User talk:Connel MacKenzie/archive-2007-1

Rfvfailed

Note: The original write (by Vild) of Hippietrail's idea can be found at Wiktionary:Grease pit/2-level dictionary#2-level dictionary.

Some time ago, you suggested removing the rfvfailed discussions from the talk pages and putting them elsewhere. I added the request at WT:BOT/T as you requested, but it hasn't been taken up. I can do it manually, by creating an alphabetical rfvfailed series of pages, and sticking the discussion there. Will this solve your problem?

That sounds about right, for a solution to the RFVarchive problem. --Connel MacKenzie 08:28, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

On an entirely different note, I am pleased to see the beer parlour discussion re rfv. We desperately need a policy here. I started dealing with rfv because I was offended by many of the rubbish entries. However, much as I would like my views to prevail, I think that the only way to really deal with the problem is to insist on citations. If we are strict regarding this it will clear out much of the rot. The problem is it may also kill the patient as it will seriously discourage new users (who are the ones who tend to add new words). Thoughts? Andrew massyn 22:12, 15 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

It is very difficult to cite the comparatively rarer meanings of very common words or of words that are very common in another language. But those rarer meanings may still be common enough that "everyone" knows they are used. I think the present system of "a) enter the word as you want, b) it gets RFVed only if someone objects, c) it then needs cites (or near unanimous confirmation that it is valid) or it will be deleted" works well in that respect.

The main issue, IMO, is to decide what level of verification is required, and as I have said in the main discussion, to consider whether the criteria for other languages (and perhaps for obsolete English words) should be less severe. --Enginear 01:15, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I find myself on the fence on this topic. As Enginear points out, there are many cases (and potentially 3-5 hundred thousand more) where insufficient citations will be found. On the other hand, we get a lot of crap.

The truly rabid inclusionists wish for any possible UTF-8 combination of characters to be defined with some plausible meaning. But, fortunately, we have none of those people contributing here. What we do have, are all the shades of gray above that. Some want technical terms. Some want jargon. Some want movie titles. Some want term made up for comedy. Some want every possible sentence. Some want programming languages to be included. Some want obsolete languages. Some want unwritten languages (presumably looked up by IPA?) Some want construction jargon. Some want legal terms. Some want an entry for everything that is delimited by a space character in Wikipedia to be defined here. Some want an entry for everything delimited by any punctuation. Some would like the name of every author. Some would like the name of every politician. Some would like the full name of every person (ever) to have an entry. Some want every possible misspelling. Some want every possible typo. Some want every possible OCR/scanning error.

No one person seems to want all these things. And certainly no one expects to find all those things in any dictionary. But we all dream. And we all have our pet 'vertical segment' that we want to populate. Are people insane? Well, no, people's actions are mostly products of their life experiences. Since every person is different, everyone wants to push 'their' segment.

Interestingly, I want about 6 of the 18 "some want"s above, and positively don't want about 6 more, which suggests that on balance I am happy with the potential size of Wikt, although obviously I will try to influence it the way I want. I suspect I'm more inclusive than most. If so then (albeit with oversimplistic logic and perhaps giving undue gravity to the details of your list) we probably have overall a slight pressure towards being relatively non-inclusive, which explains why the project is currently under control. It's therefore a good time to set policy, in case the mix of people changes in the future. --Enginear 13:30, 18 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with the current scheme is that no one "CFI" fits well for all cases. If someone wants to come along and enter all the terms in their pet vertical segment, we should allow for that to happen (in wiki-theory.)

On the other hand, most people's expectations of what should be in a dictionary is quite different. RFV/CFI is the current approach to striking a balance between what people want to add here, vs. what all others expect to find here. Unfortunately, because it is "trying to please everyone" it is in turn pleasing no one. I don't think anyone is truly happy with 100% of the results we get from RFV/CFI today. The few people that think it works well enough, tend to think that it should have a lower threshold. Everyone else thinks it should weed out much more.

Should we include all urbandictionary terms? It really is a tough question. Whenever I see an entry that 'cites' UD, it is vulgar, 100% of the time. Do we need that shit? It is always formatted poorly and phrased in an un-dictionaryish manner. Well, maybe.

I don't think Hippietrail's notion of "multiple level dictionary" subdivides the type of cruft well enough to 1) sift out non-dictionary terms from NS:0 and 2) allow for an infinite number of 'vertical segments' where people can enter their pet terms. But is infinitely closer to achieving the goal, than anything else I've seen proposed so far.

I think there should be a trade off between how esoteric an entry we allow and how low quality an entry we allow. Eg, if I enter CLASP (a method of construction rarely used AFAIK except for UK schools in the 1960s/70s/80s), it had better be high quality, and well-cited, because no one else is likely to be interested enough to correct/improve it or even to prove its existence in fact I'm not interested enough to enter it at present, either). However, if someone enters a word in the Simple English list, then it should be kept almost however bad it is, since it is important and several people would be motivated to improve it.

That is what I had in mind when I said I thought RFV (and RFD) worked quite well (though they may not be the most efficient method of acheiving good entries). At the end of the process, the entry is usually either improved or deleted. If neither the original editor, nor anyone else, can be bothered to respond on its behalf, with action as well as words, it is highly likely to be deleted. --Enginear 13:30, 18 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

(My pet segment, by the way, is programming languages...I would like to see a "dictionary" style definition for every possible computer instruction, in any/every programming language. I'd like such a thing to identify syntax, by language vendor/version. Putting that information is a separate WikiCities wiki seems too painfully redundant...but with each passing month seems more and more like the only viable outlet.)

An excellent example of jargon (or is it cant or even language) which should be entered and kept. Every so often, even someone knowledgable in a field forgets the meaning of a word, and precise meanings can be highly important, rarely more so than in computing. More often, we need to check things on the periphery of our professional field, eg I might want to check an architectural term, and you might want to check the exact meaning/syntax for a Fortran command to enable accurate translation to a modern computer language. Why shouldn't we be a valid source for such information? It doesn't matter that we cannot be excellent in all segments at once. People within the vertical segments we are good at will use us, and the number of good segments will slowly grow. --Enginear 13:30, 18 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

In Wiki-theory, if a contributor comes along who wishes to create 5,000 entries in their 'vertical segment' they should be allowed to, somehow. Currently, we expend an astronomical amount of time, effort and electrons on trying to stop the 'vulgar vandals' from entering their crap. If we instead gave them a viable outlet, I do believe that most of our current vandalism would simply disappear. That has been the main thrust of my recent rants.

Under such a system, the CFI would have to be bolstered considerably. Just as everyone wants their 'vertical segment' entered, they each would want it in the main namespace. I think it would be more useful to gradually erode the main namespace, until it contained only about 30,000 entries, with all the rest being shunted off somewhere. That would mean simply that things are categorized and labelled appropriately. (Note that MediaWiki 'Categories:' fall very short of any such arrangement.) Things like 'vulgarisms' could conceivably be turned off by default. (For example, would could have a 'dictionaryish' definition of lay and a crass definition of lay that does not appear by default...only an indication of other 'topic areas'/'vertical segments' where such a thing might be found. Hmmm, I'll have to thing of a better example.)

I think that's a great idea. Restrict NS:0 to "simple English" perhaps, and most people will then feel their pet word is far too clever/subtle to be there, and they will want it in a segment! I frequently use Metacrawler, which lists beside each answer the search engine which found it. You can, if you want, restrict it to using only those search engines you want it to use for a particular search. At work, I use a document search engine which is also segmented, with each segment needing a separate subscription.

A search of that type, where one could alter the default namespaces to be searched, would solve the boiler problem, where both everyday and construction-industry meanings are shown, when probably the majority of people only want the former, many more would want the former, but want an indication that there is a more technical meaning, and only a few want to know the latter. The same applies to vulgarities (and could perhaps be adapted to give some sort of "parental control" if we ever wanted to go down that route). We'd have to sort out what we do about actually displaying the relevant "parts" of an entry, but even OED2+ online comes up with a list of separate entries (occasionally over 20) for the same English homograph, which have to be checked individually to find the right one, so we would not be alone even if each NS had to be read separately.

The other things which I feel would help would be the ability to hide/unhide cites and translations, as discussed a while back, and perhaps to hide/unhide other languages.

Finally, if we are worried about what casual visitors feel about poorly formatted entries, the answer is probably to be free with the "cleanup" tag, as they seem to be on WP at present. Then people know when a word is still a work in progress. I think this is separate from the other issues, except for the connection with RFD noted above. --Enginear 13:30, 18 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

As far as technical limitations go, I think by the time en.wiktionary.org has 5,000,000 entries, we will have astronomically faster hardware and software. So I don't foresee any realistic problems with including "everything." I do foresee astronomical resistance from people (like me) who have very specific notions of "what a dictionary should be." Where we go from here, I can only begin to guess at.

H'mm. Increase of people in a wiki and increase of proportion of work done by bots versus growth of processing power and scalability of search routines. Yes, I suppose so ;-) --Enginear 13:30, 18 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

</rant> --Connel MacKenzie 08:28, 16 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I too, am occasionally guilty of in-line comments. I wish there were some way to prohibit them on certain edits like this though. The follow-on comments truly are a progression. If this gets reposted on WT:BP, the in-lines will detract from the flow of the original, I think.

Re: 6 or 18: I only listed a tiny subset of the sorts of things that have raised disputes in the past. With a namespacing scheme for each vertical segment, and control-able defaults for which ones are included in a default logged-out-user search, I'd support including 15 of those 18. There are lots more though (obviously!) So, at heart, I probably am more of an 'inclusionist' but I probably don't seem like it when I'm pushing a POINT. OTOH, I think only 2 of those 18 belong in the main namespace (possibly zero, actually, if the s/w worked as I think it should.) --Connel MacKenzie 17:18, 18 November 2006 (UTC) Timestamp. --Connel MacKenzie 20:30, 25 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Is that a nudge, or just an edit to stop your auto-archive? Perhaps people making in line comments should start with "In line comment:" so others are not confused by lack of a signature above (and keep them short). Will bear it in mind.

Yes, a number of us were surprised to find that you were the author...and so realised the seriousness of the problem. I think I've commented on most of the points on BP. I do like the idea of a small NS:0. --Enginear 19:55, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

No, that wasn't a nudge - I don't have the syntax for preserving a section from Werdnabotting quite right, so I'm timestampping it regularly until I get bored of the topic, and it fades from peoples memories as ever having been an option. :-)

I wonder, offhand, how many people watch my talk page as closely as I watch WT:BP? It is a tiny bit unnerving. (Hence the disclaimer at the top of this page asking for no one to post anything on this page! :-) That disclaimer works about as well as the reminder to AOL'ers that I haven't blocked them personally...and that they can edit via https:.) --Connel MacKenzie 20:02, 26 November 2006 (UTC)[reply]

OK, one last timestamp, then let it be the last message archived this year, so I can find it five years from now, when Wiktionary wakes up and realizes the current system can't work. --Connel MacKenzie 18:10, 29 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Waitsec. The only two people to have commented here have both suggested (demanded?) that a policy is needed to solidify the current practices. Perhaps it is time for a nudge. On the other hand, the point of my essay was that our current practices don't suffice. The stuff crap-loaded into the main namespace is overwhelming, while the allocation of appropriate secondary level namespaces simply don't exist. So I'm not sure what sort of policy statement could (let alone should) be drawn up here. Perhaps I am too mired in the details. Have any better minds thought of a viable solution yet?

<brainstorming> Perhaps we could just disable the [Go] button via JS, and subvert the [Search] button to search a particular category (i.e. English definitions that contain translation sections - about 30,000 words) with a "stemming" algorithm applied. Lack of a match then, would force a full search of all namespaces (including NS:0) and display the search results, instead of going directly to an ambiguous direct hit (i.e. {form of}.) </brainstorming>

It does seem to me, that if we are going to switch over to massively-inclusionist, the "cruft" needs to be set aside somehow. To have a three line pointer (as the search page currently has) to an entry might suffice. That way, we can have all the vulgar definitions, all the obscure definitions, all the jargon and everything. And most of the time, it will simply be swept to the side. When 4chan posts an article with a link to Vulgar:choda, they can smack that page all they want, while we continue with building a dictionary. When someone enters the Nonsense:gazilliotrilliobillionth big number, they can have a place to do so, while we steadfastly ignore them. When someone enters Misspelling:spacial, we can keep our Alternate spelling:spacial entry side-by-side with it, spatial and special.

Well, I'm talking to myself, and am no closer to gleaning a policy page from this. Comments? --Connel MacKenzie 18:34, 29 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry -- didn't get online yesterday. I thought you'd given enough context for me to understand stemming (but I see my guess is at odds with our word-related def) but I don't know what a three line pointer is (and nor have we defined it). However, whether or not it's what you meant, I like the idea that the (not logged in) "Go" default would be to search the reduced NS:0 first and only look further if no match were found, assuming that the "Go search" could be personalised in a similar way to the existing "Search". I could, for example, adjust my logged-in default to include jargon (and perhaps also rare, archaic and even colloquial), while the pubescent schoolchildren could save time by switching off NS:0 and searching only vulgar.

It doesn't directly address the issue of words for which some meanings fall in one category and some in others. That could be adressed simply though clunkily by having identical entries in each namespace applicable to a particular lexeme. An alternative theoretical solution, giving more useful/appropriate displays, would be a single NS with composite entries, but with individuals personalising their displays to show, or not, definition lines with particular glosses. However, that removes all the other advantages of removing "cruft" from NS:0, and also adds significant processing requirement. Of course, having identical entries in each NS does not preclude the possibility of moving to the display-by-glosses idea in the future. --Enginear 20:42, 30 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I was thinking that there would be no gloss-level redundancy. For example, sandwich might have a NS:0 listing, as well as a Vulgar: listing. The first three lines of each are displayed when doing a search.

By "stemming", I mean that if someone enters "sandwiching" and searches, they would get sandwich and Vulgar:sandwich. There is at least one good stemming algorithms availble.

Yes, part of the impetus for the proposal is to stop promoting nonsense to the search engines and mirrors.

Non-English entries are a bit trickier. Would a "Non-English:" namespace fly? Or would each language need its own prefix?

Thank you for the comments! --Connel MacKenzie 21:21, 30 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes...I must have been tired last night. I couldn't see how to deal with the fascinating (to me at least) issue of how meanings morph over time, if we didn't have gloss-level redundancy (and I didn't even notice that my suggestion would fail for the same reason unless the appropriate gloss NSs happened to be selected). Of course the answer is either by cross reference or wiki-linking. After all, we don't combine Sandwich (town > title of earldom > island) on the same page as sandwich, so why should we combine Vulgar:sandwich with it.

Also, on the occasion of separate etymologies for homographs in different NSs (and therefore no x-ref as above), there should be at least a note in each entry that entries exist in other NSs. Yes, I would certainly support a proposal along those lines.

I suspect we need to allow for NSs for every language, even if we start with just Non-English. My guess is that separation by language is more important than separation by vulgarity, etc, but perhaps the majority would disagree. --Enginear 13:52, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

On the "vulgar" namespace (as an example): can you imagine the wars between people who insist that their word is not "vulgar" and the people who insist that every word that is the slightest bit offensive to the extreme prudes must be moved to the Vulgar: namespace? (If you want PIE, or you guys's multiplied by about a hundred thousand ...) I think it's a really bad idea ... and as to languages: the combined namespace is by far the coolest thing about en.wikt, and a very major reason why I am here. If we are going to separate them, we might as well just push all of language XX into the XX wikt with English (etc.) translations and worry about the language interface separately. Robert Ullmann 15:52, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

User:Enginear, you just hit on the missing puzzle piece! Of course! Why didn't I think of it before? YES, I would support, nay, demand that sandwich have a {{see|Vulgar:Sandwich}}.

Robert, yes, I am convinced that the revert wars over fuck being in the main namespace vs. being in the Vulgar namespace would be much more preferable than our current practice of just deleting stuff. I can envision criteria such as "does Encarta have an ICRA warning" [1] or other secondary sources (does R:1913 list it as vulgar) listed as references. But the whole point is that the entry would simply be moved back and forth - it wouldn't be getting deleted during the conversations! Would we have an "Incorrect:your guys's" entry? I hope so. Would that one be going back and forth? Probably. Would we have a place for "PIE:"? Absolutely. We'd have all the same arguments about what warning banners should be atop those entries, but again, we wouldn't have the knee-jerk response of "delete it all" being our only tool to deal with it, anymore. Yes, the same copyright arguments would still go back and forth.

--Connel MacKenzie 18:05, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

A (another?) question about WOTD

Looking at synecdoche, I can't tell when it was WOTD. It already was, right?

Did we ever get a thingamajig to put on entries (or their talk pages) to say "This was Wiktionary's WOTD on such-and-such date."? Is it in use? Should I ask this on WT:GP or WT:BP? --Connel MacKenzie 00:26, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, synecdoche was WOTD on 26 Sep 2006. There is an alphabetic index of all previous WOTDs maintained at Wiktionary:Word of the day/Archive/Alphabetic, and this page is linked from the primary WOTD page, and hence can be accessed from any WOTD template in use. I update the alphabetic index each time a forthcoming month is completely filled in, so it also lists the next month's WOTD selections.

No, there is no template existing (that I know of) for previous WOTD selections. There was (and may still be in some dusty corner) a template for marking nominations, but it's (thankfully) dropped into obscurity and disuse. Marking all the words that have been nominated is a Bad Idea^(tm) in my opinion. Should we mark previously selected WOTD entries? Possibly. I know that previously featured articles on Wikipedia get a little gold star in the upper right corner that links to the primary "Featured article" page. (see Redshift for an example). Something equally unobtrusive could work, as long as it doesn't interfere otherwise with page layout. I think the WT:BP would be a better place to raise the question/proposal, since WT:GP is for technical issues of implementation. I we simply adopt the gold star marker that the Wikipedia projects are using, then there shouldn't be any technical issues to resolve. --EncycloPetey 05:47, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for sounding circular there. But I'm glad I asked, as you've obviously given it a bit more thought. I'll propose the gold star thing on WT:BP for past WOTDs. It might encourage other entries to get "over-nominated," as a secondary effect...but having an easier way of not re-nominating past WOTDs I think is worth it. If words start getting "over-nominated" we could always alphabetize that list, leaving them struck out if rejected or skipped. Hmmm. By "we" I guess I really mean "you." :-) --Connel MacKenzie 06:40, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I probably spend too much time thinking about WOTD, but I think all the effort has paid off and made it a nice attraction of the English Wiktionary. I think we were the first language to successfully institute one, and I'm glad Vildricianus set up the technical end so well (even if he is MIA now). --EncycloPetey 07:04, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Template:Kwic

Hi,

It's just a template for displaying keyword-in-context lines. We didn't seem to have one, which is rather odd for a project with a "Concordance:" namespace. ;-) Maybe there is one and I couldn't find it... Unfortunately the one I made is not working quite as well as I'd hoped; I'm afraid a three-part template (something like Kwicheader-Kwicline-Kwicfooter) may be needed to get the formatting right. At any rate, this grew out of a little conversation here, which got me to thinking how nice it would be to have a few illustrative keyword-in-context lines, drawn from Wikisource or wherever, for common words in Korean or other languages.

As I said, I'm not terribly pleased with this template at the moment; feel free to bump it into my userspace if it's getting in the way. Cheers, - Visviva 20:22, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I see. So this is comparable to Wiktionary:Quotations#How to format a quotation (our normal format) for Concordances only? Thanks for the explanation...please continue being bold, until someone screams. :-)

--Connel MacKenzie 20:26, 31 December 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Odd edit tools

For some reason the character insertion edit tools (IPA, Misc, Greek, etc) no longer matches between the name and the selection displayed, but I don't see any recent edits that might have caused this. Ideas, or should I post in the GP? --EncycloPetey 06:08, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Have you refreshed you JS cache? Monobook.js was changed to correspond... --Connel MacKenzie 06:11, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Quickest way to check is to log out. --Connel MacKenzie 06:11, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The problem persists even after I log out. --EncycloPetey 06:14, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm. Well. I really should import the thing I wrote for bs:. And rewrote for the sidebar thing. I do wonder why the Monobook.js sometimes does not refresh, even when forced. --Connel MacKenzie 06:31, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it seems to be OK now, though there is no longer a line break in IPA to separate the consonants to a second line. I had to log out, manually clear the cache, close the program, and wait a while, but it's looking OK now. --EncycloPetey 07:18, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad to hear you got it working, but aghast that you had to manually clear your JS cache. You should probably mention it in WT:GP so others that experience the same thing have some clue. --Connel MacKenzie 07:32, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

References

Well, the website is a source by which the user can verify the information, but the content of the definition isn't copied (nor even translated) from there. A comparable case: I trust that the American Heritage dictionary isn't GFDL-compatible either, but that doesn't prevent us from citing it as a reference.

The problem may be my own laziness... For most of these entries I have multiple sources at hand which contain the same basic information; I've just been dropping in the Naver citation as it is fairly authoritative and accessible. Perhaps it would be better if I cite at least two?

Good to know somebody's keeping an eye on things, anyway. Cheers, -- Visviva 07:11, 1 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The RFV terms

Some of the pages you're delinking on are words that have been listed with {{pronstub}} for a long time. Most of the ones remaining there are terms I haven't been able to find anywhere but here (or sites that mirror us). --EncycloPetey 08:35, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Huh, what? I just went through one acroto-phobo-something that had failed, checking its WhatLinksHere. I assume w:Template:Porn-stub has nothing at all to do with {{pronstub}} right? Was that what you meant? --Connel MacKenzie 08:41, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No, I do mean {pronstub}, even though all the remaining terms seem to be porn-related. There were other terms in there last month, but I got through them over the holidays. --EncycloPetey 09:02, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Shouldn't {{pronstub}} be a redirect to {{rfp}}? --Connel MacKenzie 08:42, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

My opinion: No. It should be deprecated and put to rest, since it essentially duplicates {{rfp}}. But, I suppose a redirect could work too. --EncycloPetey 09:02, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, it follows the older naming convention ({{substub}}, {{etystub}}, etc.) so I think the redirect would be better. I guess those all are supposed to get separate RFVs now. :-( What a pain. --Connel MacKenzie 09:15, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

If they're redirected, will the oldest ones still be properly listed in the right-hand box of oldest requests? --EncycloPetey 09:30, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Dunno. We could tag them all RFV first then experiment. --Connel MacKenzie 09:31, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

None? OOooopsie Just closed another!

Remember the rule of thumb: NO REDIRECTS in the main namespace. --Connel MacKenzie 21:06, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oh darn... how do you folks ever get anything done? Drop me a link the guideline, would you. I seem to stumble over needed words often enough! Happy New Year, btw. // Fra nkB 21:10, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Wiktionary:Redirections#Redirecting different word forms as well as at least a dozen other places. --Connel MacKenzie 21:17, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Whatever you're moving and doing, work space-and-a-half into it too. Cheers! // Fra nkB 21:16, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You can just answer here. I got your last as I opened this window to edit. Do you all do anything on classifying misnomers like this odious set of word abuse constructs? (I swear news people define the languge!) // Fra nkB 21:25, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Just because one common meaning of "space" is the separation between words, does not mean that is the only meaning of "space." For it to be a misnomer, it has to use a meaning incorrectly which it does not. The amount of space from one line to the next is doubled. --Connel MacKenzie 21:29, 2 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

WT:INE

This is not the same as nominations for WOTD. Some entried are interesting as new additions for WOTD, but are in foreign languages, and so will not be selected as WOTD. There are also words so bizarre and useless (but real) that they're "interesting", but again, will never be good candidates for WOTD. The WT:INE thus provides a curio cabinet of new entries that is (and should remain) quite distinct from WOTD. --EncycloPetey 12:51, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ahhh. Well, I still think it serves no purpose and the usable contents of it merged in, then it be replaced with a redirect. Are you saying it should just go to WT:RFDO? I don't understand what purpose it fills, otherwise. --Connel MacKenzie 14:44, 3 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

It's the Wiktionary equicalent of Ripley's to some degree. Wikipedia has a similar page w:Wikipedia:Unusual articles, though that isn't restricted to recent additions. It's a srop-in page for the curious, and I don't see that it does any harm. --EncycloPetey 01:05, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Baxter

Will you stop that guy? Dart evader 19:32, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

ty. --Connel MacKenzie 19:34, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

move vandal

how do you undo this stuff consistently? Robert Ullmann 09:38, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Two equivalent methods:

Method one

Find where each page started, move it back (skipping all intermediate moves), and delete the residue.

Method two: (My preference, as it seems more consistent, at the expense of blitzing the log)

Open Special:Log/move (linked from the block page)
Click one-by-one the [revert] button, in newest-to-oldest order
When done with the reverts, go to vandal's Special:Contributions
One by one, delete the targets of "moved to ..."

--Connel MacKenzie 09:43, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

The Wikipedia tools (e.g. VP) for mass-revert are a little more advanced than anything I use. They also leave behind the dead redirects (which you can kill by going to Special:Contributions/Biddle as method two, steps 3 and 4.)

You may also wish to steal Az's scripts from Wikibooks. They seem to rely on a sysop flag, which he doesn't have here because he's too new. --Connel MacKenzie 09:55, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Az1568 ran a script to move some of them back, but says it "can't handle double pagemoves". So there are more. (it seems to have just missed 4) Robert Ullmann 09:50, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Biddle (talk • contribs • global account info • deleted contribs • nuke • abuse filter log • page moves • block • block log • active blocks)

You occasionally have to delete to make way for a move (even as a revert) so you need the sysop flag to do some of this. I am going to sleep three hours ago. --Connel MacKenzie 09:55, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

When you block him, you are left with a rather helpful page. Only open new tabs in firefox, for each of the things (in this case, just start with the one line that is for page-move vandals.)

If you screw up, don't worry. If you delete the wrong one, you simply restore it. If you move a page and delete to make way, but got the wrong one, don't worry. Just delete it, then selectively restore everything except the bad move. When in doubt, just move to the page's correct starting location (e.g. Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion.)

Remember...when you are doing it...being bold, it turns out to be a lot easier to clean up than you'd imagine. The logs look horrible, but c'est la vie. --Connel MacKenzie 10:14, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks, I think I would have been okay, but for the Az1568 help; I was just about figuring out which 4 moves he hadn't fixed when you cleaned it up. Thanks. (sleep well; I'm just getting up ;-) Robert Ullmann 10:32, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

thanks

Lot of thanks Connel MacKenziefor very helpfull tips I will certainly help in clearing Category:Translations to be checked (Marathi) time to time , besides I will include a link to this category on Marathi Wiktionary. Mahitgar 11:45, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

CommonsTicker: Ticker Trouble

Hello

As you may have noticed, there have been some problems with CommonsTicker lately:

first, the toolserver was down. After it was back up, we had to wait for fresh database dumps.
also, many updates where failing because ticker pages where growing too large. Updates that went through half-way somtimes also caused entries to be posted multiple times, making the problem worse.
when I tried to improve performance, I introduced a bug that caused the ticker to post trash sometimes. I disabled the ticker again when I was told about it, and I have fixed all effected pages yesterday (I hope I didn't miss any).

To sort this out completely, I have to rewrite parts of CommonsTicker. For now, I will enable the ticker again for most wikis, but not for the ones that where having most trouble - namely de-wikipedia, en-wikinews, eo-wikipedia, es-wikipedia, fr-wikipedia, ja-wikipedia, ru-wikipedia, simple-wikipedia and zh-wikipedia. I'll have to investigate those more closely.

So please keep an eye on CommonsTicker in the next days - if there is any more trouble, please tell me, preferrably on meta:User_talk:Duesentrieb/CommonsTicker.

Regards -- meta:User:Duesentrieb 13:39, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

This message was posted automatically by the CommonsTicker bot. For feedback and discussion, please go to meta:User talk:Duesentrieb/CommonsTicker -- CommonsTicker 13:39, 5 January 2007 (UTC) [reply]

attentivity?

You wrote (my bold) at rfv for attentivity

The fact that it is not a word leads me to believe it will pass our CFI easily. --Connel MacKenzie 17:01, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Did you mean now? RJFJR 19:02, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No, Connel meant exactly what he said ;-) Robert Ullmann 19:04, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I meant, the fact that it appears in no other dictionary (it certainly isn't new) is an excellent indication that it is not a valid word in the English language. --Connel MacKenzie 19:08, 4 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Then did you mean it will not pass CFI? (will fail CFI? or does passing CFI mean it doesn't belong?) RJFJR 19:15, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Perhaps someone should block me for w:WP:POINT. I expect that "attentivity" will pass en.wiktionary.org's RFV process with flying colors. But I fail to see why our RFV process performs so poorly for terms like this, where all other dictionaries recognize it as an "improper" construct with occasional use...so obvious as to not merit any mention at all. --Connel MacKenzie 19:27, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

WOTD - it's all Greek to me

Sorry, your nomination is a little late as it's already in the queue for this month. It's slated to be WOTD on the 18th. --EncycloPetey 01:23, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No rush! Thank you! --Connel MacKenzie 01:38, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, no one nominated it, you just chose it, before I nominated it? Neat. --Connel MacKenzie 17:23, 5 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Errors?

Hi There. Could you tell me what errors I'm adding to English entries? --Dogme 20:05, 5 January 2007 (UTC) [reply]

a' bhean-phòsda

Deleted. The a' is an article in Gaelic, and should not have been included. I assume our contributor realised this, and so blanked the context -- either because he didn't know he could move the page or because he realized an entry without the article existed. --EncycloPetey 06:44, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Category:nl:Parts of speech and subcategories

This cat is incorrectly named. It would be nice if you made a bot that did the renaming. However, since it does not cover that much words, I might do this by hand, at the same thing cleaning up the entries. henne 10:11, 8 January 2007 (UTC) [reply]

Labelling scenarii

I have responded unto you on my talk page. Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 15:36, 6 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you, I’ve replied there, again. --Connel MacKenzie 17:02, 6 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you. I’ve written another spiel in reply, for your perusal. Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 22:36, 6 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve replied unto you again. Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 03:46, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I’ve posted another reply on my talk page. Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 04:59, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have done as you asked; please read my summary at Category talk:English nouns with irregular plurals to ensure that what I have written is accurate. Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 18:41, 7 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks again. --Connel MacKenzie 05:01, 9 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Mrbowtie

See my talk page
Could you please run a CheckUser on Mrbowtie (talk • contribs) - I think that he may be Wonderfool. SemperBlotto 10:31, 8 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
Ah, he seems to be complaining that the IP address 80.43.102.208 (or the range including that address) is blocked. I thought that I had only blocked account creation - could you check please. SemperBlotto 10:57, 8 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Please don't repeat IP information (even when it is mistakenly exposed.) In this case, it doesn't matter, as it is a Tiscali ISP address, but still. Checking in a few minutes... --Connel MacKenzie 17:00, 8 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

User:Mrbowtie is using on of the typical Wonderfool ISPs. Confirmed.

--Connel MacKenzie 17:14, 8 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Dispute (of sorts)

Just FYI, I've taken issue with your characterization of one of my edits, and your handling of it, both here (where your original message on the subject appeared) and here (where it is actually more relevant). Not a huge deal, but since it is covered in two places, I thought it best to let you know directly. — SMcCandlish [talk] [contrib] ツ 21:34, 9 January 2007 (UTC) [reply]

User:Silence

Hello Connel, please could you run CheckUser on Silence (talk • contribs) I've been poking around the contribs and found this [2] (scroll right to the bottom to see what I mean -slightly sycophantic if not wonderfoolish) which worries me slightly and I have this slight doubt about whether his or her edits have been in good faith. --Williamsayers79 16:48, 10 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

All CU results indicate this user is a single contributor with no relation to any IP ranges used by Wonderfool/Dangherous sockpuppets, nor to any of the myriad open proxies used.

Looking back at the diff you provided, I think I agree with User:Silence about the character of the glib responses that Wonderfool gave on that RfA. Some were actually quite amusing; moreso now, than when he wrote them (all things considered.)

--Connel MacKenzie 17:05, 10 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for checking that, can't be too sure these with some of the odd balls that have been on here recently, I'm glad he is not a Wonderfool!--Williamsayers79 19:43, 10 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

cuneiform

please note User_talk:Robert_Ullmann#cuneiform and User_talk:Dbachmann#Cuneiform. I am looking for an optimal format for these entries. Your input is appreciated. Note that there is a reason the templates are transcluded. It is not helpful if you just slap cleanup notices on these entries, I would ask you to present a sample entry illustrating how you would suggest it should be done. Dbachmann 14:41, 12 January 2007 (UTC) [reply]

Determiner headings

If I start adding determiner headings, are you just going to go and revert them again?--BrettR 17:49, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think so. (Not exactly sure what you're talking about...examples please?) Please let's continue the discussion you've started in WT:BP so we can find a middle ground that the community accepts. --Connel MacKenzie 18:04, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That is to say, I think we can find an acceptable format for identifying them. Please note that I am not stalking your edits - if things crop up on my "todo" cleanup lists, I clean them up. So please, give examples of entries that show what you are talking about. --Connel MacKenzie 20:47, 12 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the apology.--BrettR 14:14, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

requests for pronounciation

Please refer to what was said to me under 'request for pronounciation' on my user page...I was only doing what I was told to do. zigzig20s 23:28, 12 January 2007 (UTC) [reply]

Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher

Hi - just out of curiosity, why did you delete the above entry? Thanks in advance for the explanation. :) -- Schneelocke 10:31, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Because it failed RFD, here and on de.wikt: Wiktionary:Requests for deletion#Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher. --Connel MacKenzie 14:13, 13 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. (Hmm, strange, searching for the word didn't even find that RfD entry, even though I'm searching in all namespaces by default.) In any case, do you have a link to the deletion discussion on the German Wiktionary, by any chance? I can't find that one, either, and I'm not really comfortable with the idea that something is deleted "because the Germans did it, too" when there is no actual discussion to be found on de:. Or is there a deletion review process on here? The word is a curiosity, of course, but it certainly is being used, too (I'm a native German speaker, I might add), so I think it should be included. :) -- Schneelocke 10:17, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Eierschalensollbruchstellenverursacher looks to me like a lockdown page. Did I get it wrong? It certainly doesn't have the normal "new entry" buttons of a blank page that simply hasn't been entered yet. On the other hand, perhaps I have erred, as de.wikipedia does have an entry? --Connel MacKenzie 14:45, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Well, I still don't understand why the de.wikt: page looked so different from the other items I searched. I must've hit [Go] while logged out for the others. It is back on RFD where you can berate me for being too hasty. --Connel MacKenzie 16:49, 14 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for the packet of info

Thanks for the welcome, that was very useful info... I don't edit here much, but it's good to know the sort of thing you laid on me, I appreciate your help.

If this was wikipedia and I had the time I might also log out and award you the anonymously granted/semitransparent Modest barnstar, but suffice to say I really do appreciate the greeting. Pedant 02:11, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

exactly my point, I feel it's good to keep the dictionary free of frills. As a reader of dictionaries when in elementary school (yeah I was a nerdy kid, read them from Aa to Zy) I felt the Reader's Digest Encyclopedic dictionary had things that just did not belong in a dictionary, I feel similarly about barnstars and various WP'an frou-frou. Cheers though, and thanks. Pedant 02:26, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

for amusement

Have a look at this which I found while looking for any reference basis for the info in w:List of cuneiform signs. (There is no particular connection...) Robert Ullmann 12:56, 15 January 2007 (UTC) [reply]

Your userpage

Hey! I found your page from your account on the English Wikipedia, where I'm a registered user. It seems in your contact info on your userpage, there's a mistake. It says "Though I'm an admin, I make it a point to bite newcomers. I'm guessing you mean not bite newcomers. 69.117.147.42 23:50, 15 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I guess I'd better correct that. Thank you. --Connel MacKenzie 00:05, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Whenever did that change ... it definitely used to ~~be correct~~ say you didn't. Perhaps one of the more amusing bits of vandalism (or was it just self-mutilation on a bad night). :-) --Enginear 14:22, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No comment. :-) --Connel MacKenzie 14:42, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Truth? What is truth? :-D --Enginear 19:52, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hehe. Actually, I think the comment was going to be "truth in advertising" but a keyboard error cut me off. --Connel MacKenzie 20:27, 16 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Brackets in `{{plural of}}`

Hi, maybe you can answer my query which I posed on William Sayers’ talk page: Square brackets in ‘plural of’, as it seems you are the reason he is doing this. henne 14:20, 17 January 2007 (UTC) [reply]

Project - Spanish

Would putting Wiktionary:Project - Spanish on the translation project page be wrong? If it isnt, where would it be put?

I just think that it would be a good idea to stick a translation thing on that page, the only translation page in the community portal.

Bearingbreaker92 20:29, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Move it wherever you think it works best - but please leave the redirect from my userspace behind so I can find it. I have no idea where it "properly" belongs. --Connel MacKenzie 20:38, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, you were talking about something completely different. Linking there from the translation project page ... erm, what translation project? WT:TOW? Yes, you can certainly link it from there. Or TTBC. Both are relevant. --Connel MacKenzie 20:43, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion of bukkake post-RFV

Hello,

I was wondering about your deletion of the article once it had been RFVPassed by DAVilla (see the RFV disscussion here.) In your comment, you noted that you could only see one of two quotes. I had added *three* quotes at the article itself (and had not added them to the discussion in the RFV.) For some reason, DAVilla removed the Google Books link to the first quote, though it still works for me (may require a login.) All of them used the term *without* italics (although one was used nearby a use *with* italics, go figure.) Was your deletion based upon your dissatisfaction with these quotes, or with the two that had been posted by Dmol earlier in the RFV discussion? I strongly feel that the provided quotes met CFI, and am inclined to un-delete the article, but I'd like to avoid an edit/restore war. Please let me know what the basis you used to override the normal RFV was. Thank you. --Jeffqyzt 16:23, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I do not recall seeing three valid quotes in the entry. For some reason, a bug is preventing me from previewing the various deleted entry revisions right now. I will address comments in WT:RFV sometime today (hopefully soon, when I figure out why I can't see the entry preview.) --Connel MacKenzie 16:48, 17 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

OK, now the preview is working. Some of these I've mentioned previously on talk:bukkake, but here goes.

Doing my own b.g.c. search, I found the first reference that you indicate. (I couldn't earlier.) The third link definitely is in a quotation...and yes, outside of the direct quotation is used only in italics (in that paragraph, even.)

The reason it falls outside of a "normal" rfv, in the first place, is that it had been severely disputed on several previous rounds. And after all this time, to see only one valid citation, and that the traces of the RFV were removed without the one week waiting period of being "rfvpassed" implied that none were left to be found, and that people were already working around an easily-gamed system. Lastly, (and for me, most convincing,) a Primetime sockpuppet appeared in the edit history of it.

--Connel MacKenzie 02:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

And now Kappa has added more to that talk page. That does leave a bit of a mess. --Connel MacKenzie 02:12, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I fail to see why these are not considered "valid" citations. Just because the third cite is a quotation within the larger work does not make it invalid (IMO.) There is no such prohibition in our CFI or in WT:" (which is still only a "think tank," BTW.) I think your understanding of "use vs. mention" is different than mine; our guidelines only point to the Wikipedia w:Use-mention_distinction article, so presently it is unfortunately ambiguous how this applies to our citation policy in cases such as this. By my understanding, within the context of the third cited work (Pornified), the whole quote is "mention", but within the context of the quote, the word "bukkake" is "use", and not italicized to show either foreign language inclusion or mention distinction. I therefore see no reason why it cannot be provided as evidence.

Regarding the number of quotes, I stopped at three because I figured that was enough and I didn't see the point of making the page a clearinghouse for pornographic quotations; the term is squicky enough as it is (not to mention not wanting to wade through them myself.) There were more available, and Kappa has apparently added some of them.

Regarding the previous RFV failure, I can only say that I was unaware of such, since it was not noted at the top of the RFV listing. It seems a shame that Primetime et al. can cast suspicion and doubt on otherwise potentially valid entries merely by popping in, but there seems to be little that can be done about that until the community of administrators has grown significantly. In any case, would you object to the entry's reinstatement, provided that the combination of non-controversial quotes from both Kappa and myself is added? There seem to be enough now. --Jeffqyzt 15:02, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I have no further objections, your honor. All my concerns have been addressed. --Connel MacKenzie 09:03, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Time out

I just went and reverted your reversion of illiteracy. Has it come to this?

You want to keep out words you don't like. But you can't. I give you concrete reasons why it won't work but all I hear back is "La, la, la, you're using a lot of words!".

Quit whining about it. Just to be clear on usage: "I don't like this word! We have to keep it out! CFI is letting in too many bad words!" is whining. "Let's just look at what people use and get on with life." isn't.

There's an easy way to deal with vulgarities like choda, pet projects like prætentious and silliness like scenarii and an illiteracy. Put them in if they're used and keep them out otherwise. There's also a hard way. Piss and moan when you see something you don't like, hold your breath until someone puts in the cites, then piss and moan some more and try to change the rules so it won't happen again.

You'll get the same result either way. It's just faster and more fun the easy way. -dmh 15:26, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Why yes, it has come to this. Whatever "this" is.

You vandalized the illiteracy entry, pushing your point, that the technical definition is not a definition at all. Yet by your own agenda, "Appearance in other dictionaries" is one of the criteria we should be following. So your removal of the definition that appears in all other dictionaries, yes, is vandalism. --Connel MacKenzie 17:21, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Furthermore, you know perfectly well that "just leave them alone" is bullshit. You have been here long enough to see that what is rewarded gets more effort. Inclusion in a dictionary (where all other dictionaries had previously rejected something) is a "reward" to our vandals. But even such philosophical issues aside, the problem with "illiteracy" is that you have vandalized it by removing the valid definition, in favor of your own. The problem with "scenarii" is that the entry "scenario" was vandalized, listing "scenarii" as the valid plural. The problem with "prætentious" is that it was labelled as the preferred spelling. The problem with "choda" is that Wiktionary is being used as a neologism promotion engine, spreading that to mirrors (skewing web searches enormously,) destroying the possibility of using en.wikt: for spelling corrections (by craploading that and thousands other invalid entries) and offending many. Even avid S&M practitioners don't expect to find S&M definitions here - this is called "Wiktionary" not "The S&M Wiktionary."

Now about pissing and moaning...you are acting in a disruptive manner, while I am following the debated, deliberated, hashed out consensus of the Wiktionary community. You are pissing and moaning trying to change that consensus. Good luck with that pissing and moaning. Let me know how that works for you. --Connel MacKenzie 17:33, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

What are you talking about? Really. I did not remove any definition at all. I added the "illiteracy rate" sense because it's not the same as "inability to read" and it's attested. I changed "A denigrated word or phrase or grammatical turn, the use of which is brands the user as ignorant and uneducated (e.g., ain't, irregardless, or the use of the double negative)." to "A denigrated usage (e.g., ain't, irregardless, or the use of the double negative)." because the "which brands ..." part is POV bullshit. The edited version conveys the meaning just fine.

I also added examples, including completely unobjectionable ones for the first two defs, and a more pointed one for the last. There's no question that "an illiteracy" is just the sort of thing that language mavens would rail against if they weren't using it themselves, but I agree that pointing that out in the example is petty. Mea culpa. It's not like I was expecting that part to stand.

In normal Wiktionary practice, someone would look at what I'd done and said "Hmm ... first def looks good. Second def looks good. Third def looks good (or maybe "Do people really say that??"), but the example needs to change." Then they'd change the example. As I just did.

But like Stephen before you, you reverted the whole damn thing, good and bad. Now you justify it because you're trying to keep me from pushing some agenda. My agenda, as if it's not already clear, is to keep Wiktionary a serious dictionary and not, say, a vehicle for people's priggish views of what other people ought to say. That includes fighting for words that clearly have a place, but it also includes hunting up cites, clearing out POV garbage and tracking down etymologies.

It's hilarious that Stephen cut out what, six cites of anarchy because I was supposedly pushing some POV and didn't know what a descriptive dictionary was, especially since the defs I cut stayed cut after the ensuing tea party. It's just as hilarious that you can take out a new, valid definition and revert an improved one and claim with a straight face that you're upholding standards. If you weren't in a tizzy about my helping bring bad words in you would have done the right thing and just fixed the offensive example. Please. Step back, take a deep breath and come back to earth. It's nice here. -dmh 18:44, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Nice try. You are giving all of your arguments less and less weight. Stop vandalizing language headings, and stop making POV edits because you hate Ec. --Connel MacKenzie 18:48, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

And stop with the personal attacks, already! --Connel MacKenzie 18:49, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Would you please follow your own advice, to check other dictionaries? --Connel MacKenzie 19:03, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Would it be inappropriate to point out that "A denigrated word or phrase or grammatical turn, the use of which is brands the user as ignorant and uneducated (e.g., ain't, irregardless, or the use of the double negative)." is not even a grammatical English sentence? -dmh 20:06, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

As that conclusion is incorrect, yes, that would be inappropriate. --Connel MacKenzie 20:08, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm referring, of course, to "... the use of which is brands the user ...". But never mind. I've moved this to the BP, where you may feel free to look as silly as you wish. Sorry to do that, but I'm not going to make reasonable changes in good faith (whether you believe that or not), only to have them reverted as vandalism. Didn't fly with anarchy, most likely won't fly here either.

Now please, calm yourself. In one sentence you complain about personal attacks and in one adjacent you say I'm doing this because I hate Ec (which I don't, BTW). Somewhere along the way observing that people use "illiteracy" to mean "illiteracy rate" (they do, look it up if you don't believe me) becomes adding a POV definition of a different term. And I'm supposed to be advocating reliance on other dictionaries? No, I argued at length against that.

The world is not as sinister as you seem to make it out to be. I disagree with you on a couple of things, I'm generally OK with a lot of things you say, and I'm pretty sure I strongly agree with some of them.

One thing we clearly differ on is what new words should come in. You see ingenuitive and frictive as breakdowns in the process. I see them as a natural consequence of recording what people actually use. FWIW, I find ingenuitive grating and would not use it. But so what? As far as I can tell, there's no way to design a reasonably objective set of standards that will screen such things out without screening out a lot of things that ought to be here. There doesn't seem to have been much progress on that while I was away. AFAICT, I've proposed the only substantive change to CFI lately, one that would actually make it harder to claim attestation. The core of "attested and idiomatic" with the three-cite rule of thumb, imperfect though it certainly is, appears to be in daily use a year later.

But I digress, once again. If you think CFI is broken, propose better. Not "everything in some set of approved print dictionaries", of course. That's a non-starter. I personally don't think we can do much better, and I certainly don't think bringing notions of "correctness" and "illiteracy" in will get us anywhere, but maybe I'm wrong. You certainly seem to think so, so prove it. Show me the new CFI and get the community to buy in.

-dmh 20:48, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ahhh. The error "is" escaped my notice. Those three extra characters do seem incorrect. --Connel MacKenzie 20:56, 18 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Today's redirect Deletions

Strictly out of curiosity-what was with all those items you deleted? Were they simply redirect pages, or did some have content? If one were to recreate some of the pages (such as yogurt and telecommunication, among other notable ones) would they be alternate spellings of something? — This unsigned comment was added by Sewnmouthsecret (talk • contribs).

Yes, those were all residual #REDIRECTs from ages long past, that need to be "soft redirect" or full entries. See User:Connel MacKenzie/redirects/Other for what is still to be done. Having the redirects in place, means that people can't use the preload templates to reenter them. It also means the links that should be red, show up as blue, so people don't realize they are still needed. --Connel MacKenzie 01:34, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Historic note: when I generated the list, several wikilifetimes ago, Lupin PopUps did not exist in a usable form. Because the list was so quickly outdated, nothing really could be done with it. Now that it is so simple to see which is a redirect, and which is not, these can be cleared in a pretty straight-forward manner, so that they can all be re-entered properly. --Connel MacKenzie 01:37, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Many of these could have been rescued, and made into "alternative spellings". I realise that would have been much more work. I rescued a few that I saw whiz past, but I was sleepy and probably missed lots. SemperBlotto 08:57, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

No. Almost all of them will become "real" entries. That's the next round. --Connel MacKenzie 08:58, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Your recent verbosity

I just thought I'd take a second to pester you with a little (is it yellow, orange? I don't remember) box at the top of your screen and say that your most recent comment was well articulated and quite thought-provoking. It'll take me a day or two to respond to your little straw poll (and I imagine probably with a few qualifications). You'll have to let me know when the full book comes out. I imagine it will be interesting reading. Cerealkiller13 01:34, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

:-) Well, if the results are anything like I suspect they will be, than I'd better find a new hobby (such as writing a book) quickly. Thanks for the kind words - it is encouraging to hear that one's prose is appreciated. --Connel MacKenzie 01:38, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Your message reminded me of the proper colour. And I wouldn't count your chickens before they hatch. I certainly can't predict the outcome, but I have a feeling that most of the people who are willing to devote hours to writing a dictionary care a great deal about language, and will not treat it lightly. By the way, I've been meaning to ask you this for a while, but have not gotten to it til now. Would you be willing (and have time) to take a look at some of the Greek entries that I've been cleaning up? I am confident that you are somewhat aquainted with Dubaduba's work, as your hand has graced nearly every article I see. Currently, I have gotten through all of the Ancient Greek proper nouns up until Σ and I would just love for you to look at (and probably dismember) some of the articles, as it is much easier to find the mistakes before I've gone through all the Greek section than after. I figure that you are one of the most demanding editors on Wiktionary and if they pass your test, the rest should be cake. And I promise not to scream at you and go on a tirade about how you're some miscreant juvenile who doesn't know anything about Wiktionary (even if that would be breaking a very time honoured tradition). Thanks in advance. Cerealkiller13 02:03, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Unfortunately, as it is currently written, we cannot use the grc-pnoun template on words that don't inflect. It could probably be rewritten so that it would work. Perhaps I'll take a look at it tomorrow, and see what I can do. Cerealkiller13 04:25, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks very much for responding thoughtfully on BP. I've tried to do the same. -dmh 04:50, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Argh! You would do that, wouldn't you. You do realize you just killed the poll, right? I honestly do want to know what the community thinks about such a question!

I mean, I really honestly do want to know what the community thinks about such a question!

I know you started reading (catching up reading) on the "multi-level Wiktionary" revisited. But without some-such technical marvel, I cannot see having all the crap we currently have in the main namespace, kept.

I think I have said, about a thousand times, that everything that isn't 100% kosher shouldn't be in the main namespace. Right now, the crap entries are very, very, very rarely even tagged as crap (or slang, or rare, or whatever.)

Right now, en.wiktionary.org has some major problems. Entries in the main namespace are mirrored and re-mirrored. Within a week of a completely made-up word being entered here, the web hits jump by 20 to 80 thousand. I'm not talking about trendy words in the news, either. I'm talking about en.wikt's direct effect.

You've beat around the bush a few times. Here's the answer to your unasked question:

The only entries that should be in the main namespace:

Should not be inflections
Should be something you'd expect to teach to someone learning English
Should not be misspellings
Should not be vulgar
Should not be a term that you couldn't use in a school in India
Should not be a term that you couldn't use in a school in the US
Should appear in other major general-purpose dictionaries
Should be undeniably a word in the English language

En.wiktionary.org should not throw away things that don't meet that criteria.

Blatant vandalism should be zapped as quickly as possible
Questionable terms should be kept in a holding area
Non-NS:0 terms should have logical places to be kept

Lookups should find a term, and list all hits, unless user preferences have a filter on a particular type

MW software must be modified to not allow propagation of non-NS:0 stuff.

--Connel MacKenzie 05:38, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

By "Should not be a term that you couldn't use in a school in India/US" I assume you meant that the terms "should not be so offensive they couldn't be used" in schools rather than that, for example, they should be words a student could use without having the spelling marked as incorrect -- if the latter, without the use of col*r and gr*y you'd be reduced to black and white, at which point, returning to "offensive" the US contingent would rewrite it to African American and Caucasian and the Indians would be totally flummoxed. (In spite of which, if you mean it shouldn't be highly offensive, I agree.)

Similarly, I agree with the spirit of "not be vulgar", but again there are cultural differences between US & UK, let alone between US & India, which will require some care to define (possibly again looking at what is acceptable for use by teachers in schools in all main English speaking countries -- so Holy cow! might well be borderline).

Interestingly, a large number of words/meanings used by authors studied in school, eg Shakespeare and Chaucer, would thereby be banished to another namespace. Perhaps a specialist namespace dealing with "rude" words used by famous authors, which would be findable in web searches, otherwise we would lose a lot of credibility. --Enginear 15:05, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Hmmm. No, most terms unique to an author would end up in a "Rare:" or "Uncommon:" namespace to begin with. Not being able to guess the future, I could even imagine a "Shakespeare:" namespace.

Color/colour & gray/grey of course would not be in the main namespace. They would be in US: or UK: or CE:, of course. (But otherwise would cross-reference each other as they do now.)

As far as the "schools" criteria - you are right; only highly offensive stuff should be filtered by that rule.

But,

You raise a very interesting point. With each namespace, we need a WM software flag indicating if it is OK for mirroring, or not. As this is all hypothetical at this point, there is still some wiggle room, to add that qualification.

Thanks for your comments. --Connel MacKenzie 15:49, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

So obvious once you point it out -- a "Transnational" mainspace + country-specific NSs + others. That also allows for including, in appropriate countries, words which are used locally without concern, but are considered offensive elsewhere. NS0 would then have the exciting property that any text written entirely in NS0 words, and using only the meanings listed therein, would be correctly understood, and not give offence, by all but the least knowledgable English speakers worldwide. AFAIK, no one's issued a dictionary (rather than a word list) with that property yet.

Re "famous authors" I wasn't meaning only words specific to them, but also uses which were considered OK when they were written, but are now considered vulgar or otherwise offensive. I have forgotten most of my "great literature" knowledge (not that I ever had much) but for a more recent example, there is Twain's frequent use of nigger. Still, such words could be in "period" NSs or, as you say, by author.

If Hippietrail is looking for coding challenges, then one is working out how best to display meanings of a word taken from several NSs that a user has selected, without duplicating loads of headers unnecessarily ... not essential, but a nice to have ... and I would like to be able to hide/show interspersed quotes. Still, that's peripheral to the main multi-level proposal. --Enginear 19:37, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

For another specific example, I was thinking of Pejorative:nigger or Extremely mind-bogglingly insulting:nigger for that case. But such namespace names will work themselves out, I suppose.

Rendering just the namespace-headings and definitions from multiple namespaces, by default (with a [+] button or something?) That a pretty cool idea! --Connel MacKenzie 07:54, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Small points from your piece

The German and Dutch word distinctions have forced us to explain many entries in ways we would never imagine, as native speakers.

I believe this is exactly the sort of thing I have in mind in saying we should look at the translations to discern senses of English words.

Of all things, I think our readers are of the most concern.

I agree

No one wants to open a dictionary and see goatse.

Covered in CFI under vandalism (That was one of mine. It explicitly blessed Ec, among others, gunning blatant misbehavior on sight, even if the term itself was legit. You're welcome, and so much for "dmh hates Ec".).

Not true at all. Please go back and re-read it. Nothing I wrote applies to what CFI currently is but instead, to what it might be, if Dmh has his way with rewriting it. If we are going to be including everything, why then, yes, the goatse of course will have entries, and of course will have images to accurately convey meaning. :-) I do not want to see that here, thank you. I know our readers don't, either. --Connel MacKenzie 05:47, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, I thought you meant people just plopping goatse images into the or the main page. That's vandalism. If you're talking about the goatse entry, then there's no need for the image to come popping up. Maybe on an external link with a disclaimer. Doesn't seem difficult.

No one wants to look up a term, and find an obscure, deranged S&M re-definition of a normal word.

Some people will want to know why everyone's snickering when they say "tea bag". A dictionary gives (and for some time has given) a non-threatening way to find out without risking humiliation by asking, or just googling and finding out way more than they want to know. I certainly wouldn't mind using the "hide" feature for some entries. We currently hide big blocks of translations (good stuff, that!), so this shouldn't be hard. Hard-core libertarians will howl, but I expect the community as a whole would be comfortable.

OK, what the hell are you going on about? Did you not really read the multi-level wiktionary proposal? You said you did. GO BACK AND READ IT. Jesus have mercy. --Connel MacKenzie 05:47, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That was out of left field. Please, breathe into a paper bag or something. I'm just saying that some perfectly reasonable people will want to know objectionable meanings. But we probably do want to keep such things from jumping out at people. I just re-read the link you screamed at me to read. It seems to contain (sort of dispersed) one or more proposals to deal with such problems, with various opinions as to whether they'll work. Reasonable stuff, I think, but I'm not sure what "the proposal" is.

What's odd to me here is that I'm saying "It would be good to make potentially offensive material harder to run across." and (I think) you're screaming "WE NEED A WAY TO KEEP CRAP OUT OF THE MAIN NAMESPACE". Basically the same thing except I'm aiming at the result (make it harder to run across) and AFAICT you're focusing on a particular way of doing it (namespaces). Where's the disagreement? Bring it in but label it, I've said for a long time. Same approach for goatse, ain't or whatever the flavor of the month is. We can then have edit wars over those mechanisms, but it probably raises the bar enough to keep much of the riff-raff out.

No one wants to be redirected to a made up "phobia" that describes a fear of the word they are looking up.

Took me a while to remember hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia. That one probably fails "conveying meaning", right? What was the redirect? That sounds just wrong.

No, en.wikt: has been hit with hundreds of trolls that have made up "phobias" or gleaned them from joke references. With normal stemming rules, these "phobia" entries become first-hits for a wide variety of lookups. Having anything that ends in "phobia" in the main namespace would be a undeniable travesty. As is the current situation.

Hippiomonstro... would of course, be in a "Jokes:" namespace. --Connel MacKenzie 16:01, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Having unattested words in the main namespace would be a travesty. Having attested silliness would be aiming to describe all words in all languages (to coin a phrase).

No one wants to find out that a Pokimon character used the thing they are looking up in episode 827.

I'm not really bothered either way, unless the term came into the lexicon from Pokemon, in which case I definitely want to know. If this was just a "fun fact" note, it should have been gunned. If it was a legitimate cite, then it's a matter of taste which cites you show. There are bigger fish to fry.

I wish to be very clear here: you (the linguist) are alone here. Readers do not want to see Pokemon crap! --Connel MacKenzie 16:01, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Really? Whom did you ask? What percentage even care? And like so many of your whines, how big a problem is it anyway? Try hitting "random page" 10 or 50 times. How many Pokemon quotes do you find? The main problem I see when I do that is that most of the entries are minimal and quite a few were written before there were well-established conventions of style. At least a quarter of the entries in the main namespace are conjugations of Spanish verbs, and regular ones at that. God help us when the Latin and Arabic scholars get up to speed (yes I KNOW THAT THE LINK YOU POINTED ME AT MENTIONS SEPARATE NAMESPACES FOR OTHER LANGAUGES. For the love of all that is good and holy in the world, etc., etc.).

I'd add a more basic want, though: When someone types in a word, they'd like to see a page for it, preferably one with a decent definition. -dmh 05:24, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Duh. Hello? Earth to Dmh! Anyone there? Did you read what you said you read? Why have you gone full circle now? --Connel MacKenzie 05:47, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

For the love of Jesus Christ, our Savior, please go back and read the proposal. That is exactly the intent of the proposal. Please go back and read the proposal. For crying out loud, why don't you just read the proposal. Perhaps if I say it again, it may have the desired effect. Please go read User talk:Connel MacKenzie/archive-2007-1#Rfvfailed. The closest en.wiktionary.org will ever come to always returning something is by shuffling the crap (vulgar, jokes, nonces, pokemon, rare, dialectal) to other namespaces. --Connel MacKenzie 16:01, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Not sure I understand you here. If I run across a word somewhere, do I want to see a definition or do I want to see there's nothing there because someone decided that it didn't belong in the main namespace (or in wiktionary at all)? I'd like a definition, thank you. Preferably a coherent one that told me where and when a word is and isn't used. Therefore, let's try to get in as many actually-used words as we can, and give them the best definitions we can. Let's not try to second-guess which ones are "garbage", or "deranged", or "things I'm not interested in and therefore neither is anyone else." Just find the cites, extract the defintions, polish, repeat. That's what I try to do when I'm not playing Parry meets Eliza with you.

I'm going to try to stay out of this a bit more, other than a couple of things on BP. I may try to edit some entries. Who knows? Maybe I'll be able to do a few without having someone who hasn't done the grunt work revert the results and claim without a shred of evidence that I'm all wrong or trying to rewire Wikt to give me free cable TV. A person can dream. -dmh 19:00, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

You really need to cut out that crap. You know perfectly well I checked before rolling your BS POV edits to illiteracy back. I didn't immediately cite them, because you were so obviously wrong. Go check the BP now. And shut up with your lies about not checking sources. You are the one guilty of that! Stop jerking my chain. On IRC I can just /ignore you. Here it's a bit harder, but I'll try. --Connel MacKenzie 23:26, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Ancient Greek

The Ancient Greek proper noun template has been fixed, and can now accommodate uninflected forms. Take a look and make any modifications you think necessary. In addition, all of the proper nouns which use it have had their first parameter cleared (The first section is now simply done with PAGENAME, with no option to input a different value). I imagine that some admin will probably come and kill my children for what I did to the recent changes list, but they'll know that they're dying for a noble cause. In any case, I'm not terribly worried, as I have no children. Cerealkiller13 22:57, 19 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Whenever I bombard Special:Recentchanges, I make sure I change my Special:Preferences to mark all edits minor, so people can filter them if they wanna. But anything under a couple hundred edits is hardly "bombarding" so I wouldn't worry about it. Your edits were probably auto-patrolled, anyhow, so I doubt anyone noticed. :-)

Thanks for taking the initiative on this. Have I mentioned that I don't know any Ancient Greek, recently? Anyhow, yes, the template itself looks quite nice now! Next: documenting its use in Template talk:grc-pnoun (above the conversations.) No rush on that. --Connel MacKenzie 07:46, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Template:neologism

Apart from the conditional recommendation, the text you reinstated is duplicative. The text about illiteracy is already present. Given that these terms have already passed RFV, and that illiteracies will be marked as such within the article, and that this is a permanent banner on the page (as opposed to any of the cleanup templates), shouldn't we be aiming for brevity? DAVilla 02:01, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Dmh set a minor precedent on that, for radically changing the meaning of a template, while it is currently in use without discussion, by being bold. So, I was just following his lead there. I think the whole mess should be rolled back, but what do I know? I'm just a contributor here too, so I suggest you just be bold with it. No one should be left out, from editing {{neologism}}. If we all take a pot-shot at it, then we can all claim it was applied to an entry as we intended, not as its current form. Wouldn't that be fun? Of the 30+ entries that currently transclude it, can you summarize what you think they collectively represent? That is, what exactly is it, that we should say about them? --Connel MacKenzie 07:36, 20 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

That's easy. They're bad words. They're words that you don't want in Wiktionary, perhaps because there's some part of "all words of all languages" that you find hard to understand. You've tried disrupting them on the way in with "RfV and we'll delete it if you don't put in three cites", and of course that didn't work. So now you're going to try putting in a big honking disclaimer that "this is a bad word and only stupid people would use it." -dmh 20:02, 21 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I'm tryting to do exactly what? How many {{neologism}} tags have I added? ANY? Go away. --Connel MacKenzie 06:14, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

rel

A quotation from the beer parlour:

Raw google and g.books are interesting, but mean very little in themselves. Only looking at the sort of hits you are getting will tell you anything. rel gets 55.9 million hits ... Robert Ullmann 16:33, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

I added rel. Thanks for the pointer! -dmh 23:59, 21 January 2007 (UTC)

That nonsense has been deleted. Thanks for the heads up. --Connel MacKenzie 00:22, 22 January 2007 (UTC)

Granted dmh did not assert how the page is legitimate, but checking AHD it appears to be nonetheless. Hence your deletion would be a violation of "assume good faith". I would like to give you an opportunity to review your action. If you agree that the content is off the mark but not completely incorrect then I'm willing to make the necessary changes. If it is incorrect then I would like to know why, and we can leave it be. DAVilla 16:37, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

AAI (abbreviations, acronyms and initialisms) has had its own share of controversy at en.wikt:. Originally, all were supposed to be entered as the capitalized form only, then gradually, some lowercase forms were accepted with it, usually with the period (e.g. rel..) But even that is not without controversy: should it be Rel. or rel.? Certainly not rel nor REL.

But the reason I deleted it, wasn't based on the terms validity; it was an example in use in the BP discussion of something that is not a word. The fact that an abbreviation might meet CFI is irrelevant (and disruptive) to that conversation. But the sinister part was Dmh, as usually, refusing to listen to anything anyone has to say, that doesn't 100% agree with his agenda. He asked for examples from me, only so that he could go on a crap-loading rampage for any term I identified.

I am very disappointed in Dmh currently. Instead of trying to understand what has transpired in his extended absence, he is just being disruptive.

Now all this, really is curious. When I was a Wiktionary newbie, I honestly looked up to Dmh's thoughtful/clever arguments that undermined whatever it was that Eclecticology has said on a given day. There was a "fun" element that has been lacking here for some time now. That is, it was fun to see people arguing logically yet reaching somewhat irrational conclusions as a result. (E.g. "Lower case first letter for entry titles.")

But I feel that something fundamental has changed. I do know that I am a "rabid inclusionist" compared to many of the sysops that have been sysops here longer than me. My heavy involvement with en.wiktionary has sadly left me in something absurd, almost like a "leadership" role. So now, I've become the "defender of CFI" or something. I feel as if Dmh has chosen me as a target, now, as a result.

Therefore, I will concede, that no action of Dmh's nor any action of mine, with regard to the specific entry "rel" is neutral. He would not have entered the term, has it not been used as the salient example. I would not have deleted it if it wasn't currently being pointed to as an example; moved, perhaps; cleaned up, perhaps.

On IRC, I had joked that Dmh should be given the sysop flag, and a general strike called on by all other sysops for a day or a week. There is something he fundamentally does not grasp: the volume of incoming crap cannot always be cleaned up directly. When questionable terms come in, a sysop can choose to 1) spend two to three hours citing and formatting an entry properly, leaving, in the end, a fairly useless addition to Wiktionary, in place. Or, that same sysop can 2) delete the nonsense in 5-10 seconds, and move on. Or that same sysop can 3) spend three to ten minutes on "proper" WT:RFV nomination. The problem with 1 & 3 is that the idiots entering crap are encouraged to enter more. Are we exclusively a slang dictionary? If slang "crap" is the only thing we reward, that is what Wiktionary will become. You get what you reward.

There are enormous tasks that still have not been accomplished. Major imports of other public domain resources continually get eschewed in favor of humoring the latest WT:BP discussion. The whole tenor of WT:BP is counter-productive. What is Wiktionary?

Wiktionary is a place where those who are lexically inclined, can come and help create a dictionary. The concept of allowing anyone to edit is not to give vandals free rein, but to allow anyone with relevant information to immediately be able to help. Entering a stub for an unusual word might be considered help, if a good faith effort is made to create an entry. But slang additions 1) usually aren't enlightening on their own, 2) are invariably entered with no effort made at all, to follow existing conventions. We have a load of practices, pseudo-policies and conventions in place that make it easier for the existing batch of contributors work in parallel, gradually unifying the dictionary together as a coherent "whole." I do recognize now, that anything attacking that, is harmful.

I don't feel like restoring rel right now. Maybe I will later. Maybe I won't. If you want to, go ahead and restore it and clean it up. That window of discussion seems to have passed, with no one missing the WP:POINT of the term's entry.

--Connel MacKenzie 17:57, 22 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

I think this one has been overtaken by events by now. FWIW, I wasn't trying to disrupt. The only point I was trying to make was that rel (or rel. — take your pick, none of them is in at the moment) was a word. This seemed like a legitimate point to make in that context; it wasn't a counterexample, it was just an oversight as far as I could tell. This wasn't libnut or choda or whatever. Rel (with or without the period) stands for "release" all over the place. Clearly in widespread use, not vulgar or anything like it (Firefox spell-checker doesn't flag it, for example).

As an old-timer, concerned with increasing Wikt's coverage at any opportunity, I have a strong impulse to try to turn red links blue, and this seemed like a perfect opportunity.

I think (or at least hope), that Connel and I have been able to hash out our differences on IRC. Yes, it is easy to forget the sheer volume of crap and, as I've said, RfV is not as bad as I'd made it out to be. Mistakes were made. I'm trying to clean up my side of the street and own mine.

I would very much like to go back to just entering terms, pulling cites, fleshing out entries and investigating the language. One of my main interests is how meanings shift and how words come into use. This means I spend more time on the margins than, say, someone recording names for arms and armor through the ages (which unquestionably makes Wikt more useful). I've done probably my share of more basic work in the past, and I may do so again. E.g., I went down the list of Basic English words (and whatever the shorter list was) making sure every one had an entry. I've done considerable work on the and a (which was an unholy mess to start with — as I recall Hippietrail did a bunch of that, too). See also of and Talk:Of/Raw. (which is RFD??) -dmh 15:14, 23 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Purgatory

While I think Dvorty's (and others'?) suggestions for more neutral names are good, I realized this morning that "Connel's House of Pain" makes a good acronym. Maybe it will catch on informally. -dmh 14:56, 23 January 2007 (UTC) [reply]

I’m taking a break from serious involvement with Wiktionary

Hi Connel. Thanks for taking the time to discuss policies, procedures, and the like with me. Your decency and consideration are much appreciated. You may want to give my writ a read. Kind regards, † Raifʻhār Doremítzwr 17:48, 23 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]

BTW, thanks for the shout out ...

... mentioning that I've been around for a while. Much appreciated. -dmh 07:15, 24 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]