Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2011-04/Commercial terms

Rephrasing

Per your (DAVilla's) "The title is the 10% inspiration. You are to provide the 90% perspiration", I have provided part of the perspiration and rephrased the requirements, trying hard to keep the semantics intact; see this diff. I see you as the owner of and the person responsible for the vote, so you should revert me as you see fit. --Dan Polansky 09:20, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Hopefully I went even further, and hopefully we can go even further. The goal is to simplify. DAVilla 08:33, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Type

What TYPE refers to is not wholly clear to me from the following, and IMHO has to be supplemented with examples of types directly stated in the proposed regulation:

• "Below, IT stands for the product, service, or organization to which the term refers. The TYPE refers to the type of product or service, or to the industry, as applicable."

What is unclear is the level of generality of the type. From some earlier discussions, it seems that people consider "car" to be the type of the product. --Dan Polansky 12:50, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I think that's a problem, and it can be addressed by removing TYPE entirely from discussion, eliminating item 3 (production by one associated with TYPE) and the first part of item 4 (generally concerned with TYPE). I've reworded the last and main item so that it doesn't rely heavily on TYPE, a concept introduced by bd but never really central to the way I thought of it, just a good starting point for exemplification. If the source generally concerns the TYPE, then doesn't that mean that the TYPE is implicitly identified? DAVilla 03:06, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

I for one am okay with all requirements referring to type being removed. My point is that if you decide to include references to type, you should clarify what type refers to with examples and counterexamples directly in the proposed text. I am not saying that you should expand the proposed text with whole example quotations, merely with examples of types. --Dan Polansky 07:10, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Type and context

The following requirement is rather complex, and hard to satisfy:

• The content preceding and surrounding the citation must not identify the TYPE, whether by stating explicitly or implicitly some feature or purpose from which the TYPE may be surmised, or some inherent quality that is necessary for an understanding of the author’s intent.

What it seems to be trying to say is this:

• It must be impossible for the reader to infer the TYPE from what is written before and after the citation.

But it follows that if the reader can discerns that the name refers to a company, he has already figured the type--"company". I do not think this requirement and its likes are acceptable to me, but it can be acceptable to those voters who actually want to have almost all company names and brand names excluded. --Dan Polansky 12:50, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

No, for a company the TYPE is the industry. Using your structure, I would say it more like:

• It must be impossible for one unfamiliar with IT to infer the author's intent or meaning from what is present before and immediately after the citation.

I've changed the wording around a little on the page, but not as much as above, so maybe not enough. DAVilla 03:11, 24 April 2011 (UTC)

I do not understand the role of "author's intent". What intent? The answer could be "author's intent concerning the use of the commercial term in the sentence", but I still do not know what that refers to. --Dan Polansky 07:13, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Intent is what the author means to say, what the purpose of the term is linguistically within the citation. DAVilla 14:43, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Can you give some examples of "purposes of the term"? By "the purpose of the term is linguistically"--do you mean the semantics AKA meaning AKA sense of the occurrence of the term in the citation? Is there any difference between "the linguistic purpose of the term in the citation" and "the term's meaning intended in the citation"? In the sentence "Verizon may sell $17 billion directory services" (which I am quoting from elsewhere), what is "the purpose of" the term Verizon? --Dan Polansky 15:28, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Mostly, yes. They're identical in the example you give. I'm shying away from semantics, maybe unnecessarily, because in many cases the work could be taken literally to mean a Porsche or a Mack truck in the specific make, but the real intent is a car with pizazz or a big 18-wheeler, and the make is mostly irrelevant. Does semantics consider context? For your example, one source called Turkcell "the Verizon of Turkey". What does Verizon mean in that phrase? DAVilla 04:40, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ If "the real intent of the term 'Mack' in some phrase is 'a big 18-wheeler'", than the real intent of the occurence of the term in the phrase is the same as the meaning of the occurrence of term in the phrase. Maybe am I just not used to the phrases "the intent of a term" and "the intent of an occurrence of a term", while I am used to "the meaning of a term" and "the meaning of an occurrence of a term". More in the long response in the section "Entering lexicon".

Re: "Does semantics consider context"? I am not sure what you mean by the question, as "context" is a horribly ambiguous word. Most occurrences of terms have one meaning out of several possible meanings of the term. It is the text that immediately surrounds the occurrence and other context information that helps select the meaning of the occurrence. The immediate physical and other surroundings of the speaker shared with the receiver can also be called "context" and help select the meaning. So the selection of the meaning is often largely driven by various things called context, but I am not sure this is where you headed with the question. I estimate that various things called context also generate on-the-fly meanings of terms that mildly deviate from the major standard senses entered into a dictionary, but I know very little or nothing about this, and it is unclear that dictionaries can be concerned too much with these deviations. --Dan Polansky 09:01, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

Entering lexicon

I have difficulties with the predicate "has entered the lexicon". I do not understand what it means, and what definition of "lexicon" I should apply to it. The presence of the following sentence is one reason, among others, for me to oppose the vote:

• "A term with commercial interest should be included if it has entered the lexicon."

--Dan Polansky 07:00, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

A version after update:

• "A term with commercial interest should be included if it has become a household word, that is, if there is common lexical knowledge of its meaning."

Is "common lexical knowledge of the meaning of a word" the same as "common knowledge of the meaning of a word"? If not, what distinguishes lexical knowledge of meanings of words from non-lexical knowledge of meanings of words? Is the intended meaning this:? "A term with commercial interest should be included if many people know what it refers to"? --Dan Polansky 15:32, 25 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes, basically. I was using lexicon in sense 5, except applying it to the general population instead of one individual.

We qualify "many people" by looking for citations where the author takes the risk in assuming that his or her audience will understand. DAVilla 04:24, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ The sense five of "lexicon" is "The vocabulary used by or known to an individual. (Also called lexical knowledge)" Applied to general population, the definition becomes "The vocabulary used by or known to general population", and "to have entered lexicon" becomes, now on a dedicated bullet point:

• "to have become part of the vocabulary that is used by or known to general population".

If that is what you mean by "have entered the lexicon", let us use this phrase. Checking other dictionaries, I do not see that "general population" is entailed in "lexicon" (the dictionaries subsume both the vocabulary of an individual and the vocabulary of a group under "lexicon", but the group is not necessarily general popularion), so you have to be explicit about "general population".

I shy away from "intent", "lexical", and "lexical knowledge" rather than from "word", "meaning", "sense" and "semantics". A person who does definitions in a dictionary has to have an idea of the latter terms, but does not need to be concerned with the former terms. I think that the word "Verizon" in the phrase "the Verizon of Turkey" has a common-noun meaning AKA sense; Wiktionary editors have been entering common-noun definitions of this sort of usage to proper nouns. So there, I see no problem with "meaning", "sense" or "semantics". Nonetheless, I do not see how the existence of "the Verizon of Turkey" justifies a proper noun definition for "Verizon" or that the proposed regulation refers to these sorts of cases in any particular way; if it does refer, I would oppose it.

As regards "lexical knowledge", I am not even sure what the term refers to exactly and what it is contrasted to. Like, are all classes of information entered into Wiktionary part of lexical knowledge? Are there some properties of words that are not part of lexical knowledge? Are word frequencies and statistically determined collocations part of lexical knowledge? I don't know. The phrase "lexical knowledge" seems to be a less transparent way of saying "knowledge of words" as opposed to, say, knowledge of grammar; alternatively, it is a phrase that satisfies the construction <adjective> <noun>, so you get "lexical knowledge", "grammatical knowledge", etc. Furthermore, "knowledge" is an often-needless nominalization (noun-making) of "to know", which is done without in the last bullet point.

Sorry for the rather long response. --Dan Polansky 08:44, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

From your feedback I think this can be written a lot more simply and transparently. It felt good to write something that became policy the first time around, but I rather hate that people have to come back to me to ask me what it means. Now that you have peered inside my mind, you have the ability to "translate" the wording for everyone else. Honestly I wouldn't mind if the substance was changed too. I just wish we had more ideas to draw from. Where are all the people who have complained about the complexity of the rules? DAVilla 15:51, 26 April 2011 (UTC)

If you agree with my feedback (which is one of a single person, disregarding views of everyone else, as these have not been presented), you should replace

• "A term with commercial interest should be included if it has become a household word, that is, if there is common lexical knowledge of its meaning."

with

• "A term with commercial interest should be included if it has become part of the vocabulary that is used by or known to general population"

doing so for clarity. Nonetheless, this raises the question of why the term needs to be known to general population rather than to specialists. After all, names of chemicals are included in Wiktionary even when they are unknown to general population. --Dan Polansky 09:18, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

IT or REFERENT

In the vote, a macro is introduced for the phrase "the product, service, or organization to which the term refers". The macro is named "IT", which is the capitalized pronoun "it". It seems "REFERENT" would be a better name of the macro: "that to which a term refers" is known as referent. "referent" sounds academic, admitted, but it is easier to remember than "it", to me anyway: "it" could refer to the product etc., to the term, to the citation, to the source of the citation, whatnot. --Dan Polansky 09:12, 2 May 2011 (UTC)

The context bullet point

Text: I am still unconfortable with the use of "intent" in the second sentence of the context bullet point (which is currently the third bullet point): "In other words, it must be implausible for one unfamiliar with the REFERENT to infer the author's intent from what is present before and immediately after the citation." Let us test this sentence on the citations collected at Citations:Wiktionary. Does the citation "According to Wiktionary, anger is a strong feeling of displeasure, hostility or antagonism towards someone or something, usually combined with an urge to harm" (link to Google books for context) satisfy that "it is implausible for one unfamiliar with the REFERENT to infer the author's intent from what is present before and immediately after the citation"? Given my understanding of "intent", I don't know, and I do not see how the definitions of "intent" present in dictionaries guarantee that the sentence is going to be read unambiguously by those who apply CFI. --Dan Polansky 11:02, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, feel free to change that language. As to the quotation, see my comments in the RFV discussion at Talk:Wiktionary for why I wouldn't count it. DAVilla 16:45, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

I need your comments as referring to the sentences of the current proposal. I need to know how am I and other people to determine whether the mentioned citation meets the third point any why. If you say that for "According to Wiktionary, anger is a strong feeling of displeasure, hostility or antagonism towards someone or something, usually combined with an urge to harm" it does not hold that "it is implausible for one unfamiliar with the REFERENT to infer the author's intent from what is present before and immediately after the citation", that is a good reason for opposing the vote. If there is another sentence of the point 3 that the citation does not meet, I need to know which sentence. The reader of the mentioned citation does not know what Wiktionary is in particular from the citation. --Dan Polansky 08:41, 10 May 2011 (UTC)

"According to ______, anger is a strong feeling of displeasure, hostility or antagonism towards someone or something, usually combined with an urge to harm."

The meaning of this sentence is obvious even without Wiktionary. What would you fill in here but a source for the definition of anger? The intent is to cite a more authoritative work. The fact that it's Wiktionary as opposed to some other dictionary is not meant to color the perception at all.

"According to Wiktionary, anger is FUCK YOU ADMINS! adding that George Bush is gay." Now the role of Wiktionary is important to an understanding of the quotation. 70.124.61.238 06:11, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

The meaning of the sentence "According to Wiktionary, anger is ..." is not completely known when Wiktionary is removed, and thus is nowhere obvious; the meaning of the sentence differs with varying ______. When ______ is replaced with "Wiktionary", you get one meaning of the sentence; when ______ is replaced with "OED", you get another meaning of the sentence; when ______ is replaced with "OmegaWiki", you get yet another meaning of the sentence. I do admit that most of the semantics of the sentence is already known without knowing ______, but the one semantic piece is still missing.

Furthermore, the proposed regulation refers to "term’s meaning" rather than the meaning of the whole sentence. In the sentence, "Wiktionary" does not stand for "a dictionary" or even "a wiki dictionary"; it stands for the particular dictionary.

On intent, your comment above shows how your understanding of "intent" differs from my understanding of "meaning" AKA "semantics", and why I would like to see the word "intent" removed altogether. One source of confusion is the polysemy of "meaning", a word used to refer to (a) semantics, (b) intents and purposes, (c) logically necessary consequences, (d) empirically probable consequences, (e) bearing of found facts and accepted hypotheses to candidate actions, (f) other things. Nonetheless, in the context of a dictionary such as Wiktionary, "meaning" should IMHO be read as "semantics", unless it is obvious from the immediate sentence context that it should be read otherwise.

This disagreement about the application of the current wording of the proposed regulation aside, and bearing in mind that you may modify the current wording in order to avoid misunderstanding: if you want to create such requirements on the citations that "According to Wiktionary, anger is a strong feeling of displeasure, hostility or antagonism ..." does not satisfy them (and given that in the immediate context of the citation, "Wiktionary" is not introduced), I am going to oppose. --Dan Polansky 08:10, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

"According to the Book of True Black Magic, the staff should be of cane and the wand or rod of hazel, both virgin—that is, having no branches or offshoots."

"According to Restaurants and Institutions magazine, Poppers were the # 1 food item added to restaurant menus in 1995, with restaurants purchasing over 700."

"According to Harte-Hanks, Texas Weekly had the largest circulation of any publication in the state, and was marketed as a means for reaching a large number of non-metro Texas residents at a low cost."

Your interpretation opens the floodgates. I have no choice but to lose your support. I'm not going to create a vote that shifts the balance, let alone topples it. But we can hope at least the wording will be clear. That's been the problem all along. DAVilla 07:16, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

I see what you mean. I think the problem I have is one with the overall method by which you want to draw the line: the method starts with requiring the general population to know the term (why general population), and continues by using "intent" and "purpose", subsequently equivocated as "meaning", to draw the line. A method that I would like to see is quite different: a commercial term should be included if it is attestable and if some information other than definition can be recorded on it that is of lexicographical interest. Taking your examples, "Restaurants and Institutions" is of no lexicographical interest: its pronunciation is sum-of-parts, and so is its etymology. By contrast, "Wiktionary" is of lexicographical interest, as it has pronunciation, and etymology. Brand names of pharmaceuticals are of interest, as they are actually used more often by consumers to refer to the drugs than the generic names, and they often are single-word, have pronunciation, and sometimes even the etymology is known. I would just like to see the regulation on brand names removed from CFI, together with the section on company names, and let such terms be discussed on individual basis, above all with reference to useful lexicographical information. Furthermore, I do not see why terms of commercial interest should have a regulation that is separate from names of specific entities in general, other than possibly excluding certain types of citations such as those from the selling materials of the manufacturer.

So I think you are right: the way the whole proposal is going, you cannot gain my support unless you lose your support, so to speak. I hope my input was not a sheer waste of your time. --Dan Polansky 07:46, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Not a waste at all. And if it would clarify the meaning, you're still welcome to edit the vote, despite not supporting it. DAVilla 08:03, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ As regards clarification of meaning, I post some more notes.

1. I would remove this:

• "In other words, it must be implausible for one unfamiliar with the REFERENT to infer the meaning of the citation from what is present before and immediately after."

I do not really think "in other words" fits: I read this sentence rather differently from the leading sentence of the third bullet. In a dictionary, "meaning" should above all refer to "semantics", but that is what you do not seem to have in mind. The meaning AKA semantics of the whole citation does dependend on the choice of a particular dictionary; the meaning AKA semantics of the whole sentence does depend on whether you put "Wiktionary" or "OED" in the sentence.

2. Another thing I would remove is this:

• "For instance, if the author uses the REFERENT as a substitute for the TYPE in general, then the TYPE is central to the meaning and the citation must not identify the TYPE, implicitly or explicitly."

It is misleading by introducing an instance that is not most typical. In this discussion, you made it clear that you want to exclude citations in which "Wiktionary" is not used as a substitute for the TYPE in general, and there are many more citations of Wiktionary sort than those that use the term as a substitute for the TYPE. Giving the Wiktionary sentence as an example of a citation to be excluded would be much more useful for clarifying the intent of the third bullet point, IMHO anyway; a suitable sentence to be excluded that uses ather commercial term than Wiktionary might be better, though. --Dan Polansky 08:44, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

3rd bullet point

Can someone please take the third bullet point and write a one-line summary followed below the bullet points by a one-paragraph abstract employing a link to the full-length research paper detailing when a blank can be filled in versus when the meaning of a term is not only necessary but cannot be deduced? DAVilla 05:43, 18 May 2011 (UTC)