User talk:لاميه

I'm pretty new to this whole Wiktionary thing, so if I'm doing anything wrong, let me know! لاميه 18:40, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Hey there

Try looking at some of the entries in Category:Pashto nouns, Category:Pashto verbs and Category:Pashto adjectives to see how stuff is formatted. I think سپوږمۍ and سړى are some decent examples for nouns, وېرېدل and ږغېدل for verbs. Also be careful to put ==Pashto== above ==Persian==, we do that stuff alphabetically. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me. I think I'm the only regular editor who does Pashto stuff lol. Pashto has some odd stuff to be really careful about, so I'll try to help you as much as I can. Just try to start off slow. :) — [Ric Laurent] — 19:49, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the examples! Definitely helpful to have "follow this model" pages to build from -- I just sort of jumped in head first (as this talk page attests, heh). I've worked on other wiki type things before, so I'm familiar with the markup, but I've never done anything like Wiktionary, so all the conventions are new -- I appreciate the patience! لاميه 17:13, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Welcome!

Welcome!

Hello, welcome to Wiktionary, and thank you for your contribution so far. Here are a few good links for newcomers:

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I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wiktionarian! If you have any questions, bring them to the Wiktionary:Information desk, or ask me on my talk page. If you do so, please sign your posts with four tildes: ~~~~ which automatically produces your username and the current date and time.

Again, welcome!

—Ruakh_TALK 19:51, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

P.S. A few comments:

• We generally prefer that editors here have usernames that English-speakers can read. We make exceptions for visitors from other Wikimedia projects (since they'll automatically have the same username here as elsewhere), but that doesn't seem to be the case for you?
• Your edit-summary at [[پريز]] makes it sound like you don't actually know what this word means, which makes me worry about how you created the entry for it. Note that we can't copy translations from other dictionaries, both for legal reasons (copyright violation) and for moral ones (plagiarism, unless we give attribution).
• We don't generally use anchor tags or definition-numbers to indicate which sense of a translation is meant; rather, we expand the definition to give multiple translations, or to give a translation plus a brief gloss.
• We don't generally use redirects here. Every word, every spelling, every form should normally have its own entry.
• We don't give interwiki-links to nonexistent entries. If and when an entry is created in another Wiktionary, a bot will automatically come through and add the link.

Sorry, that's kind of a huge info-dump, but you did ask if you were doing anything wrong. :-)

Anyway, yeah, welcome!

—Ruakh_TALK 19:51, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Speaking of that one particular entry, the proper spelling is apparently پرېز (parez). I left پريز as a redirect for now. That's one of the things I was talking about that Pashto needs a lot of attention for - it has a lot of letters than no other Arabic-script language uses. Or at least none of the major ones... maybe others. Anyway lol ې is one of them, then ځ, ټ, ګ, څ, ڼ, ږ......there's so many lol. — [Ric Laurent] — 20:07, 7 November 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for the comments folks! I really appreciate all the feedback and the friendly manner in which it was given.

1. Username is no problem -- I created it at the Pashto-language Wiktionary first, then realized that I could use the English-language Wiktionary to do actual definitions (now! with more nuance!) instead of (hopelessly clumsy) using [[en:]] to handle definitions. Is there a way to move/rename accounts, or should I just make a new one? Would it be adequate to change my Signature (for talk pages) to something in Latin script?
2. The uncertain edit summaries are definitely an issue, and I'd like to talk more about that. That particular one is from a simple wordlist a teacher made to support an article from BBC Pashto or Taand; I lost the original article, so I don't know which contexts of "abstinence" apply here, or if they all do. (As an American English example, "abstinence-only education" is used exclusively to refer to sex education, and never for education about drug abuse, despite the term being applicable to both.)
3. To expand on that, my vague strategy at this point is to use Wiktionary to look up words I don't know, and if they aren't in here, to find out what they mean and add them. (Pretty simple!) And since I have all these prebuilt wordlists (they are really simple, just two columns in a Word table, "English Word" and "Pashto Word"), maybe those would be a good starting point to go from? They're not detailed enough to be copyrightable...which is both good and bad, I guess.
4. Good to know re: anchor tags. Will remember.
5. Likewise with interwiki. (See, this is why it's good to start slowly!) I'm glad there are bots to do that! Very cool.
6. And @Ric specifically, yes, the Yeh letters in particular are so difficult! The native speakers I know don't always bother to distinguish between them, which makes it *very* confusing to learn. I appreciate you fixing that.  :-)

Now some other questions:

1. What's our position on Gaf-with-circle vs. Gaf-with-line? (Again, the native speakers I know vary between them.)
2. How should I handle misspellings or "Did You Mean?" type things? If Wiktionary doesn't do that, I'll understand, but at the same time it would be very helpful to be able to search on common misspellings (all the Z sounds, G sounds, Arabic emphatics vs. their non-emphatic counterparts, all the Yeh's, etc.). Perhaps this sort of thing would be more appropriate as a Firefox plugin?

Thanks again! لاميه 17:31, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

For example

Okay, so I just made څرګند. It brings up some important issues:

• Pronunciation. How should I denote it? Can I use non-IPA pronunciation? (My IPA is pretty shaky, since I haven't used it seriously since aught five.)
• Related forms. Does that look okay?

Lamia 20:21, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. :) IPA for Pashto is here. Also transliteration. — [Ric Laurent] — 21:22, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Unicode

Buddy says: "Beware Unicode code point issues like U+0643 vs. U+06A9 vs. U+06AB"

• ك
• ک
• ګ

To that I would add U+06AF: گ . Because gafs and kafs are just confusing. Lamia 20:31, 8 November 2011 (UTC)

Signature

Sig still seems to be malfunctioning (wrong time offset). Hrmm. Lamia (talk) 20:59, 8 November 2011 (UTC)