User talk:Matthiaspaul

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Please read our Criteria for inclusion before you remove any more content, as you did at myrio-: we don't use reliability of sources as a criterion (it's possible it wouldn't meet the requirements of the CFI, either- but there are other ways to deal with that). Also, you left the entry with a mangled half-sentence as the only definition. A dictionary, unlike an encyclopedia, has only a relatively small amount of information, in an extremely condensed and tightly-structured format. Removing arbitrary chunks of text like that can do a great deal of damage. Thanks! Chuck Entz (talk) 05:07, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Hi Chuck, I beg to pardon, but what creates a great deal of damage is the faulty information spread around by that Wiktionary entry:

Myrio- is NOT the inverse of myria-, but just a spelling variant of the official spelling myria proposed by Thomas Young in the early 19th century. Both prefixes mean 10000, not 1/10000. There are lots of reliable sources for myria = myrio = 10000, but over the years not a single editor so far was able to turn up a single reliable source for myrio = 1/10000 (although you can find this faulty definition in several, but only very recent spots in the net).

I have run into the pitfall myself when carrying that unsourced information from one Wikipedia entry to another while improving the coverage of the metric prefixes in Wikipedia. But a recent discussion in the English Wikipedia and my own research into the subject now revealed that the whole 1/10000 thing was down to a mistake made by another editor back in 2004 when he added the faulty information from the back of his head to the English Wikipedia. From there it spread into various other Wikipedias and onto other sites, and from there back into Wikipedia. Putting out a fire, I am now in the process to correct it, that's why I removed it. The myrio- entry in Wiktionary was created just a few days ago and it is already starting to be cached by external mirrors. We must stop it before spreading the faulty information reaches a new dimension.

You might want to read: Wikipedia:User talk:Urhixidur#myrio

and check the edit history and discussions on entries like

Wikipedia:Metric prefix, Wikipedia:Unit prefix, Wikipedia:Gradian, Wikipedia:Myriad, Wikipedia:Myrio, Wikipedia:Myria, Wikipedia:Myrio-, Wikipedia:Myria-, Wikipedia:Myriograde in the English Wikipedia.

As a sidenote: I have close to ten years international Wikipedia experience on my belt, so you don't need to template me. However, not being involved in the Wiktionary sub-project I deliberately left the entry in the state I did in order to prompt a local to more carefully look over and CE it again than I had the time for it yesterday. Since my edit summary was very clear about that there is a problem with the entry that must be corrected and it is obvious that this isn't even remotely any kind of vandalism, I had expected more from another experienced editor than blindly reverting a fellow editor. That looks quite sub-standard and not quality-oriented to me.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 14:45, 10 October 2015 (UTC)

Your years of experience with Wikipedias is precisely why you needed to be templated. We're a descriptive dictionary, not an encyclopedia, so there are some very basic differences between us and the Wikipedias: for us (with certain, limited exceptions), the only reliable source is usage, and the definition line is equivalent to the entire body of a Wikipedia article. We also don't have the resources for the kind of multilayered internal procedures that Wikipedia has. You really do need to learn how we do things in order to work effectively and avoid problems. Chuck Entz (talk) 16:09, 10 October 2015 (UTC)