Wiktionary talk:Hall of Fame/archive

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suggestions

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Worst gloss: trampolo; worst plural: sneakers. — Ungoliant (Falai) 00:54, 20 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

lol @ trampolo! I've cleaned it up, though; I worked out which non-bird sense was meant by checking Google images. And I switched sneakers to use the same format everyone at RFD seemed to like on trainers. I think that saves both entries, and Wiktionary's reputation! :) - -sche (discuss) 01:47, 20 January 2013 (UTC)Reply

I think that hoeng1gong2 jyu5jin4hok6 hok6wui6 jyut6jyu5 ping3jam1 fong1on3 deserves a place on the list but I can't think of a good reason why. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 01:04, 4 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

It could go in the anteroom of silliness as "surprisingly not the result of keyboard mashing". Or "Entries which look like keyboard mashing" could be a category? lol - -sche (discuss) 02:24, 4 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
It faces stiff competition from FlatO@InsideChesthigh-PalmDown-FlatO@InsideChesthigh-PalmDown Nod FlatO@InsideChesthigh-PalmForward-FlatO@Inside-PalmForward OpenB@SideChesthigh-OpenB@SideChesthigh OpenB@SideTrunkhigh-OpenB@SideTrunkhigh. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:14, 4 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
This word really gets me, in the vein of keyboard-mashing: Albanian gjyq. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 07:24, 12 November 2017 (UTC)Reply
And this goes in the somewhat related but equally silly category "not surprisingly the result of keyboard smashing": くぁwせdrftgyふじこlp;. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 01:31, 6 March 2018 (UTC)Reply

papadom

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papadom is a strong candidate for the "most alternative forms" title. --Rowboater (talk) 22:14, 4 February 2013 (UTC)Reply

So it is! Thanks! - -sche (discuss) 23:19, 4 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
But are all the forms citeable? I specifically checked each form at Hanukkah. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 02:17, 5 February 2013 (UTC)Reply
OK, I've checked all the forms; about half turned out to be bogus. - -sche (discuss) 03:07, 10 March 2013 (UTC)Reply

Most alt. forms

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Knowledge. — Ungoliant (Falai) 01:57, 11 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Weeding out the ones which are only attested in Middle English, or are not attested at all, knocks it from 30 down to 16, but that's still impressive. - -sche (discuss) 18:06, 11 April 2013 (UTC)Reply

Note to self, investigate barghest and hajduk. - -sche (discuss) 22:07, 28 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Most parts of speech

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Portuguese a: letter, noun, article, pronoun, preposition, verb, contraction. — Ungoliant (Falai) 02:31, 8 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Worst formatting

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[1] (Volapük section): a word related to half the language’s other words. — Ungoliant (Falai) 02:11, 16 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

I dunno. The user who did that did that to a lot of pages, and the information is not exactly incorrect (or even badly formatted)... it's just very copious. - -sche (discuss) 02:45, 16 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I’d consider lists that long without {{top2}} ~ 5 or {{rel-top}} badly formatted. Most of the content is unnecessary anyway. Why add SoP to Derived terms? Why add term only remotely related to dinosaur to See also? — Ungoliant (Falai) 02:53, 16 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Descendants section completeness

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Appendix:Latin/metipsimus. — Ungoliant (Falai) 05:00, 23 June 2013 (UTC)Reply

Impressive! - -sche (discuss) 14:07, 23 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I imagine we can find (or make) some really comprehensively 'descended from' PIE roots, too (especially using Yair's etymtree, modelled here, to show all the descendants on one page without actually duplicating the text itself across pages). - -sche (discuss) 14:10, 23 June 2013 (UTC)Reply
I imagine if someone fleshed out Appendix:Proto-Sino-Tibetan/s-la or , it would overtake even शर्करा. - -sche (discuss) 02:12, 10 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
Honestly, the bulk of it would come from outside of Europe, which is where Wiktionary gets weak. I could do it by spending a day at the library, I suppose, but it seems pointless. (Same situation with the descendants of ἐκκλησία (ekklēsía).) —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 20:04, 20 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Don't worry about getting to a library; just the translations we already have in tea will push this to the top, once I sort out who borrowed what from where. - -sche (discuss) 08:52, 21 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
It's not so easy! For example, did the smaller languages of East Africa (for most of which I doubt we have translations anywhere on this project except at water) borrow it directly from the source, or via Swahili? I suspect the latter, but I doubt it's even knowable. For that matter, our entry says that Swahili got it from Hindi, which I suppose is ultimately true, but I bet it went via Persian. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 19:12, 21 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
Do you mean via Arabic? Hindi चाय seems to derive from Persian (rather than to have led to a Persian word), because I've read that the y in Persian čây (and hence in Hindi chai) is a grammatical suffix the Persians added to the ča form they borrowed. For languages where it's not clear whether or not there was an intermediary, I've put it under the known ancestor with a note 'possibly via X'. (I wonder if all the loanwords are of interest to anyone besides Wiktionarians, or if we should collapse them or put them in a separate table, where they wouldn't swamp the few inherited [Chinese] words.) - -sche (discuss) 02:36, 22 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

Anteroom of Silliness

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I nominate this definition — Ungoliant (falai) 00:35, 3 February 2015 (UTC)Reply

Sadly, I've seen a lot of entries like that. There used to be some German ones, though I just googled site:en.wiktionary.org "A German prefix" and it looks like they've all been taken care of. Czech still has do-, nade-, od-, roze-, and se-. - -sche (discuss) 01:19, 3 February 2015 (UTC)Reply
I think this entry, especially the last def, deserves a place. Unless, of course, you have any clue whatsoever about what's going on there. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 07:04, 2 August 2015 (UTC)Reply
Sadly, that entry is far from unusual; it's an example of what DCDuring justly calls "the near-incoherent terseness of our copyings of a 110-year old Sanskrit dictionary". Many (most?) of the things en.Wikt copied from Monier-Williams are similarly incomprehensibly curt or else not even English at all (महाभारत is a tame example; I can't offhand find any of the more elaborately unintelligible examples I've seen). - -sche (discuss) 04:18, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Most spellings

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疙瘩 has 18, including the lemma and simplified forms of alternatives. —suzukaze (tc) 03:23, 5 August 2015 (UTC)Reply

Most syllables in a single glyph

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This is language-specific and so not a good Hall of Fame category, but , , and all have unusually many morae packed into a single glyph. Does Chinese have any single glyphs that stand for 5+ syllables? What words in languages that you know pack the greatest number of syllables into the fewest letters? - -sche (discuss) 22:58, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply

In Chinese, it's very rare for a single glyph to represent more than one syllable. This Chinese character (not in Unicode) represents 4 syllables, but I don't know of any characters that represent more than that in Chinese (though I'm not an expert by any means). The Arabic ligatures and , which are in Unicode, look like they represent about 10 syllables. And some of the Ancient Greek ligatures here may also be of interest. —Mr. Granger (talkcontribs) 23:11, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
can be read as túshūguǎn (Mandarin)/toshokan (Japanese) but it's contrived. —suzukaze (tc) 23:20, 19 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
I wouldn't consider a single Unicode codepoint for a sequence of numerous Arabic glyphs making up several distinct, spaced words to be a single glyph. The polysyllabic Chinese signs are interesting; it's also neat that signs are still being created. It occurs to me that several languages have long letter-names (epsilon, double-u, etc, and even more if you add diacritics like ŵ), but self-referential things like that ("ŵ is a word meaning the sign ŵ") are not very interesting IMO. - -sche (discuss) 15:35, 20 February 2016 (UTC)Reply
(おもんぱか) (omonpakaru) is also unusual. —suzukaze (tc) 08:23, 12 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
(うまのはなむけ) (uma no hanamuke). —suzukaze (tc) 03:06, 12 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

Longest English words

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...are tracked by Category:Long English words, I see. It's swamped with chemical names and I'm not sure how interesting it really is. - -sche (discuss) 06:33, 27 May 2018 (UTC)Reply


Hall of Shame

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Exceptionally bad things.

Moved off the main page in preparation for the page possibly becoming official, because this probably isn't of interest to the average user (and may leave negative impressions of the site). - -sche (discuss) 19:34, 11 January 2020 (UTC)Reply

Worst language naming problems

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  • Kara. 6–8 languages vie for this name: zra (a Korean language, also called Kaya), kxh (an Omotic language, also called Karo... like btx; see also arr/Citations:Arara/aap), leu (a language of Papua New Guinea, rarely called Lemakot), reg (a language of Tanzania), kah (a language of the Central African Republic, also called Fer), kcm (a language of the Central African Republic...also called Gula...which is the name of five other languages), some Sudanese language, and some Ethiopian language (see Citations:Kara). See also the w:Kara languages. ([2])
    Oh, and gya (a language of Cameroon and the Central African Republic, the principle variety of which is Kàrà / Kara / Gbaya Kara). (Compare gso, which also called Buli, which is the name of two other languages.)
  • gel : previously called Kag-Fer-Jiir-Koor-Ror-Us-Zuksun.

Worst bureaucratic rabbit holes

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  • on not one but two occasions, active policy votes were subjected to requests for deletion

Worst formatting

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  • The original version of noncuplication, which was for a time unviewable: the formatting was so bad it broke the page. IPA modifier letters were misused as superscripts, other templates (which called still other templates) were nested inside {{term}}, the etymology asserted that the term was formed on the pattern of a nonexistent/redlinked term...
  • Many Sanskrit entries suffer from what one user calls "the near-incoherent terseness of our copyings of a 110-year old Sanskrit dictionary" (Monier-Williams); often, they are only partly in English, partly in Sanskrit, and partly in a code that is sometimes indistinguishable from keyboard-mashing; for example, बुध् (budh) (old revision) and शालिवाहन (śālivāhana) (revision).