Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2015/December

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Wiktionary:Votes/2015-12/Deleting: l/en, l/la, l/de, etc.[edit]

FYI: I created a new vote, linked directly above in the title. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 04:42, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What happened to those? --Dixtosa (talk) 07:59, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Dixtosa: I deleted the vote per Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2015/November#About deleting l/en, l/la, l/de and others. The vote was unnecessary because we already have RFDO consensus to delete those. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:04, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Mathematical entries with semi-equivalent senses[edit]

This sort of came up at the RFD of vector. We have quite a few entries for mathematical objects (I'm going to pick on tensor as an example, but algebra probably has it far worse, especially the cop out at sense 7!) with big piles of senses that are sort-of-equivalent. These generally have a high-school-maths-layperson definition at one end of the difficulty spectrum (for tensor, "A mathematical object consisting of a set of components with n indices each of which range from 1 to m where n is the rank and m is the dimension of the tensor.", which isn't too hard to understand if you think of a tensor as looking like an n×m spreadsheet, but doesn't describe all the crazy sorts of tensors that pure mathematicians have dreamed up) and an abstract but precisely defined definition at the other ("An image of a tuple under a tensor product map." which covers all(?) eventualities but tells you absolutely nothing about what a tensor is like, like defining gold as "What comes out of a gold mine"). Current, I think they're a confusing mess, but my suggestion at the RFD of vector to arrange them as subsenses of a general sense wasn't too popular either. How should these sorts of entries be treated? Smurrayinchester (talk) 11:11, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I have a related issue with many terms that have a "true" definition that is scientifically accurate but also has little cognitive connection to the word as used in everyday life. [[iron]] comes to mind. The chemical-context definition does not have much connection even to the metal-merchants' definition, let alone that of the man on the street.
For mathematical terms differentiation by level of abstraction seems appropriate. The high-level-of-abstraction definitions both require and the readership can grasp a more specialized vocabulary.
I do think that the sense-subsense approach is useful to remind readers of the underlying unity of the mathematical senses. The sense is a good place for the topical heading "mathematics"; the subsenses would merit usage context labels like "elementary", "formal", or whatever actually reflects the differences in the user population. DCDuring TALK 17:19, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Support arranging the discussed senses as subsenses. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 23:24, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Combining senses would definitely be wrong at iron, which (apart from the alloy catch-all) distinguishes between elemental iron specifically and the chemical element more generally, something you would hope the FDA would do considering your stomach absorbs Fe2+ more readily than Fe0. In fact, there should probably be another specific sense of iron in its dietary role. (A better example might be Cr3+ vs. Cr6+, one benign and the other carcinogenic, as the subject of the movie Erin Brockovich chronicling her crusade with the EPA. Actually, I'm not confident either the FDA or the EPA make the distinction!) But if you list the chemical element as the main definition, would the alloys fall under it, given that they may contain more C, for instance, than Fe?
Mathematicians will often use words like algebra in any of those senses, much as we might use a technical word like line equally well to describe the painted stripe down the middle of a road. (Why is edge of a graph a subsense and line of sight not?) Likewise, people who ask for a number between 1 and 10 usually hate irrational responses. I'm actually not familiar with all those uses of algebra, though I do think that one definition is a cop out. When two things are not so different that even their explanation follows the same trajectory, I would just give the general description and list particulars. Cop-outs may be the strongest case for subsenses.
To me distinct definitions are really a question of whether the two things are the same or not, and subsenses aren't going to get around that problem. For vector, I would have been tempted to combine two of the senses, saying that a magnitude and direction can equivalently be expressed in vector form. Alas, in describing the form I have illustrated the distinct use I was trying to combine! So yeah, although they are mathematically equivalent in many ways (at least for positive magnitudes), conceptually the purposes are different enough that we will actually intend one use or the other. But you would have to decide that even if they were going to be subsenses of something else, so subsenses don't eliminate the question.
They do introduce other questions though. I don't like the idea of subsenses because it would try to make an explicit connection out of a tentative one. It implies a relation between a higher and lower level sense usually arranged that way out of convenience. As much as grouping helps in clarity, to what extent does a subsense have to be a more specific sense of what it falls under? The issues I've raised with iron and line already call that out. Maybe if subsenses were accepted here, they should look more like they do in Webster (1a, 1b, 1c, 2, 3a, 3b), and not like the outline our wikitext naturally tends to (1, 1a, 1b, 2, 3, 3a). In other words, subsenses should be groups of related senses, not hierarchies. DAVilla 13:36, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Community Wishlist Survey[edit]

Hi everyone!

We're beginning the second part of the Community Tech team's Community Wishlist Survey, and we're inviting all active contributors to vote on the proposals that have been submitted.

Thanks to you and other Wikimedia contributors, 111 proposals were submitted to the team. We've split the proposals into categories, and now it's time to vote! You can vote for any proposal listed on the pages, using the {{Support}} tag. Feel free to add comments pro or con, but only support votes will be counted. The voting period will be 2 weeks, ending on December 14.

The proposals with the most support votes will be the team's top priority backlog to investigate and address. Thank you for participating, and we're looking forward to hearing what you think!

/Johan (WMF) using MediaWiki message delivery (talk) 14:41, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Converted templated/sectioned links to plain links[edit]

Today, MewBot (talk • contribs) edited exactly 919 entries with the summary "Converted templated/sectioned links to plain links".

I don't know if this bot run was specifically discussed before, but I think doing it was a good idea.

It seems the bot basically did 2 things:

  1. Converting [[example#English|example]] into [[example]].
  2. Converting {{l|en|example}} into [[example]] within templates.

I support it within {{head}}, {{m}} and probably other templates. It makes some entries more standardized and less ugly. Example edits:

I also support these edits specifically, they removed langcodes within lists of Derived terms, but templates such as {{der3}} and {{der4}} already add the section links:

Here, I don't like very much the fact that English sections were linked through {{l}} and now they aren't, but I guess I can live with that, until the langcode is added to the template:

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 23:21, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

If both of these things were done within templates, then they are the right thing to do. Section links are automatically added within templates, while using {{l|en|example}} within a template adds extra unnecessary formatting, which could even be bad for scripts for which we enlarge the font, causing the font to be enlarged twice. Anyway, I know why CodeCat did this. It was to accommodate changes to the linking system discussed at WT:Grease pit/2015/December#Sense-ids for multiple linked words in a template. By the way, what you were complaining about in your last link can be fixed like this. --WikiTiki89 23:30, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I know, thank you. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 23:45, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
These entries are being tracked through Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:tracking/links/fragment. There's quite a few the bot hasn't fixed or isn't able to. I'm not sure what to do with some cases, including any uses of {{zh-l}} that are nested inside an already-linking template. —CodeCat 01:04, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
What you can do is take my advice and not worry about it and require sense-ids to be preceded by a hyphen. --WikiTiki89 01:13, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Langcode missing = module error[edit]

Category:Pages with module errors currently contains 475 pages. It seems the category is filled with pages using {{altname}} or {{alternative name of}} lacking the language code.

Example:

gallows tree was defined as: 

# {{alternative name of|gallows}}

I added |lang=en to fix this entry in particular.

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 04:15, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

That's because CodeCat changed the template to use a module, changing the behavior of the template in the process. I'm getting real tired of this. <ugly rant removed> Chuck Entz (talk) 04:50, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
IMO the problem is not so much making a template stricter in its parameters but in leaving the resulting module-error mess for others to fix. CodeCat should either remove the requirement for a language code, put the offending examples in a cleanup category rather than triggering an error, or fix up the errors themself. The latter task shouldn't be too hard with a bot, as most of the entries are for English pages. Benwing2 (talk) 05:03, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Exactly, CodeCat is happy to make a mess, but not to clean it up. Renard Migrant (talk) 13:00, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
You've got it all wrong. It's our fault for not being tidy to begin with. DCDuring TALK 14:21, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Do you want me to fix them or not? A bit nicer would be appreciated. —CodeCat 16:23, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@CodeCat Thanks for fixing them all up. We do appreciate your work (at least, I do). Benwing2 (talk) 04:29, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you, CodeCat. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 05:49, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Wanted entries by language[edit]

I created separate pages automaticallly listing the contents of Wiktionary:Wanted entries by language. Example: Wiktionary:Wanted entries/en.

I had proposed something similar at the end of Wiktionary talk:Wanted entries#Adding orange links in October. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 11:21, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Attestation vs. the slippery slope[edit]

I created Help:Attestation vs. the slippery slope out of WT:CFI#Attestation vs. the slippery slope.

I suggest removing that section from the CFI. Reason: It's more like an essay, it's not a regulation. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:09, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Maybe the section should be renamed, but I think it should be kept where it is. --WikiTiki89 20:42, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Does it contain any criteria for inclusion? If so, what are they? Renard Migrant (talk) 21:41, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It clarifies what is not criteria for inclusion. --WikiTiki89 21:47, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
So none in other words. At least we agree on that. Renard Migrant (talk) 16:56, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'd personally keep in CFI, because some people continue to make that hideously bad argument that "well, if we keep this, we'll have to create (something patently ridiculous that nobody would ever vote to keep)". We probably should have an "arguments to avoid at RfD" guideline page, and that page should be linked to from CFI. Purplebackpack89 21:44, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Right. We should never treat a treat an expression as a member of a class, only as an individual. And, against all evidence, we should certainly not anticipate any arguments from precedent that might be used as the result of the inclusion of a term.
Perhaps what we really need is comparable essay entitled "Inclusion as Precedent: the Thin Edge of the Wedge". DCDuring TALK 23:03, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That's the flip side of the coin, DCDuring: you and Equinox don't get to make the slippery slope arguments, and I don't get to make the "we kept BLAH, so we should keep BLERG" arguments. Seems only fair. BTW, there's a term for this dichotomy on Wikipedia: they call it OTHERSTUFFEXISTS. Purplebackpack89 23:31, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Fair, shmair. How is fairness even a consideration in RfD discussions, let alone the RfV discussions the section in question is clearly intended to apply to?
I often couch my RfD arguments in terms of classes of entries that share characteristics. Is that supposed to be proscribed by the section of WT:CFI in question?
Arguments from similarity are very commonly made on all sides of RfD discussions, which is why the section DanC proposes to excise from WT:CFI is empty blather. It cannot be sensibly rendered into any specific rules that the discussion would adhere to, but more importantly, it should not be. DCDuring TALK 00:28, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The argument isn't "we will have to create X". People with brains know this. Equinox ◑ 05:23, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If you don't like the line of argument, @Equinox, stop using it so much. Purplebackpack89 17:11, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If we take this section out of CFI, we'll wind end up taking all sections out of CFI! :P DAVilla 11:18, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Just to be clear, there are probably more parts of the CFI I'd suggest removing using the same argument: That they are more like essays, rather than regulations.
I wouldn't take all sections out of CFI, of course. :) --Daniel Carrero (talk) 16:39, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
PBP still doesn't get it (or is a consummate troll, as others on this project have suggested to me more than once). The argument isn't that we would have to create them: it's that if you are to justify the inclusion of one, in any sane or logical way, you must also admit that there is equal justification for inclusion of the other(s). Ergo PBP's arguments are not sane or logical, which is naturally very annoying. Equinox ◑ 14:15, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Setting aside the fact that you've spuriously personally attacked me yet again, I have never bought into your dichotomy. Just because we create one two-word entry doesn't mean we have to create another two-word entry. Some two-word entries are more deserving than others, and in fact it is your claim that most two-words entries are equally (un)deserving that is fallacious and does not pass logical muster. Purplebackpack89 14:48, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That's not actually a personal attack, and I'll give you the benefit of the doubt and assume you're intelligent enough to realise that. Anyway, it seems patently obvious that nearly all possible two-word collocations should not be dictionary entries; only a very small percentage are idiomatic or otherwise inclusible. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 16:09, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
But, Metaknowledge, there's never been clear consensus as to what that percentage is. The Equinox/DCDuring line of reasoning is that it is essentially zero, and if it's not zero, it HAS to be a hundred. I believe that it is significantly greater than zero, and unfortunately, their slippery-slope/it's-gotta-be-either-zero-or-a-hundred line of of arguing has convinced me that, given the choice between zero and a hundred, I would probably pick a hundred, because there are far too many legit two- and three-word entries that would be lost if I picked zero. It's not trolling to dissent from the zero-or-a-hundred line of arguing. Purplebackpack89 16:25, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The section was nearly removed via Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2012-02/Attestation vs the slippery slope. It is nowhere close to being supported by consensus. I still want to see the section removed. CFI should not be a catalog of non-arguments and non-criteria. Maybe some people would abstain rather than oppose the removal, to have CFI be closer to consensus? I'll keep dreaming. --Dan Polansky (talk) 14:01, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The closing admin could have ruled that a consensus to delete; 64% is in the closing admininstratior's discretion range where he/she can either choose to mark it as a no consensus or as a vote passed. That's the weakness of having no pass rate for votes; it's ultimately the decision of one person whether it passes or not. Renard Migrant (talk) 14:13, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
"64% is in the closing admininstratior's discretion range where he/she can either choose to mark it as a no consensus or as a vote passed": This I have never seen established. 2/3 I see as fairly safe a threshold to use and fairly uncontroversial despite at least one user raising his doubts about that threshold, but 64% not so. The above, AFAIK, is not an accurate report of our practice. Futhermore, I find the whole idea of significant admin discretion rather objectionable. --Dan Polansky (talk) 14:23, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Let me add that if there were such an admin discretion that can change the threshold from 66.6% to 64%, that would be far worse than any confirmation bias in repeatedly extended votes that multiple editors so loudly objected to. --Dan Polansky (talk) 14:25, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I created Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2016-02/Attestation vs. the slippery slope 2. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 11:45, 11 February 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Listing collocations as definitions[edit]

Previous "discussion": Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2015/November#A def line for phrasal verbs

Last month, User:WurdSnatcher made a proposal to use a new template {{phrasal verb}} in definition lines to indicate that the verb may be part of a phrasal verb. This discussion was ignored, but I think that the idea has merit even if the execution was less than ideal. I think it would be good to list idiomatic multi-word phrases in which the term is a part, as definitions. There are a few reasons I can mention:

  • Many other dictionaries do it this way, in particular paper ones, so this leads to the expectation that Wiktionary is similar.
  • If a word is used as part of a multi-word phrase, there is a good chance that a user has no idea that this is the case, especially if the user is not proficient at the language. They will look the words up individually, but in doing so, they will miss the idiom.
  • As an extension of the above, if a user is looking for a definition, they're not usually going to consider looking in any other sections. Listing the idiom as a definition will help them come across it.

Overall, I think our focus should be more on getting people to the information they want, and less on creating sections for everything. Therefore, I propose that we allow a soft redirect (form-of like definition) similar to what {{phrasal verb}} does, to be placed on a definition line to direct users to the entry of an idiomatic phrase containing the word. For example, give would have as one of its definitions something like "see also give up" and yet another with "see also give in" and so on.

I think that preferentially, these definitions would be placed at the end of the list of definitions, after any real ones, and arranged alphabetically. The phrasing of the "definition" is not part of the proposal, merely the idea itself, and it would be template-controlled so it can be changed easily anyway. —CodeCat 23:07, 2 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

This seems duplicative of one function of the Derived terms section. Perhaps phrasal verbs should simply not be hidden under show/hide bars for the reasons you state.
Folks already sometimes do what you recommend now. Nothing other than lack of interest would prevent contributors from doing more. If other contributors disagree, then they may remove the definitions or links. If this is to be mandatory in the sense that such definitions are not to be deleted once added, then it would seem to me to require a vote. DCDuring TALK 00:38, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The whim of the last contributor is not good policy. If we formulate best practice on this, I think it's important that it be rooted in the user experience. Since other dictionaries do something similar, phrasal verbs should be extracted from derived terms to highlight their significance (and maybe other forms as well but these are the biggest culprit). I don't know if definition lines are the right place, or maybe a separate section that's always expanded, or a language-specific see also like the one used for Japanese. I think we can agree that these should only link to the appropriate pages, wherein the definitions are actually given, so as not to depart too broadly from current practice. The point, then, is to increase their prominence without actually defining them on the page. DAVilla 11:15, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
On a wiki the whim of the last contributor IS the default policy. All the rules that we erect and the complex formatting or templates that we require take us further and further from the essential nature of a wiki. To some extent this is inevitable, but there are many ways to both let a thousand flowers bloom and maintain consistency without erecting barriers to participation and contribution. A style of template and module programming that imposes one rigid requirement after another on user input to achieve some foolish consistency is not worth the cost. DCDuring TALK 19:15, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Report on our Binomial entries[edit]

Early this year hired a computer in Amazon's data center for about $10 for a week and had it sift through all of Google's 2-gram database for every mention it could find of a binomial name (like Boa constrictor). Of the millions of binomial names and synonyms in the Catalogue of Life, just 52,625 were found in enough publications for Google to record as a 2-gram.

These 52,625 binomens get a combined 36.1 million actual usages ("mentions") in Google's collection of OCR'd and digital publications. The other binomens—the ones that are each mentioned fewer than 40 times across google's library—make up the "long tail" and I'm going to ignore them for this report and focus on "the 52k".

The question I asked was how many of these 52k can you look up in Wiktionary, what percentage of the mentions of those 52k can you look up, and how much have these numbers changed since January—over 322 days of Wiktionary editing activity (2015-01-02 and 2015-11-20).

For binomial entries (e.g. Boa constrictor): We've added 144 since January and now cover 2,590 of the 52k (4.92%). But as we cover many of the most used ones, we actually cover 9,310,553 "mentions", or 25.74% of the 52k's total mentions, 1.3M more than in January. To reach 30% mention-coverage we'd need just 30 more entries (probably mostly disease and research related species because they get mentioned a lot).

For genus names, (e.g. Boa), the 52k reduces to 16,768 unique genera, and we cover 3,308 of these (19.73%). 151 of them added since Janauary. And if you look up the genus in Wiktionary each time you see one of the 52k binomials in a book, you'll be successful 65.87% of the time (up from 63.12% in Jan; that's an additional 989,108 book mentions covered). If you want to get this number up to 75% you can have a go at turning these 248 genera entries blue.

And finally the specific epithets, which I like because they are used across genera and are often real Latin words (e.g. constrictor). We now have 7,034 of the 52k's 21,529 unique ones (32.67%). 89 of those were added since January. There's at least 26,680,536 printed binomials with lookable-upable specific epithets out there, or 73.77% of the 52k's mentions (up slightly over half a percentage point [0.54%] since January). I recently posted a list of the ones I think we most need to the Tea Room. To reach 75% we need just nine new entries, and seven of those already have good definitions in a language other than Latin, so really it's just two: solani and typhi. To get to 80% coverage we need about 218 new entries. Maybe my stats are a little warped (e.g. by hiding the long tail of uncommon species names, maintaining Google Books' academic focus, and ignoring recently described and fossil species), but I feel like 80% would be a pretty huge milestone.

Sorry I have ignored the work done by Wiktionarians outside of "the 52k", but uh, that'd be more effort for me to get stats on, especially to compare historical data. Also, I've only counted entries which have a Latin or Translingual section, which means, for example, I don't count us as having an entry for the specific epithet "pombe" or "pertussis" even though the entries give clear meanings and etymologies. I also have made no attempt to measure quality, and perhaps in future I'd like to find the entries most in need of etymologies.

Hope those stats are vaguely interesting to someone. I might try updating some to-do lists and I've been thinking of tackling Latin lua templates again, but I think my wiki activities will mainly go back to finishing the threatened species lists, like List of critically endangered mammals which I was working on earlier this year. Happy editing. —Pengo (talk) 00:40, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks a lot. These are great facts, humbling yet offering hope. DCDuring TALK 02:10, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
For the short list of species names, I note that only one (Rana pipiens (Northern leopard frog), since 2012 Lithobates pipiens) is of an organism visible to the naked eye, the others are microscopic agents of disease. I haven't been too enthusiastic about adding these, though they are obviously entry-worthy. DCDuring TALK 02:50, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yeah, I did try making separate plant and vertebrate lists at some stages to keep things less microscopic but I mostly didn't maintain the kingdom divisions so much as I went on. You can still dig through for a few missing charismatic megafauna binomials on this list, and there's a few major plant binomials missing and plenty of plant-based epithets too if you want to dig down. I had been planning to make some more fine-grained top 10 lists, like for more specific taxa like mammals and beetles, etc. Actually I did end up doing this for some Wikipedia projects (e.g. fish, plants, bacteria, gastropods...) but the response wasn't particularly amazing (except for ants; someone made all the top 100 missing ant articles) but I didn't bother pursuing this angle so much after. Pengo (talk) 04:05, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This kind of demand-based selective list is wonderful, whether I have a taste for most of what it produces or not. I've been confronted lately with a good number of missing entries for unicellular organisms and knew that they had to be dealt with. I've also found what seems to be advanced as a complete tree of life from 9,000 orders to 2 superkingdoms. It is intended to be review in five years, but it arguably a good refelction of the current state of taxonomy, providing a base against which other taxon definitions can be compared. I'm working on phyla now, then subphyla, classes, etc. DCDuring TALK 04:52, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Homophones in Appendix:Variations of[edit]

Do we have standards for {{also}} inclusions and Variations of pages? I remember discussing these a long time ago, and I can't see how homophones would be considered, given that the list isn't supposed to be language specific. DAVilla 11:07, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • Are you referring to homophones in the appendices themselves, or as hatnotes on the top of entries? bd2412 T 13:54, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • The rules for {{also}} use have always been in its documentation afaik. I seem to recall very recently seeing a poll on adding a formal list of agreed-upon rules for {{also}} use, but don't now know where that is. In any event, no, homophones are not included in {{also}}. I don't think they're included in the variation pages, either.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:45, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    • It's very common for "Variations of" appendices to have a section called "Homophones", but they aren't really homophones. I'd support a different name for them. They tend to include strings that are similar to the one in question but replace a letter with a letter that (in English at least) often has the same sound (e.g. replacing c with k and vice versa) or doubling one of the letters. For example, I recently made Appendix:Variations of "mis" and included a Homphones section where I listed miss (and several variations on it), mys, miis, and MMIs. I think it's helpful to include these links, but I know it's misleading (or flat-out wrong) to call them homophones. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:11, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Blocking policy RFM[edit]

FYI: I created WT:RFM#Wiktionary:Blocking policy -> Wiktionary:Blocking to suggest renaming a policy page. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 16:45, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Search bar abbreviations[edit]

About Wiktionary:Votes/2015-11/Namespace abbreviations:

These were described as "search bar abbreviations" in the previous discussion. "WT:" and "WS:" have more uses outside the search bar, so I suppose "CAT:", "RC:" would behave the same as them, right?

Let's see if I understood correctly what happens if the vote passes:

Wikipedia uses "CAT:" as a pseudo-namespace for shortcuts such as:

Suggestion: CAT:EN-L could redirect to Category:English language, CAT:EN-N could redirect to Category:English nouns, etc. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 05:48, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

CAT:Cats, yay! Renard Migrant (talk) 12:48, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that's exactly what we want, except that I really hope that [[CAT:English nouns]] will not categorize an entry, but only link to the category. --WikiTiki89 18:50, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Components of toponyms[edit]

There are quite a few English words that only occur in placenames – for example, parva and magna (see eg Appleby Parva and Appleby Magna), much as an synonym of "great" (eg Much Hoole), chipping indicating market towns (eg Chipping Sodbury, Chipping Norton), kirkby indicating towns with churches (Kirkby Overblow, Kirkby Moor), stoke indicating farmsteads (Stoke Mandeville, Stoke Damerel). Two related questions – first, should we have these as entries? On the one hand, they're words just like anything else, but on the other hand, it would be weird to have as a definition of, say, bridge, "Indicates a town near a bridge". Secondly, if they are included, how are they defined and do they take capital letters? Smurrayinchester (talk) 13:54, 4 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I see three categories of word here...
  • English words with the normal meaning: bridge just means "bridge"; the placename might be Severnbridge (bridge over a river), Ironbridge (bridge made of something) etc etc. There is no new meaning to add.
  • Foreign words which are just used in Englandish placenames: usu. Latin, French, Norse, or Welsh, with their ordinary meanings. So magna/parva means greater/lesser, cum means "with" etc. Again, there really isn't anything to add, unless you think that any word or name commonly used in English is necessarily English (which is not an attractive idea).
  • Interesting examples like "Chipping", which are used pseudo-productively (i.e. occur all over the place), but which cannot be found as foreign language entries. It seems to me that adding these would be helpful and sensible.
Imaginatorium (talk) 06:20, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, we should have them. I'm pretty sure that chipping means marketplace but the OED doesn't have that meaning (and neither do we). Perhaps it's from an Old English word. SemperBlotto (talk) 07:18, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think Chipping is actually norse (or similar), and isn't it cognate with købing, köping and so on? Imaginatorium (talk) 07:55, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
OE cēping. Equinox ◑ 08:01, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Another example: the French word for Cairo is Le Caire (Le is part of the name). But it is sensible to include a French section for Caire (with a soft redirect to Le Caire), because, when you see a sentence such as Le Caire est... and you've never heard this name, it's not obvious at all that the Wiktionary page is Le Caire rather than Caire. Soft redirects are the solution, except in cases such as New York: New York should be in the derived terms of York and of new, no soft redirects are needed. But derived terms should not be hidden! (cf. new). Lmaltier (talk) 18:53, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A Plea From "Somebody": Knights on Steeds vs. Manure Cleanup[edit]

When you change a template or a module, there's far more to it than the direct effects: if you add a node to a category tree, every language that has nodes beneath it in the tree will need to have the category for that node created. If you add code that checks for something that was previously ignored, all the entries which fail that test will have to be fixed. If you add a template that requires use of information that hasn't been entered in the data modules, the data modules will have to be updated in order for the template to be usable. If you create a template that adds a new type of category and add it to a bunch of entries, those new categories will have to be created.

The merits of the changes aside, there's a common thread here: if the person who makes the changes doesn't do the work resulting from them, "somebody" will have to do it. If Special:WantedCategories has thousands of extra redlinks in it, routine redlinks from people working on entries get neglected. If Category:Pages with module errors has thousands of extra members, technical problems and various types of errors will get lost (not to mention the damage done to the entries by replacing useful text with ugly red error messages). We can't just leave things the way they are.

Making changes with effects that you can't or won't clean up yourself isn't something abstract- it is, in effect, forcing other volunteers to drop whatever they wanted to do and work for you instead. These volunteers aren't some vague "somebody", but real people who are donating their time to the wiki just like you are.

I'm not saying that you should never do anything that requires work by others- some things just need to be done. I've spent hundreds (maybe thousands) of hours cleaning up after others around here, and I don't regret it. What I am asking:

  1. Give the time to be spent by others the same consideration as your own time in your planning. That, of course, requires that you have an idea what that time will be.
  2. Be considerate of those whose work will be required:
    1. Discuss the changes beforehand and listen to suggestions, so people will feel like collaborators instead of slave labor
    2. Be diplomatic and search for compromise when your changes conflict with how other people want things to work. Sure, there are the knee-jerk naysayers, but there are also people who have invested a great deal of time and thought into the status quo, and who generally are the same people who will be doing the work to fix things.
    3. Do what you can to minimize the work done by others. If you have a bot that can easily create categories and your change will immediately add redlinks for thousands of categories, consider doing a run right after you make the change so that most of them won't show up in Wanted Categories- to be created by people who have no such bot.

Just remember, as you dash about like a knight on a steed implementing Noble Ideas, that "somebody" has to follow with a shovel and a broom to clean up what your horse leaves behind. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:45, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Many of the first wanted categories are on the format of "Category:xx:List of sets" in different languages.
Current category system:
To supporters of this system: Where has it been discussed before? I'd probably want to offer some input as to what exactly could be the names of the new categories, before implementing them.
--Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:47, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I created it because there really are two different kinds of category: categories with lists of items of a particular semantic set, and categories with items related semantically to something. These are quite different things. Category:en:Planets of the Solar System contains terms for the planets, not terms related to the planets. To make this distinction clear, I created the concept of a "set" category, distinct from a "topic" category. —CodeCat 22:54, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
But where has this been discussed? Please create a BP discussion for any major changes before implementing them, even when you think they are Good™ changes.
Old discussions which seem relevant:
--Daniel Carrero (talk) 23:04, 5 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Considering all the thousands that you've added to Special:WantedCategories in the past year, you're in no position to be lecturing anyone. I will say, also, that she has to deal with certain people who will attack any proposal she makes like a horde of rabid hyenas regardless of its merits. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:14, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think you are being unfair to hyenas, at least rabid ones, which reportedly are not known to attack other animals when rabid. DCDuring TALK 04:18, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm sorry.
I don't remember adding thousands of wanted categories in the past year other than a number of "X appendices" for Swadesh lists and palindromes and a number of categories for the entry of acute accent. I do remember adding thousands of wanted categories before that without proper discussion years ago. Hopefully I got better with that, usually I'm creating BP discussions even for a few relatively "minor" ideas as well as major policy changes, etc. and the responses have been nice/civil, or sometimes nobody says anything. What about: "certain people who will attack any proposal she makes like a horde of rabid hyenas regardless of its merits". Feel free to correct me, but I've seen some discussions complaining about major changes which were done without being discussed first and I don't remember many BP discussions where one person proposed something and then got attacked by it regardless of its merits, surely we can still propose new ideas safely here? --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:07, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I seem to have overestimated the numbers by quite a lot - probably due to the irritation factor making them seem bigger than they were. The Swadesh lists and the acute accents weren't thousands, but they were definitely extremely annoying, mostly because they added dozens of unnecessary single-entry categories. As for the rest, your place name template did overload WantedCategories, albeit not directly, and probably in the low hundreds rather than the thousands. Many of the categories in that batch were aggravating as well- only a fraction have more than two or three members, and I sincerely doubt that more than a handful will ever actually be used for finding entries.
As for whether they've been discussed: you've been certainly bringing things up for discussion, but mostly for the purpose of keeping yourself busy. I can confidently state that you haven't asked for input on what you should to have for lunch, or whether items in shopping lists should be capitalized. Beyond that, I've gotten tired of reading all the things you have brought up for discussion, so I really have no idea what they all are. At times you're like the proverbial new retiree who drives his or her spouse up the wall by alphabetizing the spice cabinet and repeatedly rearranging the furniture.
As for what I said about CodeCat: just about anyone else can safely propose things, but she can't. Granted, a substantial part is due to displaced resentment over her past behavior, but there are a few people here who would die rather than say something positive or even polite about anything with her name on it, and yet they still seem to have plenty to say about it... Chuck Entz (talk)
I don't think I left any place name categories for other people to create. I only worked on mass-creation of municipalities of Brazil, example: Category:pt:Municipalities in Minas Gerais, Brazil with 853 entries. I created that and other categories for municipalities of Brasil, even those with 1 or 2 entries. (As in the Spanish Category:es:Municipalities in Minas Gerais, Brazil.)
About the furniture thing. That's new, and also rude. I don't remember ever being criticized on Wiktionary for bringing too many things up for discussion. I don't intend to stop if that annoys you, but if more people think that's a problem I could work around it. Or maybe the idea is that I could do more stuff (at least minor things, I'm not saying this with malice) without ever asking on BP if it's okay? I don't have all the time in the world to do what I want anyway. I've always liked to create templates, categories, organize appendices, etc. My last finished project was the Wiktionary:Wanted entries/en page (Module:wanted entries), I believe, which I did in a few hours after having proposed it a few months ago. I have a list on my PC of things I'd like to propose/do/vote on Wiktionary, some of those are years old, usually I wait until I have a solid idea in mind. (example: I'm still thinking of a good format for appendices of alphabets that were discussed earlier, to try and solve the problem of cluttered letter pages like A).
Re: "there are a few people here who would die rather than say something positive or even polite about anything with her name on it, and yet they still seem to have plenty to say about it..."
To @CodeCat, I'm your biggest fan, keep up the good work. I love what you have done with the templates/modules around here. If I did ask you to bring new projects up for discussion more, it may be because in the past I myself have implemented new projects which not everyone liked, (or even had to revert/delete) others that lasted until now and are widely used ({{poscatboiler}}), and overall I found it's best to ask first before doing anything. My recent streak of discussions could be some sort of defense mechanism because of interactions in the past or something, I don't know. But what I love the most on Wiktionary is to keep creating and organizing things. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 05:47, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not disputing the value of "lists of sets or "all sets" categories, but the addition of those nodes to the tree guaranteed that thousands of those categories would need to be created immediately. It just happened that Special:WantedCategories went three weeks without being updated right then, so you had plenty of time to deal with them without it becoming an issue. The fact that you didn't do anything says to me that you either didn't think about that, or you didn't care. I do a lot with topical categories, but none of my changes show up en masse in Special:WantedCategories: if my change affects a hundred categories, I create a hundred new categories by hand, plus any redlinked parent categories I see in the ones I just created. If I don't have time to do that, I don't have time to make the original changes. That should be standard practice. Any exceptions should be discussed beforehand in good faith, so the people who are doing the work don't feel like they're being jerked around. Chuck Entz (talk) 01:14, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Superior software designs minimize the need for manual changes. In one's skills aren't good enough to craft such superior designs, then one needs to get others to help with the design. For some really worthwhile changes it should even be possible to recruit other contributors to help with whatever manual cleanup is needed. But if one can't or won't fix the problems oneself (by hand or by bot) and can't get others to clean up the mess (by hand or by bot), then, as Chuck says, the change shouldn't be made. Perhaps we need to detect and revert more of such changes. DCDuring TALK 01:32, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@CodeCat Can you help create the various language-specific LANG:List of sets entries in Special:WantedCategories, along with LANG:All sets and LANG:Periodic occurrences? I think this should be easy to do with a bot. This is all that Chuck appears to be asking now. Thanks! Benwing2 (talk) 01:53, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think CodeCat's had so much criticism over the years, she's decided to skip the discussion bit and just go for it. Renard Migrant (talk) 11:54, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm running wantedcats.py now to create all these categories. —CodeCat 14:31, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@CodeCat Thank you! Looks good. Benwing2 (talk) 12:11, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@CodeCat There are still some categories missing, e.g. Category:lbb:All sets, Category:ple:All sets, Category:poz-pol-pro:All sets. These are parent categories of LANG:List of sets entries that you created. Benwing2 (talk) 12:13, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Are they listed on Special:WantedCategories? —CodeCat 12:50, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
They aren't yet, but they will be as soon as Special:WantedCategories is updated, as a result of the categories you just created. Keep in mind it only updates once every few days. Benwing2 (talk) 13:05, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If you're wondering what to create, any language that has a LANG:List of sets entry (whether or not in WantedCategories) will need a LANG:All sets parent category, if it doesn't already exist. Benwing2 (talk) 13:07, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Extending vote on templatizing usage examples[edit]

Since there were still new votes added to Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-08/Templatizing usage examples just a couple of days ago (2 December, 3 December, 4 December), I think it might be a good idea to start extending the vote. The first extension would be one month. Then, at the end of each extension period, if there were some new votes added during that period, the vote would be further extended by one month. The limit on length would be 6 months since some people seem to deem more too long; I personaly feel no need for a limit but others do. What do you think? --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:22, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Why postpone it? It's succeeding by a landslide. —CodeCat 18:29, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The reason for extending the vote (not postponing the vote) is that, despite the vote's running for 3 months, regulars are still adding their votes as of recently, and that, for English, the vote is not passing AFAICS. A reason against extending could be that it would be allegged to be fishing for results. For English, the vote does not seem to be passing. For English, there are 10 opposes. Extending could give the vote a chance to pass even for English. --Dan Polansky (talk) 18:53, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I won't check the English situation right now, this alone might be a good reason for extending the vote if Dan Polansky assessment is accurate.
That aside, the vote is scheduled to end today. This causes the vote to be the first in the list of votes in the watchlist and also to have the end date highlighted in red. I think it's only natural that some people would cast votes in the last day. In other votes, people have cast votes in the last day, too. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 18:59, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The last day is 6 December. The votes I mentioned are from 2 December, 3 December and 4 December. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:01, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Still, in 2 December, 3 December and 4 December, the "pl-2015-08/Templatizing usage examples" would be at the top of the list (except for 1 finished vote), and the end date would be highlighted in yellow (not red). --Daniel Carrero (talk) 19:04, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Oppose any and all extensions of votes, especially by someone who is clearly fishing for a different outcome and supports the outcome likely to fail. DTLHS (talk) 19:04, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Then again, the vote seems to be failing for English, and this is my preferred outcome. I don't see much chance that the vote would fail for non-English languages. Therefore, I don't really see myself as fishing for results. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:32, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The problem is that this proposal does not separate out votes for English and non-English entries. It seems there's mostly consensus on using the template for non-English entries, but much division otherwise, and that division adds a lot of votes along the lines of "Support ... but oppose for English" and "Oppose ... because English". I haven't counted the votes, but it seems the thing to do would be accept the proposal for non-English-language entries and start a new proposal specifically for the use of {{ux}} / {{usex}} on English-language entries. Either that or invalidate this proposal and replace it with one that makes it easier to vote for or against each of: English, Non-English, and Latin-scripts. Personally I would accept the current proposal as is, but I'd like to see a clearer consensus than what is possible with the current proposal even with a time extension. —Pengo (talk) 22:22, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I fully agree with User:Pengo. DCDuring TALK 22:14, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Also agree, and I think we should start another vote to clarify what people think about templatizing English. Benwing2 (talk) 02:40, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Do we want an active checkuser?[edit]

We currently have two checkusers on this project, TheDaveRoss and Versageek; the former has made 12 edits since May and the latter zero, so they are both largely inactive and show no evidence of keeping up with the community. That's been fine, considering we've had no need of one, but if the need were to arise, it does not seem clear to me that it would be met in a timely fashion. Is there interest in electing a new checkuser out of the active administrators? Note: I have no ulterior motives of trying to become a checkuser; I am wholly disinterested in any position that requires me to divulge my identity to Meta. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 23:41, 6 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

meta:CheckUser policy says: "On any wiki, there must be at least two users with CheckUser status, or none at all."
I could be a checkuser if other people would be okay with it. I don't have any problem confirming my identity to Meta. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:39, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm not massively paranoid about my identity so I could do it. But I'd prefer not to. Please consider me if there are no other options! Equinox ◑ 04:15, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

To answer Metaknowledge's question objectively: "I wanted thoughts from the community about whether this is a good idea, not volunteers." I think having checkusers here is a good idea. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 06:04, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

  • I think having checkusers here is a good idea too. Just today there was some issue about whether user X is a sockpuppet of User Y, which is what CheckUser exists to determine. I get the impression that suckpuppetry is a perennial problem here, as is paranoia over it. Count me out, though. --Haplogy (話) 06:25, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
    Sockpuppetry does seem to be an occasional problem as are spamming and vandalism. As I understand it, reviews of blocks sometimes benefit from the exercise of checkuser powers.
    We should have at least the two checkusers that MW requires if we have any. The criteria would seem to be that any holder of the powers be competent to use them, be trusted not to abuse them and be readily available to use them. I'm not competent. DCDuring TALK 15:39, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • I support having active local checkusers. bd2412 T 16:02, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Good idea as well. Are there any reasons why we shouldn't have one, other than no need ? Leasnam (talk) 16:06, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
A couple notes. First, we don't really need checkusers on this project. For a while we did, but in the past few years it has been averaging about one local use annually. The Stewards are more than capable of taking up that slack, and since there are a flock of them they will get to it more quickly as a team than probably any two local users who were flagged. There is a big downside to having local checkusers, which is that the opportunity for real abuse is an order of magnitude higher for this tool than the others. None of the other tools give insight into the location or identity of any user who chooses to not to reveal personal information; any harm is limited to within the scope of the project. This is not to say that Stewards are more trustworthy than trusted community members, it is only to say that the opportunity for conflict among people who interact is a lot higher.
Second, edit activity is only one measure of activity. I still read the interesting conversations in BP and RfV/RfD every day or two, I just don't spend much time editing. I am not trying to be defensive with this statement, I am just noting that a checkuser request wouldn't wait particularly long for me to see it. Versageek is also at least active enough to have done a checkuser check in August of this year, based on a block that Metaknowledge made. - TheDaveRoss 16:25, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
User:Jusjih is a Steward who contributes and is a sysop here. There may be others. DCDuring TALK 17:22, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Are those of you who supported the idea no longer in support after reading TheDaveRoss's comment? I find it to potentially be an interesting argument for decheckusering our current checkusers, having not considered the Stewards probably would be faster. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 19:37, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see any great advantage to decheckusering the current checkusers. They seem like a good first stop for any call for such services. That stewrds are also available reduces the force of arguments from unavailability for decheckusering. What is the point of this? Tidying? DCDuring TALK 19:47, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't see any advantage in de-checkusering either, but it may behoove us to have at least one checkuser who is fairly active. Purplebackpack89 21:29, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It almost looks as if User:Jusjih was making a point to check in here every month. He missed November in both 2014 and 2015.
Are checkuser powers ever needed urgently? An urgent problem (vandalism, spam) can usually be resolved with a prompt block. I think that checkuser powers are most useful for unblocking, which is usually not quite as urgent a need, though a mistaken block of an IP address in wide legitimate use should be promptly resolved. DCDuring TALK 21:40, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That has been my experience, CU is an after-the-fact cleanup effort rather than an in-the-moment tool. Even the irregular use that it now gets is probably not making much of a difference, in general it is finding associated accounts which are already blocked. Historically it has been used once in the case of a persistent plagiarist, once in the case of a persistent adder of distasteful material, and many, many times to check and see if one account is the sock of another after they are both blocked. If we started getting the kind of automated vandalism which has occurred elsewhere that might change, but history doesn't show any urgent need for local issues. - TheDaveRoss 17:06, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It seems that as long as we have a way of requesting checkuser services from the stewards on the rare occasion that we need it, then there is no reason for us to have local checkusers. --WikiTiki89 21:50, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
From Meta:CheckUser policy:
After gaining consensus (at least 70%-80% in pro/con voting or the highest number of votes in multiple choice elections) in the local community, and with at least 25-30 editors' approval, the successful candidate should request access at Steward requests/Permissions with a link to the page with the community's decision. If there are an insufficient number of votes for at least two CheckUsers on a wiki, there will be no CheckUsers on that wiki.
Can we muster 25 editors' approval of two candidates or even that many participants in a vote? DCDuring TALK 22:11, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
IOW, we need 6 more votes for a single candidate than the Chuck-Entz-for-bureaucrat vote has garnered so far to result in us being allowed to have that candidate as checkuser. DCDuring TALK 03:26, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The Reconstruction namespace has been created[edit]

The Reconstruction namespace has been created and we should begin the work to move the pages from the Appendix. --WikiTiki89 17:20, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@wikitiki89: Like this: Reconstruction:Proto-Indo-European/ḱwṓ? Also, the name for the talk namespace is "Reconstruction talk," with the extraneous comma. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:25, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I was just about to say that, the extra comma is I suppose an error in a MediaWiki: page somewhere. Renard Migrant (talk) 17:26, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Wikitiki89: Also, for some reason, they are not showing up in the appropriate categories. E.g. Category:Proto-Indo-European lemmas. I'm literally walking out the door for work or else I'd investigate myself. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 17:56, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The modules need to be updated for the categories to work (since most of them check whether the namespace is main or "Appendix:" before adding a category). Also, the actual moves can more easily and consistently be done by bot, so don't bother doing them manually. --WikiTiki89 18:16, 7 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The talk namespace name has been fixed, so we can now start moving all the pages. —CodeCat 18:04, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@CodeCat Did we decide we wanted the language name in the title or not? I thought we were leaning towards “Reconstruction:ḱwṓ” with a PIE section, but I may have missed the change in thinking. —JohnC5 22:14, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
We haven't voted on that. In either case, we should move everything to the RC namespace before reorganizing the pages. --WikiTiki89 22:18, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
If we are intending to leave redirects from Appendix to Reconstruction, I would recommend moving over any redirects first and moving regular pages only after that. Otherwise it will be hard to tell moved pages apart from actual redirects. —CodeCat 22:23, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, that makes sense. --WikiTiki89 22:26, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Is someone going to do this? —CodeCat 16:36, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I always assumed you were going to. Since you usually do these kinds of things. If you can't I can do it, but my bot isn't even approved yet, because I've never used it for anything significant. --WikiTiki89 16:46, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe assuming wasn't such a good idea, as I didn't really intend to do it, I figured someone else would. Am I now required to do it? o.0 —CodeCat 16:51, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
No, you're not required. As I said, I can do it, but my bot will need to be approved in the process. --WikiTiki89 17:25, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Useful linguistic and other resources[edit]

Some other Wiktionaries keep lists of useful language resources, e.g. the Russian list: Викисловарь:Список литературы. Similar project pages exist in German, French, Portuguese and Spanish Wiktionaries (see interwikis on the Russian page). --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 03:52, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yep, for the French one: Wiktionnaire:Références -- Noé (talk) 11:15, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
This would be really useful for enwiktionary. —Aryamanarora (मुझसे बात करो) 15:15, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I thought we did have such a list, albeit since I can't remember what it's called that's not a very helpful statement! About pages have them, such as Wiktionary:About English (and so on). Renard Migrant (talk) 17:27, 10 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It's like policy pages. The policies change, the documents change. The English Wiktionary is much more dynamic, has more active users and there's no point having references for languages no-one's working with. I am sure dead links will be noticed and removed quickly here. "Word of the day" failed miserably in the Russian Wiktionary because they have less users and their activities and interests differ. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад)|
We have WT:SEA, but that's a list of where to find uses of words, rather than where to find mentions / dictionaries. - -sche (discuss) 23:02, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

An IEG proposal for Wiktionary rejected[edit]

Hi all,

I am quite sad to announce that my Wikiproject Siriono proposal was rejected. It was a project wrote by a linguist to integrate is own lexical database about an endangered language spoke in Bolivia from FLEx software to Wiktionary and a plan to go back there in Bolivia to teach the speakers how to read and contribute to the Spanish edition of Wiktionary. The project was not so much to make them new contributors but to show that Wiktionary can be a great tool for people working on endangered languages, not only has a database to archive the language but also as a collaborative tool to make the language and the dictionary a commons property. The decision to reject this project is the following: 

Without a better understanding of how data transfer from FLEx to Wiktionary would work, and in light of the fact that current Wiktionary capabilities are perhaps too narrow to broadly accommodate the needs of linguistic researchers, we are concerned that this project would not scale. When weighing the high cost of funding the project team’s travel to Bolivia against concerns about the potential for long-term impact, we felt that this project was not ultimately a good fit with Wikimedia’s scope at this time. You might consider the possibility of resubmitting your proposal in the future as a more narrowly focused pilot investigating the feasibility of data transfer between Wiktionary and FLEx, and establishing best practices for accommodating linguistic research on Wiktionary.

This led me to write some observations about this decision, and I invite you to read it. I also want to focus on one point here: external communication. It appears that goals and achievement of Wiktionaries are not known outside of the project. We are very happy or proud about some of our actions but no one know about that! We realize that since few months in the French Wiktionary and we are experimenting some change on this aspect. I am very interested to know what is going on in the English Wiktionary. So, for a brief résumé, we did talks in conferences like lexicographers meetings or days about open projects, we participated in editathons (like in November about Art in Renaissance), we started a monthly news magazine like SignPost for Wiktionary and we have public meetings/workshops every months in Lyon, France. Is there similar initiatives for English Wiktionary? Thank you for letting me know, I'll be glad to mention that in our Actualités Noé (talk) 12:49, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Noé, thanks for sharing, I watched one of the talks, great to the see the French Wiktionary's efforts to make the project more known externally. Not sure if there is anything comparable in the English project, but when I do come across publications or talks it is often in an academic context. I'd suspect that the French and English communities are very different, the French one being smaller, more homogeneous and less geographically distributed helps to launch initiatives like these. That said there's no reason not to do something similar over here. Wiktionary is a fantastic resource and deserves more visibility (and contributions, obviously). It would also be interesting if you could share the results of the initiatives you mentioned, to see what works and what does not. Jberkel (talk) 14:35, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks for your comment. I made a new category on Commons for our slides: Category:Wiktionary presentations in French. I agree about the differences between the French Wiktionary and English Wiktionary, but what we did was mainly due to two people, because they became to live in the same city, Lyon, where a bunch of great people live, including half a dozen of pro-Wiktionary Wikipedian. It was a very specific occasion that led us to start so much things in a short period of time. We are writing a first "annual report" for Wiktionary, I think we will translate it in English and include some words about our initiatives and the results. Thanks for the suggestion. Noé (talk) 17:15, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
For information, note that, in 2012, the French Minister of Culture has launched a common project with Wikimedia France, and has mentioned the French "Wiktionnaire" in her allocution before mentioning Wikipedia...: http://www.culturecommunication.gouv.fr/Presse/Discours/Lancement-DBpedia-en-francais-et-inauguration-de-Semanticpedia
A future project for the semantization of the Wiktionnaire was also envisioned : http://www.wikimedia.fr/signature-du-partenariat-semanticpedia-avec-le-minist%C3%A8re-de-la-culture-et-inria Lmaltier (talk) 18:32, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm disappointed to see the project was not funded, especially for what seems to be trivial reasons for a minor part of the project, and without the committee requested further information where they had concerns. I hope you can address their issues and still get the project to go ahead. Looks like a very worthwhile project so I hope you can still get it to happen. Pengo (talk) 22:20, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Dead links[edit]

What are some common practices when dealing with dead links in references? I was recently editing nonplussed and noticed that the one of the links in the references is no longer valid. I tried to see if it had moved, but no luck, content is gone. Last resort was web.archive.org, which still has a copy. Is replacing the original URL with a link to the archived version acceptable? Or should we have a separate template parameter in {{cite-web}}? – Jberkel (talk) 14:49, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

To answer my own question, I've just noticed that {{quote-web}} already has archiveurl and archivedate parameters. –Jberkel (talk) 14:56, 8 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

People using Template:inherited for derivations from roots[edit]

I'm already seeing many entries in Category:Terms inherited from Proto-Indo-European that don't belong there. The template should only be used when there is a direct line of inheritance from the ancestral term (its paradigm) to the current one. Any derivational processes in between rule out inheritance, because it's not that form that was inherited but a form derived from it. This excludes roots from being called "inherited" altogether; any cases where this template is used to anything but a clear ancestral lemma should be removed and converted to {{der}}. It appears that User:Embryomystic is responsible for a fair number of these. —CodeCat 19:22, 9 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Proposal: Rewriting "Part of speech or other descriptor" in WT:EL[edit]

Proposal: Rewriting WT:EL#The part of speech or other descriptor (a subsection of "The entry core") like this.

Please point out any mistakes or omissions in the proposed text. Thanks.

Current text:

The part of speech or other descriptor
Main article: Wiktionary:Entry layout explained/POS headers

This is usually a level-3 header but may be a higher-level header when multiple etymologies or pronunciations are a factor. This header most often shows the part of speech, but is not restricted to “parts of speech” in the traditional sense. Many other descriptors are allowed, like “Proper noun”, “Idiom”, “Abbreviation”, “Symbol”, “Prefix”, “Prepositional phrase”,[1] etc.

References
  1. ^ pl-2010-01/Allow "Prepositional phrase" as a POS header

Proposed text:

Part of speech or other descriptor

Part of speech may be a misnomer, but it seemed to make sense when it was first chosen. Each entry has one or more part of speech sections. In each POS section, there is a headword line, followed by the definitions themselves. The POS sections are most frequently level 3, except they should be 4th or higher-level for terms that have multiple numbered etymologies or pronunciations.

Allowed POS headers:

  • Parts of speech: Adjective, Adverb, Article, Classifier, Conjunction, Contraction, Counter, Determiner, Interjection, Noun, Partciple, Particle, Postposition, Preposition, Pronoun, Proper noun, Verb
  • Morphemes: Suffix, Prefix, Interfix, Circumfix, Combining form
  • Symbols and characters: Symbol, Letter, Syllable, Number, Punctuation mark, Diacritical mark
  • Phrases: Phrase, Proverb, Prepositional phrase[1]
  • Han characters and language-specific varieties: Han character, Hanzi, Kanji, Hanja
  • Lojban-specific parts of speech: Cmavo, Brivla, Lujvo, Gismu, Rafsi
  • Cardinal number, Ordinal number, Cardinal numeral, Ordinal numeral
  • Romanization

Other headers can be proposed as new additions to the list. The use of nonstandard POS headers may cause an entry to be categorized in a cleanup category for further inspection.

Some POS headers are explicitly disallowed:

  • Abbreviation, Acronym, Initialism
  • "(POS) form": Verb form, Noun form, etc.
  • "(POS) phrase": Noun phrase, Verb phrase, etc. (with the exception of Prepositional phrase)
  • "(attribute) (POS)": Transitive verb, Personal pronoun, etc. (with the exception of Proper noun)
  • "(POS) (number)": Noun 1, Noun 2, etc.
  • Idiom, Ligature, Clitic, Gerund
References
  1. ^ pl-2010-01/Allow "Prepositional phrase" as a POS header

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 13:44, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Created Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-12/Part of speech. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 12:51, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Entry name section 2[edit]

FYI: I created Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-12/Entry name section 2.

Proposal: Further editing the "Entry name" section in WT:EL. The purpose of this new vote is to address at least one point brought up at the previous vote: Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-10/Entry name section#Oppose. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 23:42, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Borrowings[edit]

I have seen {{bor}} being added to the start of a lot of Etymology sections recently and I'm confused about how this is supposed to be deployed. It is really the case that we are now supposed to use it for every English word not descended directly from Old English? Has this been written into the guidelines somewhere? Ƿidsiþ 09:02, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

{{bor}} is intended for direct borrowings from another language. It wouldn't apply in all cases of words not descended directly from Old English; in particular, a word formed during the Modern English period from another English word would use neither {{bor}} (direct borrowing) nor {{inh}} (direct inheritance), but {{der}} (misc. derivation). This is documented in the documentation to the various templates. Benwing2 (talk) 09:07, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, apologies, I see that this is covered in the documentation. Never mind. Ƿidsiþ 09:09, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Chopped declension tables[edit]

I just noticed through my knackered haze that both Dutch and Finnish declension tables seem to have lost most of their information, making Wiktionary a great deal more useless, unless you're actually awake and know the grammar of the language on top. How did that come to pass? Korn [kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n] (talk) 12:57, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Check if your Javascript is running properly, because there should be a link ([more ▼]) to expand the table. — Ungoliant (falai) 13:00, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Fixed, thank you very much. Interesting system. Korn [kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n] (talk) 13:07, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Did they lack the "more" button? This happens to me sometimes. --Dixtosa (talk) 19:55, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Shouldn't they be automatically expanded if javascript is inactivated? DTLHS (talk) 19:56, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, but not if JavaScript errors out in the middle. --WikiTiki89 20:25, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It happens to me very frequently that all collapsible boxes are broken when the page first loads, but when I refresh they all work. --WikiTiki89 20:24, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
That happens with me as well. I suspect it's a race condition that is triggered when you accidentally mouse over one of them before the script is fully loaded. It might be that it calls some event handler, which crashes because it's not initialised yet. —CodeCat 20:26, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

For those wondering: I have some unknown error, which might be anything from a hardware kink to a too old browser version, which sometimes swallows actions on certain websites, including this one. I had tried clicking the "more"-button for the Dutch ones but there was no reaction, then I assumed the more-button would simply pop out the chopped version from a collapsed alternative. After being told today I tried it again and it came out after I clicked it for a second time. So for me the error was pure chance. Korn [kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n] (talk) 23:52, 14 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

NORM: 10 proposals[edit]

Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-11/NORM: 10 proposals was scheduled to last for 3 months. 1 month passed, 2 months remain.

FYI:

  • The proposal 8 in particular (Adding this rule to WT:NORM: # No multiple spaces in a row.) has currently no consensus (Support-Oppose-Abstain: 3-2-1 [non-abstainers: 60%-40%]) and I think could benefit from more votes.
  • All other proposals currently seem like they would pass, albeit with few voters: 3 to 5 support votes, and 0 to 2 oppose votes. For multiple-option proposals, at least one option seems like it would pass.
  • Overall, 10 different people voted.

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 08:03, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

WT:EL new votes[edit]

I created some new votes to edit parts of WT:EL:

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 14:44, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

oh, give us a rest )). --Dixtosa (talk) 17:59, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Dixtosa: I wish I was King of Wiktionary, then I would edit WT:EL and make it official by royal decree.
BTW, your title text seems well hidden, people might think you are really upset by the votes! =P --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:49, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm, votes... I think I am starting to perceive one of the potential issues with donating money to contributors! Equinox ◑ 20:51, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Is that serious? I thought the Enlarge your edit count today! Discover how! real threat would be placing ads in the text for money. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 20:57, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Dixtosa: Haha, that title text. —Aryamanarora (मुझसे बात करो) 23:29, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Is it possible to create diffs for proposed wording changes? Would be a little bit easier to read. – Jberkel (talk) 23:55, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I promise I'll make diffs right before starting the votes. If I made them now, they would have to be redone every time someone edits the votes. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 06:25, 16 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
To be honest I just don't have the patience to familiarize myself with 16 new proposals or 26 including the 10 norm ones. And of course I can't vote without reading them. Renard Migrant (talk) 11:28, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Maybe it would have been better making just one big vote with the proposal of "rewrite EL completely"? (The downside is that it would probably fail if there's one little thing in one section that people oppose to.)
I'm thinking, if there are any votes with 10 or less participants by the end date, I would extend them by a month. That way, the most popular votes would finish first and people would have extra time to vote on the less popular ones. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 11:34, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Long Now Foundation blogpost on Wiktionary[edit]

http://blog.longnow.org/02015/12/04/getting-wiktionary-into-panlex/ – an interesting read. —Aryamanarora (मुझसे बात करो) 00:58, 16 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I'm glad someone besides us is trying to do it. I wonder how the Wikidata project looks at it. DCDuring TALK 01:43, 16 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

"Tags: fewer-L2s, no-L2-L3" What does this mean?[edit]

On a recent edit I got tagged with "fewer-L2s, no-L2-L3." Searching in help and community portals afforded no further information. What do these tags mean and what am I supposed to do about them? --Johanna-Hypatia (talk) 18:32, 16 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

About this edit: https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=semulajadi&diff=prev&oldid=35540269
You removed the ==Malay== part. It is an L2 (level 2) header, hence "fewer L2s" and "no L2". Someone else restored it. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 18:34, 16 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Thank you. This is clear and to the point. --18:41, 16 December 2015 (UTC)Johanna-Hypatia (talk)
I have added some explanations to Special:Tags (which can be reached from pages such as those that show changes ("diffs") by clicking on "Tag" on such pages). I don't understand the conditions under which the diff is labelled with certain of the tags. Perhaps someone could add explanations for "no-L2-L3", "new-user-page", "bad-lede" and "ref-no-references". I could guess at them, but a well-informed (but simple) explanation would be better. DCDuring TALK 00:49, 18 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Done.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:42, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Really getting frustrated with the user-unfriendliness of this place[edit]

I'm no newcomer; I've been contributing to Wiktionary for 5½ years. Yet more and more I hit a wall around here when I try to contribute something; it's getting hard to believe how user-unfriendly this place is. When I try to search the help files and community portals, I rarely find any explanation of what I need to make a successful edit (let alone a new page), and much rarer still is any information I can readily understand. I can feel my blood pressure rising every time I go up against the opacity of the technical demands here.

I do a lot more editing at Wikipedia than here, even though my real love is lexicography. If I could find it feasible, I would be contributing here far more, and as a professional linguist I have plenty to contribute, if it weren't so frustrating trying to accomplish even simple functions.

How does anyone ever learn how to work this thing? --Johanna-Hypatia (talk) 18:40, 16 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

We are currently actively working on getting WT:ELE (which describes how entries should be formatted) up to date. Hopefully then it will be easier for newcomers. The problem is essentially that Wikipedia has far more contributors, and thus far more people who are willing to update the help pages. The way it basically works now is trial and error. You make an edit, some more knowledgeable corrects it, and you learn from these corrections. Oftentimes, these more knowledgeable editors are also lazy and will just revert your edit. In these cases, just try to communicate with them and have them explain to you what you did wrong. It's a learning process. --WikiTiki89 18:57, 16 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Basically the problem is that Wiktionary is a constantly evolving programmable database, built on the wrong platform (a wiki) with poor separation of data and its display, with no goal or vision for its development, making documentation basically impossible. The efforts to update some of the basic documentation pages are laudable. Thanks especially to Daniel Carrero and others who are working on these docs and building consensus around them. But I feel the real problem is that the templates are all constantly evolving, with small improvements, with no end goal or overall vision or timeline for how they should work across languages. Trying to document a changing system is basically impossible unless one of three things happen: 1. the people making the changes are meticulous in updating documentation (which they probably will never be), or 2. we create a document of how we want editing to work in 6 months time and base both the documentation and the template work around that (which would probably be much too restrictive for a wiki), or 3. for two(?) months we let templates develop and evolve freely, and then spend one(?) month under a "feature freeze" where we focus on bug fixes, consistency, usability, and documentation of what we have. Basically, consider using the model of open source software development, where there are periods of innovation followed by periods of "feature freeze" to create "stable" or "release" versions which are well documented. Of course without any fulltime staff and with a drop-in and drop-out system of editors I don't really think there's much hope of achieving this if it's even considered desirable, but it's the main way I imagine we could really create a stable "this is how Wiktionary works" document. While I think we can make great strides in getting the broad brushstrokes of documentation better and cleaned up, I feel like more comprehensive documentation that really would let someone new get into detailed editing (without having to ape the templates and formatting of other pages) would really take a radical shift in how we go about developing Wiktionary. (Another idea would be to look at statistical usage of headings, templates, etc and take those into consideration when writing documentation or even finding ways to suggest possible templates and headings to use within the wiki editor more... but that's another rant) Also I feel a bit like I'm just shooting the breeze here, and we'd make a lot of progress if we occassionally got a bunch of Wiktionary editors into a voice/video conference instead of only discussing stuff endlessly in text. Pengo (talk) 09:25, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Another problem, if you work in multiple languages, is that templates for one language often require arguments to be in a different format from equivalent templates for another language. For example, some templates need gender to be entered as "|m" or "|f", while other templates need "|g=m" or "|g=f". Johanna-Hypatia, I think you would pick it up quickly if you asked more questions here (for questions that are difficult to search). —Stephen (Talk) 10:47, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
All of which should have happened 13 years ago. How are you going to make these kinds of changes to something with over 4 million continuously edited pages and no real leadership? DTLHS (talk) 23:16, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I agree completely with you, sometimes I wonder how Wiktionary manages to get any contributions at all. We're using a system which is stuck in the past, already highly user-unfriendly on its own. Then it has grown over time without design or planning, which explains the inconsistency between languages. There are some common shared practices, but they might be different in various sub-communities / languages. There's no benevolent dictator enforcing rules, it's largely based around consensus.
I also agree with Pengo that we need to treat Wiktionary more as software / API, with a focus on consistency and documentation. This should be based on current usage, we could try to formalize the current "standard" usage patterns which have emerged over time (e.g. templates requiring gender expect it as second parameter). But even after doing that you still need to convert existing usage to modern form, which is easy to do in normal codebases but requires writing and running a custom bot over here.
I presume that as a side-effect of missing documentation a lot of new editors work by copying patters and structure of existing entries. This itself is not always a problem, but sometimes leads to bad practices getting multiplicated. To counter this I suggest we create (or nominate) something like "featured" entries, maybe one per language (the most common ones at least) and per POS. They could serve as a model for good formatting, content and so on. The documentation could then gradually get updated around these model entries, to make sure we document exactly what is needed and desired. I imagine an interactive source of an entry where clicking on the templates opens directly the documentation, and explains in plain English what the template does and what kind of input it expects. – Jberkel (talk) 12:19, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Part of it's the blasted votes. Practices change over time but to document those changes you need to get them through a vote where 66% approval rating is deemed a fail. So stuff like WT:CFI and WT:EL don't get updated because it's just too hard. I've literally given up, but making changes in editorial practice is not only easy, it happen naturally as people learn and people come and go. It's inevitable. Renard Migrant (talk) 12:29, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) I really feel with Hypatia. The nuts and bolts of this page, including the help pages, are made by people so versed in what they do, that they seem to have forgotten that the baby steps even exist.
An very simple example from Wiktionary:Entry_layout:
A very simple example
This is a simple entry for the word bed, and shows the most fundamental elements of an entry:
a word’s language (as a level 2 heading),
The page did not explain the word 'level 2 heading' anywhere. Now sure, this is easy to pick up from the context, but isn't the very point of tutorials that they tell you things rather than requiring you to pick things up yourself? The further you get in, the more you have to have picked up, and the more you have to actually piece together yourself, the more pointless it feels to work through a tutorial text block. I remember that some years ago, when I was trying to do something as simple as a collapsible table, it took ages and I think I even ended up on another page entirely (MediaWiki). There is not even an option to search the Help Pages for a topic, and if there is, I don't know of it despite years of being here, which then would be the first problem. So you have to work yourself from section to section stuffed with terms you don't know. Again, this is all doable if you're dedicated, but needlessly frustrating and not necessarily leading to useful results. Now, it's easy for me to say what has to be done when I know I don't have any of the knowledge required to do it, but if it's easier to just copy-paste something without knowing how it works, then the help pages have failed their task entirely. Also: Template standardisation. Korn [kʰʊ̃ːæ̯̃n] (talk) 12:33, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Korn: I amended the vote Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-12/Headings with an explanation of what exactly is a level 2 heading, per your comments "The page did not explain the word 'level 2 heading' anywhere. Now sure, this is easy to pick up from the context, but isn't the very point of tutorials that they tell you things rather than requiring you to pick things up yourself?" --Daniel Carrero (talk) 12:53, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think it would help if WT:ELE, WT:CFI and Template:welcome were less rambly and more straight-to-the-point. — Ungoliant (falai) 13:23, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with you. I'm trying to see what I can do to that effect. Especially on Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-12/Translations, I've been trying to remove comments/opinions and repeated information, and get to the rules already. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 14:08, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
WT:EL is too rambly because it's trying to fill too many purposes. It's how to read an entry, an intro to editing, some lexicography theory, a rough specification for the data format of Wiktionary entries, a summary page of other more detailed WT:EL subpages (which we need more of), a list of templates and headings and their syntax and order, wikitext examples, and guidelines, and justifications for why things are the way they are, and a summary of voted-on rules, etc, etc. It's trying to be about all languages, but at the same time it's largely about English. All these areas are important, but they should largely be separate documents (especially how to read wiktionary entries, and the intro to editing) or should be covered comprehensively in deep slices, (e.g. If I want to edit "Descendants" then I want a page with an intro, examples, common practices, guidelines, etc just for the "Descendants" heading, while EL gives the topic a single sentence, but it would be too much to stuff more into EL), I see WT:EL as a 1000 ft overview that branches out into many subpages or related docs. It kinda does that, but it's also kinda trying to be comprehensive, and an introductory guide, and an official "Wiktionary policy" and "guideline" and "common practices page.", etc. It needs to be a summary-style document like the layout of "Human" or other similarly broad articles on Wikipedia. And we need to work out which parts actually need to require voting to be changed. For the most part, so long as it doesn't contradict the policies that were voted on, or suggest rules where there are none, it seems like it should mostly be freely editable. Pengo (talk) 09:17, 18 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

What IdeaLab campaigns do you want to see?[edit]

Hey folks. I’m seeking your help to decide on topics for new IdeaLab campaigns that could be run starting next year. These campaigns are designed to attract proposals from Wikimedia project contributors that address a broad gap or area of need in Wikimedia projects.

Here’s how to participate:

With thanks,

I JethroBT (WMF), Community Resources, Wikimedia Foundation. 23:02, 17 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Lab schmab. Someone was supposed to be doing a tool that would make it easy to add audio pronunciations. Whatever happened to that? Equinox ◑ 07:17, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I might be able to help. How do you vision it working?--Dixtosa (talk) 18:39, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well, the reason I stopped doing it was because of the number of steps in the process: i.e. record a sound on my local computer (I used GoldWave); manually trim any leading and trailing space; manually reduce noise (probably not necessary with a good headset, but at the time I used a free-standing microphone); give it a filename according to Mediawiki naming requirements; upload it to Mediawiki with licence information (I used a tool called "Commonist" or "Communist" or something...?); and finally add it in to the Wiktionary entry using markup. Equinox ◑ 02:11, 21 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Extension:PronunciationRecording was never finished. No one seems to be working on it now. --Yair rand (talk) 03:57, 21 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Get involved in Wikipedia 15![edit]

This is a message from the Wikimedia Foundation. Translations are available.

As many of you know, January 15 is Wikipedia’s 15th Birthday!

People around the world are getting involved in the celebration and have started adding their events on Meta Page. While we are celebrating Wikipedia's birthday, we hope that all projects and affiliates will be able to utilize this celebration to raise awareness of our community's efforts.

Haven’t started planning? Don’t worry, there’s lots of ways to get involved. Here are some ideas:

Everything is linked on the Wikipedia 15 Meta page. You’ll find a set of ten data visualization works that you can show at your events, and a list of all the Wikipedia 15 logos that community members have already designed.

If you have any questions, please contact Zachary McCune or Joe Sutherland.

Thanks and Happy nearly Wikipedia 15!
-The Wikimedia Foundation Communications team

Posted by the MediaWiki message delivery, 20:58, 18 December 2015 (UTC) • Please help translate to your language • Help[reply]

Wikimania 2016: call for proposals is open![edit]

Dear users,
the call for proposals for Wikimania 2016 is open! All the members of the Wikimedia projects, researchers and observers are invited to propose a critical issue to be included in the programme of the conference, which will be held in Italy, in Esino Lario, from June 21 to 28.
Through this call we only accept what we call critical issues, i.e. proposals aiming at presenting problems, possible solutions and critical analysis about Wikimedia projects and activities in 18 minutes. These proposals do not need to target newbies, and they can assume attendees to already have a background knowledge on a topic (community, tech, outreach, policies...).
To submit a presentation, please refer to the Submissions page on the Wikimania 2016 website. Deadline for submitting proposals is 7th January 2016 and the selection of these proposals will be through a blind peer-reviewed process. Looking forward to your proposals. --Yiyi (talk) 10:23, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The deadline for the call for proposals for Wikimania 2016 has been moved on 17th January 2016, so you have 10 days to submit you proposal(s). To submit a presentation, please refer to the Submissions page on the Wikimania 2016 website. --Yiyi (talk) 09:31, 7 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Quorum proposal[edit]

If no one minds, I have the intention of extending by 1 month any vote that has less than 10 participants by the end date and has not been extended yet; except bot votes.

Starting with this one (currently 5 participants): Wiktionary:Votes/2015-11/Language-specific rfi categories

(I'm also open to other ideas concerning rules to extend votes, this is just what I currently think would be good, I wouldn't want to close a vote with few participants)

Previous discussion: Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2015/November#About the active votes.

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 14:09, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think every vote should have quorum predefined. --Dixtosa (talk) 19:27, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Dan Polansky: Last month I extended Wiktionary:Votes/2015-10/Matched-pair naming format: left, space, right when I could have closed it with 5:0:0. In this discussion, you said this was "very acceptable". But I know you said that about that vote alone (a discretionary extension); you never said anything about supporting a whole policy of extending all votes with 5:0:0 or less.
But, maybe it would be nice having some kind of rule allowing the extension of votes with few participants. Rule or no rule, I've already stated my intention of doing it on my own if/when needed, if no one minds. Since I created 15+ votes to edit EL recently, I would like to give people time to think on each proposal if/when needed. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 21:58, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
My objection is not against a rule allowing extensions but rather against a rule forcing extensions. I fear that votes that can easily pass will instead linger, waiting for the quorum of 10. For instance, here is Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2013-09/Wikisaurus and attestation, which I do not think should have been extended.
There is another thing you mentioned. There should never be too many votes on WT:VOTE, IMHO. I think like 10 is the maximum. The vote principle includes the principle of drawing attention to things, but if there are too many things being drawn attention to, the attention gets diluted. I feel you have recently added too many votes. --Dan Polansky (talk)
I take your point about allowing vs. forcing extensions.
About too many votes: I wanted to try and propose revisions to most of WT:EL quickly if possible. I've thought about other possibilities (creating a single vote with WT:EL revised completely, or creating fewer votes to edit 2 or 3 sections at a time, or creating like 8 separate votes today and 8 next month, etc.) The current state is what I thought of as best. Feel free to suggest how I could have done differently.
P.S.: I have in mind creating a vote about changing the order of sections in WT:EL, as I believe "Etymology" and "Pronunciation" should not be above "The entry core", but this one perhaps I should create after the other votes have finished. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:23, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-12/Entry name section 2 started, by the way. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:30, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Also I'm tired of seeing people complaining about how hard it is to update WT:EL because it's locked. What they say is true, but I want to update EL anyway, hence the votes. Probably we could update WT:CFI too and double the number of active votes, who knows. If WT:EL is so out of date, messy, has contradictory statements, etc. and the only way to fix it is by vote, let's make the most of it. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 05:06, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Password Strength RFC[edit]

Hello

We have started an RFC on meta to increase password requirements for users that have accounts which can edit MediaWiki:Common.js, have access to checkuser or have access to Oversight.

These types of accounts have sensitive access to our sites, and can cause real harm if they fall into malicious hands. Currently the only requirement is the password is at least 1 letter long. We would like to make the minimum be 8 letters (bytes) long and also ban certain really common passwords.

By increasing requirements on passwords for accounts with high levels of access, we hope to make Wikimedia wikis more secure for everyone. Please read the full text of the proposal here, and make your voice heard at the RFC.

Thank you

(On behalf of the WMF security team) BWolff (WMF) (talk) 07:25, 21 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Delivered using the distribution list

Community Wishlist Survey[edit]

Hi everyone,

The 2015 Community Wishlist Survey is over, and now the Community Tech team's work begins on the top 10 features and fixes.

In November and December 2015, we invited contributors from all Wikimedia projects to submit proposals for what they would like the Community Tech team to work on for the purpose of improving or producing curation and moderation tools for active contributors.

634 people participated in the survey, where they proposed, discussed and voted on 107 ideas. There was a two-week period in November to submit and endorse proposals, followed by two weeks of voting. The top 10 proposals with the most support votes now become the Community Tech team's backlog of projects to evaluate and address.

You can see the whole list with links to all the proposals and Phabricator tickets on this page: 2015 Community Wishlist Survey.

For everybody who proposed, endorsed, discussed, debated and voted in the survey, as well as everyone who said nice things to us recently: thank you very much for coming out and supporting live feature development. We're excited about the work ahead of us. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:35, 21 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

How should participles be structured?[edit]

Russian participles are currently a mess. Some of them declare the part of speech as "Verb", some as "Participle". Some are placed in Category:Russian participles, some aren't; some are placed in Category:Russian verb forms, some aren't; some are placed in more specific categories such as Category:Russian past active participles, some aren't. Questions:

  1. Should the part of speech be "Verb" or "Participle"?
  2. Should they go into a specific category such as Category:Russian past active participles?
  3. Should they go into Category:Russian participles, and should it be instead of or in addition to a more specific category?
  4. Should they go into Category:Russian verb forms, and should it be instead of or in addition to a more specific category?

The same thing goes for participles more generally, which is why I'm bringing the issue up here. My instinct is that, for Russian at least, they should go into all three categories. (Keep in mind that there are 7 different types of participles in Russian: present active, past active, present passive, past passive, present adverbial, past adverbial, and short past adverbial, and it makes some sense to group them together.)

Also, currently there are various ways of declaring the headword and the definition line:

  1. If you declare the headword as {{head|ru|verb form|head=FOO}}, it goes into Category:Russian verb forms.
  2. if you declare the headword as {{head|ru|past active participle|head=FOO}}, it goes into Category:Russian past active participles, but not into the more general Category:Russian participles, nor into Category:Russian verb forms; instead, Category:Russian past active participles itself is nested within Category:Russian participles, which in turn is nested within Category:Russian verb forms.
  3. If you declare the definition as {{past active participle of|FOO|lang=ru}}, it goes into Category:Russian past active participles, but not into the more general Category:Russian participles.
  4. If you declare the definition using the putatively equivalent {{inflection of|FOO||past|act|part|lang=ru}}, it doesn't go into any categories.

So I can get a participle into two of the three potential categories by putting either {{head|ru|verb form|head=FOO}} or {{head|ru|participle|head=FOO}} in the headword and something like {{past active participle of|FOO|lang=ru}} into the definition line. If I want all three, I either have to manually insert e.g. Category:Russian participles or roll my own {{ru-past active participle of}}.

So this leads to more questions:

  1. How should the headword line be structured?
  2. How should the definition line be structured?
  3. As mentioned above, Russian has 7 types of participles. The 3 adverbial participles don't have corresponding parts of speech defined in Module:category tree/poscatboiler/data/non-lemma forms; there is just the more general "adverbial participles". Should I define "present adverbial participles" and "past adverbial participles"? What about "short past adverbial participles"?
  4. What about Category:Russian past participles and Category:Russian present participles? Someone created these, and they're partly populated. My instinct here is that they should be deleted and the entries within them reclassified, since there isn't really a single "past participle" or "present participle", but instead there are distinct active and passive variants. But conceivably e.g. the parent of "past active participle" in the category tree data could be "past participle" or "active participle" or both, instead of just "participle" as it is now.

Finally, a general question:

  1. Should participles be lemmas, or non-lemma forms? They are currently non-lemma forms. The tricky issues are that (a) participles mostly have predictable meaning, which suggests they should be non-lemmas, but (b) they can themselves be declined and have "participle forms", which suggests they should maybe be lemmas; (c) they are frequently lemmatized into nouns or adjectives; (d) some participles (e.g. the past passive in Russian) don't exist for every verb and have a somewhat unpredictable form, which is kind of lemma-ish.

Benwing2 (talk) 05:00, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

{{look}}

Thanks, Benwing2. It may be further complicated by imperfective/perfective participles, if we want to categorise those as well. @Wikitiki89, Cinemantique, any suggestions? --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 00:57, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Order of headings[edit]

Please see the order of headings at Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-12/Headings and see if I made any mistake. Thanks. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 17:33, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Please see also Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-12/Part of speech and see if I forgot any POS header. Thanks. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 01:14, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Alt forms BEFORE the definition?[edit]

Seems to me it'd make so much more sense if alt forms were listed AFTER the definition. Purplebackpack89 22:43, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I tend to agree. Alternative forms and synonyms should be listed together, even if in separate headers, IMO. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:52, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
@Purplebackpack89 At WP, if one comes to an entry by a redirect, there is a small bit of text that says "(Redirect from [other page])" or ""[other page]" redirects here. For other uses, see other [otherpage] (disambiguation)." Alternative forms serves a similar function. Also, if search software directs a user to an entry with a title that does not exactly correspond to what the user typed, the alternative forms/spellings can give reassurance that the page presented is indeed intended to included the typed spelling. Of course as this doesn't have any statistical backing, it can be dismissed in favor of your opinion, which must have a vast amount of statistical support. DCDuring TALK 22:57, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well, DCDuring, I was looking for a halfway-decent reason why things were the way they were, because it seemed counter-intuitive to common sense. You've given me one. Purplebackpack89 23:42, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think the logic is that things that aren't dependent on the definitions go before them. Etymology, pronunciation and alternative forms supposedly fit that description. Renard Migrant (talk) 23:46, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Some good things may come from looking at things from a user perspective, even in the absence of statistics. DCDuring TALK 00:03, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The reason it was done this way is so that when you arrive at a page after following a hard or soft redirect or a piped link, seeing the form you were actually looking for in the alt forms section confirms that you are on the right page. This is the same reason that the OED lists all alternative forms at the very beginning of the entry. I have no opinion on whether this reason is still relevant. --WikiTiki89 00:12, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I find it interesting that in entries like tea cup, tea-cup and teacup, when we have an "Alternative forms" section in a language section, we usually don't use {{also}}. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 00:38, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Theoretically we should, but in practice such links are actually more annoying than helpful if there is no other content on those pages than a soft redirect back to where you were. --WikiTiki89 00:52, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm all for moving it below. I get the idea of why it's where it is, and this kind of layout works fine in single-language dictionaries like the OED, but it doesn't feel like it's doing that job especially well here. The section is not styled in any special way that would suggest it's ignorable/skippable/a navigation aid/etc; we rarely use hard redirects so there's little chance of confusion about how the user got to the page; for the most part it only lists obvious variations like tea-cup, teacup, tea cup (by contrast, the OED does not list these "forms" even though it uses them in its quotations); the useful/interesting/confusing alt forms are probably listed in the etymology anyway (e.g. we have no alt forms for "cup", while the OED lists a whole heap, e.g. "cuppe, (ME kuppe), ME–16 cupp, 15– cup, (15 Sc. culp(p))..." and many more—but if we did include these, they'd be within the etymology rather than alt forms anyway); the reader has already read past one "see also" section; it makes it take longer for the reader to find the definitions; and the section "logically" fits with the synonyms, related terms, etc sections —Pengo (talk) 01:52, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
In the entry roleplaying game, the word RPG is repeated both in the "Alternative forms" and the "Synonyms" sections. I've seen other entries where an abbreviation/initialism is listed in the "Alternative forms" section (imperative), the "Synonyms" section (United States of America) and inside the definition (personal computer). It would be nice if all entries followed the same rule. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 04:59, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I forgot to mention: In the entry roleplaying game, "RPG" is repeated 3 times: the 3rd is in the "Derived terms" section. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 13:01, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I would like to know how many instances exist of the various practices: eg, duplication of alt forms in synonyms, inclusion in alt forms of forms found "only" in Middle and Old vintages of a language, duplication between inclusion in {{also}} and in alt forms of the first L2 section etc. To some extent such counts would be a kind of Vote about the practices that made sense to a large population of contributors over the life of the project. It would also indicate how our practice has probably shaped habits of whatever normal users we might have. DCDuring TALK 12:04, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I do not consider an initialism to be an alternative form. You should think alternative spelling, and acronyms are not spelled out. DAVilla 23:17, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
  • From the perspective of Japanese entries, I'd like to state a preference for keeping alt forms above the definitions, and below the etymology and pronunciation sections. Japanese alt forms are etymology- and pronunciation-dependent, and often apply equally to all senses listed under a given etymology and pronunciation. Have a look at 骨, 雷, or 五月, or for a more complicated example, 柄.
By way of comparison, Japanese monolingual and bilingual dictionaries list alt forms right at the top of each reading. The convention here at Wiktionary is to split up entries by etymology first with the pronunciation under that, so placing the alternative forms close to the etymology and pronunciation sections hews closest to the organization that Japanese students will encounter in other reference materials.
(I am certainly open to the possibility of allowing entries to be split up by pronunciation first with the etymology under that. However, that is a matter for a separate discussion.)
‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 18:39, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
  • Although I don't often agree with him, I think that Purple has made an excellent point, and we really ought to write up a vote to change this. I think that the Japanese concern is really not a problem, because we still break up entries by etymology, but perhaps individual languages can opt out. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 00:47, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Deletion of l subtemplates[edit]

Do we want to delete l subtemplates as soon as they are unused or what? The longer we leave an used template undeleted, the more likely it is that someone will use it. Renard Migrant (talk) 23:42, 22 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Yes, delete them, IMO. Benwing2 (talk) 07:20, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There are some transclusions I've been unable to locate. I think it's because of <includeonly> tags. I can see myself going through pages one-by-one until I find th templates in question. The good news is it's unlikely to be many templates. Renard Migrant (talk) 12:57, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I can't edit Template:fr-conj. Renard Migrant (talk) 23:37, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I discourage wrapping whole templates/module invocations in includeonly tags for that reason. That, and you should just be able to get an idea of what a template puts out without transcluding it. I've unlocked the template for you to edit. —CodeCat 00:02, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

a simple question re participles[edit]

I think people said "tl;dr" about my previous message.

So, just one question here:

  • Should participles go under a "===Verb===" heading with {{head|ru|verb form|...}} headword line, or a "===Participle===" heading with {{head|ru|participle|...}} headword line?

Benwing2 (talk) 07:19, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I think it should "Participles" header, they are legal here and match what they are. Polish participles also use this header but categories are different. They could be all subcategorised as verb forms. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 08:41, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Hmm. English, Bulgarian and Czech have them under "Verb" (although there are hardly any Czech participles). So there appears to be no consistency. Benwing2 (talk) 16:15, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
It's very hard to define what is a "verb" and what isn't. Participles are derived from verbs, but that doesn't make them verb forms necessarily, just as openness is not an adjective form. I think that "Participle" reflects the fact that the word is not purely verbal, but also has adjectival uses. —CodeCat 16:21, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Category:Russian participles is a subcategory of Category:Russian verb forms, which, I think, could be done for other languages as well if they are not already.--Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 20:53, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
An unmentioned option would be to use the ===Verb=== heading with the {{head|ru|participle}} headword line, putting it in Category:Russian participles. --WikiTiki89 22:16, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I created a template {{ru-participle of}} to serve as a definition line and put the term in the right categories, so this is less of an issue. Benwing2 (talk) 22:29, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Usually, all form-of entries have the same POS header as the what they link to, so I'm inclined to say that if there are no new definitions specific to the participle form, then it should be under a ===Verb=== heading. --WikiTiki89 22:31, 23 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
We should use the header that fits what something is. If they are not purely verbs, they shouldn't be labelled that way. —CodeCat 00:05, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I'm ok with using a ===Participle=== header, and a {{head|ru|participle}} headword line. I agree that these participles aren't exactly verbs; they're either adjectives or adverbs depending on the type of participle, and they get lemmatized accordingly (or sometimes to nouns, i.e. substantivized adjectives). Benwing2 (talk) 00:48, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Here's a related question: Words like используемого (ispolʹzujemovo), which is the masc gen sg of используемый (ispolʹzujemyj), which is both a participle and a lemmatized adjective. What should the part of speech of используемого (ispolʹzujemovo) be? Currently it claims to be a "Participle" and the headword says "participle form". But maybe it should be an adjective? Maybe then, Russian participles should really have the part of speech "Adjective" or "Adverb" depending on which one applies, rather than "Verb" or "Participle"? Benwing2 (talk) 01:28, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The problem with participles is that they're neither solely verbal, nor solely adjectival, but get put to work as one or the other in different syntactic contexts. Participles tend to be used for a variety of different things in different languages: I've seen a lot of participles in Ancient Greek where I would have expected one kind of clause or another in the equivalent English sentence, for instance. They can be nouns, too. There are several verb forms that act like other parts of speech, but they're hard to extricate from the traditional verbal paradigms- if you take out the forms that act like nouns or like adjectives, there's not an awful lot left to the principal parts of the Latin verb. For that matter, what would you do with all the languages where the infinitive is the lemma of the verb, in spite of the fact that it's a verbal noun? Chuck Entz (talk) 04:10, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Deliberate misspelling template[edit]

I propose that a new template be listed at the form of templates page. There is currently a gap or grey area for entries of deliberate misspellings. This misspelling predominantly occurs online for example on websites wherein certain words are blacklisted, or websites with strong vulgarity rules. I would appreciate it if someone creates such a template. thank you. Contrib raati (talk) 10:40, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Do we now have any entries for such misspellings? Could you give any specific examples? Would those examples meet WT:CFI attestation standards? DCDuring TALK 14:20, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
$cientology, mooselimb, Micro$oft, medireview, diabeetus. — Ungoliant (falai) 14:45, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
diabeetus and mooselimb might be considered eye dialect ? —Pengo (talk) 00:10, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There will always be exceptions, and we should have ways of handling exceptions, but not necessarily a template for every situation. DAVilla 23:13, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Context vs. Label[edit]

I was going to do some cleanup work regarding context (or cx) templates which are missing language tags, however I am not sure exactly where they stand. I noticed that Template:label mentions it is a "replacement" for Template:context, ought I replace the template while I am updating the lang= parameter? I can't find any discussion which says what is preferred, and both are used (sometimes in the same entry). - TheDaveRoss 15:24, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

The more important cleanup matter relating to these is how we establish and maintain a distinction between usage context and topic. (Do we all understand the distinction? What is our policy about it? [Ignore the issue in perpetuity? Solve the issue by claiming it doesn't exist? Kick the can down the road?] Should the distinction be made visible?) The issue, as I see it, is that, for example, slang used in the military should not have the same label as terms about, say, military ranks or ship-type names, which are about the military.
Establishing uniform template deployment that does not have any effect visible to passive users seems, erm, of low priority. DCDuring TALK 17:39, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well, my main purpose isn't to swap templates, it is to add the missing language so that the template can categorize. I just figured I would fix two things at once if it made sense to do so. I think you are saying we should have both concepts of context and label, which makes sense to me, but that isn't how these templates appear to be being used at the moment. - TheDaveRoss 18:13, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
No, there is no distinction between {{context}} and {{label}}. There's actually a vote going on now to replace all uses of {{context}} with {{label}}, and it looks like it will pass: Wiktionary:Votes/2015-11/term → m; context → label; usex → ux. So I think you should feel free to replace the template to use {{label}} while you're adding the language code. Benwing2 (talk) 18:17, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
There is a line in WT:BOT#Policy
3. I will ask around for consensus, perhaps at the Beer parlour, or
4. I will make sure that the task is so innocuous that no one could possibly object
If you wanted to stick to the letter of the law, I don't think either of these criteria applies. Renard Migrant (talk) 23:48, 24 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
At this time I was not planning on doing any fully automated tasks, since Template:context is used in a lot of places that it probably shouldn't be. I am using my old bot framework to load the page and generate a suggested edit, then reviewing and updating manually. Actually I am not even doing that yet, since the numerous API changes since the last time I ran this have broken just about every aspect. I do appreciate that this topic does not yet have consensus and thus will only be adding a language for the time being. - TheDaveRoss 22:37, 25 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I apologize for jumping the gun. Benwing2 (talk) 04:25, 25 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Since WT:BOT#Policy doesn't apply to humans, you're welcome to replace label with context (or indeed the other way around) manually. There's no rule against that. Renard Migrant (talk) 21:44, 28 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I went ahead and left it as context, I converted a bunch of cx to context before there was some objection so in the last bunch I left cx as it was as well. - TheDaveRoss 21:53, 28 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Celebrity nicknames[edit]

Wiktionary currently has a policy of not containing entries on individual human names, unless those names are used in an attributive sense to identify something other than the actual named individual (e.g. Benedict Arnold, Jimmy Choo, Ruy Lopez). Human nicknames, however, are also ubiquitous. It is currently argued at Wiktionary:Requests for deletion#Pop nicknames that some nicknames of specific individuals used only to refer to those individuals are within the CFI, primarily where these use abbreviated forms of the first and last name.

In theory, I do not see why this could not also justify the inclusion of any set of initials for any person referred to by their initials more than three times in durably archived sources, including for example MJ (for both Michael Jordan and Michael Jackson), KG (for Kevin Garnett), LT (for both LaDainian Tomlinson and Lawrence Taylor), LJ (for Larry Johnson), RG (for Robert Griffin), JT (Justin Timberlake), and thousands more, at various levels of celebrity. Premising the inclusion of nicknames solely on their being idiomatic in referring to individuals also opens the door to entries for nicknames of individuals like The Round Mound of Rebound, The Big Aristotle, The Chairman of the Board, The Godfather of Soul, The Trickster, Old Fuss and Feathers, and The Grand Old Man of the Army, and taken to its extreme, every nickname adopted by a rapper or professional wrestler, particularly those that are mononyms (Mankind, Everlast, Koncept, Capone, Undertaker, Iceberg, etc.). Is this a direction that we want to go? bd2412 T 18:54, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I created FHC = Brazilian president Fernando Henrique Cardoso a while ago. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 19:21, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know. We have JFK as the president and so do multiple OneLook dicts: “JFK”, in OneLook Dictionary Search.. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:37, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I would suspect that instances can be found of JFK used attributively. Even so, the fact that we have these doesn't necessarily mean that they should exist in a dictionary, or that we don't want to engage in some form of line-drawing as to including some of them. bd2412 T 19:44, 29 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
All the intellectually satisfying lines that we could draw seem likely to suffer from the same problem: they exclude some things that would help a good number of users and include things of virtually no value to anyone. Relying on individual votes puts a burden on active contributors which eventually becomes wearying and often seems to me to be putting personal taste above the likely needs of any realistic assessment of our actual or potential user base. Relying on attestation-based tests, usually my personal preference, is not much better due to the substantial labor potentially involved, especially given the lack of high-capability tools (eg some kind of lexicographer's workstation).
We could add {{no entry}} pseudo-entries for many nicknames and indeed names of individuals. We could add en masse such entries for all individuals with WP articles and for any nicknames of such individuals. We would probably find that we would add some more useful disambiguation pages in the process. I will attempt to convert [[JFK]] into an adequate entry along the lines I suggest. DCDuring TALK 00:01, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think the problem is that avoiding a flood of useless garbage would require a notability criterion, which we have so far avoided. Chuck Entz (talk) 03:43, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know if notability would help. Shaquille O'Neal, doubtlessly highly notable, went through literally dozens of nicknames that would be useless for a dictionary. At the outside, I think we could put them all in an appendix, but it still feels close to having entries on people rather than words. bd2412 T 05:03, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Well clearly the fact that you call them "useless for a dictionary" would make them unnotable to us. Our notability criterion would obviously be different from Wikipedia's, and would apply to the words themselves and not to their referents. Anyway, I'm not sure I would support such a thing. --WikiTiki89 17:20, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Notability of the referent, not of the term. So my mom's nickname (June) doesn't count, because she is not notable (except to me, love you mom!). - TheDaveRoss 17:28, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
What I mean is the notability of that sense of the term, so your mom's nickname wouldn't count, because it is not notable that you call your mom June, despite the notability of the word June. If we used the notability of the referent, then any nickname Shaq's family and friends have for him would automatically be notable. --WikiTiki89 17:32, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I assume that any term, regardless of its referent, will be subject to the CFI with regards to attestation. I thin BD2412's objection is that the notability of the referent is not a great measure of the usefulness of a term. - TheDaveRoss 17:37, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Why not just, 1., hitch a ride on WP's notability criteria for persons, 2., use {{no entry}} for canonical forms of names of such persons, and, 3., limit ourselves to nicknames of these persons, relying on boredom and the effort involved to limit the volume? 4., If WP has a suitable dab page or redirect we could refer to those in a {{no entry}} so that users could still find what they wanted.
Step 2 could be performed by a bot (or upload?), as could Step 4. From within that universe of personal names and nicknames we could decide which ones were worth some effort from us to convert them from {{only in}} pseudoentries to real entries, for whatever lexicographic reason we chose. We could do the same for other classes of proper names or just for some subclass of personal names. DCDuring TALK 19:33, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I think WP's policy is more permissive than we would really like. - TheDaveRoss 19:23, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Out of curiosity, I googled for a "list of shaq o'neal nicknames", and google gives a list of 38 without even linking to a page or source (though some are repeated): The Big Aristotle, The Big Daddy, The Big Shaqtus, Shaq, The Big Cactus, The Big Banana, MayorMcShaq, The Real Deal, The Big Agave, The Big Shamrock, Big Shamrock, Shaq Daddy, Manny Shaq-iaou, Hobo Master, The Big eQuotatious, Superman, The Big Galactus, The Big Felon, The Big Field General, The Big Maravich, The Big Conductor, Diesel, Shaq Fu, The Big IPO, The Big Baryshnikov, Wilt Chamberneezy, The Big Leprechaun, Dr. Shaq, Shaqovic, The Big Twitterer, Witness Protection, L.C.L, Osama Bin Shaq, MDE, The Diesel, The Big Cordially.. Wikipedia lists 12 which all have references, and it adds The Big Fella.

I'm not a fan of "notability" criteria. Notability is always ultimately subjective, and a dictionary should only care about whether a word or term is used and encountered, not whether it's about someone who's won awards.

For nicknames, I'm going to propose we simply double our CFI requirements: 6 citations spanning more than 2 years, or attributive usage. Pengo (talk) 02:25, 6 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

For what it's worth, the current standard would allow Cher (born Cherilyn) but exclude Adele, allow Beck (born Bek) but exclude Madonna. Seems very arbitrary. I suggest that any standard other than attributive use will result in similar arbitrary distinctions. - TheDaveRoss 14:29, 8 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
How would y'all feel about something like Coach K (basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski)? I'm considering creating that entry, and I believe that it could meet even Pengo's proposed double-citation standard (Google Books search for "Coach K" Duke). Purplebackpack89 18:30, 8 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I think it would easily pass the current CFI interpretation, but unless it is used attributively I don't think it is worth inclusion. Coach K is one which very well might be used attributively, since he is an archetypal figure in college sports and basketball. - TheDaveRoss 18:56, 8 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

What conventions for Pali entries?[edit]

I came into possession of learning materials for Pali, and I am hoping to expand our coverage of terms in this language. We don't yet have any Wiktionary:About Pali page, and Category:Pali_templates is nearly empty, so I ask here instead: shall we default to using the Latin alphabet for Pali lemmata? ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 09:32, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Our Pali entries really suck, overall. We seem to mostly use the Latin script as default, but it would be good to at least link to the equivalent forms in the other major scripts Pali is written in like ariya does (although that entry isn't good by any means). I think that if you want to, you can really forge ahead and make new standards and templates yourself. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 17:42, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
(edit conflict) Sounds good to me. Having languages written in obscure scripts isn't very user-friendly; this can be overridden when there's a good reason e.g. the language is standardly written in that script, but I don't think Pali had a single script it was written in. Are your learning materials written in the Latin alpabet? Benwing2 (talk) 17:44, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
For starters, anyway, I'll stick to the Latin-alphabet spellings, as that is all I currently have access to. ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 05:27, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
I can't speak more to the scripts, but @Wyang would be a good person to talk to about that. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 05:58, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Seems doable. I created Module:pi-Latn-translit, now invoked by {{pi-alt}}. Feedback please :) Wyang (talk) 08:08, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@Wyang: Wow, great job! The one issue I see is that (as you can see at jhāpana), it displays [term needed] instead of omitting the script used in the headword. —Μετάknowledgediscuss/deeds 01:39, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks Metaknowledge, fixed now. Wyang (talk) 01:48, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Ooh, you can try this grammar book too if you need it. I was making a conjugation template for Pali at User:Aryamanarora/pali, but it's likely very inaccurate. Also, Pali's Devanagari transcriptions are very regular, so I could help with those. Aryamanarora (मुझसे बात करो) 00:33, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Also, this Latin alphabet dictionary. —Aryamanarora (मुझसे बात करो) 00:37, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Having some kind of rules for Pali would be very helpful, at least for etymological sections. South and South-East Asian languages borrowed heavily from Pali. Sometimes the etymologies in dictionary just state "Pali" but sometimes a Roman transliteration is given. E.g. a Khmer word អន្តរវាសក (ʔɑntaʔraʔvaasɑk, “underwear”) (using Sealang dictionary's transliteration) is derived from Pali "antaravāsaka". So, is "antaravāsaka" a proper spelling for Pali or just a transliteration? --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 09:06, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
It's a proper spelling, since Latin is one of the alphabets used for Pali. I'm pleased to see the {{pi-alt}} template, but I wonder if it can be made to completely omit the line for the current transliteration. For example, at byaggha there's a line that just says "(Latin script)"; couldn't the module eliminate the whole line? (Sorry I'm late to this conversation, I only just now noticed, on January 2nd, that the December Beer Parlor was not on my watchlist!) —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 09:28, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
No problem - reformatted. Wyang (talk) 10:03, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

AWB access request[edit]

User:Koavf I have AWB access in en.wp and I'm looking to do more to make lists here (phrasebooks, appendices, etc.) specifically related to Spanish. Right now, all I am looking to do is use AWB to generate a list but I can't pore through it without having AWB turned on (I don't even want to make an edit yet). —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:48, 30 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Template:PL:pedia[edit]

Template:PL:pedia was move to Template:projectlink/Wikipedia, without discussion, AFAICS. Similar templates were not so moved: Template:PL:species, Template:PL:versity, Template:PL:source. I would like to move the template back to Template:PL:pedia. What do you think? --Dan Polansky (talk) 16:06, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Whatever keeps consistency between template names. —suzukaze (t・c) 00:52, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I support moving it back. (TBH, @Dan Polansky, I would probably support moving all these templates to a long, self-explanatory "projectlink/xxxxxxxx" format with shortcuts to use, but I don't care enough to push a naming system like that, to let's move back Template:projectlink/Wikipedia into Template:PL:pedia to easily regain the consistency lost in that move.) --Daniel Carrero (talk) 10:20, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Before making this move we should decide what to do with {{pedia}} and {{pedialite}}, which are both aliases of Template:projectlink/Wikipedia. The names of {{pedia}} and {{pedialite}} are extremely confusing, as they suggest that they do different things, which they evidently don't. It also wouldn't be obvious to me that Template:PL:pedia and {{pedia}} are the same thing -- it's easier to see that {{pedia}} is a shortcut for {{projectlink/Wikipedia}}, which is clearly longer. I'd suggest at least the rename {{pedialite}} → {{pedia}} and then deleting {{pedialite}}. Benwing2 (talk) 11:58, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Another issue: Template:PL:pedia and all those PL: templates look like wikilinks to the Polish wikipedia. In fact, if I write {{temp|PL:pedia}} I get {{PL:pedia}}, which does link to the Polish Wikipedia. This suggests that we should maybe rather complete the rename of all the templates to {{projectlink/FOO}} and create appropriate shortcuts that don't have wikilink confusion; I wonder if this was the original rationale for the move. Benwing2 (talk) 12:03, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

activity requirements[edit]

As Wiktionary:Votes/2015-11/Eclecticology for de-admin and de-bureaucratting has passed, I have made the necessary request at Steward requests on Wikimedia. The steward wants to know the location of our Admin/Bureaucrat activity requirements. As far as I know, We have no such policy page. I did not even find the public discussion about de-sysoping Eclecticology. I think we have to implement activity rules or else the steward may refuse these requests. —Stephen (Talk) 18:58, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

We could just copy Wikipedia’s Bureaucrat activity requirements, which are:
Inactive bureaucrat accounts
Bureaucrat accounts which have been completely inactive for at least one calendar year (without any edits or other logged actions) may have their bureaucrat permissions removed. The bureaucrat must be contacted on their user talk page and via email one month before the removal of permissions and again several days before the request is made. Should the bureaucrat remain inactive, another bureaucrat may request the procedural removal of permissions. This is not to be considered a reflection on the user's use of, or rights to, the tools. If an inactive bureaucrat returns to Wikipedia, they may request restoration of the permissions at the bureaucrats' noticeboard provided they have not been inactive for three consecutive years.
Bureaucrat activity requirements
Bureaucrats are expected to exercise the duties granted by their role while remaining cognizant of relevant community standards concerning their tasks. In addition to the "Inactive bureaucrat accounts" requirements, if a bureaucrat does not participate in bureaucrat activity for over three years, their bureaucrat permissions may be removed. The user must be notified on their talk page and by email one month before the removal, and again a few days prior to the removal. If the user does not return to bureaucrat activity, another bureaucrat may request the removal of permissions at meta:Steward requests/Permissions. Permissions removed for not meeting bureaucrat activity requirements may be re-obtained through a new request for bureaucratship. —Stephen (Talk) 19:12, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
(after edit conflict) I don't think we need these requirements; the vote we have should be enough. On Meta, you stated that "the editor has not fulfilled the w:Wikipedia:Bureaucrats#Bureaucrat activity requirements" and certain User:Jo-Jo Eumerus pointed out that you are linking to Wikipedia's requirements. Is User:Jo-Jo Eumerus a steward? I think that no link to requirements is needed, and that an unanimous local vote (local = en wikt) should be enough. --Dan Polansky (talk) 19:15, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Had anyone tried to reach him? It would have been at least a figleaf's worth of collegiality if we had. DCDuring TALK 20:42, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
Eclecticology was notified when the vote was starting up. On the Steward request page, the oldest request (at the top) was for Proger@az.wikipedia, and the requester stated that "We don't have internal rules regulating this issues, so according to relevant en-wiki rules he should be desysoped." The steward replied, "Why would En-wiki rules have any bearing on AzWiki? The better option would be for you to open a public discussion (at your version of the village pump or similar) about de-sysoping this person in particular, and about implementing activity rules in general." Then a second steward added, "Or wait until m:AAR (Admin activity review) applies automatically." So it seems we either put up a policy page or we have to wait for Wikimedia’s m:Admin activity review to take effect. —Stephen (Talk) 21:14, 31 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
The nomination M:Steward_requests/Permissions#Proger@az.wikipedia did not link to any local vote or discussion. And it was a request based on 1 year inactivity, too low threshold IMHO, espesically for smaller wikis. By contrast, M:Steward_requests/Permissions#Eclecticology@en.wiktionary links to our vote. Chances are good this will be expedited without further ado, I think. --Dan Polansky (talk) 10:39, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
I should have asked a more specific question. Was Eclecticology notified by email or merely by posting on his talk page?
It would be more polite, more collegial to notify by e-mail in addition to talk page, if only in hopes of finding out about a veteran contributor's well-being. DCDuring TALK 12:57, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
In this particular case, notification on w:User talk:Eclecticology would have been useful as he has made some contributions to WP as recently as December 2015. I'd really like to know about the well-being of his beard as well. DCDuring TALK 13:11, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
@User:Stubborn Pen: Did you notify Eclecticology by email, apart from talk page post? (Stubborn Pen is SimonP45 who created the vote.) I don't think the e-mail notification is very important: no admin/bureaucrat action in 7 years, and 3 admin/bureaucrat actions in 9 years (Special:Log/Eclecticology) speak for itself. --Dan Polansky (talk) 13:15, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
Sure, but is it kind or collegial to fail to make an effort to reach out to a long-time contributor? DCDuring TALK 19:08, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Why is desysoping such a big deal? As you say adminship is just additional buttons and responsibilities not honor. Desysoping should not be seen as an act of dishonoring someone. Notifying someone that's about to get desysoped is also bullshit. It's like we are beggin them to come back. Works like an eye catching ad. --Dixtosa (talk) 21:27, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

Agreed. It should just be automatic, not even subject to a vote, depending on certain conditions. Send a message saying the privileges have been removed but can be reinstated at request within a certain amount of time. DAVilla 22:29, 1 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
In any case, the steward has executed the request. —Stephen (Talk) 15:45, 2 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]
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