Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2015/July: difference between revisions

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* Let me echo multiple editors above: Extending votes is a common practice. This practice can be objected to, but it is not like [[Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2014-07/Allowing well-attested romanizations of Sanskrit]] is the first or second vote to use that practice. During the multiple extensions of the vote, there was ample opportunity for those who deem the practice "corrupt" to speak their mind on this issue, on the vote talk page, in Beer parlour or elsewhere. Obviously, I do not consider the practice "corrupt". Nonetheless, by my principles, [[Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2014-07/Allowing well-attested romanizations of Sanskrit]] should be extended by one month; it should not be voided. --[[User:Dan Polansky|Dan Polansky]] ([[User talk:Dan Polansky|talk]]) 08:42, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
* Let me echo multiple editors above: Extending votes is a common practice. This practice can be objected to, but it is not like [[Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2014-07/Allowing well-attested romanizations of Sanskrit]] is the first or second vote to use that practice. During the multiple extensions of the vote, there was ample opportunity for those who deem the practice "corrupt" to speak their mind on this issue, on the vote talk page, in Beer parlour or elsewhere. Obviously, I do not consider the practice "corrupt". Nonetheless, by my principles, [[Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2014-07/Allowing well-attested romanizations of Sanskrit]] should be extended by one month; it should not be voided. --[[User:Dan Polansky|Dan Polansky]] ([[User talk:Dan Polansky|talk]]) 08:42, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
* FYI: [[Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-07/Disallowing extending of votes]]. --[[User:Dan Polansky|Dan Polansky]] ([[User talk:Dan Polansky|talk]]) 08:58, 19 July 2015 (UTC)
* FYI: [[Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-07/Disallowing extending of votes]]. --[[User:Dan Polansky|Dan Polansky]] ([[User talk:Dan Polansky|talk]]) 08:58, 19 July 2015 (UTC)


All we should do is to show active votes more actively. For example, putting them in the watchlist page below Wanted Entries will dramatically increase the awareness of new votes. This has been suggested by YairRand ••[[User:Dixtosa|Dixtosa]] ([[User talk:Dixtosa|talk]]) 10:36, 19 July 2015 (UTC)


== Deletion of good faith edits with no explanation ==
== Deletion of good faith edits with no explanation ==

Revision as of 10:36, 19 July 2015

Words used "in dialects, including A, B, C"

Quite a few entries use the labels "dialectal", "dialect" and "dialects". This is allowable, because sometimes a user may not know which dialects a word is used in. But we should always attempt to be more specific, IMO. I'd like to make people aware of the label "including", which allows listing dialects in a way that makes clear the list isn't exhaustive. E.g. in the entry favor: {{lb|en|transitive|in|_|dialects|including|Southern US|and|Cajun}} → (transitive, in dialects, including Southern US and Cajun). (I can also find evidence that the sense was used in British dialects a century ago; I don't know whether it still is or not.) - -sche (discuss) 00:35, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Flash card function for language learning publicly requested

In this blog article the author suggests the desirability of having the Wiktionaries offer a flash-card like system for learning African languages. The advantage of hosting such a system is that it would offer the opportunity for teachers or advocates of the language to add entries to the languages of interest to them to achieve sufficient language coverage to make the effort worthwhile. This came up on the Wiktionary-l mailing list, so we should try to make as constructive response as possible. DCDuring TALK 18:39, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I've been extracting flashcard files (for Anki et al.) from the dumps for personal use for several years (one component of a language-learning program that has helped me earn a tidy little set of ATA certifications). It would be fairly trivial to make such files available on a regular basis for any given set of languages. -- Visviva (talk) 21:44, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think the blog author and the fellow who put it on the mailing list may be looking for more. Actually there must be good, free web-based software or free applications that could run this. Perhaps we could assemble a list with links and select words and (god help me) phrases suitable for basic word and phrasebook flashcards. DCDuring TALK 21:57, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
FWIW, Anki is open source and has web-based, desktop and app versions. The author's idea of a "flashcard mode" for Special:RandomInCategory is interesting (and could be accomplished with some clever JavaScript, I think), and could have some real pedagogical value if combined with a "basic words" category (rather than an "all lemmas" category), but it would still be a pretty poor substitute for a proper spaced-repetition flashcard program. -- Visviva (talk) 22:44, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The common element is the core list of words for all languages and some target-language-specific words. I wish I could do it. All I'd need is the talent. Maybe some false friends, though that depends of both target and native language. The common element just seems like a good idea. There are the Swadesh lists, but we have to add some more contemporary material. I liked the spirit and tone of the original Gimmick series. Anyway, we can take requests if we want. I suppose this needs to start with just one or a few languages. DCDuring TALK 00:29, 3 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Is there any reason why particularly African languages would lend themselves better to flash cards? But in all seriousness, this is a good idea, but do we have anyone willing to do anything about it? --WikiTiki89 21:48, 2 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Are you thinking about the flashcard mode in JS or something? DCDuring TALK 00:29, 3 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • This seems like a grant-worthy project for the right talent and proposal. MWF would probably support it. That's probably what the fellow who put it on the Wiktionary list was thinking. DCDuring TALK 00:32, 3 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]


Poll: Replace the image in the entry "penis"

Proposal: Replace the image in the entry "penis".
Current image: File:Labelled flaccid penis.jpg (explicit picture of a penis)
Proposed image: File:Illu repdt male erect.jpg (cross-section drawing of a penis)

Support

  1. Support --Daniel 00:52, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Support Seems obvious. -- Visviva (talk) 18:20, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Support I don't know why it has to be the erect one? Kaixinguo~enwiktionary (talk) 18:23, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Support As long as a guideline like Wiktionary:Votes/2015-06/Collapsing offensive images is not in effect, I think supporting this replacement is the best way to go. --Njardarlogar (talk) 13:38, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

  1. Oppose That's a lousy drawing.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:35, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Abstain

  1. Abstain I oppose both images of these Chinese penises. We should replace both with a picture of a more realistic, bigger penis. --Vahag (talk) 11:46, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Abstain I support replacement with a drawing in principle, but as for the proposed medical drawing, I wonder whether I would recognize it to be a drawing of penis if I did not already know it was one. I am not sure the proposed edit is really an improvement. I collected some drawings at Commons:Human penis drawing. At the very least, File:Illu repdt male.jpg seems better to me, but I still wish we would have a much nicer drawing. --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:31, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Abstain I'm not bothered by the current image, but if we do switch to a drawing, I'd suggest one of File:Penis location.jpg, File:Sketch of a flaccid penis.png, or File:Sketch of a human penis.png. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:43, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Comments
Related discussions:

As an aside: If there are any other explicit pictures in any language, I would like to know. The entry masturbation had an explicit animated gif from May to June 2015, it does not have any image at the moment. --Daniel 19:49, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

There is one at ძუძუ ('female breast'). --Njardarlogar (talk) 13:40, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Add breast to the list. It wouldn't surprise me if many of the non-English entries have such images. --Njardarlogar (talk) 13:43, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
What do you think of the drawing I just placed at ძუძუ? I wish I could find a nicer one, though. --Dan Polansky (talk) 15:51, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Is there any reason this needs to be in the Beer Parlour? It's discussing one entry and so should be in the Tea Room. --WikiTiki89 17:02, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I just forgot about TR. Maybe my brain went ou autopilot and subsconsciouly considered this as a follow-up to the other BP discussion. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:06, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
For the moment I am replacing the current image with File:Penis location.jpg. After 7 days, poll results are technically 4-1-3 with the majority of voters supporting the proposal. Still, a number of people disapprove of the specific proposed image. File:Penis location.jpg was among Angr (talk • contribs)'s suggestions. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:06, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Presentation of Katharevousa Greek in en:Wiktionary.

I currently treat Katharevousa as shown here, entering it as an alternative form of the Standard Modern Greek one. Where an SMG form does not exist I would define it thus:

1. (Katharevousa) suitable translation

Does this seem the appropriate treatment. Are there better, different examples in other languages?

(@Chuck Entz, @Xoristzatziki, @Flyax, @Eipnvn, @Angr)  — Saltmarshσυζήτηση-talk 05:39, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

There are two distinct "areas": "polytonic orthography" is the one and the other is "Katharevousa". "Katharevousa" has only "polytonic orthography" but "Demotic Greek" (official language of Greece since 1976) was also printed in "polytonic orthography" (officially until 1982). But there are polytonic forms that belong purely to "Demotic Greek" (βασιληᾶς or βασιλιᾶς). Also "Demotic Greek" is not a "descendant" of "Katharevousa". But there are many words created (most translated or transliterated) during the period where "Katharevousa" was official language and thus can be somehow stated that come from "Katharevousa". IMHO "Katharevousa" should be used only if form has only "polytonic orthography" and the printed word cannot be treated as a polytonic form of a word in use. Also "Katharevousa" is far more distinguished by her own set of grammatical and syntactical rules which cannot be "presented" in individual lemmas. (about the above mentioned example: Ἀριθμοί is the polytonic form of Αριθμοί which, in turn, comes from Ancient Greek Ἀριθμοί and not from "Katharevousa"). --Xoristzatziki (talk) 16:14, 5 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

As a start, and by way of suggestion, I have made some changes to Αριθμοί and Ἀριθμοί. A suggested category might be Category:Polytonic Greek. Are there any views on whether "Polytonic spelling of" might be better than "Polytonic form of"?   — Saltmarshσυζήτηση-talk 10:16, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

eye dialect ing

I'm curious about the policy on eye dialect spellings of ing verbs in English. For example we have walkin' but not buyin'. AFAICT none of the eye dialect spellings are cited. Is there a special policy on when to include them? Just to pick an obscure verb, with a little casual googling I found a use for transmogrifyin' -- just one, but if I could find one barely looking, I bet there are more out there. Do we make pages for every English verb where someone has written it like that enough times to meet CFI? Are we actually required to find examples? There are no examples for any eye dialect words I've checked including some ones I'd have been surprising to find in writing, like agonizin' and considerin' (neither of which have any easy to find results on Google Books). Just curious if this has been discussed, I don't plan on mass-making these pages or nominating them for deletion or anything like that. WurdSnatcher (talk) 13:58, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I personally consider them less useful than "common misspellings", as the general rule of dropping the "g" becomes obvious to a language learner rather quickly. We are not very good at agreeing on quantitative criteria for any class of inclusion/exclusion decisions, so the motivation and opinion of contributors, subject to the RfV process, governs, leading to an unsystematic result. DCDuring TALK 14:17, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
As far as I'm concerned, they're includable if they meet CFI: at least three uses in independent, permanently archived sources, spanning more than a year. For most verbs it shouldn't be difficult to find usage, considering how widespread such forms are in reported speech. But they're not eye dialect and shouldn't be labeled as such; they should be labeled {{nonstandard form of}}. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 14:22, 4 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In an old discussion, we sorta decided to include them like any other word: any that meets our attestation requirement is in; any that doesn't is out. Our discussions since have followed that rule AFAICT. (And I agree with it, personally, fwiw.) However, I've found one discussion that did not apply that rule to multi-word terms, preferring instead to have only the single-word g-less term and the g-full phrase.​—msh210℠ (talk) 18:14, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

appendices

Category:Appendices and Category:English glossaries are inconsistently formatted and disorganized. Is there a policy on how to handle these pages? I was thinking about trying to clean things up over there, can't find any guidelines or even significant discussion about it. WurdSnatcher (talk) 01:39, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I don't think there's been any major discussions about appendices.
Personally, I can think of some guidelines I've been applying to them when possible:
--Daniel 06:28, 6 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Using BBC Voices as a source

A few years ago, the BBC organized a large series of conversations between members of the public across the country about their dialects/accents. This information is now maintained by the British Library (so we can assume it's permanently archived) and although the files don't have full transcripts (just summaries), it's still a useful source for a lot of terms that are difficult to archive. To pick a random example, several participants in the Hartlepool conversation use the word cuddy-wifter/cuddywifter, which is difficult to cite even in its standard meaning of "left-handed person" (only one non-mention on Google Books), but as comes out in the course of the chat it has an additional meaning on Teesside of "Catholic". Given that a lot of the problems that we have with collecting dialectal terms is that they are often used in speech but seldom written down, can we use this archive as a citation? Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:29, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

(ETA: the recordings made in Scotland are fully transcripted, and can be searched here) Smurrayinchester (talk) 10:30, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well, we have chosen not to accept voice recordings as sources, even though there are plenty of movies, music, and other media containing voice recordings that are durably archived. However, the transcripts can probably count as written sources. --WikiTiki89 11:48, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The untranscripted recordings afford an opportunity to cite pronunciations, thereby upgrading the objectivity of our pronunciations. Is there any kind of index to the untranscripted recordings to help one find where a particular word is pronounced? DCDuring TALK 14:15, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Some (not all) have been looked over by linguists who've indentified the phonemes the speakers used. For example, here's the analysis of the Birkenhead recording, which has some snippets with interesting pronunciations highlighted and transcribed (very closely) with IPA. For example: "I was hung-over yesterday [jɛstədᶻi] so (yeah) and then I got a phone call [fʌʊŋkˣɔːɫ] from the college [kˣɒləʤ] saying, “oh you’re in an interview [ɪntsəvjuː] tomorrow” [tsəmɒɾʌʊ] and I was like, [laɪkˣ] “what what about?”" (incidentally, I think the [ts]s in that quote are typos for [tˢ]). There's also more general notation of standard phonemes - it notes that the FOOT vowel is [ʊ], that there's a lot of H-dropping, etc. I don't think there's a proper archive - the best way to find a word is probably to do a Google search of the http://sounds.bl.uk/ domain and try your luck. Smurrayinchester (talk) 15:40, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Or perhaps they really were saying [ts] rather than [tˢ]. You'd have to listen to the recording. --WikiTiki89 16:00, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Re "we have chosen not to accept voice recordings as sources": on the contrary, WT:CFI explicitly says "Other recorded media such as audio and video are also acceptable, provided they are of verifiable origin and are durably archived". Libraries often archive copies of CDs and DVDs (songs and movies), and several of our entries cite songs and movies as a result. There was some discussion of the subject in in May 2012, where it was pointed out that using only audio citations of a term we can't be sure of the spelling of would be problematic, but audio citations can be used in conjunction with written citation (as on Qapla') or (as Chuck put it) "where only one spelling is possible and the audio or video confirms usage", such as (as Ruakh put it) when "we often RFV a specific sense of a term, or an idiomatic expression whose component words are clear. In both of these cases, it can sometimes be quite clear what the spelling is." - -sche (discuss) 18:11, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Your right. I really should replace my brain with a RAID array. --WikiTiki89 18:18, 7 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

are religions nouns or proper nouns?

It seems we are not consistent on this on Wiktionary.
Categorised as nouns: Bahá'í Faith, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Druidry, Hinduism, Islam, Judaism, Scientology, Taoism
Categorised as proper nouns: Cao Dai, Jainism, Luciferianism, Raëlism, Rastafarianism, Shinto, Spiritism, Thelema, Wicca, Zoroastrianism
What do we do about this? ---> Tooironic (talk) 05:38, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What other dictionaries distinguish proper nouns from common nouns and could offer us guidance? I recall from discussions of personal names and some other words that many other dictionaries don't distinguish proper from common nouns, and a surprising number of works, even high school and college English textbooks, erroneously equate "proper noun vs common noun" with "capitalized vs lowercase". Merriam-Webster, Dictionary.com, Collins and Cambridge all have "Buddhism", "Paul" and "White House" all just labelled noun, strongly suggesting that they simply don't distinguish proper from common nouns. (This means that if we could be consistent and correct in our labelling of things as proper vs common nouns, we'd be offering readers something other dictionaries don't!) Our colleagues at de.Wikt, who do distinguish proper from common nouns, have Buddhism as a common noun. - -sche (discuss) 05:55, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Other languages do not consider them proper nouns. Same thing with language names and names of days and months. I think English calls them proper nouns only because English capitalizes them. —Stephen (Talk) 07:56, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
They're proper nouns because there's only one of them. Christianity is a particular set of beliefs; you don't generally speak about a Christianity, or these Christianities. (There are of course cases where "Christianities" is used, but that's true as well for any proper noun, e.g. Elvis Presleys or Elvises or Elvii.)--Prosfilaes (talk) 08:09, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That just means it's uncountable, like iron or physics. —CodeCat 12:45, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
But you can talk about "this iron and that iron", but not "this Christianity and that Christianity". Perhaps physics should be a proper noun. --WikiTiki89 14:14, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The grammatical (mostly countable usage, modifiability by adjectives, etc) and orthographic (initial upper case) behavior of the names of religions and other systems of belief is almost identical to that of language names, especially those that are not homonymous with adjectives. We treat all languages as proper nouns. DCDuring TALK 14:23, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Physics can be used in a countable-like way in the phrase "alternative physics" example Not sure if that should be considered an idiom or not. Plenty of hits for "an alternate(ive) physics".WurdSnatcher (talk) 14:25, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
We are well aware that nearly any proper noun can be commonized: A Joseph from our Vermont created a new Christianity. But nevertheless the primary usages of these words are as proper nouns. --WikiTiki89 14:29, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
One can even use a proper noun as a verb: Elvised and Elvising would meet our standards for attestation. Even Christianitied and Christianitying can be found on the web. This kind of use doesn't warrant creating a new PoS section IMO. DCDuring TALK 14:47, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Wikitiki, you can talk about "this or that" Christianity, e.g. "The Christian imprint upon his thought is certainly clearly evident everywhere. But this Christianity is very much modified and very abbreviated." Equinox ◑ 17:37, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
See my subsequent comment: "nearly any proper noun can be commonized". --WikiTiki89 17:41, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
User:EncycloPetey has a nice, informative subpage about proper nouns where he explains the criteria for classifying a term as a proper noun. He regards that days of the week and names of festivals as borderline cases. But, under his criteria, I'd be inclined to say that names of religions are proper nouns. -- · (talk) 15:42, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think we should abandon proper nouns and treat them as nouns. Grammatical properties, like whether an article precedes a word, are more diverse than proper vs. common. The uniqueness of a referent is a semantic property rather than grammatical and not relevant to part of speech. —CodeCat 16:40, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I have been wanting us to abandon the label "proper noun" for ages. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:59, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The Penguin Writer's Manual (2004, ISBN 0141924829) says this:
A proper noun is a noun that denotes a specific person or thing. It is, to all intents and purposes, a name. [...] Proper nouns include people's first names and surnames, the names of places, times, events, and institutions, and the titles of books, films, etc. They are spelt with an initial capital letter: Sam, Shakespeare, New York, October, Christmas, Christianity, Marxism, and Coronation Street. All nouns that are not proper nouns are known as common nouns. [...]
Apart from being spelt with an initial capital letter, proper nouns have other characteristics that usually distinguish them from common nouns. They do not, generally, have a plural and they are not, usually, preceded by a or an. There is only one Australia; there was only one Genghis Khan. [...] there are many exceptions to [this]. There are occasions when either a specific example or several examples of something denoted by a common noun must be referred to: keeping up with the Joneses; [...] one of the warmest Januaries on record.
The manual then goes on to describe concrete nouns (like table) and abstract nouns (like happiness and unity), countable nouns (table again) and uncountable nouns (mud, foliage), and collective nouns (flock).
- -sche (discuss) 17:41, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I have yet to find any English grammar reference, of any vintage, that doesn't discuss proper nouns. I suppose that print dictionaries and their online descendants rely on capitalization, the habits and experience of speakers, and common sense to communicate what needs to be communicated to users without wasting space on pages or screens. CGEL handles proper nouns and proper names in less than twenty pages, so it shouldn't be all that difficult for us to interpret the treatment of proper nouns in grammar references to help us differentiate proper from common nouns. DCDuring TALK 18:04, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Comment: While there are some borderline cases, such as the names of months and days, most nouns can be readily distinguished as common or proper. The actual criteria and grammar of proper nouns are of far more debate, albeit philosophical. The problem arises in that the names of abstractions and philosophies behave grammatically much like proper nouns. Is socialism a common noun or a proper noun? In older texts, it was capitalized and treated much like Confucianism or Christianity. All three are philosophies. Further, capitalization cannot always be relied upon as a guide, since a number of common nouns and even adjectives are capitalized by virtue of their etymological source (e.g. Welshman, French dressing, African). --EncycloPetey (talk) 20:27, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Language labels within Translingual citations

At the moment we have 30 pages in Category:Translingual citations.

I found them to lack consistency as some of those had only a "English citations" section while others had a "Translingual citations" section without specifying which language is each citation. So I am trying a new format to standardize them all.

See Citations:VL. I separated the citations with language-specific labels within the "Translingual citations of VL" section. I also put them in the respective language categories: Category:English citations, etc. (Maybe something like Category:Translingual citations in English could be an improvement. Still, maybe this level of granularity is not necessary now because there are only few of those citations. If we had hundreds of Translingual citations I might think differently.) I made sure all the 30 pages are following this new format at the moment. I'd like some feedback to see if other people like this format or it could be improved some other way.

Thoughts? --Daniel Carrero (talk) 21:30, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm thinking that there should be no such thing as a translingual citation. The citation itself is in a language, even if the term it's citing is used cross-language. —CodeCat 22:03, 8 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@CodeCat: I disagree with you on this point. IMO, having "Translingual citations" mirroring the Translingual section of the entry itself is useful because allows us to group different language citations into the same senses. See Citations:(, specifically sense "Punctuation mark: expands a word into another word, inflection or spelling"; it has both Portuguese and English examples. It could have even dozens of languages in the future. It serves for easier comparison of how the same specific sense is used, to check if the Translingual definition is true in all languages. Current sense at ( is inaccurate. It is: "Begins denoting an alternative option for a preceding word. / dog(s)", but there are citations with "colo(u)r" and "(re)criação" (Portuguese). For punctuation marks, one could even argue that one sense of a punctuation mark is truly "Translingual" if it has been attested in multiple languages; ¿ has only the Spanish section. But taxonomic names would be truly Translingual even if attested in only one language, I hope: Citations:Anous stolidus has only one Portuguese citation at the moment. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:21, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The Translingual case shows that the naming convention for the citations categories assumes there to be no difference between the language label for the term and the language label for the citation. AFAICT only Translingual violates the assumption, though Translingual itself is a highly heterogeneous collection of ideograms, symbols, taxonomic names, and other scientific names. Arguably it should also include Latin-derived term that appear in medical, legal, even alchemical running text of many languages.
IMO, Any citation pages for Translingual terms should remain where they are and those pages should be categorized as Translingual, eg, the current Category:Translingual citations. IMO, there could certainly be additional categorization into categories for the language in which the translingual term is embedded in each citation. This would enable the citation to be found and reused for citing the terms of its language that it includes and subjected to any language-specific maintenance that might be required.
I don't see any great advantage to having a category like Category:Translingual citations in English rather than two categories: Category:Translingual citations and Category:English citations, but one disadvantage: there is no simple single category that contains all the pages bearing in whatever content namespace that have all the citations in each language. The current search engine makes it easy to search for the intersection of categories. As long as there is no regression of search-engine capability, we should be good for real-time search. We also have the dumps to process should there be regression. DCDuring TALK 00:17, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I am thinking, maybe I would support that "Latin-derived terms that appear in medical, legal, even alchemical running text of many languages" be Translingual entries. Some phrases and terms to consider: List of Latin phrases and List of legal Latin terms. Maybe the pronunciation of those would be slightly different among different languages but taxonomical names with pronunciations would also have this issue to consider.
I agree with DCDuring's reasons for having the Category:Translingual citations, in addition to the reasons I stated above in my response to CodeCat. About Category:Translingual citations in English, I'm not really interested in it at the moment, but it's possible that at some point in the future I'm going to bring it up again. IMO, if we had hundreds of Translingual citation pages, then I would prefer using categories than using the search engine for more navigable results. (seeing 200 page titles at once, sorted alphabetically, where it's possible to see how many members one category has, etc.) --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:21, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
No one except for me wanted a pronunciation header for taxonomic terms. I only wanted one suggested (ie somewhat prescriptive) pronunciation. But since Translingual terms are unlike the usual terms in a few ways, perhaps we should reconsider what the distinctive characteristics of the various types of Translingual entries are and develop a custom ELE for them. For example, we could have a "hidden" pronunciation section for taxonomic terms with pronunciations in as many languages as people care to provide.
I take your point about the possible future value of Category:Translingual citations in English. DCDuring TALK 02:49, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I added the Brazilian Portuguese pronunciation in the Translingual sections of Homo sapiens and Vulpes vulpes. I deleted the English section of H. sapiens in the process, because it seemed to me it had no value other than having pronunciations, foreign script translations (like ホモサピエンス, moved link to Translingual section) and the plural "Homines sapientes", which I cited in Portuguese too. The English section had some random translations of man/person too, which I just deleted.
Custom ELE for Translingual entries = WT:AMUL? I guess it would be both the CFI and ELE for that "language", though it would have to be edited further as I see it currently focuses almost entirely on criteria for inclusion and says little about layout. I support the proposal: 'we could have a "hidden" pronunciation section for taxonomic terms with pronunciations in as many languages as people care to provide'. But maybe for the moment we could just keep adding pronunciations in any language to Translingual sections without bothering to have them collapsed. Related category: Category:Translingual terms with IPA pronunciation (292 members). --Daniel Carrero (talk) 06:52, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think the Chinese entries are a possible model: we should have a collapsible pronunciation table along the lines of the translation table, since the same symbol is read out loud in different languages and dialects as period, full stop, point, Punkt, etc. One problem to deal with: scientific names, at least, also have syntactic information in various languages. For instance, scientific usage in English is to refer to "the family Malvaceae", but a lot of people who aren't familiar with this refer to "the Malvaceae family". Another is that scientific names are more often read than heard, so pronunciation can vary widely from person to person: I would pronounce Malvaceae as something like /malˈvej si ej/, but I often see the pronunciation given as /malˈvej si i/. Writing for the public on pronouncing scientific names tends to say things like "there's no one right way to say it- everyone is different". This is especially true when scientific names are based on names of people: if one recognizes the name, one may pronounce it after the pronunciation of the person's name, rather than by the usual rules. For example, "hopei" might be pronounced as two syllables or three, depending on whether one notices that it's based on the surname Hope. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:00, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Sounds like we should have a Pronunciation section at WT:AMUL(or WT:ATAX?) to which we can have a standard link, perhaps as part of the control for hiding/showing the pronunciations. It seems impractical and speculative to offer too many idiosyncratic pronunciations within each language. My own inclination is somewhat prescriptive with respect to a term like hopei, in case we don't have an etymology or a user doesn't look at it or make the appropriate inference. DCDuring TALK 14:15, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If my input is of any value: if Wiktionary had pronunciation of taxonomic names and had them more thoroughly covered, I would look them up regularly, and would expect (and want) the prescriptive (presumably Latin), more neutral pronunciation, rather than the way it is pronounced in various languages (unless it's in common use outside of the scientific community like Homo sapiens or T. rex). The pronunciation would vary from person to person and would have too many variants for there to be any point in looking it up rather than sounding it out using the pronunciation rules of the language of the context. JodianWarrior (talk) 14:49, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Proposal: Use WT:TAXON, not WT:ATAX: "tax" is ISO 639-3 for Tamki language. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 19:00, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Sure. DCDuring TALK 23:39, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Audio" in front of pron files for non-pluricentric languages

Do languages that do not have several very well established regional varieties (an example of this could be English (US), English (UK), English (Aus), etc.) need the text "Audio" prepended before their pronunciation file players? Neitrāls vārds (talk) 20:31, 9 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal for a "best practices" recommendation: "Audio" before a pronunciation file should be used only in the presence of some other qualifier. It is otherwise redundant As bullet points are used to itemize/list text, a bullet point is not to be used either (because a Flash element is not text.) (Ping some users whose editing involves pronunciation files User:Pereru, User:Panda10, anyone else welcome to express their opinion.)

Pronunciations would be formatted in the following way for pluricentric languages languages:

And the following way for languages whose pronunciation files usually do not feature additional qualifiers:

(deprecated use of |lang= parameter)
Audio:(file)

or

(deprecated use of |lang= parameter)
Audio:(file)

Modified 2nd version: "Audio" is not to be used in the absence of some other qualifier but bullet point must be used.

3rd version: "Audio" is not to be used in the absence of some other qualifier. An editor can choose whether to use a bullet point. ({{IPA}} doesn't appear to be checking for namespace when adding categories the IPA examples should be removed from this page at some point or namespace-checking/cat suppression should be added to the template.)

Just learned that ping won't work without signing. User:Pereru, User:Panda10. Neitrāls vārds (talk) 19:57, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think the bullet point should be retained in all cases. It makes the flash element align with the other things, and gives them all the same visual 'introduction' (a bullet point); it also makes the edit window more legible, IMO; furthermore, it helps when indentation is used: for example, if audio were added to impact, it could be indented under the 'noun' and 'verb' lines (although see object for another way of presenting such information; we are not consistent).
If we were to drop "Audio" from non-pluricentric languages, could we just drop it from all languages? Then we would have:
and
- -sche (discuss) 21:22, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I prefer the bullet point NOT to be retained -- the result is that the flash element is placed right under the pronunciation transcription to which it refers, as part of the same paragraph -- which to me is more logical: the pronunciation file is not a separate pronunciation, a separate item in a list of possible pronunciations, but an actual realization of the same pronunciation that was transcribed with the IPA right above it, i.e. logically part of the same paragraph. (I might even prefer it if the flash element occurred in the same line and after the actual IPA transcription; but occurring right under it is also OK.) --Pereru (talk) 21:56, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm fine with removing the "Audio" label. If there are qualifiers, they can be displayed without the "Audio" label. It would also be fine removing the bullets but without them two or more audio templates will be displayed in a single line. It doesn't look good. Maybe you can modify the audio template to resolve this. Leaving the use of bullets optional is probably not a good policy. Some editors would use it, others won't. It would create too much inconsistency in the layout. I assume the new standards will be implemented by a bot and they will continued to be checked after every edit. --Panda10 (talk) 12:44, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Old Italic standardization proposals

I've recently been working on Module:Ital-translit and Appendix:Old Italic script and have come to the point where I need some oppinions. The Ital code block does not currently possess all the characters needed fully to encode all the languages that use it; so I propose the following rules to standardize the Ital's use. Previous conversations maybe found at User talk:JohnC5#Testing transliteration modules and WT:Beer parlour/2013/June#South Picene alphabet.

Proposal 1:All entries should be written left-to-right

The majority (if not all) of the languages that use Ital are written boustrophedon and thus could have lemmata appearing in left-to-right or right-to-left order. Modern scholarship, however, tends to merely unspool the inscriptions and then present them in left-to-right order. I therefore propose that all languages using Ital should be lemmatized in left-to-right order.

Support. This is proper use of Unicode, because Ital is encoded as left-to-right. If we ever decide to make some piece of Old Italic text in boustrophedon or right-to-left, it should be done with HTML, never by typing it backwards like some have suggested. — Ungoliant (falai) 14:00, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Support. I second everything Ungoliant said above. --WikiTiki89 16:56, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal 2:Allow alternative use of Ital characters

For much of Ital script, the character may be transcribed unambiguously or with only minor phonetic deviations from the canonical. Examples are represented be a blue box in Appendix:Old Italic script and include:

  • 𐌂: canonical - c; Camunic, Oscan, South Picene, Noric, North Picene - g
  • 𐌅: canonical - v; Old Latin - f
  • 𐌈: canonical - θ; Umbrian - t; Noric - d

However, in some cases, one language may use one glyph to represent an entirely different sound (whether by innovation of a new but similar letterform or by reällocation of a previous letterform). Examples are represented be a red box in Appendix:Old Italic script and include:

  • 𐌁: canonical - b; Camunic - ś; Raetic - tʼ / þ
  • 𐌑: canonical - ś; Camunic - b; South Picene - í
  • 𐌣: canonical - 50; Camunic - þ; Faliscan - f

I therefore propose the use of the character which most closely resembles the letterform in a particular language. Therefore South Picene matereíh should be lemmatize as 𐌌𐌀𐌕𐌄𐌓𐌄𐌑𐌇 (matereíh) and not 𐌌𐌀𐌕𐌄𐌓𐌄𐌝𐌇 (matereíh). The rules will be those set forth in Appendix:Old Italic script

Support. I see no reason against this. --WikiTiki89 16:59, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
My initial reaction is to oppose. As was just noted in the Grease Pit, "б in Serbian is sometimes displayed differently from the б in Russian", but we don't handle this by using a different character for Serbian б in an attempt to mimic its shape. For Runic, we make do with ᛊ or ᛋ, even when the inscription clearly has S. If Unicode has encoded something as, for example, "LETTER SHE", and we use it in spelling a word which is actually spelled with "LETTER II", I don't see how readers are supposed to figure out that the word isn't spelled with she (and wonkily transliterated by us). - -sche (discuss) 18:47, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal 3:Add extra characters into Ital temporarily

The interpunct ·, two dot punctuation ⁚, and tricolon ⁝ are all variously used as word separators in Ital languages and should be used as punctuation in entries. Furthermore, South Picene (always the culprit) uses · to represent the letter o and ⁚ for the letter f. Thus the entry mefiín contains the quotation:

  • Lua error in Module:parameters at line 828: Parameter "lang" is not used by this template.

Until such time as Unicode adds one-, two-, and three-dot word-separators to the Ital code block, · (U+00B7), ⁚ (U+205A), and ⁝ (U+205D) should be used in entries and, in the case of South Picene, in page names (mefiín should be moved to 𐌌𐌄⁚𐌉𐌑𐌍 (me iín)).

  • Oppose. This is improper use of Unicode. It’s no different than using | (pipe) instead of I (capital i). I prefer using transliteration since the script variant used by South Picene is clearly not covered well enough by Unicode, but using 𐌏 and 𐌚 are also a better solution. — Ungoliant (falai) 13:53, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I disagree with Ungoliant. This is nothing like using | (pipe) instead of I (capital i), because I (capital i) exists in Unicode. --WikiTiki89 16:58, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I seriously doubt that Unicode will add Old Italic specific punctuation; punctuation is for all scripts where possible.--Prosfilaes (talk) 18:43, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I can support using U+00B7, U+205A and U+205D for punctuation, but using them for letters is indeed a misuse of Unicode like Ungoliant said. Why not use the regular "O" (U+1030F) and "F" (U+1031A) codepoints for South Picene? It does not seem particularly distinct from, say, the Serbian variant of Cyrillic to me. — Keφr 08:01, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal 4:Page names should be in Ital when applicable

For several of these languages (Old Latin most notably), there may exist a corpus written in the Latn alphabet. The majority of the languages exist primarily in their version of the Ital alphabet and should be lemmatized as such. It is the scholarly practice to place words transcribed from Ital in boldface and those found in Latn in italics or roman. Where possible, we should strive to put words found in Ital or Latn according to their appearance in the source. The major offender at this point is Faliscan, the majority of whose entries, I suspect, should be in Ital (also, -el̄u shouldn't have a macron in the page name).

Support. Entries should be in the same script as the original attestation, not printed transcriptions. --WikiTiki89 17:01, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose. We are a printed work, therefore we should follow the standards of printed works. Don't Proliferate; Transliterate!. Trying to post entries in Old Italic also demands that we have translation entries for Latin script so people actually using printed works can look things up.--Prosfilaes (talk) 18:53, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Speak for yourself. I am not a printed work. — Keφr 20:40, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry for how long this is, but I needed to discuss all the different issues because each affects how words will be lemmatized. When we have a decision, I will create WT:AITAL with the information.

People who may be interested: @I'm so meta even this acronym, Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV, EncycloPetey, The Man in Question, Wikitiki89, Kephir. —JohnC5 03:04, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Ping fail. Please read mw:Help:Echo#Technical details to learn why (you added section headers). — Keφr 06:04, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Grrrrr, that explains a lot. @I'm so meta even this acronym, Ungoliant MMDCCLXIV, EncycloPetey, The Man in Question, Wikitiki89, Kephir —JohnC5 13:34, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
For the record, I do not feel that I have neither enough knowledge of Old Italic nor of its script to offer any meaningful opinions in this discussion. --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:40, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Collapse multiple inflection-of definitions into one with subsenses?

I've always been bothered by entries like agri and aquae. There's no need to repeat "of (word)" four times on separate lines. So I'm thinking it would be good to extend {{inflection of}} so that you can specify distinct multiple inflections instead of just one. These would be displayed as subsenses, so that aquae would look like:

  1. inflections of aqua:
    1. nominative plural
    2. genitive singular
    3. dative singular
    4. vocative plural

I think this would look a lot better, and above all there is only one link to the lemma rather than 3 extra redundant ones. We can also make the list of subsenses collapsible in cases where there's too many (like for German adjectives).

To implement this, {{inflection of}} would need some way to indicate how to separate multiple inflections. This would have to be some kind of special tag that is inserted as a separator, like: {{inflection of|aqua||nom|p|(sep)|gen|s|(sep)|dat|s|(sep)|voc|p|lang=la}}. My question is what the separator should be. It should be something that isn't legitimately used in existing entries and would not likely be used in future ones. If proposals are made, the current template can be modified to track any uses of those proposed tags in current entries, which would then allow us to assess the situation better. —CodeCat 20:20, 10 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Since there seems to be overwhelming support, I've added the necessary code for this to {{inflection of}}. I've chosen ; (semicolon) as the separator. See aquae, which I've changed to make use of this new option. We would likely want to inform bot owners of this, and also run a bot to convert existing entries. —CodeCat 13:05, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

One day after starting the discussion? Typical CodeCat. Just stop and let the discussion proceed in a regular fashion. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:20, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose (just saw this) Ummm. . . so how will we key quotations to specific senses, if they're all collapsed? --EncycloPetey (talk) 02:41, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • Aren't quotations under the lemma form, not under the inflected form? —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 05:46, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
      • They can be, in languages like English that have little inflection. But for highly-inflected languages like Latin, they cannot. We want documentation of the various inflected forms, and many Latin verbs are incompletely conjugated, and some other Latin words have inflectional irregularities. It is not feasible to try to include supporting quotations for all forms of a Latin verb under the lemma; there are simply too many forms, and identifying and sorting the various forms within a lemma page would be disastrous for the sanity of both editors and users. --EncycloPetey (talk) 23:40, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
        • Angr is right, quotations and usage examples go on the lemma form. Quotations shouldn't be used merely to attest a term, they exist as a higher-quality alternative to usage examples. If the idea is to show attestation of a term, then it should go on the citation page, which exists for that purpose. —CodeCat 13:55, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose. I prefer the relational presentation over the hierarchical one. The hierarchical presentation takes one more line. Furthermore, I find the proposed wiki markup exemplified as {{inflection of|aqua||gen|s|;|dat|s|;|nom|p|;|voc|p|lang=la}} (diff) ugly. Moreover, the markup makes it impossible to place quotations per inflected form. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:18, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

the writing on the wall

We do not have an entry for any form of mene mene tekel upharsin (numbered, numbered, weighed, and divided). I think the language is Chaldean Aramaic (Biblical Aramaic) and it was probably written on the wall in Neo-Babylonian cuneiform script. Today, however, it is commonly used in English texts in Roman letters. Should there be an entry in Roman letters, and if so, what language to label it? I supposed it could be written in Hebrew (מְנֵ֥א מְנֵ֖א תְּקֵ֥ל וּפַרְסִֽין), Syriac, and/or cuneiform (if the spellings could be found in those scripts). —Stephen (Talk) 15:33, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I had a children's Bible that showed it in Roman letters. Not very "English" though. Redirect? Equinox ◑ 18:24, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, probably redirect, since the string is long enough that it's unlikely to be an unrelated word in another language. - -sche (discuss) 18:58, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The phrase was never used in Aramaic in Roman letters. The pronunciation currently in the entry is the English pronunciation. So either it should be converted to English, or it should be a redirect. --WikiTiki89 12:44, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Use "male" and "female" for gendered nouns

Many languages have nouns that occur in different forms depending on the natural gender of the referent, like French comédien/comédienne, English actor/actress. This is not actually grammatical gender the way we know it, exemplified by the fact that languages that have no grammatical gender can still often make such distinctions. Of course grammatical gender may align with natural gender in this case, but it doesn't have to (I can't think of an example, but maybe someone else can). Spanish amiga is not a grammatically feminine form of the lemma amigo; rather both are independent nouns and have different meanings. The choice is made based on the referent rather than based on grammatical rules.

So I think that using the terms "masculine" and "feminine" and using {{feminine of}} and such for these cases is incorrect and confusing, as it conflates grammatical and natural gender. It's especially bizarre in entries like mayoress with languages that don't even have grammatical gender. I'm therefore proposing to introduce the separate terms "male" and "female" to refer to natural gender in these cases. amiga is the female equivalent or female counterpart of amigo, not a form. There would need to be two new form-of templates. —CodeCat 20:17, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

If they are independent nouns then why do we need more templates at all? Define them separately, as e.g. "a man who mows lawns" and "a woman who mows lawns", and each can link to the other as a related term. Equinox ◑ 20:20, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That's not ideal, because they might have many distinct meanings. Duplicating them all would be bad. The idea of a new template is to indicate "this noun means the same as this other one, except referring to a female individual". —CodeCat 20:25, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't agree. The Italian words (deprecated template usage) gato and (deprecated template usage) gata both mean (deprecated template usage) cat. The animals are make and female, but the words are masculine and feminine. SemperBlotto (talk) 20:22, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
No, gato means male/unspecified cat, while gata means female cat. And, this is exactly my point. Grammatical gender is arbitrary. "Feminine of gato" tells us nothing; it merely indicates that this noun is related to "gato" but has feminine grammatical gender. Nothing in the entry indicates that the cat itself has to be female, only that the word referring to it is feminine. —CodeCat 20:25, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I can think of cases where grammatical gender doesn't match natural gender (cailín (“girl”) is masculine, while gasóg (“boy scout”) and stail (“stallion”) are feminine), but I can't think of a case where a word referring to a person of one gender is derived from a word referring to a person of the other gender, but grammatical and natural genders don't match (in a language that has grammatical gender, unlike English). —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:31, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Oh, and if anyone's wondering why gato and gata are orange links, it's because the Italian words are actually gatto and gatta. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:32, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
gatta, as it is now, looks good. But as I said above, with highly polysemic words it becomes a problem to copy all the definitions. A simple template that refers to the definitions of the gender-neutral term is more effective. Also, this entry illustrates another important distinction between "feminine of" nouns and adjectives: the female equivalent noun can have meanings the male one doesn't have, or the reverse. With true grammatical gender, like that found in adjectives, that would be unthinkable. They really are separate nouns. —CodeCat 20:36, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'll write more later, but at the moment I just want to highlight that the observation that "the female equivalent noun can have meanings the male one doesn't have, or the reverse" calls into question the sensibility of avoiding spelling out which senses each word has and instead using a template that would "indicate 'this noun means the same as this other one, except referring to a female individual'". - -sche (discuss) 21:05, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You're right about that point. I just wanted to accommodate users who certainly want to use a template, and also existing entries that have no definition beyond {{feminine of}}. —CodeCat 21:08, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It may be wise to distinguish languages which have grammatical gender from those which do not. Because English does not normally* mark gender grammatically, it's at least debatable whether mayoress should be described as 'female' or 'feminine'. (The references turned up by google books:English "-ess" "feminine form", compared to the irrelevance turned up by google books:English "-ess" "female form", suggest that the traditional analysis has been that it's a 'feminine' rather than a 'female' form.) *Of course, note how google books:"blonde mayoress" gets two hits while "blond mayoress" gets none, and "blonde mayor" gets no hits while "blond mayor" gets at least five (plus a lot of chaff), suggesting that there are some areas where grammatical gender agreement is found in English.
In German and other languages with grammatical gender, the case for describing Wissenschaftlerin et al. as 'feminine' rather than 'female' forms of Wissenschaftler et al. is necessarily stronger, since they are feminine, and take feminine adjectives, etc, independent of whether or not they are regarded as 'feminine forms' or 'female forms' of the corresponding masculine nouns. - -sche (discuss) 22:26, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
One other thing to keep in mind is that sometimes the "female equivalent of X" means "woman is who is an X" but sometimes it means "wife of an X". In the UK at least, a duchess is always the wife or widow of a duke; no woman can become duchess by virtue of her birth. Our definition of Burggräfin is "female burgrave", but when burgraves were still running around they were always male; a Burggräfin is the wife of a burgrave. A hundred years ago or so, Professorin almost always meant "wife of a professor" but today it almost always means "female professor". In the E. F. Benson novel Trouble for Lucia, a woman becomes mayor of a town in England and has to choose a mayoress to help her, but she is not the mayoress herself—in that context, then, mayoress means neither "female mayor" nor "wife of the mayor" but rather "woman who assists the mayor". I doubt a single template can or should accommodate all this variation. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 05:56, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Those are excellent points. For words like those, I'm persuaded that we should give the words actual definitions (as Equinox said). For English, almost all of the -ess and -rix and other such entries I've seen do have definitions, and we should just clean up the few that don't. For German, the Duden has -in entries only as pointers to their masculine counterparts, but de.Wikt gives them full definitions, and entries like de:wikt:Professorin (which records the different meanings) vs Duden: Professorin (which doesn't acknowledge them) convince me that full definitions are preferable (and, I think, already the norm). That doesn't preclude the existence of entries that would be better handled by a template whose wording could then be debated, but we should probably identify some such entries before debating wording further. - -sche (discuss) 07:26, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I agree with CodeCat that there is a problem with some entries: The current presentation at amiga#Spanish reads "feminine of amigo, friend", which seems suboptimal since it highlights grammatical properties rather than focusing on the referent. However, I don't agree with CodeCat's solution of using a template. Czech učitelka says "female teacher", which seems fine to me, and preferable to using a template. Above, Angr makes a good point about duchess: female duke vs. wife of a duke. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:23, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I came across another problematic entry, coreana. The noun presumably indicates a female person, but there is again nothing in the entry to indicate that. —CodeCat 19:38, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Language codes

2015-07.11 16:30 I'd like to add some language codes for some swedish "dialects" (they should be considered languages IMO) because I don't wanna clutter the swedish entries with tons of dialectal versions, not to mention the dialects have their own grammar and pronounciations and I would like it if I could list those.

The ones I have in mind are Pitemål (Peijtmåle), Lulemål (Leulmale), Överkalixmål (Överkölismale) and Jamtlandic (Jamska).

Don't know what else i'm supposed to say really, Codecat told me to post here about it. — This unsigned comment was added by 88.83.34.190 (talk).

@Br0shaan: just letting you know that I've moved the discussion to here (from Wiktionary talk:Beer parlour, which is the talk page for discussing the Beer Parlour itself...). - -sche (discuss) 22:02, 11 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@-sche: Thanks! I a little new to wiktionary, or well, the discussion parts of it anyway. Is there anything special I need to provide to get this suggestion get accepted?Br0shaan (talk) 19:58, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Br0shaan: we do not have the requisite framework for handling languages with a lot of dialects. Armenian has circa 50 dialects with their own word forms, pronunciations and grammar. For now I have come up only with a way to show the word forms on the entry with the literary spelling: Module:hy:Dialects. See it used in փետուր (pʻetur), գազար (gazar), բամբակ (bambak). You can create a similar module for Swedish. --Vahag (talk) 08:30, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Vahagn: That's a shame, but the module looks alright. How do you deal with words with formations completely different from standard words? Just create a new word entry? Also how should I list these in derivation trees when looking at things like norse or proto-germanic? not at all? Because that would be very dissapointing. Anyway, thanks for the help and the quick reply! :) 88.83.34.190 13:30, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Just create a new entry, like կյա̈զա̈ր, and label it with {{label|se|dialectal|Lulemål or whatever}}. The list of labels can be added to Module:labels/data which will allow automatic categorization and linking to Wikipedia. As for derivation trees, there is no accepted way of doing things; I have tried a format like in ճանդարի (čandari). --Vahag (talk) 13:43, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'll see what i'll come up with for derivation trees, thanks for the help! Br0shaan (talk) 15:18, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Vahagn: Also could you familiarize me with how the module works and how to implement it? Is there any good documentation?
The module is invoked by {{alter}}. It has some documentation. Just copy the format of Module:grc:Dialects; it is pretty simple. --Vahag (talk) 13:46, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I actually figured it out myself before i saw your answer, so yeah it was pretty easy. Most of the trouble was finding out how to make a new module page haha. Br0shaan (talk) 15:18, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Merging ( and ) into a single entry

I was thinking that maybe it would be a good idea to merge entries of separate brackets "(" and ")" into matched-pair entries such as "()" and leaving only single-character entries with definitions about actual uses of a single character without the other, when they exist; when they do not exist the single-character entries could redirect to the matched-pair entries.

Rationale:
1. (repetition) The way it is now, most definitions are repeated: sometimes, the left side sense is "Begins X" and the right side sense is "Ends X". I don't think one should be required to check two separate pages to see definitions for the same thing; also, "begins" and "ends" makes it a bit longer to read, especially when these two words are present in almost all senses in the two pages.

2. (consistency) With two almost identical entries, editing one entry requires editing the other for consistency. I am in the process of updating ( and ) to conform with uses quoted in Citations:(, but that makes it somewhat more cumbersome to keep both entries updated. One example of inconsistency (although easy to be fixed) is that { currently has a sense that } doesn't.

3. (lexical unit) I'd argue that since in most senses of () you can't use one without the other, they are together only one lexical unit. IMO, having them separated is like having the entry . (full stop) with the sense "The first, second, or third dot in an ellipsis, which indicates a pause or omission."

(The reason 4 was added later the same day, 21:44, 12 July 2015 (UTC) - original message linked here.)
4. (incompleteness) “ is defined as "Starts a quotation." and ” is defined as "Ends a quotation." Like a number of other current single-character entries, this seems directed to readers who already know how to use the brackets or quotation marks. (Compare ― (horizontal bar), defined as: "Introduces quoted text.", which from its definition seems exactly synonymous with “ but does not actually require any mark at the end of the text.) If they are merged into “”, then the definition is obviously going to change some way. But if they are kept as separate one-character entries, it would be more accurate to define them as:

entry for left quotation mark (“) - "Starts a quotation that ends with ”."
entry for right quotation mark (”) - "Ends a quotation that begins with “."

More examples of repeated definitions:
( - Begins supplemental information.

Sen. John McCain (R., Arizona) spoke at length.

) - Ends supplemental information.

Sen. John McCain (R., Arizona) spoke at length.

Some affected entries:

Thoughts? --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:45, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The merger seems like a good idea, as the matched-pair usage is, in a sense not SoP, but it is probably also true that we can find attestation of the use of each character in isolation and, just as in the case of the morphemes that make up a compound, we would probably want to keep separate entries, even if there were no attestation apart from the matched-pair use.
We would in any event need to have hard redirects from the unmatched characters to the corresponding matched-pair entry. If we go the route of extensive hard (and soft) redirects, then the objection that no normal person would ever search for [[( ... )]] becomes moot. IOW as I see it each paired entry would need at least 3 hard or soft redirects to it and would not be useful without them. DCDuring TALK 13:35, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
BTW, why don't we have non-gloss definitions for the use of most of these as part of the character-based emoticons that some of us use, eg, ?(:-【} ? They seem to be usable productively, possibly even in widespread use, eg, in Usenet. DCDuring TALK 13:44, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I do not think it should be listed as a sense. For one, the meanings of individual characters of emoticons are very context-dependent: in the "]" in ":]" is a mouth, but in "]:->" it represents devil's horns. Would you add a sense of "represents a head in orz (orz)" to [[o]]? — Keφr 16:00, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Kephir: I would use {{n-g|Used to form images, especially of faces, used in some text-based computer communications|lang=mul}}. Usage examples would probably be better than explicit glosses. DCDuring TALK 23:52, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Having in mind the emoticon o_o or o_O, you could also tweak your definition to mention that the letter "o" is used "to form images, especially of faces or eyes". --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:05, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
How about [1]? Definitions of that kind would apply to so many other characters (while the actual meaning is so context-dependent, and relatively obvious in context anyway) that I doubt it would be practical or necessary to cover them all. Ever heard of ASCII art? — Keφr 07:56, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I take your point about ASCII art and the "cell division" example that you linked here. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 12:45, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • No, I don't like it. What do we do with constructions like the French "ne pas" ? SemperBlotto (talk) 16:14, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm adding now the 4th bullet point of the rationale in my first message above; please see it. Concerning the page name, IMO I was thinking of adding a space in the page name, like this: ( ), « », ¿ ?, etc. Although I still see much merit in the spaceless (), «», ¿?, etc. I don't like ( ... ), particularly the fact that it's more difficult to type; though entries like this certainly would be linkable or redirected from their single-character parts. I am worried about ' and "; spaceless matched-pair entries for these two would be '' and ""; these look too ugly and '' (two apostrophes) looks identical to " (one quotation mark) to me. I think the same with space (' ' and " ") is great. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 21:44, 12 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

In accordance with this proposal, or to test it a little to see if it looks good, I created 18 new entries for most of the variations of quotation marks listed in w:Quotation mark. I chose to link to and from all single-characters rather than using redirects. This improves our coverage since our entries didn't mention all these varieties before. Having separate entries is also an opportunity to explain better how they are used in each language. IMO, just having the entry ” with "Ends a quotation." is worthless if we can write the quotation marks as many ways as “ ”, ” ” or „ ”.

See this link, it is very interesting. It is the previous version of the entry “ with a translation table of 33 languages - just the starting quotation mark in each one, no mention of how to end the quotation, which I find confusing and annoying since you had to go to the other page to see how the quotation mark ends — sure enough, this other link is ” also with a translation table under the same circumstances, except with only 30 languages. If you saw the first table and discovered that Hungarian and Romanian apparently start quotations with „ and Swedish starts them with ”, the second table won't help you to know how they end. Apparently this was intentional — since all these three seemingly end with ”, putting this information on the table would not be a "translation". Anyway, I deleted both tables and replaced them with one of my own. ({{quotation marks}})

Also, Dan Polansky (talk • contribs) requested: "I request that pages ( and ) are left as they were at the start of this discussion for at least three days after the start of the discussion." While I did not touch the parentheses specifically yet, I've intentionally done as he said since the discussion started on July 12 and I edited the entries of quotation marks on July 16.

New entries:

Thoughts? Is it just me or do other people think they look good too? Do people think it was a waste of time and that the new entries should all be deleted? (I acknowledge some people here opposed the proposal, others supported it.)

I mostly just copied Wikipedia as I don't speak all those languages, and I used only minimal definitions for each entry. If there's any mistake in the entries or the table feel free to fix it, also expand the entries if you like. If it's alright, I'd like to do the same for ( ), square brackets, ¿ ?, etc. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:16, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Oppose proposed merge of ( and ) on the grounds that each is susceptible to unique senses. Specifically, ) typically signifies a "smile" in emoticons, and ( typically signifies a frown. While it is true that it is possible to write emoticons going the other way, this is far less common in practice. I have no opposition to having a separate entry for () or ( ) or ( ... ) for uses unique to that setup. bd2412 T 13:27, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose merging, but it wouldn't hurt to have an entry for the combined form, with a single sense line at the left and right symbols' entries referring users to the combined ones for more complete information/more senses. We don't want to remove information, just add to it and organize it better. Chuck Entz (talk) 13:56, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Those two last comments read like supports, actually. When a paired character has a definition corresponding to standalone usage, then this definition obviously cannot be merged with the counterpart character. — Keφr 14:30, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that BD2412 (talk • contribs) and Chuck Entz (talk • contribs)'s comments actually read like supports, in that both are supporting the proposal of creating entries in the format of ( ). ("I have no opposition to having a separate entry for () or ( ) or ( ... )", "it wouldn't hurt to have an entry for the combined form"). I take the point that BD2412 and Chuck are opposing specifically the possibility of having hard redirects from single-characters to matched-pairs, like redirecting ( to ( ). --Daniel Carrero (talk) 19:41, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That is correct. I am specifically opposed to "merging ( and ) into a single entry". I do think that we should have an entry for "[]" (if that is possible), because that can be used to indicate the elision of text in a quote. bd2412 T 22:16, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Poll: Format of the matched-pair entries

What should be the format for the matched-pair entries? (This says nothing about keeping or deleting the entries for single characters, just what to do with the matched-pair entries.)

As with other polls and votes in the past, if you'd like to, you are allowed to support either one or multiple options, the same holds true for oppose and abstain.

  1. left, space, right: ( ), “ ”, « », ¿ ?, " ", ' ', [ ], { }
  2. left, right: (), “”, «», ¿?, "", '', [], {}
  3. left, space, ellipsis, space, right: ( … ), “ … ”, « … », ¿ … ?, " … ", ' … ', [ … ], { … }
  4. left, ellipsis, right: (…), “…”, «…», ¿…?, "…", '…', […], {…}

Support option 1

  1. Support That's the one I've been using for the matched-pair entries I've been creating. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 10:37, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Support I think this looks neatest and makes it clear that the punctuation isn't one continuous symbol. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:01, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose option 1

Abstain option 1

Support option 2

Oppose option 2

  1. Oppose As I said before, IMO, (), ¿? and others look great, but "" and '' look ugly and confusing in this format. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 11:28, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Oppose Same reason as Daniel Carrero. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:39, 18 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Abstain option 2

Support option 3

  1. Support, to clearly indicate that something goes between the paired characters, and to follow entries like I'm ... year(s) old. — Keφr 10:52, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Are parentheses used like that outside of the phrasebook? I'm of the opinion that the phrasebook should be a semi-separate thing, like the rhymes and Wikisaurus are. (It could include translation targets that are SOP as well.) I just don't think the phrasebook should be used as a base for formatting. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:01, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose option 3

  1. Oppose Harder to type. Even if we have redirects from ( ) and () to ( … ), most people would try to type the entry name with ellipsis anyway before figuring out the redirects, since the name with ellipsis would be the actual entry name. Redirects would not be intuitive unless we start adding the {{shortcut}} template to entries. I've created […] as an example of entry which has the ellipsis as part of the entry name, not as an indication that it is a blank space to be filled. Having [ … ] simultaneously with that entry would require some additional explanation of what is a space to be filled and what is an actual ellipsis. Just like with the English circumfixes, I don't think the ellipsis is necessary to demonstrate that the space between parentheses is a blank to be filled, because: 1) in the case of parentheses and other common English symbols, most readers probably already know how they are positioned in relation to the text anyway; but 2) especially in the case of unknown and FL brackets, the definitions should explain this satisfactorily; even a simple phrase like "Encloses supplemental information." at ( ) is good enough IMO, especially when together with examples, and perhaps usage notes when needed. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 11:28, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Oppose The ellipses aren't actually part of the punctuation, and while they may indicate that something should go between, they look messy to me. If the user looking up the brackets/parentheses/whatever doesn't know that something goes between the two parts, then they may not know that the ellipses just stand in for something. If they know that text is supposed to go in between the two sides, then the ellipses are redundant. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:01, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Abstain option 3

Support option 4

Oppose option 4

  1. Oppose Same reasons as my opposing vote in the option 3. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 11:28, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Oppose Same reasons as what I wrote above. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:39, 18 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Abstain option 4

Comments
Note that (…) is defined as something else than just the parentheses: "Symbol used to substitute parts of a quotation that are deliberately omitted.". --Daniel Carrero (talk) 10:37, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

FL example sentences

There seems to be a great deal of inconsistency in the formatting of example sentences under foreign language entries. I've been reformatting them as I come across them, but it's a lot of work, and I'm not sure if there are any accepted formats besides the one given in the guidelines. Speaking of which:

  1. (Definition.)
    Voici un exemple.
    Here is an example.
  1. (Definition.)
    Voici un exemple.
    Here is an example.

Both of the above are considered correct according to WT:ELE, and both are common. Is one preferred over the other, or are both in equal use and equally allowed?

Now, here are some formats of FL examples that I've come across frequently for Spanish sentences (but with often missing punctuation included):

  1. (Definition.)
    Voici un exemple. - Here is an example.
    Voici un exemple. — “Here is an example.”
    Voici un exemple. -- Here is an example.

There are others, but the above seem to be especially widespread (at least in Spanish entries), and at least some are being included in new definitions. Should I just leave them alone, or fix them as I see them? Is it possible to fix something like that with a bot? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 19:36, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

For very short usage examples, it is sometimes better to display them as a single line. You can add the argument inline=1 to {{ux}} or {{usex}} to make it so. — Ungoliant (falai) 19:39, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
As for bolding the term in the translation, you should do so whenever possible. The only exception is that sometimes the differences between the languages will make it impossible to isolate the term in the translation. --WikiTiki89 19:55, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Unless it is debated, I think it should be noted at WT:ELE#Example_sentences that the translation of the term should be in bold as well, since it isn't clear due to lack of consistency. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 22:40, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I've updated WT:ELE and WT:USEX. Did I miss anything (does anything still need to be updated)? - -sche (discuss) 01:25, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The example translations and transcriptions further down the page at WT:USEX don't show that the translation/transcription of the word is to be in bold as well as the term itself, nor is that mentioned at WT:ELE. I would add it for clarity's sake, so new users like me know to do it, as trivial as it may be.... Andrew Sheedy (talk) 02:19, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@-sche I missed this before, but the example "For non-English words in non-Latin alphabets" at WT:USEX specifies that there are to be no italics or words in bold in the translation. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 01:02, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I've updated both of those sections. Please let me know if I've missed anything else that needs to be done. :) - -sche (discuss) 16:13, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Persistent extensions of votes

I consider these numerous persistent extensions (in summa: 4 with a fifth attempt thwarted; I find the præsence of the adjective fair in this fifth attempt maladroit) of a single vote truly inappropriate or at least disconcerting. I would like to clarify that currently this not a critical remark regarding the vote’s closing or outcome, instead I would like to discountenance said adjustment ad libitum of the expiration date of that already protracted vote with the aim to impede an outcome that at the time of the second extension (beginning of April) was an evident lack of consensus (7-6). Actually this had been mine initial motivation for participating in the vote: the desire to contribute with one more vote to the manifestness of the rejection and hopefully præcipitate the closure of that vote.
To me, there is no reasonable justification for extending any vote more that one month (to put it simply or to appeal to æsthetics: those numerous struck extensions encumber the mere lecture of the vote’s content), or at most one and a half months, but I would be interested to heed to others’ suggestions (if any arise) for a temporal limitation in that sense in order to præclude future unconfined extensions. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 20:01, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I would like to know what are the reasons for extending a vote. Should we really wait for the people who voted later?
Concerning the Sanskrit vote, I've made a chart of the extensions and what would be the results if the vote, which ended 5 6 July 2015, had ended on each of the previous scheduled dates:
  • (5-5-1) 5 March 2015
  • (6-5-1) 5 April 2015
  • (9-6-1) 5 May 2015
  • (11-6-1) 5 June 2015
  • (12 11-6-1) 5 July 2015
  • (12-6-1) 6 July 2015
--Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:27, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If, instead of respecting the deadline, we repeatedly move it ahead until such time as we happen to have a sufficient number of voters to call it a consensus (which 12–6 isn't really, but let's ignore that arguendo), then we're favoring view of such latecomers as happen to come across the vote first, a selection bias. If we believe that a longer time is necessary or desired, then (0) that longer time should be set when first proposing the vote and not extended. And if that realization comes post facto, then, ideally, (1) call it no consensus, discuss and advertise the issue better in the BP and perhaps elsewhere, and start a new and better vote, if desired. Or, at least, (2) we should have a limit of one extension on a vote. Or, at the very least, (3) we should extend a vote as long again after consensus is achieved as we did before it was (and as long again after it's achieved in the opposite direction, if that happens). Any of those would seem much fairer than the method employed at the particular vote that led to this discussion.​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:55, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Ever heard of an Allen charge? --WikiTiki89 21:10, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with Msh210 that the practice of extending votes until victory (or defeat) is achieved is an unfair procedure. I don't think it matters on which side the extender votes or whether the extender abstains, but it is particularly suspect when the outcome is the same as the extender's vote. It is at best a lazy procedure and at worst a corrupt one.
The only remedy is to void the vote. Obviously it can be reproposed and revoted, possibly after recrafting the proposal. DCDuring TALK 23:09, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with your assessment of particular suspectness and your proposed remedy. Voiding often provides relief.  :-) ​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:26, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Everyone had four full months in which to question, complain, or lodge a protest, but everyone was silent during all of that time. Voiding the vote now, after acquiescing to the multiple extensions by maintaining silence, would be unfair to those on the winning side of the decision. The best thing to do at this point would be to leave this vote as it stands, and to develop a policy that will address the extensions issue in future vote. However, if a lot of people are hell-bent on overturning the decision, then we should put it to an official vote on whether to void the decision and redo the original vote (emphasis on official vote to void the decision). —Stephen (Talk) 12:41, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It seems to be a fairly common practice for votes (and discussions) here to drag out seemingly without end. This one was no exception. Furthermore, discussions are not mere exercises in bean counting. Five out of six editors expressing opposition to the proposal provided no substantive argument on the matter. The sixth provided a factual error as their premise. All of that can reasonably have weighed into the outcome. Are we now going to reopen every discussion that was closed after a series of extensions? bd2412 T 13:40, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This is about a corrupting procedural matter, not substance. For those whose ox is gored as a result of the abuse of voting procedure, the option of not accepting the extensions was open.
"Are we now going to reopen every discussion that was closed after a series of extensions?"
No. If we do it once and adhere to a policy of no unilateral extensions, we will never have to void a vote again. If the extension process had not been abused by repeated extensions only to result in a bare victory for the view supported by the person extending, this would not have come up. DCDuring TALK 14:35, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If you thought it was a corrupting procedural matter, why didn’t you say something about it during those four months? There have been quite a few votes where the end date was extended, often more than once. Why didn’t you say something during all of those times? Any one of you could have close the vote and made the decision at the end of each of those extensions, but none of you did. Why not? So why now, all of a sudden, has it become a "corrupting procedural matter"? Whether it was a good idea or a bad idea, you, like all the rest, went right along with it until somebody didn’t like a decision, so now you want to throw around accusations of curruption. That’s ridiculous, you had ample time and opportunity to speak up and say that you are against it. Instead of bashing someone who was just trying to do what he thought was right, while you kept silent and looked the other way, just propose that we have a vote to void the decision.
And whether you like it or not, it creates a precedent, and anybody in the future who does not like an outcome can claim malfeasance of some sort and demand the vote be thrown out. Either we accept that it’s okay to void a vote someone does not like, or we don’t do it. —Stephen (Talk) 14:55, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You're right: I should have spoken up after each extension. I saw them and ignored them. Maybe it's w:Kitty Genovese syndrome or a simple desire to avoid confrontation. (To answer your "Any one of you could have close[d] the vote and made the decision at the end of each of those extensions, but none of you did. Why not?", though — I fully intended to after two of the later ones, but they were re-extended before I had a chance.) But closure on the first opportunity, on a slim margin, by someone who voted like the closure? I needed to say something. Note, though, that I don't mind the substance of the decision at all: I looked only a little into the Sanskrit issue, but think the proposal makes sense. Nonetheless, the procedure followed stank.​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:15, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I completely agree with Stephen here. --WikiTiki89 14:58, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
As I. You can't void a vote because you don't like the use of the established process. If you want to overturn the decision, start a vote for that. If you want to change or clarify the rules going forward, we can discuss that.--Prosfilaes (talk) 21:03, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I didn't get involved in the vote because I didn't have an opinion and wasn't watching the page. I've missed lots of votes. We haven't had anything quite as egregious as this lately. Were the procedural process not such a bad precedent I wouldn't have cared. Sorry that your ox is gored as a result of the practice of other supporters of the proposal.
I've got another idea. Why don't we have another extension? DCDuring TALK 15:32, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Better yet, extend again as long as it's been extended hitherto, as I suggested above.​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:15, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The vote is ended and decided. What you are suggesting is voiding the decision (without a vote to do so) and opening the vote again so that you can beat the bushes to scare up enough votes to win the opposite decision. It is the same thing as overturning the vote and having a redo. Why not just save everybody the trouble and declare the decision reversed (failed)?
If you want to void the decision (which is unfair to the majority who supported and won already), you need to hold an official vote for the purpose of voiding the decision of the Sanskrit vote and doing the vote over again (which will set a precedent for having do-overs whenever anybody does not like the outcome of a vote). —Stephen (Talk) 23:16, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
By the way, DCDuring, there are several votes on WT:Votes that are ready for closure and decision right now. Since you think we’re egregiously corrupt and bereft of ethics, why don’t you nip over there and close the votes yourself? Or would you prefer that we continue to do it so that it’s more convenient for you to say we’re corrupt? —Stephen (Talk) 23:28, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think I ever said that individuals were corrupt, only that the process was. In any event, that is what I intended and I stand by that. I'd favor other people closing votes rather than me as I can't figure out how the archiving is suppose to go, but I closed a few votes that had run their appointed term.
Judging by the low participation, I wonder why we give any force at all to the outcome of some votes. If we can't muster a quorum (6, 7, 8, 10?; counting abstainers?; differing for various classes of votes (bot status, admin votes, substantive?), then there should be no mandatory policy resulting from the vote. Votes probably need to be more publicized. The subpage structure interferes with achieving comprehensive coverage of votes. Would Editor news be good for that or BP? Do we need a tickler system (a single page?) of some kind to remind folks when a vote starts, when it is about to end, when and how it was decided?
Perhaps BP polls would provide guidance without something becoming mandatory. DCDuring TALK 14:01, 18 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Your accusing me of making my suggestion "so that [I] can beat the bushes to scare up enough votes to win the opposite decision" is inappropriate and insulting. First of all, I mentioned above that I mind the procedure followed not the decision itself. Second, even if I disagreed with the decision substantively, that'd be a groundless accusation. You're right that the vote has been called. Arguably, it's been called inappropriately. Can't people contest the closure on the vote page and see if consensus builds there to let it stand closed or not, without holding a new vote on the issue, and with the burden on those who wish to reopen it (viz so that, if no consensus builds at all, the vote stays closed)? In my opinion yes.​—msh210℠ (talk) 05:03, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@msh210: I don't think the initially set end date of the vote is a deadline, and that our procedure is to forbid extending a vote. That would be another procedure, not the one that we have. In fact, we do not have a specified procedure as for the meaning of the end date of the vote, merely the common practice. And the common practice is to allow extensions of a vote, as was done e.g. in Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2010-05/Placenames with linguistic information 2; if anyone is interested, I can collect all votes that were ever extended. My extending this particular vote was driven by the same tentative unspoken principles I was using in previous votes that I have extended. You participated on extension of Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2014-03/CFI: Removing usage in a well-known work 3; have you changed your mind, meanwhile? --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:26, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]


All we should do is to show active votes more actively. For example, putting them in the watchlist page below Wanted Entries will dramatically increase the awareness of new votes. This has been suggested by YairRand ••Dixtosa (talk) 10:36, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion of good faith edits with no explanation

I have been a very sporadic contributor to Wiktionary for a number of years. Sometimes I have little bursts of activity, and then sometimes long gaps of inactivity. One of the things that repeatedly drives me away just when I might be getting enthusiastic about joining the project is the unexplained deletion of added content, such as happened here. This comes across as extremely rude and hostile. I understand that a lot of vandalism and nonsense has to be reverted, and I understand that mistakes are sometimes made. However, this has happened to me too often, and mostly (as far as I recall) from certain editors, for it to always be a mistake. I think instead it is a cultural problem here amongst certain members that the community would do well to address. 109.153.244.21 20:56, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

One thing that would help would be for you to become a registered user. That is what makes it possible to communicate and helps us take contributions more seriously. It also helps if the name is not too frivolous, though that is not a requirement.
I see that one can find attestation for pair of marigolds so your contribution would be a good one. DCDuring TALK 22:24, 13 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I agree, this community has a problem with biting newbies. WurdSnatcher (talk) 00:10, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Do we not have a notice that unsourced material may be challenged or removed? That might be a good start. It's hard to see why the patrollers like SB should be expected to do the work of verifying (or formally RFVing) every random unverified sense that gets added. -- Visviva (talk) 01:57, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I see no notice on the frame of the edit window that suggests anything of the kind, only the license links.
It seems that we really would like Wiktionary to be less wiki-like for anonymous users, imposing some kind of limits on their changes. Isn't that like what WP has, with some changes from some users being held in suspense until reviewed? DCDuring TALK 02:31, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The rubber gloves are (deprecated template usage) Marigolds, not (deprecated template usage) marigolds. SemperBlotto (talk) 08:04, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
According to what DCDuring mentioned above, pair of marigolds seems to be attested (both capitalized and uncapitalized). Andrew Sheedy (talk) 15:08, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I'm with WurdSnatcher on this one. There seem to be a number of "experienced" editors on this page who never bother to explain their reverts of good-faith edits, especially to new editors, and get uptight when asked to. And we wonder why we're bad at attracting new editors... Purplebackpack89 17:50, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Ungoliant and other admins have explained some of my errors to me, and I didn't made those mistakes again. I do find it very helpful when I'm told what I did wrong, since I usually do it out of ignorance. I would likely have been discouraged from editing, or would have repeated the same mistakes had my edits been undone with no explanation. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:54, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think an explanation should be given. The revert tool shouldn't be used when the editor can be reasonably expected to take heart. —CodeCat 19:59, 14 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, the auto-revert tool should really only be used for obvious bad-faith edits. If they're making a meaningful attempt, they deserve a real message explaining what's wrong. WurdSnatcher (talk) 00:27, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
+1. Revert should only be used for vandalism. Speed, schmeed. Purplebackpack89 01:01, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Not necessarily only for vandalism, but for any edit where it is judged that an explanation will not have a significant effect on the editor. So it would also include editors who persistently make mistakes and bad edits and won't change their ways. —CodeCat 15:17, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If a user is unregistered then it is very difficult to have meaningful communication. DCDuring TALK 22:25, 15 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The edit history isn't just for the benefit of the user being reverted; it will be seen by any other editor happening across the page. That's reason enough to make it helpful. Keith the Koala (talk) 06:17, 16 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Italicizing the entry name of taxonomic names

I am just announcing an edit I made, since I was thinking about it for a while and decided to just do it today without discussing beforehand.

I made {{taxoninfl}} italicise the entry title of all entries for taxonomic names that use this template, so that:

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 18:14, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Not good, because, unlike genera, families should not be italicised. Equinox ◑ 18:16, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry about that. Based on your comment, I've changed the template further to italicize the entry name only when i=1, just like the headword line. That way, Homo is italicized while Hominidae isn't. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 18:29, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
And that conflicts with the German use of Homo. Maybe I should just undo the change and leave all the affected entries without italics like they were? That said, the italicized name looks good on Homo sapiens, Acer rubrum, etc. and all the species names, though. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 18:32, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There's no good reason to have a pl parameter. All taxa are proper nouns. At rank of genus or lower they have the form of a singular Latin noun. At ranks higher than genus they have the form of a plural Latin noun. That is more or less part of the prescribed "grammar" of such names. Plural forms of generic and subgeneric rank taxa are not, strictly speaking part of the taxonomic name system. One could consider them to be borrowings into whatever language they are embedded. It would be interesting to see whether they appeared in New Latin genus and species descriptions, but arguably they would then be Latin. DCDuring TALK 18:46, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Other cases besides Homo#Translingual/Homo#German include all the entries for genera that are named after historical and mythological figures for which we now have or may have an entry. DCDuring TALK 19:24, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There are at least 179 exsiting entries for which English capitalized forms correspond to Translingual genus names. DCDuring TALK 19:36, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
How many taxonomic names at rank of genus or lower did not have i=1? DCDuring TALK 18:46, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I reverted my edits to {{taxoninfl}} concerning italicization of entry names; now Homo sapiens and the like don't have the entry name italicized any more.
Concerning pl=, I used it with exactly 2 names: Homo sapiens=Homines sapientes and Pithecanthropus erectus=Pithecanthropi erecti. At least Homines sapientes is cited in English and Portuguese through Citations:Homo sapiens. DCDuring (talk • contribs), about your comment, particularly "Plural forms of generic and subgeneric rank taxa are not, strictly speaking part of the taxonomic name system. One could consider them to be borrowings into whatever language they are embedded." In the past, before I started editing Homo sapiens and Homines sapientes for a number of different reasons, there were English sections, an (odd) translation table and pronunciations; I moved all the applicable information into Translingual. Personally, I'd rather keep them that way, even if other entries for declensions of homo+sapiens are attestable (Hominis sapientis? Homini sapienti?), especially if those are found in running text in multiple languages. But it would be understandable if you and/or other people wanted to use different language sections for those like we do for CJK languages. You said the plurals are not strictly part of the system, for this reason I apologize since the current format with pl= makes it seem like the plurals really are part of the system. I propose keeping the plurals Translingual, at least until further discussion, while linking from the singular forms as Derived terms or the like, if you'd agree with that. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:18, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Daniel Carrero: Why bother for two instances? I would have thought that {{mul-proper noun}} (which is not deprecated, just not my preference for taxonomic names) was perfect for that. Furthermore it is difficult for me to accept that plural and genitive forms are taxonomic names. The citations indicate that the terms are being used as plural for members of the group Homo spaiens, not for plurals of the group. Every taxonomic name is of a group, not of its members. One great advantage of limiting the use of {{taxoninfl}} to taxonomic names is that it can be used to identify taxonomic entries that are lemmas. Remember that the heterogeneity of Translingual makes the idea of a single class of Translingual lemmas useless for most practical purposes. DCDuring TALK 22:07, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@DCDuring: You are most involved with entries for taxonomic names and I edit them only occasionally. I have the feeling I'm probably going to fold and revert quick if you say I've done something wrong with the templates or the entries. Still, there's a point I would like to discuss. About: "Every taxonomic name is of a group, not of its members." as well as "Plural forms of generic and subgeneric rank taxa are not, strictly speaking part of the taxonomic name system. One could consider them to be borrowings into whatever language they are embedded." Wiktionary is a descriptive dictionary. Even if taxonomic names are intended to be used as proper nouns representing entire groups, while this should be respected and informed in the entries, I'd argue that their separate usage as nouns is nothing special. Just like you can say: "I've found a member of Vulpes vulpes!", you could say "I've found a Vulpes vulpes!" and find plenty of citations of "noun" versions of taxonomic names like this in multiple languages. IMO, cited uses like this don't constitute a reason for having separate sections other than Translingual for any languages, let alone a great number of language sections just for cited noun senses for a given entry as they are found, especially if any plurals attested use the rules of Latin grammar in multiple languages. I'm not sure if we could have Translingual noun senses along with proper noun senses, or maybe not? My point is just that it does not seem to merit separate language sections just for this. What do you think? --Daniel Carrero (talk) 01:17, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't think that the way people use them is the same in every language and I have no idea how to get that information. I'm not even going to do it in English. What authoritative resource would we use for that? It I can't imagine doing the attestation. I'm not going to beat my brains out to incorporate relatively subtle variations which most users won't even notice. Our dictionary is rife with omission of much less subtle information in areas that are know to cause English language learners problems: ambiguous, erroneous, and misleading use of determiners in our definitions and failure to provide basic grammatical information ((un)countability), (in)transitivity, complements) come to mind.
In any event we would have to document the usage of taxonomic names in the communities that use them most. A very small share of taxonomic names even have vernacular-language homonyms that correspond to the taxa and we have entries for some of those, especially in horticulture, eg. azalea, andromeda, rhododendron. DCDuring TALK 02:02, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Daniel is right, though: while the authorities may prescribe that the names be used only for "the group X", many of them are well attested in multiple languages as terms for "a member of the group X", which can be used with the indefinite article and in the plural (see e.g. Citations:Homo sapiens, and google books:"un Homo sapiens"). - -sche (discuss) 03:37, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I would think it more useful to have note on how folks borrow taxonomic terms into each language in general than to lexicalize a million or even a hundred instances of such borrowing.
All someone has to do is attest the pattern of usage (capitalization, pluralization, and other inflections in some languages) for each language in which the Translingual term is borrowed and used. I don't see any way around it. Today I looked at plurals of Virus. In some germanic languages the plural is Virusen. I don't think that belongs in Translingual as it reflects a pattern specific to at most a group of languages.
I certainly won't protest if someone chooses to do all of that, but I am more interested in having Translingual entries for purposes of disambiguating vernacular names; helping folks read scientific literature by providing etymology, pictures, and translations; and even providing gender to help folks with naming species. DCDuring TALK 04:03, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
A language-specific plural is evidence that the Latin/Translingual term has been borrowed into another language. (Jumi Vogler, Was der Humor für Sie tun kann, wenn in Ihrem Leben mal ..., 2014, page 20, has this example of Eindeutschung: Zumal damals das Warenangebot an Homo sapiensen noch relativ klein war.) If a Latinate plural, however, is used in as many languages as a Latinate singular, I don't see how only one of them could be excluded from the Translingual section short of saying "we copy what the authorities prescribe on this matter", which doesn't comport with descriptivism. Here's one way such information could be presented (note not only my added sense and usage note, but the plural which is already provided). If one wanted to weigh the scales a bit in favour of prescriptivism, one could even confine both things to the usage note, i.e. not add a second sense-line nor a plural to the headword-line, but mention both in the usage note.
I suppose if the 2 or 3 entries which currently have plurals are the only ones that pluralize and/or are used with the indefinite article to refer to members of a group / species / etc, and they only do so in 5 or 6 languages, one could argue it's easier to add 18 different language sections than to expand 3 Translingual sections... but if more entries than that pluralize, it becomes untenable, IMO, to require a myriad of different language sections rather than expand the Translingual section. - -sche (discuss) 07:43, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Why even keep taxonomic names here anyway? I thought species: is for that. — Keφr 18:56, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I won't invoke our slogan. Wikispecies generally does not bother with obsolete taxa or with the gender and etymology of any taxa. (Few other taxonomic databases bother with gender and etymology either.) They also do not always have entries that correspond to well-attested vernacular names including those we already have, which is the purpose of the lists at User:DCDuring/MissingTaxa. Wikipedia doesn't bother with gender and is very uneven about covering etymology and obsolete taxa.
That we don't provide pronunciations or translations of taxa is a result of our decisions, not whether such would be useful to users. Our decision about translations is apparently based on the perceived need to reflect how native speakers of various languages actually pronounce the taxon, not how it ought to be pronounced, though that is what users seem to want. Our decision not to have translations seems as much to be that a vernacular name could be viewed as a monolingual synonym, as a translation, or as a term identifying members of the group named by the taxon, so we didn't want to depart from the gem-like precision of our conceptual model of language to include them. DCDuring TALK 19:14, 17 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@DCDuring: Going the other way around, what is so special and different about Wikispecies, then? Would you say that Wikispecies can be totally replaced by Wiktionary's coverage of species? --Daniel Carrero (talk) 01:17, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Daniel Carrero: They have some big offsetting advantages relative to us, but few relative to outside databases.
  1. They have vernacular names in multiple languages in many species and genus entries. We have decide to exclude non-English names on the taxon page, relying on the English vernacular name, which may not exist, eg, for species that don't occur in English-speaking lands, especially plants.
  2. They pay more attention to the authorities behind each name. We don't, which on a small number of occasions has led to some confusion.
  3. They have about 20 or more times as many taxon entries as we do.
  4. Their average page is better linked to external sources. But for some reason they don't link to WP or Commons very much. Our best entries are better linked to outside sources than theirs (useful for determining gender, checking consensus on circumscription and placement).
One other disadvantage they have is that they don't do much (translations?) that other databases don't do and most other databases do something they don't. DCDuring TALK 01:40, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

cs-noun and animacy

Can someone please undo the recent edits of {{cs-noun}} to provide for pseudo-genders m-an and m-in. They are intended to mark "an" for "animate" and "in" for inanimate. Animacy is not gender and should not be marked as part of a gender. Thanks. --Dan Polansky (talk) 07:19, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

See my other comment ... I think rather than asking for undoing this change, if you really object to the general concept of having "gender" include "pseudo-genders" then you should (a) propose an alternative, (b) open a more general discussion about how to handle this. As I mentioned, this is far from the only place that "gender" has been co-opted to include other gender-like properties. Benwing (talk) 08:06, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I have not seen pseudo-genders in Czech templates. I do not watch the template situation outsite of Czech closely. Which other comment should I see and where? As for an alternative, that is obvious: create an animacy parameter. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:12, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
We have added an animate and inanimate parameter to our masculine template on the French wiktionary. It is most useful to distinguish nouns, compare French entry kohoutek with local entry kohoutek. --Diligent (talk) 08:36, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Normalization of entries 2

Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-05/Normalization of entries failed. See also at the end of the vote my comments about the result of the vote, which I'm cool with, since the affected policy is still imperfect. The vote proposed having Wiktionary:Normalization of entries (WT:NORM) as an official policy alongside WT:CFI and WT:ELE. WT:NORM deals with aspects of formatting that are invisible to the user but are expected to be standardized nonetheless, such as whitespaces, spaces between == ==, the placement of interwikis at the end of the page and the placement of categories at the end of the language section.

The list of items currently in the policy was developed from this extensive 2006 thread, which shaped the wiki code of our entries as we know to this date with the major role of User:AutoFormat (2007–2010) and I proposed to be officialized through this discussion from May 2015 with 13 polls. Controversial, outdated or undiscussed items were removed from the list and moved to here. Continuing from where the previous discussion left off, I thought of 2 more polls to address issues that were raised in the vote. I feel it's a good idea to keep asking questions until the policy is just right.

Poll 14

Proposal:
Having WT:NORM only with rules that affect the wiki code of the entry and are invisible to the readers.
Rationale:
Currently, most rules listed in WT:NORM are invisible, (such as whitespace, line breaks, spaces between == ==, spaces after * and interwikis at the end of the list), so it does not matter if the rules are followed or not by editors, the page would look the same to readers. If there are any rules that affect the layout of the pages, they should be kept in WT:ELE, not WT:NORM. Use the comments of this poll to discuss exactly rules can be affected by this poll.

Support

  1. Support --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:04, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

Abstain

Comments
I believe the rules that exist in the current version of WT:NORM and can be removed for affecting the layout of the entries are, specifically:

  • Language names should not be linked
  • Translation sections: Markup such as gender should be provided within the {{t}}/{{t+}} template, except for qualifiers, which should use {{qualifier}}
  • ---- before each language heading except the first

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:04, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Hi Daniel. I'm unclear as to what you mean exactly by "invisible to the reader". Can you spell out which rules aren't invisible? As I mentioned, I had two objections. One concerns the insistence that categories need to be put at the end of the language section instead of at the end of an etymology subsection; I assume this is "invisible to the reader"? The other is about only one headword line per section, which simply doesn't work well for some Arabic entries. I assume this is "visible to the reader"? Benwing (talk) 08:14, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Hi Benwing. After you sent this message, since no one besides myself had voted for this poll yet, I've changed the whole text of the poll; maybe it does look clearer now?
    After you gave your reasons for opposing both rules of "only one headword line per section" and "categories need to be put at the end of the language section", I simply removed them from WT:NORM and added them to Wiktionary_talk:Normalization_of_entries#Removed_items until further discussion. But, since following these rules does affect how the entry look like to readers, I'd say these are "visible" rules and thus I don't think they should be applicable in WT:NORM anyway. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:35, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Poll 15

Proposal:
If the poll 14 passes, thus leaving WT:NORM only with rules that are invisible to the readers, then the policy should be mandatory for bots only.

Support

  1. Support --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:04, 19 July 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oppose

Abstain

Comments

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