User talk:DCDuring

Comments welcome. DCDuring 17:44, 30 August 2007 (UTC)

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Perennials

Problems with plurals

Hi. I only recently became aware that there was a problem. My first thought was to dig into Category:Uncountable to see just what sort of problems might be present. That was when I realised that we have a grave problem, given that we cannot really keep track of anything if the templates are not working. I think EP is right.

1. Step 1 is to rename the category.
2. Step 2.IMHO is to modify the {{uncountable}}, {{pluralonly}}, {{singularonly}}, templates so that only the senses are marked as uncountable, plurale t, and singulare t respectively, and the {{en-noun|-}} template option to simply not put plural forms only. That is, disable its automatic "uncountable" label and categorisation.
3. Step 3. I hadn't thought about "pair of" Perhaps a new template and category?
4. Step 4. A bot to find and list entries that need to be checked out. (Might turn out to be a huge list :-/)

• We could then encourage the correct use of the templates. In any case, I see this as an urgent "to do" before it gets completely out of hand. I wish I knew how big a problem it really is! - Algrif 11:08, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

Your plan looks pretty good to me. The wording of the display for "plurale tantum" and "singulare tantum" and of the WT entries for those phrases needs work. It needs to be more accessible to ordinary users and not just technically correct.

I am appalled at the number of entries that have no templates and no categories. I spend time looking at frequency lists and filling in missing inflected forms. Probably half of the associated lemma entries are missing or significantly defective - and I don't mean missing senses, I mean missing PoSs, missing templates, obsolete headers, erroneous statements of comparability or countability, and structure problems. One hardly knows where to begin.

Are there good tools for counting entries with various characteristics and, especially, combinations of characteristics? I often wish that I could just do queries (not necessarily real-time) on the WT entries to get info on combinations of headers and templates (and parameters of templates). I guess bots marking or listing entries is as good as it gets. I am in need of getting up to speed on the capabilities of templates, bots, etc. What is a good place to start learning? My computer skills are not very up to date, but I am still capable of learning and willing to do so. DCDuring 15:15, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I need to think more carefully on your program. Whatever we do should be linguistically correct, consistent with good wiki-tech-practice, and sufficiently user-friendly as to help WT benefit from and handle any extra users we get from improving WT visiblity on Google. DCDuring 15:20, 10 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm quite good at suggesting, but not very good at doing. I wish I knew how to write bots, but my (modern day) programming skills are limited. I would need someone to write, or help to write, said bot. I don't even know what could be possible, although I expect it wouldn't be too hard to seek and list all entries with certain tags and bracketed words (uncountable). As for going through any generated list; like all the other listed tasks on Wikt, it could never be a one-man job, although I would see myself being heavily involved. Can we put together a brief proposal about all this for GP consideration? - Algrif 10:08, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

links

Is this word ever used to refer to more than one golf course? One can find usage of both "The links is ...." and "The links are ...." but every case I've looked at seems to refer to a single course. Also, an etymology is that it is a shortening of "linksland". DCDuring TALK 03:31, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Found usage: "links" (with either is or are) can refer to a single golf course. "Links are" can also refer to multiple courses. What is that called? DCDuring TALK 04:16, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

I don't know what name this phenomenon goes by, but it's the same as deer, where the singular and plural forms are identical. --EncycloPetey 04:23, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Based on our Category:English invariant nouns, they are "invariant nouns". Thryduulf 18:17, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

Oh, yes. I've been to that page. Could someone clarify it? I'm having trouble understanding the distinction made there between invariant nouns and invariant use of non-invariant nouns. There is certainly too much "ink" spent on the second case without making it clear exactly what the difference is. I'm too simple-minded to take on that challenge myself. I also don't understand the relationship of that to plurale tantum. I'm beginning to suspect that it would be useful to have an article somewhere (Wiktionary Appendix or WP?) explaining the various non-standard plural phenomena: invariant nouns, plurale tantum, singulare tantum, uncountability, semantic singularity, invariant use of non-invariant nouns, pair-of nouns, and collective nouns with special focus on the simple usage questions of greatest potential interest to our anon and even not-so-anon users:

1. How does a speaker/writer use each type of noun with respect to a single referent ? and
2. Does it (always, sometimes, never) take a plural verb when referring to a single referent?

Consistent nomenclature and corresponding categories for the technically adept wouldn't hurt either to assist the flow of wisdom from adepts to contributors to lowest common denominator. There seem to be some bottlenecks in the flow. DCDuring TALK 19:43, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

• Regular, non-invariant nouns can be either singular or plural with different forms, e.g. "one ship", "two ships"
• Invariant nouns can be either singular or plural, but have the same form for both, e.g. "one sheep", "two sheep"
• Invariant use of non invariant nouns is using one form, usually the singular form, of a noun that has different forms for singular and plural as both singular and plural. e.g. elephant is a non-invariant noun ("one elephant", "two elephants"), but the singular form can be used for the plural (i.e. invariantly), e.g. "I shot three elephant today"
• Pluarlia tantum can only be plural, e.g. tongs - you can say "pass me the tongs please" but not *"pass me the tong please".
• Singularia tantum can only be singular, e.g. crack of dawn.

Does this help? Thryduulf 21:17, 21 April 2008 (UTC)

It helps because it gives real cases. I seem to try to avoid using many of these expressions as do many of the folks I listen to, so my ear doesn't seem to have been getting much practice.

OK: "One sheep is"; "Two sheep are"

Help me here: "Three elephant are approaching" ?; "Three elephants are approaching". I'm not sure this comes up much in US. You must have more elephant in the UK.

OK: "Three cannon are firing", "Three cannons are firing", "The cannon are firing".

Help me here: "The cannon is firing" How many cannons may be involved? Only one?

If only one cannon can be involved, why would we bother calling this "invariant" rather than a noun with two plural forms?

OK for pairs-of words: "These tongs have rusted" (whether referring to one pair or more than one pair).

How does this work for p.t. nouns that are not pairs-of?

Help me here: Is it simply wrong to say "The experience of cracks of dawn differs by latitude and season"?

Also:

Confirm: "The fleet is passing through the channel". (US) "The fleet are passing through the channel". (UK)

DCDuring TALK 01:45, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

So links (golf sense) is an invariant noun, plural in form (by coincidence only), with the added quirk of being optionally used as a plural to refer to what is normally considered a single place (a golf course). Oof. Do any other words behave this way? -- Visviva 23:39, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Come to think of it, I guess all pair-of words behave this way; glasses, scissors, jeans, etc. -- Visviva 11:04, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

I started an entry for linksland, but was struck that this term is used only in golf-related literature. On the other hand links/lynkis is a valid Scots word for rough open ground, so linksland seems like a pleonasm, perhaps invented after "links" had begun to refer to golf courses themselves. [1] -- Visviva 23:39, 22 April 2008 (UTC)

Comparability

Please be careful here. For example all the hits for "more nitrogenized" seem to have "more" modifying the noun rather than the adjective.[2] This is also borne out by the 0 hits for "more nitrogenized than." In general "more X than" is a better search, but still may result in false positives. -- Visviva 04:41, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

Thanks. For nitrogenized, I also looked at the superlative and found nine in gbc. I reasoned that if a sup does exist, there is no reason for a comp not to exist. Is that too racy?

I am using "more-X-than" as my search term and reading until I find real comparables (not more modifying the same noun that the X modifies, first books, then scholar, sometimes then news, rarely groups. I look for 3. I'm trying to do it right so that I can meet challenges.

Many of the other adjs are logically capable of forming comparatives, but the number of uses is too low (0-2). I think editors are fooled by their own absolutist definitions. Someone defined worldwide as meaning applicable "everywhere". Clearly not how the word is actually used. DCDuring 04:53, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

You're certainly right that people tend to go overboard with prescriptive definitions. However, for cases like this, IMO very close attention to use is needed. Eight of the nine hits for "most nitrogenized"[3] seem to be modifying the noun rather than the adjective, as in "most nitrogenized compounds are..." The only exception is the 1881 use, and frankly I can't make head or tails of that one. -- Visviva 12:23, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

If your google yields the searches in the same order as mine 1 and 4 are the right cites. This is most marginal of all the cases. Frankly I am skeptical about many engineering-process words being non-comparable even without the cites. If you would like to challenge it, I will see if I can use print sources to located some additional cites beyond the two clear ones for the superlative. I must say that I thought that the situation would be even worse than it has turned out to be. I thought it would be as bad as with uncountability, but it isn't. The a-/an-, in-, non-, and un- adjectives are rarely comparable in practice. I had estimated 15-20% non-comparability, but find that the negative prefix adjectives reduce the ratio to closer to 10% opposable claims. If it weren't for the proscriptiveness of the "not comparable", I wouldn't care as much. Do our editors find that, given a permissive environment, free of received rules, they must use the freedom to create new rules and restrictions?

That is indeed a common reaction, though mercifully much more muted here than on the pedia. No worries, anyway; looks like you've got a notion for what you're doing. I just happened to notice the activity on RC and think "hm, that seems odd," so I went in for a closer look. It does seem odd that the only two uses of "nitrogenized" in a comparable way on b.g.c. date from the 19th century; but perhaps that's just a fluke. Happy editing! -- Visviva 15:28, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

I have noted the wantonness of Victorian word invention (crash of rhinoceroses) and morphology (-ical when -ic would do). I have tried editing some of the 1913 dictionary entries and 1911 Encyclopedia entries. They were developing a more Germanic language for a while. Perhaps the comparatives were part of the same syndrome. When I engage in chains of similar edits, there is a risk that I will go over the top. I think nitrogenized was the edit with the least support, though I have faith that more could be found. I have often been chastened by confronting the goggle evidence that my a priori assumptions are often wrong. I just wish that some folks would test their assumptions more often. Thanks for the chat. DCDuring 16:28, 11 January 2008 (UTC)

No.

Countable and comparable

Hello there, I noticed that you have amended the inflection lines of many nouns so that they are countable e.g. adipic acid - in this instance the the chemical itself is not countable but only if there is more than one type of adipic acid e.g. isomers - if that is the case then the definition may need revision to make that clear.

I'm also curious as to what g.b.c. is? - Do you mean Google - in which case many of the changes might then reflect incorrect or at least dubious usages and should not be included in Wiktionary unless they are noted as such.--Williamsayers79

Thanks for following up. I was aware that those changes were incomplete. Since the entry remains on my watchlist, I was hoping someone would come along, make the appropriate changes, and thereby provide a good model for other entries. Yes, I have altered them based on the books.google.com (which ought to be abbreviated b.g.c. not g.b.c. (my mistake)). I certainly wouldn't rely on google web search results given the need to sift through even the supposedly edited works on b.g.c. (let alone the older scanned material). I try to look through the first few pages of a b.g.c. search to make sure that not everything is spurious. I have noticed that folks are inclined to claim that something is uncountable when it is not (not just in chemistry). It wouldn't be so bad if uncountability were marked only at the sense line. I am generally aware that structural differences are abundant in complex molecules, that atoms have isotopes, that there are many Marxisms. However, my chemistry is not so good that I trust myself to add the appropriate senses. If you would point me to a good example of an entry for a chemical with both countable and uncountable senses and let me know the approximate limits of applicability of that model, I would henceforth apply only that model in my effots and would hope to be able to call upon you for cases beyond the scope of the model. DCDuring TALK 19:25, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

I would say that methane is a good example where the chemical itself (CH₄) is uncountable as it has only one form, and where the word is also used to refer to other chemicals based on that compound therefore haveing a countable sense to.--Williamsayers79 13:16, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

Comparablility has similar issues. I am somewhat numerate so I am sensitive to the fact that most natural phenomena are matters of degree. Folks who engage in selling, making, or studying things usually are making comparisions of types, grades, and lots in terms of various attributes which are sometimes popularly deemed incomparable. Maybe I have been wrong about believing that we should reflect the practice of "experts" in comparing and pluralizing what the laity do not, but the opposite presumption does not seem to have been based on much more than whim or limited experience in most cases, certainly not consultation with references or b.g.c. I am open to (and enjoy) argument on this as with most Wiktionary matters. DCDuring TALK 19:37, 27 January 2008 (UTC)

I'm glad you are open for discussion in this area. We often have a bun-fight here over such things when all that is needed is good discussion and clear explanations (use of Usage notes are definitely welcomed from my view point). Regards --Williamsayers79 13:16, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

From context I assumed that bunfight meant dust-up, but the sense entered and defended by SB is different. Did you mean something like tempest in a teapot? I think the heat generated has to do with the missing side-channels of communication (facial expression, posture, gesture, tone of voice, clothing, tics}} - not that folks don't get into pissing matches in the real world. Internet communication is good for paranoid reactions. I've noted it in my own reactions from time to time. I'm wondering how to defuse some of the negative interactions between important contributors. Humor is a little risky without the side channels. DCDuring TALK 15:08, 28 January 2008 (UTC)

If you're addressing the idea of what is countable (a slippery concept to be sure) Arnold Zwicky does a good job of laying out the issues here. You might also check out Reid's 1991 book Verb and Noun number in English.--BrettR 13:36, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Thanks for the references. DCDuring TALK 14:15, 2 April 2008 (UTC)

Abbreviations

Issues

Following is a initial dump of "issues". Perhaps it could become the start of a guideline for handling the occasional abbreviations that are not well handled by the default features of the existing system:

PoS

Apparently c. is considered to be the cutting edge of forward thinking about abbreviations. I has PoS info optionally at the sense line. Perhaps that is all that is required, given that probably 99% of abbreviations are of proper nouns or nouns. Also an abbreviation that gets used as a verb is often not considered an abbreviation ("RVing" is not "recreational vehicling"). The PoS info is a gloss that may eliminate the need to click through to the entry underlying the abbreviaton, if there is an underlying entry.

No underlying WT entry

Some abbreviations have no underlying entry (it would not meet CFI). For such entries there is more need for PoS info, WP links.

Pluralization

There would be some value in including the plural form of an abbreviation to that a user who typed in a plural for "apts." or "apts" was directed to "apt." or "apt."

Period/no period

Periodless abbreviations are acceptable, following European convention. It would be handy it the search engine given eihter "apt" or "apt." would yield both "apt." and "apt".

Pronunciation

Now folded into characterization as "initialism" or "acronym". As Agvulpine pointed out, some are pronounced both ways and some are pronounced in a combination. Some are rarely spoken. Some seem unpronounceable. Some fraction of Abbreviations are not well served. DCDuring TALK 19:07, 29 January 2008 (UTC)

Alternative spellings

Thanks for actually addressing the original question. Interesting that there was so much pent-up energy about the overall interface. Until there is some more radical advance on the user-interface front, we just have to do the best we can. I don't like to make unilateral changes, especially in something like first-screen appearance, especially if there is a more general issue involved. Are there other instances like OK that you know of? DCDuring TALK 11:19, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I also noted that the heading in "OK" is "Alternative forms". There are certainly other instances, arguable even rock and roll, where the content under the header is not "spellings" {u.c./l.c., hyphens, -or/-our, -ise/-ize, and/'n') but other closely related variants. Those variants don't always have a good home on the page. Do you think that we should make that the universal header in that position or an allowed alternative, either documented or undocumented? DCDuring TALK 11:32, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

I think in all cases in all entries, we should work to present entries that give the clearest information about a word in the format that is most effective and appropriate to the specifics of that entry, while obviously being subject to the limitations of the Mediawiki code and remaining loyal to our strict formatting precedents, but not obsessively so. The entries should cater first to the reality of that particular word, and second to some overly rigid arbitrary format. For example, if rock-and-roll and OK really don't have "alternate spellings", but more appropriately "alternate forms", well we should be able to make that minor distinction without much fuss. If the list of four or five alt. forms takes up too much vertical space, well then, golly gee, just put 'em side by side. Not too difficult. The formatting conventions are arbitrary, and many believe something is emphatically a necessary formatting convention when it's just some pedant with Asperger's whose brain fights for routine rather than effectiveness.

It's clear some formatting is important to the future of the project, to some preference skins and analysis tools, and to Wiktionary's ability to be understood by potential third party software. However, if a change is necessary, it should be simply made rather than fought. If "alternate forms" (or another useful heading) is currently not a valid heading in some skins, it should simply be made valid. If our software can't properly report to third parties a list of alt forms if they are horizontal with commas, well we should fix that. It's really people's personalities, not actual limitations that sometimes prevent success. -- Thisis0 21:19, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

This place seems to have more justification for format rigidity than WP. I've been cautious because I'm new and because folks can be touchy about things I don't expect them to be touchy about. The alt spellings format "issue" connected with the homophones discussion a bit and with the general problem of the low useful-info content of the first screen users see for many entries. I also am disappointed by the lack of knowledge about design-relevant user behavior characteristics. We do this for love, but I personally would love to have happy end users. I am optimistic that perhaps we can allow customization of the user interface so that editors and members of the language community can have useful interfaces without jeopardizing the experience of our presumed client base. I would be willing to submit to format rigidity if it sped up the achievement of user-interface customization. DCDuring TALK 21:37, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Again, simple solutions. Extra trivia like Homophones (and Anagrams, for f's sake) really just need to go after the definitions (like near Synonyms and See also). I'm assuming the Anagram/Homophone junkies fought so hard to be included, the momentum of their cause overshot itself and pushed right up to a prime real estate location, when they really belong down among the trivias and see-also's, if at all. -- Thisis0 22:05, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Hompohones at least might be justified on the grounds of helping someone to pronounce something or at least to stop looking for non-existent/minimal pronunciation differences. My fear is that the phonetic alphabetic knowledge (or working software for the audio) required to benefit from most of the Pronunciation section isn't there among most (many) of our end users. Simple solutions are all that we are likely to achieve. Because WMF doesn't have vast technical resources, technical solutions at all but the most basic level will be few and far between. I hope that it isn't all duct tape at the server farm. DCDuring TALK 23:01, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Having IPA here to encourage learning something new is cool, however, I wish we employed classic dictionary pronunciation, or better yet, simple pronunciation (pro-nunn'-see-ay'-shun). Wouldn't that be useful? I also wish we had a better way of showing syllabic hyphenation. As an arranger/editor of sheet music, that is my frequent utility of a dictionary, and sadly, Wiktionary is no help in that regard. I currently hafta take my business elsewhere. It would be a huge change, but I think it would be appropriate where the entry name repeats in bold just under the PoS headers. You know, where the en-noun templates and such are used. That's just a repeat of the entry name, why not make it use·ful? -- Thisis0 23:19, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

Anything that increases the density of useful info on the first screen without setting back a user's ability to find things on other screens is good. In particular, both of your ideas seem good.

1. Hyphenation at the inflection line would either give more info than is now in the entry or save a line in the pronunciation block for those entries that have it. Hyphenation skill is becoming less broadly useful as word-processing software absorbs that function so there may not be much energy for implementing it.
2. A pronunciation scheme that an amateur could use without a reference would be good, even if it was not as useful for linguists and not as correct. Horizontalizing it seems like a good idea, but I don't know whether it interferes with someone's grand scheme for the section.

Today someone was removing the Shorthand section (well formatted and apparently correct) of some entries and could not understand what use that could be. That seems like another skill (like Morse code) that will soon disappear. DCDuring TALK 23:39, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

What entries? I'd like to see (shorthand sections). Regarding horizontal pronunciations, apparently it's already being done fairly effectively (and simply -- the key to greatness!). Look at attribute. I'd just like to add simple pronunciation to the beginning of those lists. Wouldn't that be a neat way to promote learning IPA anyway, to see the equivalents side by side? -- Thisis0 23:48, 30 January 2008 (UTC)

There are perhaps 40 entries with the Shorthand heading, appearing at the bottom of the page. They mostly begin "ab". abash should be one. I assume that the person entering them ran out of gas. You can search for "shorthand" and find them by the bottom of page 3 of the search results. There might be more to found by serching the same way for "Gregg" or even "Pitman". If you want to test on a user who knows no IPA, I'm your test subject for alpha testing. DCDuring TALK 00:06, 31 January 2008 (UTC)

Wikispecies

We can't be the only people wondering about this - perhaps we ought to set-up a project page somewhere on WT and let the Wikispecies people know about it? Maybe there will be some people on Meta interested in cross-project stuff? Thryduulf 23:29, 10 March 2008 (UTC)

It could be, but I'm interested in the specific way that we could get some content and get some impossible stuff off our plate. I think everything really constructive tends to be bottom-up rather than top-down in Wikiworld. We can offer WSP traffic and etymology on taxonomic words. We can get a little traffic and perhaps a lot of words (many thousands?), mostly Translinguals and Latins. We'd probably get some (hundreds, thousands?) additional vernacular names. We might be able to get many entries we don't have, blue some links and not embarass ourselves with amateur handling of taxonomy. IF you can find somebody at Meta for support that would be great too. I'm thinking about working on our classicists. EPetey, and Ataeles, HarrisMorgan because the offer of ety help (if WSp even cares) would depend a bit on them. DCDuring TALK 00:17, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

Taxonomy levels

| Phylum phylum || Phyla |- | Classis classis Classes |- | Ordo ordo Ordines]] |- | Familia familia Familiae |- | Divisio divisio Divisiones |- | Cohors cohors Cohortes |- | Sectio sectio Sectiones |- | Tribus tribus Tribus |- | Genus genus Genera |- | Species species |- | Forma forma Formae

Some sort of quality process for important words

Hi,

I agree with you that we need to focus more effectively on core-entry quality. I'd been thinking of some sort of process that would focus on bringing entries for core vocabulary words (and particularly the senses and examples) up to the best achievable level. It would have to be sort of the opposite of our existing "Requests" processes, which do a reasonable job of enforcing compliance with minimum standards but aren't really equipped to go beyond that.

Specifically, I was thinking of something

• slow (maybe a 30-90 day timeframe?),
• fairly structured and deliberative (with a durable subpage structure, maybe including something like Appendix:Dictionary notes),
• focused sharply on key words (maybe the Academic Word List and/or GSL), and with
• restricted throughput (perhaps 10 words per month to start?).

Ideally, upon completing the process, entries would be raised to a high enough standard that they could be used as models of excellence. Truly model entries are something we currently lack, a fact which in turn discourages any serious work on quality, leaving us in the viciously circular place where we find ourselves.

Anyway, I was wondering if you've had any thoughts along these lines. This is another one of those things that I've been meaning to put together a more serious proposal for, but I keep distracting myself with various other shiny objects.  :-) -- Visviva 07:34, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Let me start by rambling.

I certainly think that we have numerous articles that have quality issues. Some of the issues are:

1. insufficient modernisation of Websters 1913 imports.
2. missing senses
3. poor grouping of senses in entries with numerous senses
4. redundancy of senses due to hyperspecific senses, especially in fields such as sports, computing, equestrianism, perhaps some scientific fields (eg, mycology).

All of these are fixable within our existing rules. Fixing them would seem to not fit well with our wikiness in that they require the intense efforts of a very few dedicated, experienced users and benefit hardly at all from the active participation of newbies, at least given current modes of participation.

I've been reading some older (1968) essays by Sir Randolph Quirk (Longmans Grammar). He cited Murray talking about the need for his contributors to go back over many entries (closed categories like prepositions especially) and make slips out for the usages that they did not find extraordinary. Quirk believes that non-literary-corpus-based analysis, barely feasible at the time of his essays, was the answer to the underlying problem. That would suggest that we need to have more recourse to the on-line corpera to improve those "core" entries.

To some extent our wikiness seems to give us disproportionate interest in "hard words" or "interesting" words. Though I should know better, I fritter away time on words like griffonage, which happened to be on the "uncategorised pages" list, instead of words like by, bill, defy, or set, just to mention words that have some degree of problem like missing definitions.

I know that lists are motivating. I don't think that the "collaboration of the week" idea worked. WotD creates some motivational pressure due to deadlines, but directs it at "interesting words" (=shiny things). Perhaps we need to have a sequence of lists aimed at intersections of maintenance categories, what-links-here, and other categories. An example might be English prepositions with Webster 1913 templates or used in 5 prepositional phrase entries. Perhaps we could have a page of lists of such lists.

And ultimately we could have featured entries and quality ratings as WP has.

I just don't know what is both motivating and truly useful. I continue to be desirous of ways of addressing the "needs" or "wants" of users, which may themselves be for "shiny objects". DCDuring TALK 11:29, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Well, there's no denying the motivational power of shiny objects. :-) On the other hand, there are a lot of structural needs that IMO are best addressed by focusing on a fairly limited set of "boring" core and near-core words. The need that's been most painfully apparent to me lately is to avoid "lost work" on translation sections -- there are far too many cases where a sloppy original entry has attracted lots of good translations, which have then all been dumped into TTBC when the entry was cleaned up (and if the cleanup itself was flawed, this process may repeat itself several times over). But that's not all; there's also the need to inform compositionality debates -- I think my most common rejoinder on RFD has been "if this is sum of parts, we're missing a sense at [X]" --; the need to support comprehensive treatment of 'nyms and 'terms; the need to delve into those issues of sense-grouping and -splitting that we keep touching on but never really hashing out; and so forth. Poorly-constructed definition sets have all sorts of undesirable side effects.

More cleanup lists would be an excellent thing, as would some kind of central, annotated list of lists (at least, I don't think there is any such list currently maintained). I think we often underestimate the amount of potential newbie and non-newbie energy that goes unchanneled. But still, cleanup lists focus more on the floor (minimum quality) than the ceiling; that is, while reducing the number of "bad" entries is a worthy goal in itself, it won't necessarily lead to more "good" entries. This is particularly the case for the lexical core, where the difference between "adequate" and "good" is particularly noticeable. To really do justice to a GSL word like by or one, or even an AWL word like analyze, requires a major collective investment of thought and effort. That's why I don't think we can do much more for these entries than we are doing now, without some genuinely new process -- perhaps something like a blend of Wikipedia's FA and Peer Review systems with their Core Topics collaboration. Maybe this process could harness the motivational power of to-do lists as well -- for example, the initial phase of review for an entry could involve outlining a list of individual, bite-sized tasks that need to be dealt with.

I think the biggest problem with the CotW approach has been that a week is too short a time to really gather even one person's energies to confront one of these words. I can say from personal experience that, when faced with an entry like do, 40 hours is barely enough time to lay the groundwork for an approach -- and I dare say few of us ever actually have 40 hours to spare in a single week. That's what tends to make these entries so discouraging to work on, and it's why I was thinking of a longer, flexible timeframe. Perhaps the process should be throttled with this in mind -- not 10 entries per month, as I initially suggested, but a maximum of 10 (or X) entries under consideration at one time. When consensus has been reached that the senses for a word are optimal, it could then be removed from the queue and a new word added. -- Visviva 12:29, 1 February 2009 (UTC) I'm having a hard time keeping my thoughts to less than 3 paragraphs lately, sorry. :-)

I guess I am of the opinion (and temperament) that wiktionary needs to be more checklist-oriented than WP. WP articles seem to attract fans, fanatics, learn-by-teaching types, and professionals with teaching inclinations, with narrow subject interests (though sometimes just eclectic). Wiktionary seems to attract serious effort mostly from language fans. Many of us seem to like short-attention-span work, for which checklists are very good.

The longer entries are overwheming. Perhaps the process would be to go through some high-likely-problem-ratio lists and

1. leave a bunch of tags (including new ones) OR
2. leave a tag on the talk page and an entry-specific checklist.

Perhaps the tags or checklists could be harvested for bot or template ideas that would make the process work faster. (I do not yet have a good feel for what can be done by bots or even templates, though a talk-page-checklist template that provided a formatted improvement checklist and entry-improvement log and some invisible maintenance-category membership does seem feasible though ambitious).

Maybe we need some simple focus-generating lists like "Preposition of the Month", "Determiner of the Month", "Pronoun of the Month", "Letter of the Month", "Symbol of the Month". (By the time we progress through each of these we could just start over, because there will be new issues.)

Maybe we need to mark senses that are in the opinion of some ready for translation. (Perhaps we could delete trans tables for those not ready and insert them for those that are.)

Senior contributor tasks:

1. Sequence X-of-the-Month lists (easy ones, test ones, important ones, bad ones)
2. Review entry for tasks to be done
3. Review senses for translations
4. Create short help pages for structured chunks of work
5. Identify exemplars for each L3 and L4 Heading

Meta-tasks include some consensus- and enthusiasm-building.

Shiny objects might be a talk-page maintenance-task template, a page about determining the adequacy of a sense, a help page about how to write some class of definitions, and a proposed list of exemplars.

I'm almost getting enthusiastic myself. DCDuring TALK 14:26, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

2012 Q I

law

Hi DCDuring--

I'm not sure how a definition of law as a scientific term of art, as opposed to the way it's frequently used colloquially, is redundant - would you mind explaining please? Thanks. Milkunderwood 02:51, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Ah, I see - you had not only reinstated the unverifiable "one-sided contract", not to be found in any other dictionary, but also reinstated the poorly expressed scientific definition with its confusing example. It's not untrue that "Newton and Einstein understood the law of gravitation in very different ways,", but more essentially Newton and Einstein understood the theory of gravitation in very different ways. A reader finding this example as written will come away with no clear distinction having been made. Milkunderwood 03:47, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

Might it help for a usage note to be added, to try to distinguish between formal vs colloquial usages in scientific contexts? Milkunderwood 03:56, 16 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't know what would help. The fact is that there are many senses of common words in widespread use that do not appeal to, indeed positively annoy, those who use the word in restrictive ways that meet some current standard of consistency with other current concepts. A lesson I had learned before but has been repeatedly confirmed here is that words should not be treated as concepts and still less as the concepts of an intellectual elite, especially at an open wiki such as this. If there is a broad consensus on the definition in some field of endeavor, then we can include such a definition with the appropriate context. There is often significant disagreement about the meaning of terms in such fields as is reflected in the practice of many authors to have specialized glossaries and the distinguish explicitly their definition of a term from that of others in the same field.

As to deletion of senses, I simply like to use the processes that we have (WT:RFV and WT:RFD) instead of simply allowing newcomers to delete what they don't like. I am sometimes surprised by the existence of attestation for senses I initially find outrageous. DCDuring TALK 14:23, 20 November 2011 (UTC)

On the scientific front, there is some distinction in how "law" is used in different fields. Boyle's Law in thermodynamics (physics, chemistry or physicial chemistry) is rigid and formulaic. In statistics, the Law of Large Numbers and Law of Small Numbers are theoretical conclusions that provide statistical results but with mathematical certainty. Some evolutionary rules (in biology) are described as laws, but have largely probabilistic descriptions of a likely outcome--not strict formulas, such as the case in Boyle's Law. Once you venture into social sciences, all bets are off--the "laws" become soft and mushy. And I am not just talking about Murphy's Law--many pseudo-theoretical expressions, such as Godwin's Law are expressed in terms of "law" even though the outcomes and predictive powers are far from certain. And, in relation to your last point, concerning surprising attestations for existence of superficially dubious forms--thanks for quickly finding an example of resurface to supplant mine from the news. Alex.deWitte 09:30, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

BTW, there was some formatting thing that put [[resurface]] on some list I monitor. Otherwise I wouldn't have noticed. It can be a challenge sometimes to find cites we accept as valid attestation. I was quite pleased with myself when I realized that searching for the passive was a good way to limit search results to transitive resurface, among which the relevant sense was not too hard to locate. It may not be "rare" in the same sense as the hapax legomena and the nonce terms used only in well-known works, but often mentioned in critical works thereon. Sometimes COCA at BYU is a good place for finding things that Google searches make difficult. DCDuring TALK 13:18, 7 January 2012 (UTC)

Tom

In reverting me you have restored the vandalism. I cannot believe you intended to do that, it is surely not acceptable to have this nonsense on display while discussion takes place. Sorry for deleting the RFV template, I had come to this through the RFC discussion and had not realised the vandalism had independently been identified at RFV at the stage I made the edit, but you still wished to continue with the RFV. I thought the vandalism was the only issue. SpinningSpark 09:35, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

Feel free to get rid of the vandalism. I would have done it myself but I still don't have a good intuitive feel for it.

IMHO, RfV templates should be removed by someone other than a complainant (eg, me) or an attestor, (eg, you). That way three folks at least have taken a look at the matter, with the decision resting with a "neutral" party. There is no rule that requires this, but it seems likely to prevent needless conflict.

The cites you found do look pretty good. DCDuring TALK 21:18, 28 January 2012 (UTC)

I've already removed the vandalism once, I'm not going to do it twice. If you're happy for Wikitionary to look stupid, I don't see why I should care much either. SpinningSpark 16:05, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

I seem to recall Tom as the name of some part of the ship in Peter Pan (the original novel). My recollection is that it was a gun, but it may have been a bell. (Or ball.  :-) )​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:23, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

Right and not just the tom-tom:

• 1911, J. M. Barrie; Anne Hiebert Alton, w:Peter and Wendy, published 2011, page 87:

  “She tells me,” he said, “that the pirates sighted us before the darkness came, and got Long tom out.” “the big gun?”

  DCDuring TALK 08:01, 29 January 2012 (UTC)

CFI and company names

FYI, Wiktionary:Beer_parlour#CFI and company names. I am notifying you as a likely supporter of exclusion of almost all company names from Wiktionary, so that you can start arguing your case as early as possible. --Dan Polansky 12:27, 14 February 2012 (UTC)

screw, cop, prison guard

• [4] —This comment was unsigned.

Could we attest those meanings? Nice source for leads, BTW. I always wondered what jolt meant in:

• 1958, w:Nelson Algren, w:A Walk on the Wild Side‎ (novel), page 312:

  But blow wise to this, buddy, blow wise to this: Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own. Never let nobody talk you into shaking another man's jolt. And never you cop another man's plea. I've tried 'em all and I know. They don't work.

-- DCDuring TALK 09:06, 20 February 2012 (UTC)

Tributary Load

OK. Well. let's see... You deleted my changes to this term (tributary load) and explained that this is not an encyclopedia... Well… OK. I see your point. I realized that you and someone else have removed my changes and I could not understand why. Then I realized that you have sent a reason in my TALK (never use the "TALK" before) Now I see your point (but do not agree with completely). In that case, can you create an article on Wikipedia for this term? For some reason (and I am sure it has nothing to do with this term) my account have been blocked with, apparently, thousands of other accounts because one abusive user is working within our IP range. This is the first time that I use Wiki in this way. I have used it (Wikipedia and Wiktionary) to find words and terms but never created an account to edit anything in it. This particular term needs a lot more information and I was compelled to create an account today. To my surprise, right after I edited the term (tributary load) I found out that my account was blocked because my IP address fall within a range that have been blocked for abuse. Not a good feeling for someone who decide to contribute for the first time in my life. So, again, since I can’t do it, could you create that article in Wikipedia for this term, please? You can use the files in my account (diagrams) that I created for this. Thank you. Jgnpress Jgnpress 18:29, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

I am not willing to add an article on a subject I know virtually nothing about or to shill for someone else. Perhaps you can work on this subject on a wikipedia project in another language? The difference between an encyclopedia and a dictionary is a fundamental one. BTW, I don't understand why so many WP articles have etymology sections. DCDuring TALK 18:40, 22 February 2012 (UTC)

You don't have to SHILL for me or anything else in that line. Thank you. I don't need your help. It wasn't for me anyway. Thank you for being so understanding and willing to help. You were fast to eliminate my editing of the term (which was a good addition to whoever wanted to understand the term correctly). And I see your point here: a dictionary has to be concise. OK, I get it. Therefore I was suggesting that, since I cannot do it because my IP range have been blocked until (I think) March, you could do a contribution to the world of Wikimedia. That was all. But that is OK. Your answer here only shows the kind of person you are. I will wait until they unblock this range of IPs and try to do it myself. Or better yet, maybe I'll just get away from this world of Wikimedia fanatics. Again, this is the first time that I tried to contribute to anything in Wikimedia, created an account for the first time just for this purpose… but the way you have treated me... well, sucks. I have never used Wikimedia a lot. I have read some articles on Wikipedia and really thought that I was in Wikipedia when I was editing the term and that it was all the same. I still do not know exactly how all of this work and do not know all the rules and regulations here. I was just happy to contribute to something that I know very well (engineering). That is why it took me by surprise to see you editing my addition to the term. It was ONLY after I realized that I was in Wiktionary instead of Wikipedia and that there are many Wiki... subjects, if you will, that I understood the difference. My fault. I was really expecting a friendlier and understanding approached from contributors like you, especially after I have explained what happened. But a harsh: I don’t shill for someone else? (This has nothing to do with me; it was an addition to the empowerment of the Wikimedia). -- BTW: Why did you suggest that I try in another language? Where that came from? The term: Tributary Load is in English, isn’t it? What made you think that I could contribute to that term under another language? How good could it be in another language? I don’t use another language, I don't even know how to say that in any other language. I live and work in the US and English is my language. I sense some form of discrimination here. Don't be fooled by my name... —This comment was unsigned.

1. I don't know what your name is. Is your last name "Press"? Is your first name "Juergen"?
2. I was trying to make a constructive suggestion. Because there were a few small grammatical errors in your first posting on this page, I thought that English might not be your first language. Apparently you were just tired or in a hurry. Sorry.
3. I'm sorry that we have gotten off on the wrong foot, especially since I have occasionally been an advocate for the inclusion of more technical term, at least those that meet our standard for "idiomaticity" (ie, being more than the sum of their component terms.
4. We often have glossaries for technical terms in our Appendix namespace. Some of the terms included in the glossaries might not be includable as normal entries and some of the definitions are more encyclopedic than I like to see in our main entries. This would be a good way to contribute if you still wish to.
5. My own initial experience at Wiktionary was not unlike yours, except with terms in psychology. I persisted and learned the weird ways of Wiktionary. DCDuring TALK 14:56, 23 February 2012 (UTC)

tocalo

Hi, I noticed you tried to fix my page tocalo. I know I left that page rather sloppy, this was mainly because of the strange formatting issues. When creating new Asturian templates and categories, I tend to just adapt the Spanish, Galician, Catalan, French, Italian etc. counterpart, but occasionally this ends up leaving a mess. Basically, with tocalo, it is a kind of compound verb form, I guess - the equivalent of tocarlo in Spanish (in Asturian, they leave out the r in these compound forms, also for reflexives - Asturian tocase = Spanish tocarse.) Anyway, I don't know how to tidy up the tocalo page. It was a kind of experiment - I'm making a lot of experiments with Asturian things, you see, and mostly they work out OK! --Cova (talk) 14:21, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

I tried to bring it into conformity with our overall standards for formatting, partially documented in WT:ELE. I don't know if there are any really well formatted Asturian entries, but you should try to find the best ones. You should also look at the templates in Category:Asturian_headword-line_templates and the pages that use them. DCDuring TALK 14:27, 1 March 2012 (UTC)

Thank you for the formatting help

Thanks very much for the formatting help, at entry, tough titties. -- Cirt (talk) 19:41, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

I hadn't noticed that you were a contributor to the entry. I routinely monitor various cleanup lists to push them as far as I can into conformity with my understanding of Wiktionary's standards as I understand them. There is no shortage of such non-conformity. See Category:Requests for various formalized listings of such needs and wants. DCDuring TALK 20:10, 2 March 2012 (UTC)

Taxonomic Names

Taxonomy is a very complicated system, so incorporating it here gets complicated.

For one thing, the rules vary depending on taxonomic level. Generic names are always nominative singular, but gender is important. Specific epithets are either nominative singular adjectives modifying and agreeing in gender with the generic name (though the gender rule is often ignored), genitive singular or plural nouns acting as adjectives, or nominative singular or plural nouns "in apposition" modifying the generic name.

Everything above genus is derived from the generic name by taking its genitive, removing the ending, then adding an ending specific to the taxonomic level (botany and zoology use different sets of names, and botany allows some older names to be "grandfathered in" as alternate forms). In zoology, at least, the rules don't cover anything above family (and its derivatives, such as superfamily), though they tend to follow common practices for a particular field.

That means that genus (with its associated levels), species (with its associated levels) and higher levels such as order, have etymologies, while family-level names can only be described as "from [fill in the generic name here]".

Of course, the etymology really boils down to "coined by [taxonomic author] from...". In fact, a truly accurate etymology often requires tracking down the original publication of the taxon and seeing what the original author says.

Taxonomic names aren't really Latin, they're a hodgepodge of words from various languages (most often Greek and Latin), those not already Latin being converted into Latin form according to various rules and common practices, then inflected by a very limited subset of Latin grammar. For example, a specific epithet named after a person starts by latinizing the name, then adding a genitive ending treated as if the name is a stem in the 1st declension for females and 2nd declension for males, with some disagreement as to whether there should be an extra "i" in front of the ending: something named for a Mr. Smith would be smithii or smithi, for Mrs. or Miss Smith would be smithae (I'm not sure about smithiae), and multiple Smiths would be smithorum or smithae. Derivative endings such as -ana are often used to avoid conflict with existing taxonomic names. I don't see how "johntuckeri", for instance, could be considered Latin, since it went directly from English to a botanical name- it was never used in an actual Latin sentence.

As for the template: different taxonomic levels are different. At genus level, it's helpful to know the gender, though that's not always easy to find out. I suppose the genitive or the genitive stem might be useful so that derived family-level names can be recognized (for example, Sphing- for Sphinx).

At species level, those which are morphologically adjectives would benefit from alternate forms for the different genders, since they agree in gender with the generic name. The change in ending can make it hard to recognize a specific epithet when the species is moved to a different genus. This doesn't apply to nouns, which don't agree with the generic name. The genitive forms agree with the referent, so alternate gender and number forms could also be of use, though this could get confusing.

As for formatting: the only taxa italicized are those that are listed in a (modified) binomial name, such as genus, subgenus, etc. and species, subspecies, variety, etc.

Author citation is another can of worms, since botany and zoology use different rules, and parentheses are important.

Any of the above have to be carefully weighed as to whether they're helpful enough in practice to outweigh the cost in clutter and confusion.

Personally, I would favor interwiki links to wikispecies rather than having our own interlingual entries. Very few of us at wiktionary understand the difference between taxonomic names and Latin, and equally few know many of the rules regarding taxonomic names. I've had trouble deciding what to do with translation requests in the Latin section where they obviously want the translation for scientific names, since It's not always obvious whether to create a Latin or a translingual entry. Besides, many are named after people or places that wouldn't meet CFI. Chuck Entz (talk) 20:18, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the trouble for such a long and very helpful reply.

Much of what you say is what I suspected or learned from Botanical Latin.

It seems to me that even though New Latin is not as elegant and regular as Classical Latin, it is a much part of Latin as Medieval Latin, Ecclesiastical Latin, and Vulgar Latin. It seems a bit more like part of true Latin than Legal Latin and Medical Latin. Merriam-Webster uses the label "ISV", international scientific vocabulary, to finesse some difficulties.

As many Classical Latin words are merely transliterations of Greek stems with Latin declension endings, I don't view the Greek derivations as outside the realm of Latin. And Classical, Vulgar, and Medieval Latin had borrowings from Semitic and Germanic languages, as well as others, especially in the area of proper names. It is finally a matter of simply making a decision as there are arguments on both sides. I don't know what Wiktionary users expect, which might have been a way of helping us reach a decision.

There are a number of translations of taxons that seem to actually be translations of "X family [or other taxonomic level]", where X is the type genus. That doesn't seem like valuable lexical content. DCDuring TALK 22:54, 10 March 2012 (UTC)

Off-topic material

Here's the off-topic material from WT:RFV for you: Mglovesfun (talk) 12:41, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

I've blocked you for deliberate vandalism. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:43, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Who died and left you boss? DCDuring TALK 12:46, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Nobody, if you dispute WT:RFV then change it. You're happy to dispute that overhead, overhaul and outcry and words in English? You can't exactly plead ignorance. Therefore if not ignorance, your only possible motive is to harm WT:RFV. 2.28.182.177 12:51, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

outcry

Could someone check whether the audio file is for the noun or verb senses? — Paul G (talk) 08:49, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

I think it covers all senses of both PoSes, except the verb sense "to cry louder than". DCDuring TALK 12:25, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

overhaul

Is the audio file for the noun or the verb? — Paul G (talk) 09:55, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

overhead

Which part(s) of speech is the audio file for? — Paul G (talk) 10:04, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

For everything except the adverb. I've never heard it as a pronunciation for the adverb, though our IPA etc says it is. Is it a UK pronunciation? DCDuring TALK 12:38, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Anyone object if I move that stuff to the Tea Room where it belongs, and leave a note for PG? Equinox ◑ 12:48, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

DCDuring objects, nobody knows why. 2.28.182.177 12:53, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

I only object to persistent deletions of valid material whose offense is its misplacement, not its content. I'd suggested TR. DCDuring TALK 12:55, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

And you blocked me for this? And you agree with me? Mglovesfun (talk) 12:57, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

You know you can remove something and move it elsewhere, right? Stupidest thread ever. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:58, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

I'm still blocking you for vandalism, though perhaps it was due to stupidity in stead of malice. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:59, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

For blocking and reverting me and not taking the trouble to correct the problem by moving the content instead of deleting it. DCDuring TALK 13:00, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

Just next time you agree with me, don't block me, as you and I agree on a lot of things, so we'd be blocking each other five times a day. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:02, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

This has nothing to do with substantive agreement and everything to do with heavy-handed reversion of a veteran user, PaulG. You had the option that you say I should have used. DCDuring TALK 13:19, 25 March 2012 (UTC)

2012 Q II

Talkback

here Pass a Method (talk) 18:23, 21 April 2012 (UTC)

Replied

Not a regular here, so my reply took a whopping 2 weeks. --Hydrox (talk) 01:00, 22 April 2012 (UTC)

scrap

Hey, I noticed you tagged it for RfV, then removed your own tag before starting an RfV discussion. Did you mean to do that? By the way, a Google Search of "plans for" "were scrapped" turned up 90,000 hits, and most of the ones on the first page fit my (partially idiomatic) description of the plans being stopped rather than definition #1 of them being thrown away Purplebackpack89 ^{(Notes Taken) (Locker)} 05:27, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

I think I was mistaken in tagging it. For some reason I was confused by the passive voice. Clearly the sense is derived from the more literal sense, but equally clearly it is not normally a live metaphor now. DCDuring TALK 13:09, 12 May 2012 (UTC)

kohling

I am new to wiktionary. can you explain what I am doing wrong please? —This comment was unsigned.

There are a lot of little things to learn, but it is good that you have registered.

1. You should sign your posts on discussion and talk pages by adding "~~~~" at the end.
2. We don't put pronunciations or etymologies (or much of anything) on entries for "non-lemma" terms like kohling. We have a way of semi-automatically adding those non-lemmas, which you can turn on by switching on the appropriate check-box at "my preferences" / "gadgets".

I don't know what kind of things interest you, so it's hard to be constructive. If English is your native language, then take a look at WT:REE for requested entries. WT:ELE is useful, as well as WT:CFI.

You may need a thick skin to accept all the corrections that are likely to be inflicted on your early contributions, but paying attention to them is the best way to learn or check what you have learned otherwise. Feel free to ask me or any editor who may correct or revert your contributions. DCDuring TALK 04:44, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Taxonomy

Hey DC, did you know we have {{taxon}} for Taxon entries now? It's very handy; it even adds the page to Category:mul:Taxonomic names 50 Xylophone Players talk 20:09, 17 June 2012 (UTC)

occupy the dictionary!

I've cited the "occupy but not hold" sense of [[occupy]], made it an {{uncommon}} subsense of "occupy (and hold)" ... but now I wonder if it would be more accurate and helpful to have only one sense with usage note ({{qualifier}}?) immediately after it:

1. To take possession or control of, to begin an occupation of. (This implies retention of control, but forces are sometimes said to have "occupied but not held" a place.)

What do you think? Either way, the definitions and/or notes can probably be improved. - -sche (discuss) 22:42, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for asking. I like that kind of thing and will get to it in due course. Intuitively, I find it hard to believe that one can be said to occupy something and not hold it for at least some period of time. A period of occupation would normally coincide with a period of holding. But the neologism may be different. Is there a new sense of occupy that is not durative, but is instead a (media) event? DCDuring TALK 22:57, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Is occupying "taking and holding for a short time" vs. holding, which does not have any "taking" as part of its definition? One can lose what one holds, but not what one occupies? The economics of paying for troops and warfare and the practicalities of police response may make a practical distinction between occupying and holding. DCDuring TALK 23:01, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Actually, our entry seems to be missing an "Occupy (Wall Street)" sense. I'm referring instead to the sense which is the subject of WT:RFV#occupy. Its quotations (from 1940, 1975, 1983 and 2006) seem to use "occupy" in the usual military sense, but without the intuitive implication you speak of (that occupying implies holding). Consider "The Japanese can occupy but cannot hold, and what they can hold they cannot hold long" or "Spain occupied, but could not populate [Florida]".

I just went looking for a quotation of "Germany occupied France", expecting to find uses like "Germany occupied France for several years" — but instead I found "In the spring of 1940 Germany occupied France, Belgium and the Netherlands." Along with the 1940-2006 citations, this suggests a sense "conquer and begin an occupation of". Is that an accurate interpretation of the 1940-2006 citations? ("Germany occupied France for several years" would be the sense we both find more intuitive, "hold; (garrison and) have control of".) - -sche (discuss) 23:32, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

Occupy definitely includes the seizure of what is then held (for a time). I don't think you normally would say "occupy and hold" whereas you can "seize and hold". COCA shows 18 instances of "[seize] and [hold]", only 1 of "[occupy] and [hold]". I didn't get enough sleep and it's been very hot here today. (No air conditioning: It's against my religion and bank account.) I know this has been a day when I should not have operated heavy machinery, so I can't quite get to closure on this. DCDuring TALK 23:44, 20 June 2012 (UTC)

COCA also has 10 instances of "[seize] and [occupy]", which certainly suggests that occupy is a lot closer to "hold". Is there then a sequence: "attack, seize, occupy, hold"? Or is holding just success in seizing and occupying? Occupation also seems to differ in meaning between "seizing and holding against attack" in war and "maintaining an armed force in a place against the sovereignty of the government and people of the place" (or something more felicitous). DCDuring TALK 00:01, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

We are attempting to make distinctions that other dictionaries do not. Perhaps we should find the applicable international law that defines post-hostilities occupation.

I am more skeptical than ever about the utility of a distinction between a longer- and shorter-term "holding" or "keeping" associated with occupy. DCDuring TALK 00:21, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

In 1940, Germany occupied France. At 10:28 a.m., I stirred the moussaka. Do we need a separate sense for "starting to stir something"? No. Equinox ◑ 00:24, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

That's where I began and where I ended. But along the way I discovered the power of coordination ("and") for determining semantic content (excluding legal use of multiple synonyms!) and a possible distinction between occupation during hostilities and occupation after hostilities. DCDuring TALK 00:37, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

(after edit conflict) OK, I've combined the senses, keeping the old def mostly intact. I've tweaked it slightly to try to account for all 'permutations': "Germany occupied (had control of) France for several years" and "China occupies (has control of) Tibet at the moment, but in the past, Tibet was independent and...", vs "Japan can occupy (take control of) but not hold (keep control of)". What do you think? - -sche (discuss) 00:43, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

FWIW, stirring can be a short activity: the ocean can certainly be said to have stirred sediment for millions of years, but you could also start stirring at 10:28 and finish before the clock reached 10:29. In contrast, occupation is implicitly a longer activity than the 1940-2006 citations have it being. I might say "at 10:28, I drove to the store down the street" (even though the trip took me until 10:30) — but I would find it very odd if a San Franciscan said "at 10:28, I drove to New York City". In the case of such a long trip, I would expect "at 10:28, I started driving to New York City". - -sche (discuss) 00:49, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Certainly, but that applies to any number of things: "at 10:28, I went to town" (either started, or arrived, but not both, assuming some walking distance)... This seems to be something for a grammar book or appendix. Equinox ◑ 01:02, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

One of the important ways of discovering the shades of meaning of common words is to pay attention to grammatical differences in usage. Having an objective complement, collocating with different prepositions, having aspectual differences are ways that verb senses can be distinguished. Whether occupy has senses aspectually distinct (inceptive, imperfective, durative, stative, etc) is what we have been trying to get at. I wish I had a more intuitive feel for such things. I barely remember the names of some aspects that grammarians have identified as occurring in the wild. Those grammar distinctions in other languages can be semantic distinctions in English. English has some inflectional aspect differences. As I understand it, "ing" endings indicate a progressive aspect and we have the grammatical distinction between simple past, past perfect, and pluperfect. More remotely, verbs ending in "le" (sparkle) are frequentatives of the corresponding base (spark). DCDuring TALK 01:57, 21 June 2012 (UTC)

Pre-CodeCat?

You make it sound like an era. I know I feel old but THAT old? o.o —CodeCat 00:44, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

When I was a boy, we would have been happy to have an era named after us. I just wanted to soften the effect of your somewhat harsh edit summary on the newbie? contributor. I figured either you could take it or I could talk my way out of trouble with you. Writing edit summaries is a lot like tweeting: you have to squeeze it in any way you can. I assume it to be limited by # of characters. How many, I wonder? DCDuring TALK 02:30, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Let's see... 200 apparently. Look at the edit summary for this message. —CodeCat 11:30, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

210, by my count. Thanks for the test. Without spaces I had to scroll far to the right see them all. I have to see how many show up on special watchlist when spaces are inserted. Maybe we should have a character counter like Twitter's.

I've noted the oddness that deletion/move summaries seem to have different length limits or are simply added-to when referenced in page histories, with the result that long deletion/move summaries only show up unabridged in logs, whereas they are truncated in page histories. (Or maybe I imagined that?) - -sche (discuss) 12:26, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I've asked a bunch of questions about edit summary size at WT:GP. I may not have asked the right ones. DCDuring TALK 12:39, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Vandalism

Please don't. Even if it's only rarely. Also why? Mglovesfun (talk) 16:30, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Who's the vandal here? See User talk:Liliana-60. You could at least wait until I get an answer. DCDuring TALK 16:32, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

No, YOU could just wait until you get an answer. Don't make a mistake and then revert an editor who fixes it. Try either not making mistakes, or ask someone if you don't understand instead of reverting blindly to a broken version. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:35, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I don't think Liliana-60 will understand your comment as you haven't told him what it is you want. I'm not sure, but I'm guessing you want a template for Canadian French? Well {{fra}} was never that, it displayed French for a while, then it was a redirect to {{fr}}. I seem to think we have a template for Cajun French, but we could easily make one for Canadian French if we wanted to. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:38, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I was relying on Canadian French#External links. DCDuring TALK 16:59, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

I see, I suppose that's because Canadian French is a form French. {{etyl:Canadian French}} seems simple enough. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:31, 22 June 2012 (UTC)

Database-dump–based list.

Hi DCDuring,

I seem to recall that a while back you made a comment about wanting a list of something . . . maybe a list of verb entries where the past-participle is a bluelink but isn't defined as a past participle? Does that ring a bell? If you can refresh my memory about what it was that you wanted, I can probably generate an approximate list for you based on the last database-dump.

—Ruakh_TALK
17:16, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for remembering. The problem as I see it is that we have a fairly large number of entries for headwords ending in "ed" that are deverbal but only contain adjective section, but do not contain a verb (form) PoS section. Your characterization is good. I could use either the list of verbs or the corresponding list of adjectives, though the latter would be quicker to work with.

Can the PoS sections just be bot-inserted be any chance, preferably above the adjective section? I'd be happy to clean up after a bot has done its work, given notice so it can be scheduled when I can do it.

There are so many things to be cleaned up.

Is it ever going to be possible to render the Special:Uncategorizedtemplates page more useful by categorizing the subpages, presumably by mass addition of standardized documentation pages, starting with those whose parent page has the fewest transclusions? Presumably, it should be done for all subpages within a language code and a language family at once - or do such groupings not speed the clearing of the queue? DCDuring TALK 18:14, 25 June 2012 (UTC)

Re: original question: I've started User:DCDuring/NonverbalDeverbals. Right now it only lists a small subset of cases, in that it requires the lemma's inflection-line to be the exact string {{en-verb}}, but it should be enough to serve as a starting-point.

I always forget how hard it is to generate these sorts of lists, because we have just so many problems with our data that you really can't make any assumptions. I started by looking at headword lines of ==English== ===Verb=== entries, and discovered that a lot of them were using {{en-noun}} or other incompatible headword-line templates, sometimes because the header was wrong and template was right, and sometimes the reverse. I've cleaned all of those up now, but it doesn't inspire confidence.

Re: Special:UncategorizedTemplates: I absolutely agree that standardized documentation pages are the way to go. I created User:DCDuring/UncategorizedTemplates not because I view that as the permanent solution, but only because I didn't think the non-bottable half of the template-categorization effort should have to wait for the bottable half to be figured out. As for doing all subpages of a template at the same time — no, that won't affect the clearing of the job queue. (I don't think it's harmful, but I also don't think it's helpful.)

—Ruakh_TALK 03:33, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

I didn't expect that so many of the adjectives would be denominal. For those of the form "Xed", I was focused on those without Noun PoS sections at "X" and with no Verb PoS section at "Xed". What you have provided seems to be/include those "Xed" entries where "X" has a Verb PoS and "Xed" does not. No matter: All of these need to be enhanced. Strictly speaking, the denominal adjectives are of a different etymology than the past participle, especially where we show distinct etymologies for X#Verb and X#Noun. See skilled and tell me what you think. What you have provided points out how many problems there are. Yet again, thanks. DCDuring TALK 12:32, 27 June 2012 (UTC)

Taxonomy (again)

Hey, when you're fixing up entries can you also convert the See also's to Hyponyms? They almost invariably are taxons within the headword taxon; species with a genus, genera within a family, etc. 50 Xylophone Players talk 16:47, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Next pass, I am going to work through the entries for genera and do a few things, like {{taxon}} and Etymologies. Frankly, I think we have no business in hyponyms and hypernyms beyond what goes in {{taxon}}, as our sister projects are already competing in the area. I'm not even sure about that stuff within {{taxon}}. DCDuring TALK 16:54, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Linguistically, I don't think we are doing much of value in taxonomy other than genera and species epithets. Translations should be from the corresponding English name, if at all possible. If not, wikispecies has plenty of room for vernacular names. Very few of the super-generic names are etymologically interesting, being usually SoP morphs of a genus name. If we had every genus name and all the English vernacular names, I think we would have the framework for adding entries in all other language. I'd even go so far as to call the various Latinate "English" names ending in "id" and "oid" and "acae" and "a" vernacular names for this purpose. My efforts in this realm will go no further. DCDuring TALK 17:10, 26 June 2012 (UTC)

Linebreaks in templates

Please don't add extra line breaks before noinclude tags in templates. The extra line breaks do get transcluded when the templates are used, causing some problems. --Yair rand (talk) 17:00, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Sorry. I was trying not to. These undocumented and uncategorized templates are quite a mess. So it's hard to take the time to be careful. It's never fun cleaning up other people's messes. DCDuring TALK 17:18, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

<noinclude>

It's unnecessary, and IMHO misleading, to use <noinclude> at a template that uses <onlyinclude> (except, of course, inside the <onlyinclude>).

And personally, I think <onlyinclude> is far superior to <noinclude> for cases like {{----}}.

—Ruakh_TALK 19:50, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

I'd be happy if the experts had categorized and documented their own templates or those in their bailiwcik. I'm trying just not to break anything or bring the servers to their knees.

I've discovered more templates that look as if any change would cause a big load on the servers, eg, {{context 1}}. Am I right?

Is there any hope to render Special:UncategorizedTemplates as useful a maintenance category as Special:UncategorizedPages by, say, getting the count of those that can't be changed down below 4000? Or is it going to be necessary to periodically run your thing to generate the list I've been working? DCDuring TALK 20:08, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

Re: first paragraph: What I mean is, I don't think you needed to re-edit {{----}} after my last edit. All you did was remove a line-break and add <noinclude> tags, and I don't really see the benefit of either of those changes. (It's only transcluded on two pages. I don't think there's a big problem with the changes. But to me they seem actively pointless, and border on revert-warring, so I'd rather get on the same page if possible.)

Re: second paragraph: Yes, you're right.

Re: third paragraph: As I told you two days ago, "I created User:DCDuring/UncategorizedTemplates not because I view that as the permanent solution, but only because I didn't think the non-bottable half of the template-categorization effort should have to wait for the bottable half to be figured out."

—Ruakh_TALK 20:37, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

I hadn't realized that you had edited it and was further confused by "includeonly" and "onlyinclude", which I still don't get. I thought that I'd forgotten to work on that template and didn't see a category, which I thought anyone working on these would add. Even a low-value categorization like to Category:Templates seems better than nothing, as it is not obvious to me what existing template category would be a good home for this. I've reverted the product of my confusion, but not the template categorization. DCDuring TALK 21:15, 28 June 2012 (UTC)

I'm totally on board with the template categorization. I didn't even know there was a Category:Templates. (I guess I never looked!) Maybe {{documentation/preload}} should include it? And maybe we should set up an abuse-filter to detect the creation of a template without {{documentation}}?

Regarding "includeonly" and "onlyinclude" . . . yeah, the names are confusing. Basically there are three tags:

• foo<noinclude>bar</noinclude>baz produces foobarbaz on the template page, but foobaz on pages that transclude it.
• foo<includeonly>bar</includeonly>baz produces foobaz on the template page, but foobarbaz on pages that transclude it. (It's one opposite of "noinclude": instead of preventing its contents from being transcluded, it prevents its contents from being anything other than transcluded.)
• foo<onlyinclude>bar</onlyinclude>baz produces foobarbaz on the template page, but bar on pages that transclude it. (It's another opposite of "noinclude": instead of preventing its contents from being transcluded, it prevents anything other than its contents from being transcluded.)

That's for regular template transclusions, as well as subst: and safesubst:ed transclusion. Preload templates, however, don't support "onlyinclude", and while they do support "noinclude" and "includeonly", they don't use the full MediaWiki parser, so they don't do a very smart job of finding where/whether "noinclude" and "includeonly" start and stop.

—Ruakh_TALK 00:52, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation about the operation of the "includes". It seems to be yet another reason for me to limit what I do to incremental editing, well away from the business end of any templates.

I don't think Category:Templates is useful as a permanent one for templates. It is useful as a holder for categories of templates and as a temporary holder of templates that do not have an appropriate category, at least in the opinion of someone assigning that category.

An abuse filter for the absence of {{documentation}} (or whatever other approach would work) would be really useful in Template space. It would also be nice to have some indication of inadequate categorization, ie, only in Category:Templates requiring documentation. It is less critical that a lack of {{documentation}}. Some way of detecting suspiciously slender documentation, not significantly different from a preload might be useful for cleanup. DCDuring TALK 01:06, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Re: "[[[:Category:Templates]]] is useful […] as a temporary holder of templates that do not have an appropriate category": Quite. That's why I was suggesting that {{documentation/preload}} might provide it, so that documented templates will start out there until someone categorizes them better. (After all, Special:UncategorizedTemplates just shows whether a template is in any category at all, even something like Category:Requests for deletion/Others or something like Category:English nouns. A template in a catch-all category can be found and categorized properly.)

Re: Abuse filter: O.K., I've given it a shot.

—Ruakh_TALK 02:22, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

I would always favor letting Mediawiki capability, like the special uncategorized pages, do some of the work. I dislike being dependent of technical experts for every bit of smooth functioning. Partially it is because of my own lack of expertise in (or enthusiasm for) technical matters. But in part it is because technical adepts move on, leaving the rest of us to cope with their edifices as best we can. The causes of departure vary, but Ullmann, Daniel., and Conrad.Irwin come to mind. And others show signs of dwindling commitment. Of course some folks are a lot more responsible that others in how they handle technical responsibilities. I am grateful to them, at least in principle. Sometimes it takes a few months before I discover where the documentation I need is! DCDuring TALK 02:34, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

I've noticed the same thing. That's why I posted all of the code for User:DCDuring/UncategorizedTemplates on its talk-page, so that it won't depend on me (and on whatever computer I wrote that on). —Ruakh_TALK 14:28, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Considering the lack of documentation for templates... do you think it would work to have a specific request page to ask for documentation or clarification of a template? Or should that just go into GP? —CodeCat 15:20, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea for mid-priority/urgency items. The highest should (and anyway would) go to WT:GP. The lowest level could just be in the category populated by {{documentation}}.

Relatedly, I asked this of Ruakh on his talk page, but you might know:

Do changes to a template that are entirely in "noinclude" even generate changes in pages in which the template is transcluded? If so, then it would be without bad consequence to insert {{documentation}} so encapsulated for all pages that lack it. DCDuring TALK 15:44, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Template:grc-cite-Plato-Laws-chapcon

I'm assuming you tagged this and Template:grc-cite-Plato-Republic-chapcon for attention because when you go to the template, you see an error? Let me assure you that the two templates work just fine when actually used. I have been unable to get rid of the direct visit error message. I'm not entirely certain why the error comes up, but I have a suspicion that it's because the less than operators that are used can't function properly when comparing wikicode parameters, like {{{1}}}, but work just fine when they receive either nothing or numbers, which is what they get in actual use. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 02:25, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

I had looked at one entry that used it (or the other one I tagged for the same reason) and it didn't seem right, but the cause may have been different. I'm just trying to push all of the templates I can into categories as close as possible to where they might get whatever treatment they warrant. Sometimes I see something that seems odd to me in my ignorance of technical matters. I trust you to take care of them, or not, as you think is worth your time, certainly without needing to give any explanation to me. I figure that I detect something real once in a while, more often something that would concern others like me that can be fixed simply, and very often something I just don't understand.

I'm happy you're still around. DCDuring TALK 03:10, 29 June 2012 (UTC)

Reminder

This seems like a good time to remind you not to revert people's edits because you don't understand them. This is not in reference to anything in particular, just presumably it will happen again if nobody reminds you. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:59, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

I take this in the spirit in which it seems to be offered. I usually try to avoid following the quick-on-the-draw practices modeled so often by some here. For example, I research etymological derivations, such as those of the terms included in Category:English words suffixed with -grapher, just to mention a current case. To support my research, I try to keep browser tabs open to Online Etymological Dictionary, OneLook, COCA, BNC, Robert, Century, and Perseus, as well as Google books etc. Do you have any other recommendations for research sources? I hate to waste people's time by making unsubstantiatable edits of any kind or arbitrary deletions, even if substantiable. DCDuring TALK 17:11, 1 July 2012 (UTC)

mathematitian

I apologize for the ̈ that got stuck in there. My Keyboard Layout is customised to have applying Diacritics on the ‘{’ Key as well as ‘}’, so my clumsy Fingers must have hit the right Brace when I was not holding the Shift‐key down. I just wanted to assure you that that was an Accident. --Æ&Œ (talk) 12:08, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Not an issue. I routinely do cleanups of format problems that AutoFormat finds. A very large percentage of my edits are mistaken in some way. Often I catch them, but sometimes I don't. DCDuring TALK 12:59, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

{{headtempboiler:suffix}}

Your edit added some excess whitespace; see e.g. -athlon#English, and its extra space between the inflection line and the sense line. (This is a big part of why I think <onlyinclude> is preferable.) —Ruakh_TALK 19:59, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know, especially the specifics. I had screwed up similarly before, but didn't get specifics. I don't get the logic of when spaces are OK and considered helpful for readability in templates and when they are destructive. Believe me, I'd much rather that someone who knew what he was doing would clean this stuff up, but that's not going to happen. Frankly, the responsible template writers should not spend their time on one-at-a-time changes rather than fixing up the messes where there skills can significantly speed or finesse the job.

BTW, I have inserted {{documentation subpage}} on all the "/doc" pages that showed up on the 7/1/2012 run of uncategorized templates. Only about half were on doc pages that I had myself created ;-\}. We might want a similar template with a less intrusive header. DCDuring TALK 20:50, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

Re: "I don't get the logic of when spaces are OK and considered helpful for readability in templates and when they are destructive": That's because the details of when whitespace is or is not significant are incredibly complicated, and no one human could ever keep track of all of them! (This is one of the reasons that it can be useful to test a change before making it.) —Ruakh_TALK 23:23, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I see. But some folks know this kind of thing better than others.

For my current, narrow purposes, extra space that appears on the documentation page and is transcluded onto the main template page is wikitext (low risk). Similarly with talk page stuff.

On the main template page, is my best bet to simply tack <noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude> onto the end of the last line and make sure I've backspaced away any stray spaces or newlines?

Trying to eliminate excessive space in entries gives me some idea of the effects, so I usually try to follow the delete-stray-spaces-at-the-end discipline. DCDuring TALK 23:35, 2 July 2012 (UTC)

I think your best bet is to use <onlyinclude>. It's intuitive, it works, I've never once seen it cause a problem. (Well, sometimes it causes other editors to make mistakes because they don't know what it is, but the best solution to that is to use it more, so people get more familiar with it!) —Ruakh_TALK 00:21, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, you don't have to tell me the same thing five times to get me to do it. Just three or four. DCDuring TALK 00:48, 3 July 2012 (UTC)

"in alt"

Hi, is [[alt]] in the two meanings for which you've provided citations for the phrase "in alt" really an abbreviation? It doesn't seem like it to me. —Angr 07:43, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't know. Last night, I didn't find mention of it anywhere except as an abbreviation. The OED might help. I'm not familiar with it and haven't studied it for long. I am fairly sure that the excitement sense is an extension of the musical sense. The musical sense can, I think, occur outside of "in alt", though often only in tables. But I think I have seen "to alt G" or "to G alt", for example. Collins and RHU have information. RHU has an etymology. See in alt at OneLook Dictionary Search. They still don't have the extended meaning.

I never liked abbreviation as a PoS header. The entry for [[alt#English]] is ridiculously disorganized. Alt in the internet sense and in the senses in question seem to have become words in their own rights, with two separate etymologies. I don't mind having simple lists of terms whose etymology and meaning are identical, but many abbreviations have gone beyond that. DCDuring TALK 15:46, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

To me, abbreviations are things that are generally not pronounced the way they're spelled, unless they're initialisms. So [[etc.]] and Mr. are abbreviations because they're pronounced [[et cetera]] and [[Mister]], while abbreviations like [[e.g.]] and [[i.e.]] have become initialisms because they're pronounced "ee-jee" and "eye-ee". So while I'm sure "alt" can be an abbreviation for the musical voice alto, if it's being pronounced [ɔlt] (which I'm certain it is in these examples), it's not really an abbreviation. Another thing making me think this meaning of "alt" is different from alto is that "in alt" means "in the octave above the treble staff", which is quite high, but the alto voice is (despite its etymology) rather low, the lowest of the female voices. The alto range is in the bottom two-thirds of the treble staff and maybe about half an octave below it. So it seems unlikely that "in alt" (whether literally or figuratively) is really directly related to "alto". —Angr 16:23, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

My idiolect used to have it that abbreviations were things that in writing had to have periods. I suppose that if it were actually diachronically or synchronically from either alto#English or directly from Latin altum a linguist would call it clipping. But RHU has it as being from Old Provençal or Occitan alt or alt. DCDuring TALK 16:38, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Yeah, having periods is an important feature of abbreviations for me too, but since Brits usually write things like "Mr" and "Mrs" without periods, I figured they're not a necessary condition of abbreviationhood. —Angr 17:25, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

abozzo & abozzo

I was going through some terms that I had looked at earlier and I noticed that after I had added abbozzo as a new entry and tagged it as the alt form, you changed it to the dominanat form and abozzo to the alt form. I am curious why, as all of my dictionaries state the opposite. Granted, my dictionaries are not from this century, so I understand if things have changed, or if my sources are incorrect. I just wanted to be sure that it was not you that had made a mistake. Thanks in advance Speednat (talk) 19:26, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

I wish I'd recorded my evidence. I recall doing some basic online research but don't recall exactly what. What I would usually to is:

1. check abbozzo at OneLook Dictionary Search and abozzo at OneLook Dictionary Search
2. search Google books ("English pages") for '"abbozzo" -"abozzo" -di' and '-"abbozzo" "abozzo" -di'. (The '-di' is intended to reduce the number of hits that are use in English texts of Italian book and article titles containing the words.)

If the two approaches go the same way I stop, otherwise I try to be more specific in my searches or try Google's newspaper archives and Google Scholar. I doubt that Groups would be much help for this.

When I duplicated this now, I reached the same conclusion, but you should satisfy yourself. OneLook includes Webster 1913 & 1828 and Century (c 1913), which I take as adequate indication of 19th century terms for a first look. (Wordnik on OneLook is the way to see Webster 1913 and Century quickly.) I'm not sure that COCA/COHA and BNC have much value for this kind of term, but they might. It would be nice to be able to run Google nGrams but these terms are too rare. DCDuring TALK 19:44, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

Doing some preliminary numbers, it is like 7 to 1 in favor of abbozzo. Why, then does my dictionary show the opposite. Is it mistaken? or does it use a different system of importance? I thought they also looked at instances of use. Speednat (talk) 20:49, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

One possibility is managerial or editorial error. But older dictionaries they did not have had access to corpora that we can take for granted. Murray's OED relied on files of slips of paper. Imagine the space taken up by a billion pieces of paper and the manpower required to keep it organized. Well, they didn't have the space or manpower, so they used smaller corpora.

Some users of the term used and use the Italian spelling instead of whatever English dictionary writers thought or think appropriate. The first dictionary writers may have been simply using the spelling they found in the 'better' works they read, which may have been in error. It would be interesting to know what the standard spelling was in Italian in the 17th and 18th centuries. Perhaps the early English users of the term were simply copying standard Italian spelling, just as more modern ones have later.

And all, but especially older, dictionaries copy the mistakes of others when they try to save time and money. That is why we have the potential to be better than any older print dictionary. DCDuring TALK 21:18, 7 July 2012 (UTC)

redundant newlines in templates

I've removed two of them recently [5], [6]. They break the entry layout when such templates are used in running text, which {{PIE}} and {{gbooks}} are. I've noticed that both were a result of your adding {{documentation}} template recently, so perhaps you should check other edits of yours. Cheers --Ivan Štambuk (talk) 16:39, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for reminding me. I haven't cleaned up all of them yet, obviously, especially the ones from early in this effort. I've been trying to categorize the many uncategorized templates (at least those not widely transcluded), both to make them more accessible and to vacate Special:Uncategorizedtemplates to make it more useful as a cleanup category. (It had more than 5,000 pages, so many didn't even show up.) If you can categorize those uncategorized templates you are knowledgeable about (or others), you can reduce the number of mistaken or imprecise categorizations I will inevitably make. DCDuring TALK 17:22, 8 July 2012 (UTC)

Footnotes and other issues

I noticed you have corrected a few of my pages. Please let me know what I need to fix or improve upon. I see that Wikt. doesn't use the footnotes the way I was. I have always used the Footnotes section if the Ref. section had some non-inline ref. already there. That way it would look neater. ie. Numbered bullets and regular bullets all together. I do have a question on Abies. Why would that not be considered a borrowed item? I was under the impression that the item was "borrowed" if it was the same word with the same meaning. Thanks for your help Speednat (talk) 05:30, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

I clean-up what the format bot finds according to our formatting rules WT:ELE, standard practice, and my taste (in principle, when it does not conflict with the previous). Let me divide things up by the level of "authority". "Footnotes" is not a standard header. We have a cleanup list for that. That is what brought it to my attention. I did a minimal change for that. If you can improve on it, please do, but we have a limited number of valid headers.

Is there some other way of achieving more uniformity of appearance? I suppose, for example, we could put any references that contained external links under External Links, though that would not be in accord with standard practice. Or the bullets and indentation could be hard-formatted to match (eventually, perhaps the reference templates could be so formatted. You could see if this could be done and bring up the improvement as a proposal at WT:BP (necessary IMO to get a change in widely transcluded formatting templates or to get our technological adepts to put some time into a new one.

The changes to Abies are a blend of standard practice and my preferences.

"Borrowing" is a universal phenomenon for incorporation of FL words into a language, so that it is largely redundant to "From". In particular, taxons in translingual sections are borrowed in a predictable, even boring, pattern. The use of Borrowing could be readily justified in cases where there is no transformation of the word. I would view conversion to mixed upper-lower case as a transformation, more so a transliteration from Ancient Greek to Latin, and more yet an alteration of inflection. I am not sure that this is the standard view or that we have a consensus view at all.

I dislike the use of usage context labels like "botany" because they neglect the use of taxonomic plant names in other disciplines, such as pharmacology, mycology, entomology, ecology, soil science, horticulture, agriculture, etc.

HTH. DCDuring TALK 11:30, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

Empty documentation

Why are you creating empty documentation pages? That seems to go against the whole idea of {{documentation}}... —CodeCat 23:45, 13 July 2012 (UTC)

It goes against a part of the idea. The main idea as I understand it is transclusion of template documentation and categorization from the documentation subpage so that documentation edits and categorization changes do not add to the transclusion queue. The logic of what I have inelegantly done is to exploit the transclusion idea to allow template categorization decisions for fairly widely transcluded templates to be wrong without bad consequences for the transclusion queue.

The idea is to make exactly one change to the main template page, inserting "<noinclude>{{documentation}}</noinclude>" or a functional equivalent. Then all subsequent changes made on the documentation page need have no effect on the transclusion queue. The null documentation contains a header template (which categorizes the documentation subpage, thereby keeping it out of the uncategorized pages list), categorizes the main template to the best of my ability, and hard categorizes the template as having no documentation.

I hope that makes sense. I have checked my understanding of this with Ruakh a few times to try to get it into my thick skull. I have been doing it for a while and the bad consequences have been limited to my occasionally leaving in an extra carriage return and not being aware that uncategorized template documentation pages (/doc) themselves go into the list of uncategorized template pages. I hope there is not some problem which blows up later. DCDuring TALK 00:09, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

But editing a page that is transcluded by another will also trigger an update on the second page. So if you edit a documentation page it will still trigger an update on the template. —CodeCat 00:14, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

The "<noinclude>...</noinclude>" surrounding {{documentation}} is supposed to prevent that, as I understand it. I don't know whether a change to {{documentation}} itself might trigger something massive, but I think {{documentation}} is only called when the template page is viewed, so that changes to what it in turn calls don't otherwise matter. Please feel free to get others to opine on my understanding of this and on the consequences of the changes I have made and intend to continue making, though not a fast pace. I have been specifically trying to avoid making any changes at all to the most widely transcluded uncategorized templates. DCDuring TALK 00:28, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

It would be nice to have actual experts who can explain this, right now we're all just guessing. A bit like Ancient Greek science, where thinking was all they thought necessary to understand the world. :) —CodeCat 00:34, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Included in Wiktionary:Grease_pit_archive/2012/March#How_to_code_selective_application_of_.3Conlyinclude.3E.3F are some comments by Ruakh on the operation of noinclude and related tags. See also some discussion between me and him on this subject, either on this page or on his talk page. If he's wrong, I'm screwed. DCDuring TALK 01:03, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

We should probably ask the MediaWiki developers how it works... —CodeCat 01:27, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

If you're using my comments there, then I need to correct something. In that discussion, I wrote "In fact, I believe that when you modify parts of a template page that are inside <noinclude> or outside <onlyinclude>, that the software is smart enough not to add transcluding pages to the job queue, since those changes don't affect the template itself. (I'm not sure about that, though.)" I now believe that that is not the case. (I'm still not sure . . . though come to think of it, I have a thought about how I can test it . . .) —Ruakh_TALK 02:01, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

Re: "if you edit a documentation page it will still trigger an update on the template": That's true, but who cares? The only reason it's a problem to edit a widely-transcluded template is that it triggers updates on all the pages that transclude it. Those pages don't transclude the template's documentation page. (The update-triggering is not recursive in this way. Updates are only triggered when you edit a transcluded template. That does include indirectly-transcluded templates — modifying {{Xyzy}} would affect any entry that uses {{term}} without sc= — but does not include templates that are merely transcluded on template-pages of transcluded templates.) —Ruakh_TALK 01:46, 14 July 2012 (UTC)

User:Ruakh/Help:Templates

As you've discovered, there are a lot of nitty-gritty details when it comes to template behavior. I've started User:Ruakh/Help:Templates; and, since this is something you were asking about, I decided to start with the subject of whitespace. I welcome comments, improvements, etc. (from you, or anyone else reading this). —Ruakh_TALK 21:21, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

I have made a good number of mistakes in this are. I'll take a look. DCDuring TALK 21:52, 16 July 2012 (UTC)

Comparative online dictionary study

Have you seen this yet? I just noticed this scholarly paper on enwikt, dewikt, and ruwikt which you might be interested in, especially in terms of comparisons to other online dictionaries. Cheers! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:28, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I have read one study not too long ago, perhaps a dissertation from Darmstadt? This looks much better. The conclusions are much sharper. I will check this one out more carefully. An outsider's views are always interesting and sometimes more credible than those of insiders. DCDuring TALK 20:46, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Note that this can't be fully called an "outsider" perspective. For example, the authors cite a 2010 paper by a certain Krizhanovsky, who I believe to be none other than Andrew Krizhanovsky, who made the Wiktionary Android apps and is quite active over at ruwikt.--Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 20:53, 20 July 2012 (UTC)

Headword lines

I think it may be better to leave them as it is for now until there has been some more discussion on the matter. —CodeCat 21:02, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

There was no discussion when the previous practice was changed. Too late, anyway. DCDuring TALK 21:04, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I'd really like to be able to get a decent count of English lemmas without having to introduce all kinds of correction factors based on time-consuming statistical studies and without requiring error-prone dump processing. DCDuring TALK 21:06, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

beddy-byes

I don't agree with your edit here. If it were a plural, then "going to beddy-byes" would mean going to more than one bed, which it doesn't. Equinox ◑ 22:00, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I had my doubts. It is probably both a plural and an alternative form. As you can tell, I am on a rampage because of the vast number of bogus categorizations of plurals as nouns. In addition there are some debatable ones. On this one and possibly a few more, I may be wrong. DCDuring TALK 22:04, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't think it's a plural at all. A very hasty search for "a beddy-bye" on Google Books just found two non-standard singular forms (meaning "a yawn" and "a bedtime story"), but nothing obvious meaning "a bed". Equinox ◑ 22:06, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

P.S. Speaking of childish expressions, wangtooth made me laugh. Sounds painful. Equinox ◑ 22:07, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

There are some good funnies hidden among the antiquarianisms and ligature spellings. I added some usexes at beddy-byes. Is that the full extent of usage, do you think? DCDuring TALK 22:10, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

Just going by G.Books again, "their beddy-byes" is only found for "their bed / bedtime" and not (IMO) as a plural. But I don't mind; just didn't want to see the legit non-plural entry disappear. Equinox ◑ 22:14, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't see many instances of "his/her beddie-byes", which I would expect for a plurale-tantum noun. Can "beddie-byes" mean bed clothes, PJs or sheets? DCDuring TALK 22:21, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

I haven't often heard it with a pronoun. One goes "to beddy-byes", or it is time "for beddy-byes", rather than his or hers. In other words it's a sort of fanciful diminutive of bed (go to bed, time for bed). Equinox ◑ 22:23, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

OK, I put in a PP usex. Plenty of hits for the PP. DCDuring TALK 23:29, 23 July 2012 (UTC)

long#Tok Pisin

This one word is used in place of just about every preposition English has, it would seem. I was wondering if you'd be interested to try to split this more fully by sense, given the existing definitions. Should in and on be given different senses, or are they similar enough concepts? Is it worth making as many senses as possible? Are the senses as currently given clear enough?
I know you don't know Tok Pisin, but it's an English-based creole, so it retains a very English way of looking at the world, grammatically speaking. If you want word-by-word translations of the cites in the entry to help, I can do that too. I just want somebody generally good at this to give the entry a critical look. Thanks so much --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:24, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Flattery will get you everywhere. Function words are hard. I'll take a look. DCDuring TALK 23:49, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

Short phrases sound stilted. I find them amusing. Thanks --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:52, 24 July 2012 (UTC)

I assume long is from English along in most senses, not the duration sense where it might be from English long#Adverb. Are there really only the seven prepositions we have? Long seems to cover every basic spatial preposition there is in English except "inside". Is it also used for time? It seems not. It must be used with spatial adverbs sometimes. As I think of this, I think I would take a look at case grammar. There are lists of cases that linguists have found are reflected in inflections in some languages. Excluding cases like nominative, accusative, and vocative, those lists are close to a universal list of generic prepositional senses. See w:List of grammatical cases. I recommend this because it is more refined than English glosses using polysemic prepositions. A Tok Pisin preposition may translate all the senses of all the prepositions we would use in translating or just some. DCDuring TALK 00:54, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

To clarify: "inside" as an adjective is insait in Tok Pisin, but as a preposition, it's insait long. I just fixed that. I'm still not sure if insait long is SOP or not. What do you think?
It is used for time, actually, and not just spacially. The last cite at long is temporal (it uses the word taim (“time”)).
Pacific creoles are notorious for using only a few prepositions. Long, bilong, and olsem cover most needs; bipo (“before”) and bihain (“after”) cover the rest of the temporal needs.
Should I really list case senses? Dative, ablative, accusative, objective, apudessive, locative, prepositional, inessive (with insait), superessive, delative... honestly, most cases on the list fit the bill. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:47, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

No. I'm suggesting only that you make sure that you really understand how each of those cases is expressed by means of prepositions, preposition-adverb expressions, and any other means Tok Pisin uses. Then you can select the English translations that are the best match. I always worry about being misled by my own preconceived notions about things - and words.

Also, you should consider using {{n-g}} for "non-gloss" or "functional" definitions of what are, after all, function words. Such definitions are worded as Used to indicate (a wide variety of/all spatial relationships) and Used in combination with adverbs to (specify certain spatial and temporal relationships). But I'm sure you can do better than that. If the glosses satisfy you, mazel tov. If not, the functional definitions may bail you out. DCDuring TALK 03:50, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

I usually don't use n-g for words that can actually be directly translated. I can, of course, combine the two approaches, which is what I will do after I write this comment. You seem rather downcast about the whole deal, so I hope I'm not being a total idiot/ass and not realizing it. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:09, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

I was a little disappointed in myself for not getting a better handle on the specific easy passages. Mi no ken helpim yupela mo. DCDuring TALK 10:09, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Tok Pisin gets a lot harder if you want to have a real conversation; passive voice constructions, for example, can be grammatically complex. As for your sentence, yupela is plural; the correct word would have been a bare yu. More subtly, you were missing the untranslatable particle i. So it should have been: Mi i no ken helpim yu mo. If you feel like learning what is arguably the easiest foreign language for English speakers, I would love to have another person as a crazy as I am around here! --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:35, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

You have that without my even learning Tok Pisin. DCDuring TALK 16:36, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Exactly. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:39, 25 July 2012 (UTC)

Minor, unrelated note: not everything in the template namespace is a template. Please do not treat template subpages as if they need documentation, especially without reading their talkpages to find out why they exist. Thanks --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:56, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Anything that is uncategorized should be as long as it threatens to take up permanent residence on maintenance pages. Maintenance pages are shared resources like public parks. Leaving pages there is like appropriating park land for oneself.

For any template that risks being widely transcluded, the categorization is best not on the template page itself. If there is absolutely no danger whatsoever of the page being widely transcluded, then categorization on the template page is adequate. I am not in a position to assess the risk of widespread transclusion nor the need for some kind of documentation. Would "This page supports XXXX. See documentation at XXXX" be too hard? Perhaps a template for insertion in the subpage to support both categorization and pointing to real documentation would suffix. DCDuring TALK 13:08, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Well, that would be rather annoying when the entire point of a subpage is to be clean (i.e., no documentation, etc in the way). --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 14:53, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Lots of things that are good for the project as a whole are annoying for individual contributors, eg, WT:ELE, WT:CFI etc. DCDuring TALK 16:28, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

I don't mind you categorising it, just you documenting it. --Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 17:46, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

Not my department any more. DCDuring TALK 18:18, 27 July 2012 (UTC)

drug deal rfdef

It seems that the definition you are requesting for drug deal is the SOP meaning, or perhaps two SOP meanings. To the extent that any of these involve political deals, one could as easily refer to a "tax deal" or an "immigration deal", or any other subject over which a deal could be struck. As for legal sales of medical drugs, I don't think anything lifts that out of being SOP. bd2412 T 16:29, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

I can't tell what is or is not SoP anymore, just as as I cannot tell what is or is not a phrasal verb. We have drug (“A substance, especially one which is illegal, ingested for recreational use.”) I would have thought that was exactly the sense involved. In the case of some of the citations we do not really have the right sense of drug afaict. So, is the rule that if we have the sense, we include it and if we don't have it, we exclude and call it SoP? Whimsy and popularity is all that I see in our decision making, not even moderated by humility, skepticism, objectivity, of use of facts or even citations in argument. DCDuring TALK 18:37, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

If I told you I saw two people engaging in a drug deal in broad daylight, not ten yards from a police officer, you would likely think that was pretty brazen of them, because the phrase normally implies something that is both illegal and clandestine. If I were to then tell you it was a purchase of aspirin at a drugstore, you would understand that I was making a joke by using the literal, SOP sense of the phrase to imply an idiomatic sense. bd2412 T 20:00, 15 August 2012 (UTC)

explicit

diff, really? Where is this used? Not come across it, but there are a lot of things I've not come across. Mglovesfun (talk) 19:46, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

See Robert, ie, Modern French. I was just pursuing what Ruakh had said. Apparently incipit and finit were used to mark the beginning and ending of manuscript works, probably carrying over from scrolls or just economizing on writing materials. They are correct Latin third person present indicate forms. Being used in the same way, apparently, explicit may be formed in imitation, as if from *explicio. DCDuring TALK 19:47, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

See also Century quote from Enc. Brit. (at explicit²). DCDuring TALK 20:00, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

abaisse

I noticed your edit concerning the pronunciation of abaisse. I never liked separating the pronunciation like I had, but it seemed to be the way that it was being done. I like what you have done; however would it not be better to precede the pronunciation with the "sense" template. I am going to try that, take a look and let me know if you don't like it. Thanks Speednat (talk) 23:07, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

I missed where you used the template "a", and thought you just typed in the qualifier. So I merely moved it to the front of the line. Speednat (talk) 23:11, 20 August 2012 (UTC)

Template:ko-hanja

Another template where you added a line-break . . . (fixed now). —Ruakh_TALK 15:24, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for letting me know. I thought I had caught them all. I'll check my contributions in template space from that time. DCDuring TALK 15:28, 21 August 2012 (UTC)

Deletion

Can I have you delete a couple of entries that I created in error and have since created the correct entries.

• abbetdin -> Abbetdin is the correct
• abbethdin -> Abbethdin is correct
• abatvent -> abat-vent is correct

thanks Speednat (talk) 18:41, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Sure. The generic approach is it use {{speedy}}. You could insert a comment to explain why. Also, couldn't you have moved the entry? DCDuring TALK 18:48, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

 Done

Sorry, I didn't know about speedy or about moving. I will look both up thanks.Speednat (talk) 22:23, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

This is how most people learn, so nothing to apologize about. "Move" should appear as a tab at the top of your page, if it is available to you. DCDuring TALK 22:36, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

It is not available. Speednat (talk) 23:17, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

To the right of "history" there's a star that adds things to your watchlist, and to the right of it there should be a down arrow, and if you hover over it, you should see "move". But even if you move a page, we'd usually like to delete the redirects, for various reasons, so it can be useful to tag the redirects with {{speedy}} or {{delete}}. - -sche (discuss) 23:27, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Nope not there, not in IE or FF. Speednat (talk) 23:47, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

Very odd-- When I click on a link, for that split second before the page disappears and the new page loads, the arrow shows up. I changed my skin to monobook, and now it shows up with a tab. Speednat (talk) 23:56, 26 August 2012 (UTC)

below the salt

...is surely the same POS as [[above the salt]], so could you either make "below the salt" a prepositional phrase or make "above the salt" an adjective? Thanks, - -sche (discuss) 20:39, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

Yes, boss. Iza werkin jez az fas I can. DCDuring TALK 23:26, 5 September 2012 (UTC)

template:rft-sense

Why?​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:06, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Because the items get gobs of attention once in the tearoom. DCDuring TALK 18:21, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

I suspect some people may check some language-attention category but not the TR.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:00, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

I care most about English, of course. I am very of distressed by our uniformitarian approach to template and category design. I fear it will come crashing down or die from inability to accommodate changes flexibly.

As to request/maintenance categories, English could use a fine-tuned system, putting each item into one specific category, saving the general "attention" category for items not otherwise classified. I can't speak for most languages, but I suspect that the languages with the fewest contributors more clearly benefit from the attention-by-language approach. DCDuring TALK 19:34, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

This template doesn't require lang= and wouldn't normally have it for English, so the code you removed should do nothing for English. I can edit it so that it explicitly does nothing for English even if people do use lang=en. Would that be okay with you, then?​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:22, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

That would be fine with me. And if someone misses the English, they can go back to the original. DCDuring TALK 22:04, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

Showing usage of a word graphically

Hello,

I found another method to find out the usage of a word: http://www.wordcount.org/main.php - is that a reliable website?

Greetings HeliosX (talk) 17:58, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Taking the site as face value, the underlying data is the British National Corpus, so it is contemporary UK usage that is represented. That corpus is a large one with 100,000,000 total words. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has 450 million words. BYU reports that Google Books has 450 billion words. The words are word forms not lemmas ("book" and "books" would be in the count, separately). I can't speak to whether the site host has done what he says he did. If you are looking for a list that you can use and do with what you will, you should look at this page. Generally, you should examine this site which you can freely use after registering and which has a useful user interface but which does not support mass downloads. DCDuring TALK 19:06, 24 September 2012 (UTC)

Taxonomic names

If you don't hear from me about this during the week, then bug me about it this weekend. My other efforts are being hampered by offline activities and settling in to a new computer, so we might as well make a start dealing with this issue.

I see three main stages of settling this:

1) dealing with the basic information for genus (and higher rank) names: what do we include, where, how, and in what format

2) dealing with binomial names of species and subspecific taxa

3) dealing with the second half of binomial names, which I will call specific epithets in discussion because I am a botanist.

I'd suggest we deal with these topics in the order given above, one at a time, in order to keep things a bit more organized. I also think we ought to have all the conversation at a single location, dedicated solely to this issue, where the material wil be housed for posterity, even if it starts out in a temporary location and is later moved to a proper location of some sort. --EncycloPetey (talk) 04:20, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

That seems like the right order.

Shouldn't we have a project page right from the start, with a shortcut and all WT:ATAX -> Wiktionary:About taxonomy? We could conduct the discussion on the talk page and have copies of or links to any useful content now on other pages at WT:ATAX. DCDuring TALK 11:56, 25 September 2012 (UTC)

Something like that, but it's really about taxonomic names, rather than taxonomy itself. The fussy would point out that it's biological taxonomy, as opposed to other kinds, and all this is part of the reason I didn't specify a particular page name. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:51, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

See Wiktionary:Taxonomic names. DCDuring TALK 02:59, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Comparative / superlative of "strict"

Hi there - regarding the usage note you wrote for the Wiktionary entry for "strict": What's the source for saying that "more strict" / "most strict" is most often used outside the UK? I've lived in the US all my life, and I've never heard "more strict", only "stricter". "More strict" sounds very odd to me. All the North American dictionaries I can find give only the -er / -est forms. I think this usage note should be removed unless a reference can be given to back it up. Thanks. Seansinc (talk) 07:09, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

I was greatly relieved to find that someone else had added that remark originally in this edit. I merely moved it this past March from the inflection line to a usage note.

I checked COCA for relative frequency both over the whole corpus and in speech. It shows a bit more than the usual use of "more" and "most" rather than the "-er" and "-est" forms. In speech "more"/"most" were about 10% as common, in writing about 4%. At BNC there were no instances of more and most.

This suggests to me that perhaps some US speakers don't like to pronounce "cter" and "ctest" and avoid it when they have a choice.

Let's take this to WT:TR where some who are more knowledgeable about speech than I can weigh in. DCDuring TALK 14:33, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

pants

Since sense one specifies ‘usually’ as far as the ankles, I believe sense 2 is redundant. Certainly I can't see it in any other dictionaries. Ƿidsiþ 13:59, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

I'm sorry. I will restore your sense merger and insert the tags and inflection line that I'd like to see. I was just about to do just that, having finally seen what you were trying to do. DCDuring TALK 14:01, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Translingual epithets

Any way I could get you to budge on Translingual species epithets always being Latin based on User talk:EncycloPetey#destructans or indeed any other discussion? It seems to me these are coined (where they are coined and not borrowed) by non-Latin speakers, and not for use in Latin texts. I'd imagine the advantage you see is then they're all in the same language not some in Latin and some in Translingual. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:03, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

See #Taxonomic names, User talk:EncycloPetey#Translingual, and, especially, Wiktionary:Taxonomic names. DCDuring TALK 12:32, 30 September 2012 (UTC)

It's possible if you want everything in the same language to add a Translingual section to some Latin words, such as atlanticus. In many cases it might do nothing more than duplicate what's already there, but as long as the content is correct it doesn't matter if it duplicates the content of another language section. We allow Middle French words that have identical spelling and meaning to French words to have their own section, ditto Middle English (such as Middle English: book). Mglovesfun (talk) 13:52, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

It might come to that.

As you probably know, I've modified {{taxon}} to categorize by level or type of taxon and created {{taxlink}} to do what {{spelink}} did but also cover more levels of taxa and categorize by the level of taxon that is missing. I also have {{rftaxon}} to be inserted in L2 sections that have a natural kind of living thing among the meanings of the headword. I have created the associated categories that were "wanted", though many have few members. I have also been regularizing all of the existing taxonomic entries that I can find, starting with those that are in relevant categories. Next will be cleanup lists for miscategorized taxonomic names (probably just a few in English and Latin), then insertion of {{rftaxon}} and {{taxlink}} in the appropriate L2 sections of entries in the topical categories for living things. This should lead to a large number of wanted taxonomic entries and render moot such questions as whether we should have entries for species. See Category:mul:Taxonomic names (species).

If I also use {{taxlink}} or equivalent within species inflection-line templates for redlinked species epithets I will find out more about the nature of the missing ones, which fact base will help the discussion of L2 section for missing species epithets. I no longer really care, except for facilitating the build-out of taxonomic-name entries in general. DCDuring TALK 14:15, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

There will be many more epithets not in the lemma form. It doesn't matter to me or to taxonomic usage whether the inflection is good Latin (it usually is) or good morphology in terms of any vintage of Latin language, just like medical and legal "Latin" terms. So I would just as soon simply have the form as used without even bothering to try to specify what form of the lemma it was. DCDuring TALK 14:32, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Todo/anomalous section0 content

I managed to get to the last one (can't remember how) and it contains a character information box which is appropriate before the first language section as it refers to the entry as a whole, not any particular language. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:54, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Cool. I won't waste more clicks trying to read it. DCDuring TALK 14:15, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

Cat

I read long ago that cat in the sense of "dude" is supposedly of African origin, along with the hip uses of hip and dig. Both of these are listed as Wolof in Wiktionary.

I did some research into the history of this Wiktionary enty and discovered that this use of "cat" was indeed once listed at a separate etymology with the Wolof root mentioned, then they did some shuffling of the cat entry, and the Wolof -kat reference was assumed to be . . . vandalism? and deleted. Jeremy Jigglypuff Jones (talk) 21:41, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Here is the old version, by the way. Jeremy Jigglypuff Jones (talk) 21:45, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

IOW, you have no support for anyone to look at for the existence of -kat#Wolof, for its meaning, or for a connection between the purported suffix and the English term. DCDuring TALK 22:46, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

I see that it is a hypothesis rather than a fact or a well-accepted view. I suppose the problem is the lack of a clear-cut path of transmission between Wolof and the earliest recorded uses of hepcat/hipcat/cat in the 1930s. One would expect there to be many (20? 50? 100?) words that have taken the route as well. -kat#Wolof is something like the agent suffix -er#English, so cat would have been derived from hepcat rather than directly from -kat, based on the meager evidence we have. I've read a little about this kind of thing and understand the evidence problem for direct African influence on AAVE and American English in general: There isn't much evidence, but one wouldn't expect there to be much. But there are nagging questions. Why should Wolof be the African language that lends the most words to English? DCDuring TALK 23:30, 11 October 2012 (UTC)

Translingual proper nouns

Seems KassadBot doesn't like your ''{{head|mul|proper noun}}'' syntax; it's been adding {{head|mul|proper noun}} like this. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:04, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

Thanks. I noticed and I've stopped that. I need to have an easy-to-type replacement template that does the job for taxa of genus-level and below and possibly other jobs. One problem may be that some Translingual terms of that type may also have other uses which are not italicized, eg, as names of stars or constellations. DCDuring TALK 17:09, 12 October 2012 (UTC)

{{taxon}}

Hi there. The template {{taxon}} wikifies the entire colloquial name (see, as an example, Caytoniales). I'm pretty sure that it didn't use to, and I don't think that it should. The documentation example actually shows the colloquial name supplied to the template with square brackets. Is this something that you have changed? SemperBlotto (talk) 09:37, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

It wikifies each argument unless there is wikilink within it. For all but argument 5, the gloss, this highly desirable. Usually, a wikilinked vernacular name is preceded by the for superior aesthetics. It does force the use of technical terms or lame wikification in some cases. DCDuring TALK 13:26, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

That was how it has behaved all along. I managed not to screw it up when I made my categorization change. DCDuring TALK 13:37, 16 October 2012 (UTC)

ferret

Any reason you deleted the verb? Is this related to the problem Lo Ximiendo posted on his user page? --WikiTiki89 15:47, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

If indeed I did it, it was inadvertent. I will inspect and restore any blunder. Thanks for letting me know. My feelings wouldn't have been hurt if you had corrected that destructive change, though it was probably combined with other hopefully constructive changes.DCDuring TALK 18:57, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Holy smokes. Thanks for reverting. I have no idea how that happened. DCDuring TALK 19:00, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

I don't know if I reverted any intentional changes along with that though. --WikiTiki89 19:03, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

No. Thanks again. It might have been something with my touchpad. It is not the first time that I missed such an inadvertent deletion. It's a good thing it is so easy to reverse changes on a wiki. DCDuring TALK 19:07, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

It was actually really hard. I had to move my mouse all the way over to the undo button, then click, then move it all the way over to the save button, and then click again. --WikiTiki89 19:10, 19 October 2012 (UTC)

Give me your tired, your minacious

As one of our experts on telling adjectives from nouns, I thought you might like to comment on Talk:minacious. The supposed noun citations of it are of the form "the minacious"... and yet we do have noun defs of [[poor]] and [[Irish]] supported by similar usage. - -sche (discuss) 21:42, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

It's a "fused-head" construction per CGEL, which virtually any English adjective can enter into. It usually requires some knowledge of the context to know what the fused head is exactly. We should probably have a couple of sentences about it at Wiktionary:English adjectives. I think many of the others, including the demonymics, are suspect too, but a mammoth cleansing seems a poor course of action. DCDuring TALK 22:06, 25 October 2012 (UTC)

{{l|en|…}}

Regarding your question on my talk-page . . .

I think it's worth keeping in mind that {{l}}'s slowness, while less-than-ideal, does not directly affect readers, because no matter how many times {{l}} occurs in the entry [[foo]], the processing of it never takes place during the rendering of http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/foo. (Or at least, most of its processing doesn't.) For example, try visiting User:Ruakh/Test, which is a copy of Wiktionary:Requested entries (English) from before my change the other day; you'll find that it loads quite quickly.

The slowness does affect readers indirectly, in that:

• It affects editors, and anything that makes editing harder, or less enjoyable, will be to the detriment of our project and its content.
• One could argue that it increases server load in general, potentially making browsing slower overall. However, such an argument would somehow have to address the awkward fact that browsing isn't slow.

but IMHO, neither of those is reason for a panic attack.

—Ruakh_TALK 17:13, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I just got a difference of about 8 times using the requested entries page, with the original version taking about 50 seconds. I don't know whether it has to do with MW servers or how my ISP handles a request that hasn't been completed all at once. Equinox mentioned that he thought the page was loading more slowly "lately". The insertion of {{l}} was August 8.

I will run the comparison again with a timer later once all caches between my PC and the MW disks have cleared, hopefully before the storm knocks out power or my internet connection. I will make some kind of change to each involving {{term}} to try to force some kind of reconstruction of the page by the servers.

Are all of the templates required actually transcluded? There was some discussion that some templates that are used do not show up on the list of transcluded templates. If they do not show up on that list but are used, then how can we be sure the server fully prepares the content in advance?

In any event this seems to be something that would be limited to our problem pages. We could use a little performance-engineering support from MW. I'm sure our major design choices are defensible even if they go beyond what they wish we had done. DCDuring TALK 17:52, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

• I just tried again: Current version: 6 seconds, Old version: 42 seconds. DCDuring TALK 17:54, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

• No, you didn't. A URL of the form http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/foo only shows you the current version, so you can't have used it to time the old version; and the edit-history shows that you did not temporarily revert to the old version just so you could test this. That's why I was explicit about the URL format, and why I said that this is something that affects editors, not readers: readers don't go poking around in old versions, examining diffs and seeing what's changed. (Not usually, anyway. Not so's it would affect our competitiveness vis-à-vis other online dictionaries.) —Ruakh_TALK 18:30, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I didn't use [[foo]], I used the request pages. What am I supposed to do besides click on the two links to the old version of WT:REE and the one on your user page that you so helpfully provided? I didn't have to make any changes to generate the difference that I measured. I doubt that there have been enough changes to WT:REE to invalidate the comparison as an approximate measure of the scope of the problem. —This unsigned comment was added by DCDuring (talk • contribs) 18:45, 28 October 2012‎ (UTC).

Re: "I didn't use [[foo]], I used the request pages": Well, duh. I didn't think otherwise. ;-)   "Foo", in my example URL formats, was just a placeholder for the pagename.
Re: "What am I supposed to do besides click on the two links to the old version of WT:REE and the one on your user page that you so helpfully provided?": You're supposed to compare the current version of Wiktionary:Requested entries (English) (which uses wikitext of the form [[foo]] for its links) to the current version of User:Ruakh/Test (which uses wikitext of the form {{l|en|foo}} for its links).
Now do you understand?
—Ruakh_TALK 19:41, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Well, duh. That's what I have done from the beginning. I have now done so several times getting loading time for the {{l}} old version in excess of 40 seconds each time and less than 8 seconds for the current {{l}}-less version. Your links made that the easy thing to do. I have suggested that others run the test, using the same links copied to the tabbed-languages vote. If others have different experience, then there may be some interaction with ISP operations or some other problem peculiar to me. DCDuring TALK 19:52, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Wait, so you're saying that visiting User:Ruakh/Test takes >40 seconds for you? Because for me, it's very fast. (That's why I didn't understanding that you were doing that: your results were well out of line with what I was seeing.) Except that actually, right right now it's slow. *investigates a bit* Y'know what? It's because there are a few separate levels of caching. If I visit the page when it's already in the parser cache, it's very fast. If I visit the page when it's not already in the parser cache, it takes a long time. Dammit, that's going to make it very hard to test proposed changes. Especially since intereditor cooperation seems to be out of the question; WT:NOT claims that "Wiktionary is not a battlefield", but I think it's simply mistaken. :-P   —Ruakh_TALK 21:01, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I could tell that my results went against your expectations and experience. I will do other things to let as many caches empty as possible. I don't think that WT:REE is getting a lot of use right now. (It isn't one of those designated high-use page, I don't think.)

You could also try the test on a copy of Wiktionary:Requested entries (Scientific names) before I (laboriously) removed all of the {{l}} instances. I won't fool with it (I am quite sure that no one else would) if you tell me that you want to run performance tests. You would have maximum control of caching effects.

BTW, as I reduced the number of instances of {{l}} performance got better, probably by a caching effect at first, but it seemed to get gradually better thereafter. Then, toward the end of the process, it got much, much better. Final elimination of {{l}} did not have a dramatic effect. Could there be some non-linear number-of-transclusions effect? I know that that goes against your model of how it's supposed to work, but still.... DCDuring TALK 21:19, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

I have no idea. Some amount of nonlinearity wouldn't surprise me, but I'm not sure exactly what pattern I would expect. (Note that my knowledge of MediaWiki internals, while broader than average, is still not exactly vast.) —Ruakh_TALK 21:29, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Can we use this guy from MW who visited WT:GP to get some information? If you want I could ask questions in my own blundering way. I'm used to exposing my ignorance. DCDuring TALK 21:39, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

• I haven't visited Ruakh's test page, so it shouldn't be in any cache on my end. I may have visited the newly-updated Requested Entries page, but if one of you would like to copy it to another test page, I'll load each test page (the old, supposedly "slower" version and the new, supposedly "faster" version) in turn and give you feedback on how quickly/slowly they finish loading and how quickly/slowly each one re-loads/saves after a null edit. - -sche (discuss) 23:24, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Ed. Rev.

Thanks for the info on quoting from "Ed. Rev." (aka The Edinburgh Review)! ~ Jeff Q (talk) 18:53, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Sure. A lot of what happens here is not well documented so asking for an explanation or (politely!) expressing a confusion or frustration is appropriate and deserves as much of an answer as one can give. If I knew of some relevant documentation I would have referred you to it! DCDuring TALK 19:01, 28 October 2012 (UTC)

Exocoetidae

Hi there. Do you think this entry should have some sort of links to exocet and Exocet? SemperBlotto (talk) 12:17, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes I do, now that you mention it. But it brings up a question of how to present such things. If this part of Translingual were conceived of in Wiktionary terms as a language, then something related in another (real) language is either a descendant or part of its etymology. If this part of Translingual is conceived of as a sort of branch of English, then it can have English terms as Synonyms, Related terms, Translations, etc.

I don't really want to waste time on addressing this in principle. Over time it will be resolved by building good entries, which will demand suitable treatment. I think I can predict aspects of the outcome, but I may be wrong.

Translingual is a bit of a miscellany that may need for some of its parts to hive off.

There are fair number of taxonomic terms that have extremely lame "definitions", consisting solely of taxonomic placement and a vernacular name ending in "id" (eg, for Cupateidae: "the cupateids"). These really should be in related terms and replaced if possible with a more illuminating definition.

In the meantime, we could put such things under Related terms or See also. I'd prefer Related terms. DCDuring TALK 12:34, 11 November 2012 (UTC)

thymallus

Hi again. I have forgotten what sort of entry we are supposed to create for these sorts of word (the uncapitalised form of the genus name (Thymallus) used as a type species. Any ideas? SemperBlotto (talk) 17:06, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't know what we have been doing, nor do I have any particular ideas about what we should do.

I suppose that we need to have a separate entry for the lower-case form, even though there is a kind of grammar that says how this are to be interpreted. If the word is also a normal Latin word we could have an New Latin context and a special non-gloss definition. For a term not used in regular Latin, we could treat it the way you do the eponymous epithets, as a Translingual entry.

I'm not too worried about "getting it wrong" as long as the terms are locatable (categories, distinctive context or words) and reasonably consistently laid out. That would ease the burden of any possible restructuring that may need to occur. DCDuring TALK 17:44, 12 November 2012 (UTC)

OK. I have made an attempt at it (and also at bagarius). I shall use this format in future unless anyone objects. SemperBlotto (talk) 17:55, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

I've started doing it that way myself. I still can't think of a good alternative. DCDuring TALK 17:59, 16 November 2012 (UTC)

Frankish language template

I noticed that the Frankish language template frk states that it is Frankish, but elsewhere i have seen the language referred to as Old Frankish, which is it? If it is Old Frankish can you change it? The reason I noticed is that someone has added the word "old" in front of the "ety" template stating frankish, and that kind of seems like a bandaid fix to me.

I looked a little further and it seems like probably Frankish is old Frankish but I would like an admin's opinion before I change the old back to regular. Thanks Speednat (talk) 00:26, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Old Frankish and Frankish are the same, but we call the language Frankish because there is no modern Frankish language (that is called Franconian, apparently). So you should probably remove the "Old" when you see it, especially when it is "Old {{etyl|frk}}" because the etyl template will always show the proper name anyway, and if we ever decide to change the name it will end up saying Old Old Frankish... —CodeCat 00:30, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

I'm not knowledgeable enough about such things to have an opinion. CodeCat, MGLovesfun, and Liliana-60 might have opinions. As has been confirmed by the message from CodeCat while I was writing this. DCDuring TALK 00:33, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks that's what I was thinking. Speednat (talk) 05:18, 13 November 2012 (UTC)

Your language preference

Quick question: Is your language setting in Special:Preferences set to "en - English"? --Yair rand (talk) 11:53, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Yes. Why? DCDuring TALK 12:49, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Ah, so much for that theory. I had read that pages were cached separately per language, which would result in pretty much every page taking forever to load if one's language was set to anything different, so it occurred to me that that might be causing the lengthy page loads you mentioned you were experiencing a couple sections up. Why pages are loading effectively instantly for me but taking nearly a minute for you remains a mystery for now, I guess... --Yair rand (talk) 13:00, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Thanks for taking the trouble to investigate. Does everyone use the same server? Aren't there mirrors? Have you polled admins about their loading-speed and determined their location and IP or IP type? I'm in NY doing Wiktionary from my home using TimeWarner Cable as my IP. The polling might be a good idea anyway to determine how widespread the difficulty is and to generate some hypotheses.

I simply can't be bothered to work on the large entries, many of which urgently need work, with the kind of performance I get. That's one reason I now spend time on taxonomic entries instead: they are much quicker to load, edit, and save. DCDuring TALK 13:12, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

I don't really know if the same server(s) everywhere, or if that would make a difference, or what. I'm not really knowledgeable about how things work on the back end. I agree that polling to see if it's a very widespread issue sounds like a good idea. --Yair rand (talk) 13:30, 18 November 2012 (UTC)

Template:k and script

I thought I'd follow up on your question about why it is important that templates know which scripts languages are written in. My understanding—which others will hopefully correct if it is deficient—is that it is because our site-wide .css causes certain scripts to be displayed in fonts which can handle those scripts, rather than in the default font which tends to display them as meaningless boxes. However, the .css is apparently not yet smart enough to recognise that every time a particular Unicode codepoint appears, it is a particular script, e.g. ฆ (ฆ) is always a letter in the Thai script. Scripts must be "applied" to things. Thus, our templates like {{l}} look up each language's script subpage to know what script it uses and thus what font to apply to it, so that it does not display as boxes. {{l/en}} is simplified compared to {{l}} because English is usually written with ASCII characters (instances of Greek letters, click characters and other things being copied from other languages are rare), and which our whole site is in English unless otherwise stated anyway, so no script needs to be applied to English. {{l/th}} (for Thai) could also be a lot simpler than {{l}}, because it could contain the script declaration within itself, rather than requiring the template to look up other templates, but it would still need to contain the script and be a bit less minimal than {{k}}, so that the text of the link displays properly (but if {{l/th}} does contain the script within itself, it should be no slower than {{k}}, AFAIK). There are also what I'll call "philosophical" benefits to declaring every Thai string's script as Thai, etc. - -sche (discuss) 21:39, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

There is another reason. This doesn't apply strictly to scripts, but since this functionality is part of script templates, it is tied to them. Usually whenever a script template is used, it is called with a lang= parameter which specifies which language the text is written in. This parameter is used by browsers to figure out how to interpret the text. Most browsers don't really do any interpreting, but one very important application is text-to-speech. If you don't specify, for example, the word attention with lang=fr, a speech synthesizer will assume that it's English and pronounce [əˈtɛnʃən] rather than [atɑ̃sjɔ̃]. ({{head|fr}} is better than '''attention''' for this same reason) So we have to specify the language, there is really no way around it if we want to be accessible to sight-impaired users. On the other hand, I do believe that we can use CSS to do most of the work that the /script subtemplates currently do. For example, it is possible to use CSS to specify that anything on the page that has lang=th applied to it should use Thai font. I'm not sure if we can completely replace script templates in this way, but we should certainly have a closer look in the Grease Pit. —CodeCat 22:38, 23 November 2012 (UTC)

This page is not watched by enough folks to ensure getting the best corrections.

The script-related reasons would seem to have the most relevance for non-Latin scripts. Do not all browsers, no matter what the language selected by the browser or the operating system, need to have and actually have the capability of handling Latin script? If that is so, then we do not need universal use of resource-intensive script selection, especially in the entries that have obvious performance problems. I have never had problems with the use of language-code-based script selection where it is essential.

Selecting language is done by the contributor who specifies the language. All a template does is expand a code to a language name, a labor-saving and error-reducing step of some value, but not absolutely essential.

The resource-intensive aspects of our most widely-used templates (the t family, l, and term) seem to be existence tests and template calls. I don't see any way of completely dispensing with template calls. I do think that we can dispense with and force contributors of bots to insert language codes that actually exist by having dramatically ugly visible results from a template that contains a non-existent language code. Looking up a script where the script is Latin seems extravagantly wasteful for templates that can be used hundreds of times in an entry, for just that purpose.

I am tired of not being able to effectively make small edits to large English entries because of ridiculous save times and even excessive load times. DCDuring TALK 01:37, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

fustic

I don't understand your reversion there. It makes no sense to link to an obsolete name, to dead pages, redirects, or incorrect names or name parts, instead of linking to names of species, current names, and the like. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:20, 10 December 2012 (UTC)

"a muscularly Christian period"

Just in case you haven't heard of it: that citation of yours presumably refers to muscular Christianity. Equinox ◑ 22:36, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

I was definitely a little vague about it. Anglican religious movements were not part of my RC childhood. I still think a cite of "muscularly Christian" might help. There are definitely two sides of Christianity, one somewhat feminine and passive, the other male and active. DCDuring TALK 23:23, 11 December 2012 (UTC)

Thanks

Thanks for your altruism. Pass a Method (talk) 18:57, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

right to privacy - Russian translation

Hi,

Thanks for your interest but sorry but your edit made the translation incorrect grammatically.

In "право на неприкосновенность частной жизни" two words are not in their lemma forms but in genitive case.

To achieve the same using {{t}}, one needs a parameter alt, e.g.:

право (ru) (pravo) на (ru) (na) неприкосновенность (ru) (neprikosnovennostʹ) частной (ru) (častnoj) жизни (ru) (žizni)

This looks ugly and doesn't look a phrase but a list of words. I no longer that method after a lot of negative feedback, which made sense to me. {{t-SOP}} is another alternative, which I'm not a big fan of.

право на неприкосновенность частной жизни (ru) (pravo na neprikosnovennostʹ častnoj žizni) would not be great either and some people complain about this way.

--Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:04, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

Sorry. Do you know whether Liliana's bot automatically handles correction of {{l}} in translations? DCDuring TALK 23:07, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't understand the question. I don't remember what the bot does. Can you give me an example of a potential problem? How does it change translations? --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 23:13, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

I thought that all translations were supposed to be enclosed in a template of the {{t}} family. Is that wrong? DCDuring TALK 00:16, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

{{l}} and {{t-SOP}} were not "officially" adopted but for cases where a target language is translated as SoP or is non-idiomatic, it makes sense to use them and is often the case. There were a few discussions about non-idiomatic translations about proverbs. If I had more time, I would convert such translations into hedgehop#Translations type. See also Wiktionary_talk:Entry_layout_explained#Occasional_use_of_.7B.7Bl.7D.7D_in_translations about my suggestion, which was welcomed but no action resulted out of it. It's definitely easier and quicker to add a quick translation using {{t}}, even for SoP and non-idiomatic translations. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 00:26, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I just try to keep translations in compliance with accepted standards. Usually I only correct things marked by AF aka Kassadbot. My mistake here was to venture beyond that practice. I have an an animus against overuse of {{l}} and that clouded my judgment. In fact {{t}} suffers from the same performance-sapping problems. That said, any language that needs to make sure that the correct or best non-Latin script is used should and must use those templates. DCDuring TALK 01:39, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Both {{t}} and {{l}} have automatic script conversions, compare the look سيارة and سيارة. --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 02:25, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

I know. I'm confessing to some irrationality. DCDuring TALK 04:16, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

Low German taxonomy

Just FYI, if you're looking for taxonomic names to format, most of the ~53 entries in Category:nds:Animals and Category:nds-de:Animals contain nonstandardly-formatted mentions of taxonomic names in their nonstandardly-used "Related terms" sections. I've formatted some of them, and I'll get to all of them eventually, so it's no problem if you have other things you'd rather work on. - -sche (discuss) 18:50, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

I don't really know even now what a standard format should be for taxonomic name entries or for the mode of including taxonomic names in non-Translingual entries. But if you could use {{taxlink}} around any taxonomic names that you notice, then the taxonomic names would appear in a subcategory of Category:Entries using missing taxonomic names and get a link to wikispecies until the wiktionary entry is created. I'm getting used to the pattern of these entries, including those for obsolete names etc.

I have fairly explicit observations (See User:DCDuring/Taxa-related page problems.) about some substantive deficiencies in taxonomic entries.

I am mining some simple wikisearches for taxonomic names: "English" "genus" has some 3,000 entries, of which I've probably done more than half. I'll try "Chinese" genus" and "English" "species" after that, then items in various en categories and probably cmn categories. fi is pretty well covered, with a very large portion of the living-thing entries having corresponding Translingual entries..

Then there are already probably 2,000 taxonomic entries that are redlinks categorized using {{taxlink}}. There are more that are redlinks in Translingual etymology sections and as arguments in {{taxon}}. Also there are 2,200 taxonomic entries in Category:Taxonomic names needing vernacular names that do not have any vernacular name or definition other than position in taxonomic hierarchy. Then there are all the redlinked vernacular names.

One of my objectives is to solicit translations from the common languages spoken in the native range of the species, which is greatly helped if there are images of the geographic distribution species from Commons. DCDuring TALK 19:59, 17 December 2012 (UTC)

real gone

Hi. 3 refs added, hidden in attention box, as request. Couldn't find deletion discussion under link. In ictu oculi (talk) 04:24, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

But why isn't this just real + gone? DCDuring TALK 09:54, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Also "hepcat" in the definition is a noun, not an adjective. DCDuring TALK 09:55, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Happy new year etc.

Hi! Happy Christmas and all of that tinytimulous bullshit. I would like to discuss with you your current Wiktionary doings SLASH aims (cannot find slash on this keyboard, for love nor money) and what is pleasing SLASH annoying you. I would like to say this is on behalf of some grand Wikimedia survey but it isn't at all. Haha. Perhaps I'll telephone you when you least expect it. But not until I get home so you have rather more than a week. Hope you are well, etc., with love from aunt Equinox ◑ 21:42, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Appropriate generic seasonal greetings to you too.

Some of my aims are at Wiktionary:Taxonomic names and its talk page and at User:DCDuring/Taxa-related page problems.

What scares me is our lack of technical adepts who can simplify and improve performance of our baroque infrastructure. Annoyances are too numerous to mention. DCDuring TALK 21:51, 26 December 2012 (UTC)

Taxlink

I noticed on abalone you removed the taxlink template. Am I not using that in a correct manner? Please let me know because I was under the impression that that particular template was used in that situation. Granted I did not have an argument for the genus or family. Speednat (talk) 00:11, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

I removed it because we have our own entry for Haliotis.

The template is principally intended to help identify entries that need a taxonomic entry to eliminate what would have been a redlink. In the interim it provides a wikispecies link. You can continue to use it as you have, but, if you can, please put in taxonomic level (genus, species, subspecies, etc) as follows {{taxlink|Haliotis|genus}}. Put in "unknown" if you don't know and can't easily find out.

Don't be surprised or offended if I remove it. The template is modestly expensive, so I remove it when it is no longer necessary, ie, when we have our own entry. DCDuring TALK 01:13, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

cool thanks

Endodontidae?diff=19177867

Is this what you had in mind? —Ruakh_TALK 15:56, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Yes, thanks. Sometimes I just miss these things. All taxa, even obsolete ones BTW, should be presumptively Translingual. DCDuring TALK 16:26, 29 December 2012 (UTC)

Oats

Hi DCDuring, could you please tell me what exactly do you want to be checked here? I added the Afrikaans and Dutch translations for 'oats,' and only then I realized I may have made a mistake. I think these are all translations of 'seeds of an oat plant.' In my opinion the translation box 'plural of oat' should be no more than a redirect to the page 'oat.' The text in the translation box should consequently be changed to 'seeds of an oat plant' (and still be awaiting verification). Except for Afrikaans hawer and Dutch haver of course, since these are correct translations for 'oats.' Caudex Rax ツ (talk) 15:14, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I am often puzzled by a sense of "Xs" that seems to me to be subsumed in the "plural of X" definition. It is true that English speakers rarely refer to a single oat meaning a single seed. But "many oats" is about as common as "much oats", though it is tedious to determine which sense of oat/oats is meant in each usage. (If speakers think of oats as a plural in all senses then our entry at [[oats]] is wrong to have the "seeds" sense.) In Afrikaans and Dutch does the translation for the "seeds" definition differ from the plural of the Afrikaans and Dutch words for oat? DCDuring TALK 15:56, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Both Afrikaans hawer and Dutch haver are uncountable. According to Van Dale EN–NL the countable noun oat refers to botany, and the non-countable noun refers to bucolic poetry. The following (last) meaning refers to food and is preceded by the words "altijd als meervoud: oats," meaning "always plural: oats." Pharos AF–EN / EN–AF endorses this: according to this dictionary oat refers to the plant or to a kernel of oat, while oats "fungeer as ekv. of mv.," meaning "functions as singular or plural." In other words, if the term oats refers to food, it's uncountable in Afrikaans and Dutch, and therefore always singular, whereas it's always plural in English. Caudex Rax ツ (talk) 17:27, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Does our entry for haver#Dutch show that?

I'm going to investigate the temporal and semantic scope of the uncountability/countability of the senses until I am satisfied, but probably not today. Thanks for reminding me of this. DCDuring TALK 17:32, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

The entry for haver#Dutch says plural of haver is havers. Yet both Dikke Van Dale and Prisma's 'Groot Woordenboek Afrikaans en Nederlands' say haver is uncountable. Greetings, Caudex Rax ツ (talk) 18:22, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

We have a template for this situation, called {{sofixit}}, which follows:

If you feel a change is needed, feel free to make it yourself! Wiktionary is a wiki, so anyone — including you — can edit any entry by following the edit link. You don't even need to log in, although there are several reasons why you might want to. Wiki convention is to be bold and not be afraid of making mistakes. If you're not sure how editing works, have a look at How to edit a page, or try out the Sandbox to test your editing skills. New contributors are always welcome.

- DCDuring TALK 18:27, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Will do. Have a nice day, Caudex Rax ツ (talk) 19:00, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Ah, I see you already did. Caudex Rax ツ (talk) 19:02, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

Not I, but CodeCat. DCDuring TALK 19:22, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

It is generally uncountable, but the plural of uncountable nouns may occasionally be used to indicate various types of something. So "verschillende havers" would mean "different (kinds of) oats", although it would be a rather unusual way to say it ("verschillende soorten haver" would be more usual). —CodeCat 01:52, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Not dissimilar from English in that regard, except, possibly, the relative frequency of countable and uncountable. I don't really know what the frequencies are. I have a feeling that oats is used as a singular noun: "Oats is one of the healthiest grains." If true, that will mean more work on both [[oat]] and [[oats]]. DCDuring TALK 03:05, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Latin specific epithets

A lot of WT:RE:la is just specific epithets that were not actually words in Classical or Medieval Latin. I'm not interested in creating those, because I personally don't think they're Latin, but as long as I don't have to deal with them and they're marked as New Latin, it's fine. So, would you be OK with me moving all that to a subpage of the requests page, linked to prominently at the top? (PS: specific epithets which were real words in Latin, like mūsimō which you requested and I just created, will stay on the main page.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 18:57, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

I'm not sure I know how to distinguish between epithets that Latinists find acceptable and those they don't. We have numerous words such as canadensis#Latin which might not be "real" Latin, but are nonetheless there. I know it isn't just a question of whether the word is in Lewis and Short. SemperBlotto has been adding Translingual entries for some eponymous noun and adjective forms based on Latinized names of zoologists and botanists. Perhaps you could provide me with some further guidance on this important matter. I never had much luck with EP on it.

If it is just a matter of opinion, I'll continue to put in requests at WT:RE:la and let the opinions be made manifest there. If they don't get added, then so be it. We could date the requessts, leave them there for a year, and see what happens to them.

In a similar situation I stopped working on a some cleanup list until the AWB-assisted mass generation of cleanup items was cleaned up by someone else, which took a few months. DCDuring TALK 19:39, 31 December 2012 (UTC)

A big list of specific epithets is at User:Pengo/Latin/Most_Common_Epithets_contents. He also has pages and pages of less common ones. DCDuring TALK

I'm not really a Latinist, I just like the language and I speak it. Certainly, Lewis & Short (or my Collins, which includes some properly marked Neo-Latin) is enough to make something feel real to me. I guess the distinction is this: it may not be possible to find a non-taxonomic cite for sandvicensis, and it describes something which was only known to Latinists in the late 18th century at the earliest. "Real" Latin, for me, can include Neo-Latin if it's a word like oxoniēnsis, which can be found on inscriptions dating back for the last couple hundred years, and is a serious way to refer to the city of Oxford in Latin. For the former, I strongly prefer Translingual. Many of these names are only found in the nominative (like sandvicensis) or genitive (like Jonesi) cases, and that's a strong pointer to the fact that they're not real Latin, and they're not deserving of inflection tables like a real Latin word.

The only reason I ask to separate them from the main requests page is so that I can create entries for everything I consider to be real and leave the rest to Semper. I'm working on some JS (with massive help from Ruakh) to speed up the process. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:19, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

If you look at WT:REE you will find that the list there of requested terms conforms to no rules. They are reviewed one by one and deleted for cause eventually. If you have particular objectives and criteria, then it seems that you may need your own pages that support your particular objectives. You should be able to apply your criteria to whatever existing lists of terms you want to make your own list. I am in no position to help you there.

But, to make life easier for you and to accommodate your distaste for specific epithets as a source, I won't add any new specific epithets to the page and will start sooner rather than later a project I had in mind: creating a category of entries with missing specific and infra-specific epithets, populated by a special-purpose inflection-line template and/or a variant of {{taxlink}}. You may want to review that category once it really exists, so you can pick those terms that you think are worth making true Latin entries for. For now, there is a small population of such at Category:Entries using missing taxonomic name (epithet). You may also want to pick from Pengo's lists, too. You might want to make a list of uncapitalized lemma forms of genus names to see how many do not have Latin L2s. Some will definitely be in Lewis and Short. DCDuring TALK 02:57, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

That category sounds intriguing. I found Pengo's lists more or less unhelpful in that regard. I also like the lowercase genus name idea; for dinosaurs, for example, it is unlikely to yield any fruits, but it might be helpful with birds, for example. How would I generate that sort of list? (PS: I'm not a fan of Wiktionary taxonomy, but I must admit you're doing a good job of it.) —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 06:16, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Category:mul:Taxonomic names (genus) (more than 3,000 entries, 15 pages) has the (capitalized) genus names that we have. I have used brute-force methods that are not suitable for so many pages to make plain text lists, which I have formatted offline with special-purpose templates to accomplish duplication and lower-casing using the lcfirst: function. I don't know of any elegant methods. So I would ask Ruakh or some other person good at extracting info from the dump. DCDuring TALK 13:25, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Another class of specific epithets that I think are most easily considered Translingual and not Latin are those that are simple transliterations from other languages, usually a name for something living in a native language in the range of the living thing, but also like onca#Translingual. Tef ( < teff) is another. Also, I have applied {{taxlink}} to a few species and genus names at WT:RE:la. I will get to them within the week. —This unsigned comment was added by DCDuring (talk • contribs).

Something else that you've been doing to Latin entries that I strongly disagree with: creating new senses like this. Any use of the specific epithet would simply mean that the species was considered to be Egyptian, nothing more, nothing less. It's a Classical word with a Classical definition. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:00, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

By all means let's not try to resurrect Latin by treating these as words that might give it a new lease on life. Let's let the dead languages rest in peace. Don't trouble your head about it any more. DCDuring TALK 01:04, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Linguae mortuae semper vivant! (May the dead languages live forever!) There is still material being produced in Latin, literature being written, conversations being had. We must treat Latin as a language that is just as living as English, with neologisms like interrete and hamaxostichus coëxisting with Ciceronian diatribes and Augustinian jeremiads. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:21, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Then I don't understand your animus against the development of new meanings via scientific Latins. Would hamaxostichus prove attestable? DCDuring TALK 02:06, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Because they're not written in Latin (which, believe or not, requires some knowledge). They are usually coined somewhat macaronically, with but little regard to grammatical niceties. Often, they're just Latinised Ancient Greek (or Mandarin or Japanese or Russian or Portuguese...). Yes, hamaxostichus is easily attestable (if you had bothered to go to the entry, you would have noticed that I had already provided three cites). —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 04:17, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

By that standard Lewis and Short need some corrective editing. Many words in Classical Latin are "just Latinized Ancient Greek". And Afer seems to be taken from a "Punic" source. Borrowings are part of every living language, AFAICT.

The Castellanus cite is from a phrasebook, isn't it? DCDuring TALK 04:30, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

No, no, borrowings that are actually normalised to a language and used in full sentences written in that language can be demonstrated to have entered successfully. gorbuscha (from горбуша) and onca (from onça) had their spellings normalised, but nobody used the names in Latin texts, AFAICT. An example of a borrowing from Translingual into Latin can be seen in gallopavo (“turkey”), formed synthetically from gallus (“chicken”) + pavo (“peacock”) by Linnaeus and subsequently used in full Latin sentences (see google books:"gallopavonibus"). And yes, I believe Castellanus writes humorous Latin phrasebooks for those few brave tourists to the Imperium. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 05:07, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

So, practically, you just mean attestation in running Latin text, ie, that contains a Latin verb.

Is a phrasebook a source of usage or just mentions? DCDuring TALK 12:53, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Most unfortunately, the verb criterion is not enough. A lot of Latin texts were written in a kind of stylized shorthand, in which verbs like "to be" and "to have" are left out in favor of case constructions. In the phrasebook, however, you will note the verb advenio (“arrive”), which is what the hamaxostichus in question will most likely do. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:53, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

I conclude from this that Translingual entries will never get timely, constructive support from Latin and should include whatever terms are useful without regard to the existence of Latin as the meanings are likely to be distinct, even if the word has Latin ancestry. If Latin would like to claim a meaning, then it can do so once it is attested in ways acceptable to those who support Latin. I will commence expunging the New Latin from Latin L2 sections shortly. DCDuring TALK 17:20, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Sorry. I gather that it's hard to get Latin editors to help support Translingual. Personally, I'd like to help, but I'm also a notorious purist. My position is somewhat confusing, as I support New Latin entries like gallopāvō (and note we lack the generic name Gallopavo) but rely on attestation to decide where to draw the line. If I can be of any service in the domain of the Latin L2, please tell me or drop an {{attention|la}} for me. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 23:27, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

I think I will simply create Translingual noun and adjective entries. I will expect that some of them will be supplemented by or converted to Latin entries. If a sense does not exist in running Latin text then it will simply remain in the Translingual L2 section. And I will move distinct New Latin senses for specific epithets to Translingual. If we get citations that show the term exists in running Latin with the meaning, back they can go. That seems like a robust approach consistent with just about all the expressed concerns I have ever heard about this. It's a bit more total work than it would have to be, but it economizes on Latin expertise, which is apparently somewhat scarce.

Taxonomic work just requires a moderately long apprenticeship (Sitzfleisch), though Latin and some relevant biological expertise certainly help. Getting all three in one person seems hard. DCDuring TALK 00:32, 5 January 2013 (UTC)

twenty

I saw a doubtful edit made by user Fête (talk • contribs). Can you confirm that the three pronunciations deleted are right? Ĉiuĵaŭde (talk) 14:23, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Sorry. I can't help with pronunciations. DCDuring TALK 14:24, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

Ok. No problem. Happy New Year. Ĉiuĵaŭde (talk) 14:25, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

The main problem with them is that you used phonemic slashes when you should have used phonetic brackets, assuming that those pronunciations are even accurate, which I somewhat doubt considering that I've never heard most of them. But if they're phonetic, we can bet at least somebody says them. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 16:29, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

FWIW, I've certainly heard many any instance of t-less pronunciations of twenty. DCDuring TALK 16:54, 1 January 2013 (UTC)

I mean weird pronunciations like [ˈtwʊ̃.ɾi]. If you can't read IPA, that's like twoo(n)ri where the oo is from book, the (n) is nasalized as in French, and the r is a tap like in Spanish. Personally, I've never heard anything approaching that AFAIK. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 01:09, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Yes, that seems weird. That I couldn't tell how weird is why I should leave pronunciation to the professionals. DCDuring TALK 01:31, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Serbo-Croatian

"See Vote on Serbo-Croatian." Where was this, and what was the outcome? Thank you! Slandan (talk) 00:12, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2009-06/Unified Serbo-Croatian. Note the vehemence. DCDuring TALK 00:18, 2 January 2013 (UTC)

Agapornis cana

The spelling Agapornis canus isn't an "alternative form"; it's a misspelling. --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:59, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Maybe in Latin, and maybe according to some authorities, but not in fact in Translingual. DCDuring TALK 21:01, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

It's an error, just like "Untied States" would be. Species names are governed by strict codes that determine which form is correct and which forms are not. If it's in violation of the Codes, then it's wrong. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:06, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

We don't respect the authority of national academies. Why should we respect the ICZN? In any event, "common misspelling" doesn't reflect usage before the ICZN. DCDuring TALK 21:16, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

National academies have no authority to govern language, but the ICZN has international backing. It would be a great disservice to our uers to imply that Agapornis canus is an acceptable form of the name. If it is only valid prior to the Code (assuming it was used then), then at the least it would be obsolete or archaic. More likely, it was a propogated error. --EncycloPetey (talk) 21:19, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

We don't respect national academies even when they have the power to regulate words used in government and courts. ICZN is not followed by every book publisher. When someone does the work to better characterize the usage, fine. If someone wants to context-tag all of the terms not according to ICZN in some new explicit way or insert a usage note, I would welcome it. I would love it if the various terms in Category:mul:Taxonomic names (obsolete) were reviewed and corrected in this regard and in any other ways appropriate. I suppose I could use {{attention|mul}} or {{attention|mul}} and activate appropriate categories to draw attention to cases I find problematic. DCDuring TALK 22:20, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

Or special-purpose categories and templates, such as Category:mul:Taxonomic names to be checked against ICZN and {{check-ICZN}}. DCDuring TALK 22:23, 4 January 2013 (UTC)

liquidus

Hello DCDuring. In June 2011, you tagged liquidus for clean-up; however, it is unclear what it is in the entry that needs to be cleaned up. Please pass comment in WT:RFC#liquidus to clarify matters. Thanks. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 18:26, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

I probably put it in when I was tired or in a rush. I've made a few changes and removed it. DCDuring TALK 19:20, 8 January 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for the prompt resolution. I'm so meta even this acronym (talk) 17:55, 10 January 2013 (UTC)

brave

It was {{trreq|tt} not{{trreq|tt}}. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:58, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

I blame my eyesight. Thanks. DCDuring TALK 18:59, 22 January 2013 (UTC)

WT:RFDO#Template:xno

Please consider revising your vote in this debate. English etymologies will remain unchanged; this is about improving accuracy and reducing duplication in the treatment of a dead medieval language. Thanks —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 02:35, 25 January 2013 (UTC)

sg= in English headword-line templates

This parameter was deprecated a little while ago. It still works, but its usage is discouraged because most templates on Wiktionary use head= instead. So could you use that from now on? There is a list at Category:Headword-line template with deprecated head parameter if you feel inclined to fix them, too. —CodeCat 19:46, 29 January 2013 (UTC)

My fingers have a mind of their own, the brain stem. DCDuring TALK 13:02, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Well maybe you can brain-stem the tide a bit? :) —CodeCat 14:08, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

A question on {{taxlink}}

If an entry already contains, say, {{taxlink|Zea mays|species}}, should I avoid using {{taxlink}} on other occurrences of Zea mays? — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 05:25, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

If you know that a given taxon is already listed as missing, you could skip using enclosing it in {{taxlink}} on other entries, but it should be wikilinked, which yields a redlink until an entry exists. As you may have noticed, if someone adds the taxon, entries containing the taxon enclosed in {{taxlink}} are categorized in Category:Entries with redundant taxonomic template (taxlink) for removal. Also, if a given L2 section has multiple taxa at a given level, especially species names, enclosing at least one in {{taxlink}} is a good start as it will draw the attention of some interested party to the entry.

{{taxlink}} is intended to be like scaffolding, to be removed as the edifice progresses. If we had had more inclusive and reliable runs of the new "Wanted pages" when I started on this, I would not have needed this purpose-built scaffolding so much.

BTW, I saw an e-mail that Swedish WP (fittingly the country of Linnaeus) has something creating WP articles automatically from material on the web, with taxonomic entries being a major target. We could use that tool! because our number of taxa is pathetically small (<20,000). The possibility of such tools is one reason I am focused on creating the links rather than the entries. I don't know how well they would do at present with vernacular names of animals, for which disambiguation is often important. DCDuring TALK 12:58, 31 January 2013 (UTC)

Prepared to answer a deleted inquiry on this subject:

Most importantly, {{taxlink}} is not intended to be a permanent inhabitant of any entry: it is designed to provide an interim useful bluelink, pending the creation of our own entries. There is a set of categories that are intended to provide lists for adding new starter entries reflecting the kind of taxon genus, species, family, parvorder etc that is required. As not too many folks (understatement) are working on adding these entries, the dwell time in an entry might be relatively long. Nevertheless the idea is to place the template wherever a taxon is used so that the entry goes into the queue. When someone decides to work on the taxons at a given level (species, genus, etc) in a given entry the best thing to do is remove the templates. If the template(s) is/are not removed the entry goes into the redundant template category, which I periodically clean up. If an entry exists, but there is no Translingual section, then the "nomul" parameter removes the entry from the redundant template category.

Thus, the templates that I removed today were on my cleanup list as the Wiktionary entries exist. To one, Smilodon AFAICR, I added the "nomul" parameter, as there is a German L2, not a Translingual one.

I am thinking of doing something similar for English vernacular names that more or less correspond to taxa, but that requires some further work on {{taxon}} to itemize and categorize taxonomic entries by their shortcomings, ie, no range, no vernacular name, no differentia, incomplete hyponyms, incomplete derived terms, incomplete hyponyms, project links to something other than the headword (ie, a higher taxon). I haven't decided on how to implement various improvements on taxon entries, nor whether to raise the question of recruiting those working on a webcrawling automatic entry creator to help create lots (100Ks) of taxon entries.

For now, I am working on wikilinking the unlinked taxonomic names in various entries and upgrading the existing entries themselves, which processes are likely to take months. As I am not a linguist, a taxonomist, a good template writer, a HTML/CSS/JS maven, or a botrunner, I depend on mostly manual efforts and the kindness of strangers. DCDuring TALK 19:44, 9 March 2013 (UTC)

• Thanks for the additional detail, DC. As strange as I may be, I hope at least to be kind.  :) (Given your time zone, any connection to the city?) Ta, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 07:57, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

  Your comments suggest good intentions coupled with competence. All kindness appreciated. DCDuring TALK 14:53, 10 March 2013 (UTC)

adverbs

I notice that against does not have an adverb section. Most dictionaries don't either, but the OED has a small adverb section after an enormous preposition one. SemperBlotto (talk) 16:35, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Thanks. That might be an indication that the category is questionable. If the category is OK, could handle it with an "if" or two in the template and a parameter like "noadv=1". DCDuring TALK 16:51, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

I may have been too focused on intransitive phrasal verbs, whose validity is tougher to test. We could direct users to both sections (and away from other PoS sections like conjunction etc) and have both noprep and noadv parameters available. DCDuring TALK 16:59, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, looking at the verbs affected in this case, they all seem to be transitive and the term against looks more like a preposition. But formal grammar is not my strong point. SemperBlotto (talk) 17:01, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

I'm making a bit of a study of this kind of thing, but I still have some prejudices against these: one reason why I used to keep peppering Algrif with requests for criteria for testing the validity of these. I'm trying to find some criteria on my own, preferrably grammatical like the "fronting" tests, modifiability of the particle by adverbial expressions, etc. I suspect linguists who study these may have some prejudices of their own in the opposing direction, perhaps reminiscent of my ability to find a distinction between for example and for instance. DCDuring TALK 17:38, 13 March 2013 (UTC)

for the life of my‎

You probably mean for the life of me - and that's a redirect. SemperBlotto (talk) 17:02, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Yes, thanks. I just noticed. It all started with a typo in piped link, which was therefore red. D'oh. I realized that there was for the life of one and was about to make the redirect when I noted the initial error. Two errors. I'll be deleting shortly. DCDuring TALK 17:06, 14 March 2013 (UTC)

Problems with phrasal verbs

Hi. Thinking about the problem of phrasal verbs, and the "impressive" counts obtained for non-related collocations (c.f. drift apart / drift together)
I find translate.google is a good place to go to get actual statistical results rather than relying on raw data (impressive counts is simply raw, unprocessed data).
It is an area of interest to me, the way that translation machines work. Perhaps you already know about this yourself. However, I would like to make a point.
They use various analog models, which are based on statistical probabilities starting from a huge set (several millions) of real sentences, from books, newspapers, blogs, etc. Very simply, the models are mainly developed from the statistical probability "counts" of one word being next to, or next but one to,or near, another word, and combined with the similar probability that the POS of the one will be next to, or next but one to, the POS of the other. In our example, the probability of "drift" being next to or close to "apart". When you make a simple sentence using "drift apart", the translator examines the probabilities, and comes up with a translation as per the phrasal verb -- some form of "slowly separate" (e.g. in Spanish translates to "alejarse" "separarse") as being the most likely meaning. If, OTOH you enter a sentence with "drift together" and even if you are trying to mean the opposite of "drift apart", the translator will give you a nautical definition for "drift" (in Spanish, "a la deriba"). That gives you a good insight into the statistical significance of the "impressive" counts in the raw data. It would seem that the translator, basing on real data, will give an idiomatic phrasal verb meaning to "drift apart", that "apart" deflects the meaning of "drift" (and visa versa), and that the translator model sees the collocation as a single verb unit. (Hover over the translation and you will see how the translator is seeing the words as a single verb unit.) -- ALGRIF talk 11:54, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

I prefer corpora that are less black-boxy than anything Google offers. I certainly couldn't take what they do on faith, let alone make specific inferences for our purposes from their inferences for theirs. I use COCA and BNC when I need corpora. They even offer some PoS tags (not wholly reliable). DCDuring TALK 12:02, 15 March 2013 (UTC)

It's a shame you think that raw data + intuition (that is to say, your own gut feel) is better than a systematic statistical approach to certain problems to do with collocations. It flies in the face of most accepted methods. I only mentioned Google as an easily accessed translator with clear results that demonstrate statistical parsing in practice. You can use any tool you like, if you don't like Google.
I have in mind commonly used (by Google and by others too) processes such as the Viterbi algorithm applied to out-of-context parsing. (See Pedia entry for more info). The example I gave you above shows how statistical processing of huge amounts of real English sentences can throw up that the collocation "drift" given "apart" and "apart" given "drift" is statistically significant to the point of having a very specific meaning. I.e. it is a phrasal verb. Google simply puts pretty yellow highlighting as well, if you want. -- ALGRIF talk 11:37, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

If you could make explicit any criteria whatsoever, then it might be possible to have rational discussions. Why not have this discussion in a public venue where more folks are likely to participate? Why don't you advance a proposal for something specific? I'm sure that lots of folks would like to get behind a proposal based on Google translate - because it would fit their intuition and theoretical prejudices.

In the meantime, I'm going to be trying to use my intuition to produce explicit criteria to identify the SoP spatial senses that superficially appear to be phrasal verbs. It also would be nice to explicitly define the various contributions that particles can make to non-compositional phrasal verbs. Possibly "aspect marker" is a label that suggests some possibilities. DCDuring TALK 13:25, 16 March 2013 (UTC)

It would certainly be better than trying to convince you to stop attempting to destroy perfectly good phrasal verb entries, simply because your gut tells you so, even tho you don't quite grasp or understand them, as you have previously stated. Nothing wrong in trying to learn, but please stop trying to destroy entries as part of the process. -- Discussion moved to Appendix talk:English phrasal verbs#Statistical methods with Phrasal Verbs. -- ALGRIF talk 10:04, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

I'd have been happy to learn from the master, but the master didn't seem to be interested. DCDuring TALK 10:55, 17 March 2013 (UTC)

Etymology of democratic

In diff in 2009, you have entered a particular etymology into "democratic". Do you remember what is the source or basis for that etymology? I do not see any source indicated in the edit summaries. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:28, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

I added a References section, which I did not faithfully follow (copyright), having no other source for the Medieval Latin link. Robert does not show a Medieval Latin connection either. DCDuring TALK 12:43, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Your reference does not have "democrat +‎ -ic" ([7]). Should I feel free to remove "democrat +‎ -ic"? --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:54, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Feel free to improve on the changes I just made. DCDuring TALK 14:10, 20 April 2013 (UTC)

Frankish compounds

How can we get {{compound}} to treat Frankish terms like it does Proto-Germanic, using {{recons}} instead of {{term}}? --Victar (talk) 23:53, 1 May 2013 (UTC)

I don't know. I'm not very good at templates. DCDuring TALK 01:21, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

I think that you have to go on bended knee to someone who has recently modified templates like {{Xyzy}} and beg for assistance. Or you could just hard code what you want. Or you could create a template that does exactly what you want for Frankish. DCDuring TALK 01:25, 2 May 2013 (UTC)

{{taxlink}}

Hi. Why are you removing {{taxlink}} and {{spelink}} from Armenian entries, e.g. in ճագար? --Vahag (talk) 11:15, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

I remove them if there is an associated wiktionary page. Once the entry for the taxonomic name has been created the templates no longer serve a useful purpose. Category:Entries with redundant taxonomic template (taxlink) identifies such entries that use {{taxlink}}. BTW, unlike {{spelink}}, {{taxlink}} categorizes the page as one that uses a taxonomic name that has no corresponding Wiktionary page. I prefer that the taxonomic level (species, genus, family, etc) be specified, but "unknown" is an accepted value for the second parameter of {{taxlink}}. DCDuring TALK 12:07, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

I see. --Vahag (talk) 14:07, 18 May 2013 (UTC)

Moor

Moor contains an

{{rfc}}

from 2010-10-01 diff=10581594 which doesn't appear to have had any attention. When you have a minute, would you please see if it still needs cleanup and if so, add some explanation about what is needed. Hopefully that will encourage someone to address the issues. Thanks.
SBaker43 (talk) 01:23, 20 May 2013 (UTC)

I made the changes I think were needed. Take a look and improve it. DCDuring TALK 01:41, 20 May 2013 (UTC)