Wiktionary talk:Votes/2017-07/Changing the wording of the "proscribed" label

Comments from the vote creator

This is a follow-up from the BP discussion.

Exact wording of the potential new label

I tend to favour "considered incorrect" over "deemed incorrect", as to me, there is a subtle difference in sense between the words. "Deemed" feels more authoritative than "considered". It seems there is an appetite for change here, and if there are many voices speaking out in favour of different wordings, it might be necessary to restructure this vote to allow users to express first/second/etc. preferences instead of support/oppose votes. (We're very familiar with preferential voting here in Australia, but I'm not sure how much use it has seen on Wiktionary.)

Why English and non-English?

In English there is no governing authority, so no English terms are proscriptively proscribed; they may only be "considered incorrect" by many, if not all, sources. In some other languages, the situation may be different. There may be a language authority that specifies that the term is incorrect or not part of the language; at the extreme end of the scale, the inventor of a constructed language may have decreed that the term is invalid. It's up to voters to decide whether or not the label (considered incorrect) should replace (proscribed) across the board, or only for English until we can decide on another label to use in other cases (or possibly a pair of labels, as envisaged by Ungoliant).

This, that and the other (talk) 10:16, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

I'm not convinced "considered incorrect" is sufficiently distinct from "nonstandard" for readers, or average editors who add labels, to understand that one indicates proscription of a (potentially common) term/spelling by authorities, while the other indicates that something doesn't conform to the language as used by a majority of speakers (the natural idiom as known by speakers’ sprachgefühl). Then again, some may already not understand that distinction even with the current vocabulary. :/

I'm also not sure it's a good idea to have different labels for the same concept in different languages, especially if the split is "English" vs "everything else", which is different from "languages with central authorities" vs "languages without central authorities". Conceptually, it seems to me we should decide what wording the label should display, and use it uniformly: change Module:labels so someone who writes either {{lb|foo|proscribed}} or (added to the module as an alias) {{lb|foo|considered incorrect}} gets (considered incorrect) in both cases (or whatever wording we want), like "US" and "USA" both result in (US). And practically, I don't see how a by-language split has a chance of being maintained, short of either having Module:labels throw an error if "proscribed" is used in English or "considered incorrect" is used in some other language, or having it display different text based on what language code is supplied (and I'd like to know how much Lua memory that'd use).

Btw, are you intending to change the name of the category that the label categorizes into, or not? - -sche (discuss) 19:57, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

While I'm not satisfied with using "proscribed", I also agree with sche that it's useful to have a distinction between authorities and ordinary speakers considering a term incorrect. Until there's a solution to that problem, I don't think I'll support changing proscribed to considered incorrect. As I've said in the past, the ideal is to have usage notes for everything. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 23:00, 9 July 2017 (UTC)

@-sche The subvarieties module already allows language-specific labels, so I don't think there is a technical barrier to having different wording in different languages. In any case, some people will no doubt choose to vote conditionally on both parts of the vote passing. This, that and the other (talk) 11:33, 16 July 2017 (UTC)