 12:59, 4 December 2006 (UTC)

I doubt if they are perfect (eg there is no indication of regionalisation), but two recent entries are throw enough mud at the wall, some of it will stick and throw enough mud at the wall and some of it will stick. (BTW, I think that many editors feel that phrases of this length should be deprecated, even if idiomatic, but no one has complained about these particular ones since they were cited.)

There is a consensus that variants should have separate pages which refer, rather than redirect. There is a point of view (I doubt there is a consensus) that each variant page should show only cites which have that precise "spelling", and that the validity of the variant is proved by the ability to find enough cites to meet CFI (<-Criteria for Inclusion). Well established idioms are often found in books, eg in reported speech, (books which can be read online are preferred here, in which case cites may be found on books.google.com); but b.g.c hits were lacking in the above cases. --Enginear 21:27, 7 December 2006 (UTC)

• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (A)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (B)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (C)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (D)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (E)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (F)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (G)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (H)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (I)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (J)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (K)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (L)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (M)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (N)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (O)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (P)
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (Q) - reformatted
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (R) - reformatted
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (S) - reformatted
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (T) - reformatted
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (U) - reformatted
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (V) - No phrases starting with V recorded in Wikipedia
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (W) - reformatted
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (X) - reformatted
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (Y) - reformatted
• Transwiki:List of idioms in the English language (Z) - reformatted

See also the Category: English idioms[3]