The editor of this page referred me to w:Sanskrit, which says "No native script. Written in Devanāgarī, various Brāhmī-based alphabets, and Latin script." Which is why I didn't revert a second time. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:59, 21 December 2011 (UTC)Reply
Pali is even less bound to a single writing system than Sanskrit is. Western learning material for Sanskrit is usually in both romanization and Devanagari; Western learning material for Pali is usually in romanization alone. (I've looked and have been able to find any learning material for Pali published in the West that uses any writing system other than romanization.) If it comes to another vote (I somehow overlooked the vote last August) I would definitely be in favor of keeping transliterations of Sanskrit, as they are at least as helpful and familiar to Sanskrit learners as Devanagari is. It's not as if we're going to run out of space if we have both. —Angr19:00, 21 December 2011 (UTC)Reply
@Eirikr, if you ask me, I don't know why we have Japanese romanisation in the full format as full entries with parts of speech, etc. All info should be kept in the kanji/kana entries and romaji to be a method to find those entries. We have changed the approach for Mandarin pinyin, see biǎoyǎn as an example and Wiktionary:Votes/2011-07/Pinyin entries.
Sanskrit is not an ancient script in terms of that it is not used anymore. Hindi, Nepali, Marathi, etc. are also written in Devanagari and we do have many Sanskrit entries in Devanagari. I've seen romanised Sanskrit books, though but romanisation is always different, dependent on the source. Not sure if the vote on ancient scripts applies here. Pali is a difficult case - it's written in multiple scripts, all of them complicated. If we keep the entries, I think we need categorise them properly and set some rules. I have no strong opinion about either Sanskrit and Pali at the moment. --Anatoli(обсудить)22:37, 21 December 2011 (UTC)Reply
For Japanese, my understanding is that romanized entries should only have POS headers and bulleted lists of terms linked to the main entries and providing brief glosses; romaji entries shouldn't have any etyl, conjugation, usex, or other information, as that should all be on the main page under the headword as written in kanji or kana.
For romanized entries in general, I think including them does a world of service to anyone who has not mastered whatever other scripts are out there. I appreciate being able to look up a word that I may have heard well enough to romanize, but that I may have no idea how to write in the native script. WT's search function might help, but it falls short of that mark by a wide margin for many of the entries I've seen written in Devanagari. It's also a failure if there is already an entry with that spelling, but in some other language -- I have to know enough to go to WT's *advanced* search page to be sure. This is a profound usability failure.
As it stands, Wiktionary is ostensibly intended for English speakers to be able to look up all words in all languages -- but this is currently impossible using the Latin alphabet, the only character set that most English speakers are familiar with, and the only character set available by default on many English-language operating systems.
I definitely agree that romanisation entries help finding entries in the non-Roman scripts but I would go further and remove POS as well because this already distracts uses from looking up all the relevant info in the proper entry, especially if one word can belong to multiple POS's. As someone put it, create a romanisation entry and forget about it, until there is another word spelled differently in the native script but with the same romanisation. Initially, the vote for pinyin even disallowed any definitions. We do add unwikified short definition on the same line to make the choice a bit easier, see àijiǔ. As you know, words can also be romanised differently dependent on the system or version of the system used, even with Japanese. Having a simple system would also enable bots to do the job of creating these romanisation entries.
I would support the idea of romanized entries for all words in all languages only if they serve as a soft redirect to the proper script entries, not as a replacement for the native script entries. Many languages can be romanised differently, no standard exists or there are too many standards. We also had a person who extremely exaggerated the role of romanisation entries for Mandarin. --Anatoli(обсудить)23:56, 21 December 2011 (UTC)Reply
Yes, great, that's exactly what I intend too. I somewhat agree about omitting POS; I've been including such headers when creating romaji entries based mostly on the stated policy at Wiktionary:About Japanese#Romaji entries. About glosses, however, I think omitting any gloss at all as a matter of policy would reduce usability unnecessarily, and that glosses in general should be included, provided they are suitably terse.
We are talking about the way Sanskrit should be handled, not English. The entry doesn't say it's an alternative English spelling. For the Sanskrit romanisation we probably have to talk about it somewhere else as this is not about just one entry but a general approach. --Anatoli(обсудить)01:24, 22 December 2011 (UTC)Reply
Originally, however, until this edit, it did say it was an alternative English spelling. If google books:Kṛṣṇa shows plenty of examples in running English text (whether italicized or not, as italicization is irrelevant), then the English section should be restored, independently of whether we decide to keep Sanskrit romanizations in general. —Angr10:17, 22 December 2011 (UTC)Reply
