Talk:Arbër Highway

RFD discussion: November 2020–March 2021

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process (permalink).

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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Arbër Highway

I don't think this is dictionary material. Most of the named road entries we have either have cultural significance or other meanings of some kind. I'm fully aware that this vote will probably set a precedent, though. — surjection ⟨??⟩ 13:02, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

We have an earlier (still unresolved) RfD for Ludgate Hill.  --Lambiam 22:10, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

• Delete. The definition contains nothing relevant to a dictionary. People can look in Wikipedia for this. Mihia (talk) 18:49, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
• Dunno. You could argue it does have historical significance following an ancient caravan route. We have the Great North Road, maybe we should add the Alaska Highway for instance. DonnanZ (talk) 12:55, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
• Comment: I was curious whether WT:CFI had anything to say about this, and this is what I found: "The editors have not yet reached a consensus as to whether or not the names of places and geographic features other than those listed above should be included in Wiktionary. [...] It is hoped that the editors will develop criteria over time to provide greater clarity and address matters not currently covered (for example the names of streets, buildings, tunnels)." Wonder if there should be a discussion about this. — SGconlaw (talk) 13:04, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

  We should, and while this is not the spot to have it, let me nevertheless fire a first shot. However its precise formulation, the criterion for inclusion should be similar to that for entities from fictional universes. If the term is referenced outside the context of its geolocation, signifying instead a connotation attached to the geoname, it counts in favour of inclusion. For an example, here a deceased character is described as being elegant, even in death, for wearing a bespoke “Savile Row tweed suit”. We do in fact have an entry “Savile Row”; it should be kept. For an example in the other direction, the reference here to Yavuz Selim Caddesi does not count. For that street name to merit inclusion, it needs other attestations.  --Lambiam 13:37, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

I entirely agree. There may be some wrinkles to be ironed out in the detail, but essentially I think you are right: we shouldn't include place names, street names etc. just to note that these exist and to describe their type and geographically where they are, e.g. "town in X", "unincorporated community in ", "road between X and Y", etc. There needs to be some additional non-geographical content, such as, just as you say, noting the conventional association between "Savile Row" and tailoring. I think this idea should be worked into proposed wording for the CFI, and we should vote on it. Mihia (talk) 14:39, 15 November 2020 (UTC) While trying to research how many place/street names in the world, I stumbled upon this. Ha ha!

Lovely Bottom (in Tasmania) sounds even more intriguing than Six Mile Bottom... DonnanZ (talk) 16:52, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

@Lambiam, Mihia: just to be clear, you are proposing this for geographical locations other than the ones already listed at WT:CFI (for which there was consensus for inclusion following a formal vote), right? — SGconlaw (talk) 06:25, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

For me, no, not necessarily. For instance, I do not agree that we should list "The names of towns, villages and hamlets" where there is no non-geographical information to include, such as the long list of tiny places at Moscow, and I would vote to overturn that decision if there was the opportunity. I would not oppose keeping a contained number of "large" or "important" geographical entities, fsdo "large" and "important". Mihia (talk) 10:38, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

I only meant to address currently unresolved issues, focussing on named roadways. I have not given thought to buildings (Flatiron Building), bridges (George Washington Bridge), monuments (Lincoln Memorial), and other named geographic entities or landmarks. In general, the name needs to have a meaning that extends beyond the immediate one. I agree with Mihia, though, that the current status that allows the inclusion of the name of any attested hamlet is ill advised and should be revised; it would be best to have criteria that are uniform (mutatis mutandis) across different species of named specific entities. (There was a time when the rule of the English Wikipedia was that all schools, however non-notable, could be included. Predictably, that proved untenable.)  --Lambiam 11:14, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

As I've said in a number of times, the problem with including this sort of thing is that we have no notability requirement like Wikipedia does. If we include Main Street for a large city, we can't stop someone from adding it for every city and town in the United States. What's more, they all meet our attestation requirements because legal records are, by definition, durably archived, and so are many local newspapers, directories, maps, etc. Addresses are an important part of daily life- just try and find anything on Google Books that doesn't have one or two.

For those who say that Wiktionary is not paper, that just means the limitations are different. An entry is a web page, and a database record, and it takes processor time and memory and network/disk access to display it. It also has users who have limits to how much they want to scroll though to find things.

For those who say that no one will bother to add all that stuff: there are compulsive people out there, and they have computers. For instance, I've had edits that added every single permutation of affixes for gender, number, size, etc. for a single word in a single language to translation tables. There are people who spend hours a day week in, week out, adding the same thing to every single entry. We have people who won't allow cognates from certain languages without adding one from their own. I could go on, but I'm not one of those people.

So far, the only way we've kept things sane is to limit classes of things. If we keep expanding what we allow, we'll eventually have to come up with notability requirements so that we can have the Mississippi river but not Bedbug Run in my mom's home town in Iowa. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:06, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

I'm not sure whether we should (or even want to) go down the route of actually revisiting the place names policy (see "Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2017-01/Policy on place names" and "Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2017-03/CFI and place names cleanup", which I didn't participate in) entirely, but here are some of my thoughts (sorry for the slight randomness):

• Personally, I have no objection if we just stick to what was previously agreed in 2017 and exclude other geographical features such as the "names of streets, buildings, tunnels" mentioned in WT:CFI.
• I'm not entirely sure how a notability requirement for place names would apply. I have a sneaking feeling that it may not be too difficult to find, say, three mentions of a place in local newspapers.
• Is it justifiable to say that some places only merit inclusion because they have a different connotation (like Savile Row or Wall Street), while no such limitation applies to other places (like Greenland)?
• Assuming we are revisiting the entire place names policy, for inhabited places I wonder if an admittedly arbitrary rule like "all places with a population less than 1,000 people should be excluded" would work. However, this would exclude some places like Pitcairn Island (population in 2020 estimated at 50), unless we say that islands are excluded from this rule (and would there be a basis for doing so?). Also: (1) What would we regard as reliable sources for determining the population of a place? (2) This would not help to decide if places like "streets, buildings, tunnels" should be included.
• This isn't directly related to the discussion, but maybe we should start requiring editors to provide co-ordinates for places. I have to say that it isn't very helpful to be told that Rockville, among other things, is "[a] city in Minnesota", "[a] town in Utah", and "[a] village in Nebraska".

— SGconlaw (talk) 16:48, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

You're raising a lot of points. Re co-ordinates, Fay Freak raised the same point for Moscow below, I have always regarded them too cumbersome to include for latitude and longitude - they can be often found in Wikipedia articles. But I do include British Ordnance Survey grid references, which are more compact. The situation with Rockville is due to the entry's creator - I think which county each one is in could be added.

Regarding islands, I think the general rule is to only include inhabited ones, but that rule can be bent - Rockall, inhabited only by seabirds, has found its way in, and White Island may include both inhabited and uninhabited islands, I added the NZ island because it made the news a while back. DonnanZ (talk) 12:05, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Also, on the "no one will bother to add all that stuff" point ... why would we even have a policy to admit all place names in the world if we did not aspire to eventually achieving complete coverage, i.e. including all hundred million of them, or however many it is? It wouldn't make any sense to allow types of entries on the assumption that no one will ever bother to add them. Mihia (talk) 15:25, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

• On the subject of roads in particular when there is no figurative meaning, we should not include road names that are combinations of names or adjectives with words meaning road. Arbër + Highway. New Jersey + Turnpike. Southeast + Expressway. El Camino Real (“The King's Highway”) is borderline because it doesn't have any English words. Broadway can have a road name sense because it is spelled without a space, but only as a generic term and not as any specific instances of Broadway (merge the Manhattan road sense into the theater district sense). So Delete the nominated term. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 14:35, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Delete. I am tentatively inclined to agree with the Savile Row criterion proposed above, and this seems to fail it. Even if we don't favor that criterion, this still seems to not be the kind of thing for a dictionary to cover, any more than e.g. covering recent books like Divergent or New Moon. - -sche (discuss) 04:47, 18 November 2020 (UTC)

So essentially the geographical locations listed in WT:CFI may be included without any requirement of an independent connotation (the Savile Row and Wall Street examples), but any other location – be it a bridge, building, street or tunnel – may only be included if there is an independent connotation? — SGconlaw (talk) 09:05, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

IMO, as I wrote above already, it would be best to have criteria that are uniform (mutatis mutandis) across different species of named specific entities. Our criteria are formed in a somewhat haphazard and faltering process, driven as it is by independently conducted occasional discussions and votes on each time somewhat restricted groups of lexical entities. This is guaranteed to lead to some apparently arbitrary discrepancies. We should attempt a clean-up every now and then. Until then, we have to live with some regrettable inconsistencies.  --Lambiam 16:50, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

To delete Arbër Highway we can appeal to the analagous rule that name+surname pairs are not to be included, and the custom that only the most famous celebrities get a sense under a single name. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 23:26, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

• Delete. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 00:12, 19 February 2021 (UTC)

• Delete - not an English language term. Like Sverige and Italia don't have English entries (although Italia has on Old English entry). Facts707 (talk) 17:35, 5 March 2021 (UTC)
• RFD-deleted. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 08:37, 7 March 2021 (UTC)