User:Soap/bamboo
This page is for several unrelated ideas that would require totally new software, unlike MediaWiki as we know it, in order to work. In other words they dont have a snowball's chance in Miami of being implemented. Yet I write this up because it may be useful for existing policy debates and for other ideas. While the writing below might sound dispirited, these are software limitations, not policy issues. I think of this as a positive space to describe my ideal for how Wiktionary could be.
See also User:Soap/SOP for my ideas on sum-of-parts arguments at RFD.
Group pages[edit]
Pages with multiple titles, such that the displaytitle is whatever the user searches for, but they exist as a single page at the software level instead of using redirects. These would be useful for multi-word expressions that have many, many forms, from dozens to hundreds, such that it is impractical to maintain separate pages for all of them (and even if we agree it's practical, I think it's an ugly mess).
One advantage of this is that it could greatly simplify searching for phrases, since the search engine would index all of the alias forms, and it would take much less effort on editors' part to add such forms to the index than to create separate pages (which would need to be watchlisted, categorized, and so on.) Yet they would all point to the same page, so the reader would see the same content no matter which wording they used, and would never land on an "inferior" page that contains some content but is not listed as a synonym of some other wording. This also saves the trouble of clicking through to a different page when so-called soft redirects are used.
Differences from snowclones[edit]
Appendix:English snowclones is useful, but not all multi-word expressions with changeable parts are snowclones. I think a snowclone exists when changing a content word changes the meaning of the phrase, and therefore variations like tough shit, tough titties, tough titty said the kitty (among many others), where the meaning of the phrase is exactly the same in every form, are not snowclones of a form tough X. (This is why I was against the listing of the great ... in the sky as a snowclone, but since we don't normally allow gaps in titles, I couldn't find a better place for it.)
Likewise, though it hasn't come up so far as I know, we've never required three cites for each individual form of a snowclone, but I think it would be good to require three cites for each member of a set of synonymous phrases, as we currently do, to prevent even the group pages from growing out of control with once-off coinages.
Another possible difference with snowclones is that the empty slot in a snowclone can be theoretically filled by any word, whereas in variable expressions the variable parts are a closed class. Even if sometimes a very large class, they all have something in common; for example, in phrases like go jump in the lake, the verbal phrase must be something unpleasant.
Examples[edit]
this page shows how a familiar expression may exist in dozens of variants.
Notes[edit]
See here for an extreme example of search result overcrowding which, nevertheless, mostly results from having an extremely long phrase. This is not typical of the situation today and I don't intend to exaggerate the situation by making this seem typical.
Infinite scrolling[edit]
As per User:Soap/SOP, i see a lot of pages deleted that I think should stay. Were it up to me, we'd be upvoting and downvoting phrases instead of deleting them as sum-of-parts, and this would be an entirely separate process from building the group pages (which are for maintaining synonyms). A downvoted phrase would still be listed so long as it had the standard three cites, but it would only appear the bottom of the page, and only when the user scrolled down. This could conflict with multilanguage display for people not using Tabbed Languages, but I anticipate that Tabbed Languages would be part of this if ever implemented (and like I said, i dont expect it), and that it would mostly appear on pages which only listed English anyway.
This is separate from the group pages idea because it applies to derived terms rather than synonyms. Still, a smart search engine would have some means of searching specifically for collocations, even though those collocations would not have their own pages in the index.