Wiktionary talk:Concordances

Purpose of concordances in Wiktionary

What is the point of a Concordance in Wiktionary ? The person could just directly look the word up. Why do we need a list of all words used n Sherlock Holmes stories ?

And please define Concordance--Richardb 15:07, 19 Nov 2004 (UTC)

• It's much more convenient to use a concordance which gives the specific meaning than to wade through all the alternative meanings given on a typical wikionary page. Also not all the obscure words in a concordance will be suitable for wiktionary articles, they might be encylopedic topics, or confined to the work in question. Kappa 00:43, 8 March 2006 (UTC)

Puzzled

These seem to be wordlists rather than concordances. Am I missing something? -- Visviva 12:38, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Nope, it's the articles that are missing something. The name "concordance" has been used loosely here. Since most of the lists were pulled from electronic sources available (most on Wikisource, they are electronically searchable. Citing locations in context is therefore not as critical as in a print concordance. That doesn't mean that adding context and senses wouldn't be a bad idea though. I've been working for some time to create a good concordance for Richard II that would have some additional features. It's taking a long time to get done though. --EncycloPetey 12:44, 31 December 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for the explanation. I can see where a really nice concordance would take an enormous amount of work, but how about something using the output of a concordancer? Has this been tried and/or rejected? Is there a template or CSS class that would format keyword-in-context lines correctly?

I would be willing to help write some automatic concordance generation code so that the individual words could link to a concordance of their instances in context. One simple way to accomplish this right away for individual words without using a relational database would be to autogenerate XHTML versions of the wikisource documents where each word is tagged including its name and its offset. A dynamically generated XSL style sheet, or CSS or scripting could then be used to extract the desired elements and a parameterized number of context words to the left and right. JohnFBremerJr 21:50, 31 December 2007 (UTC)

RFC discussion: May 2007–November 2009

The following discussion has been moved from Wiktionary:Requests for cleanup (permalink).

This discussion is no longer live and is left here as an archive. Please do not modify this conversation, but feel free to discuss its conclusions.

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Wiktionary:Concordances

if anything, this page should be a Template: page, not a Wiktionary: page, if necessary at all? --Richardb 07:31, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

I think ideally it should be a help page or style guideline for concordances. But concordances are still a very underdeveloped area of Wiktionary at the moment. Dmcdevit·t 08:29, 24 May 2007 (UTC)

Striked. This is not the page to discuss underdeveloped areas of Wiktionary. The page itself is OK --Volants 13:16, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

Deletion discussion at the Beer Parlour (2022)

See Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/February#Concordance namespace?. - excarnateSojourner (talk | contrib) 01:04, 12 June 2022 (UTC)

RFD discussion: October 2023–January 2024

The following information has failed Wiktionary's deletion process (permalink).

It should not be re-entered without careful consideration.

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the entire Concordance namespace

See also Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/February § Concordance namespace?

Did you even know there was a Concordance namespace? Neither did I. A concordance is an index of all the words found in a body of work. Proper concordances are supposed to contain links to the actual usages of the words, but our concordances contain only a word count (and sometimes not even that), and a link to the Wiktionary page for the word. These sorts of things are pretty easy to generate by script from a corpus, but IMO not so useful, and our Concordance space contains entries for only ten corpora or so (see Category:Concordances). Most things here are over 10 years old, and the category text for the category just linked contains a typical Dan Polansky rationale inserted into it trying to justify why concordances are needed. This whole namespace is unmaintained and better deleted, like the erstwhile Index namespace. Benwing2 (talk) 06:41, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

I have come across it as it sometimes appears when you click “What links here” in an entry. I have occasionally found it useful to locate uses of a term (for example, from the Federalist papers or Melville’s Moby-Dick) but most of the time it is not helpful because all the works of an author (like Shakespeare) are jumbled together, making it difficult to ascertain which specific work a term appears in. On balance I don’t think the concordances are useful if they aren’t split up by work or maintained. — Sgconlaw (talk) 06:52, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

What is the "cost" of keeping it? DCDuring (talk) 14:51, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

@DCDuring IMO having poor-quality out-of-date unmaintained stuff reflects badly on the project as a whole. It is better IMO to have fewer but higher-quality pages than a mixture of high-quality and low-quality pages, especially when it comes to appendices and other things not in the mainspace. It might be different if there was evidence of people working on the concordances, but in practice all of the concordances were created 10+ years ago by people no longer active, and I don't see any evidence of any recent updating except for a few minor changes. Benwing2 (talk) 21:00, 2 October 2023 (UTC)

That's a lovely general principle: paraphrasable as when in doubt throw it out.

But to address your more specific concerns:

1. If we don't advertise it, hardly anyone will find it as your own experience demonstrates.
2. You haven't identified anything specifically defective about the concordances
3. Even if there were, we could always put in a disclaimer template of some kind.
4. If someone wants to fool around with the concordance idea, it is certainly easier to do so with some material already in place than to start over, asking someone for technical help to construct one, etc. DCDuring (talk) 02:13, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

@DCDuring From a cursory glance, anything in there actually worth keeping probably already falls under the scope of WT:FREQ anyway (see for instance our Complete Shakespeare wordlist). If there's no objection, we could either delete or move each subpage to the appropriate section there on an individual basis. I personally think that the pages for the Bible, the French New Testament, Sherlock Holmes, or New Testament Greek, for example, are on balance probably worth salvaging, while the Shakespeare list adds so very little value (50 words, all blue links), even without comparison to our already existing Shakespeare list, that I don't think anyone will miss it. But since I brought it up, I'm still unsure as to whether the Frequency lists themselves should be ultimately moved from the Wiktionary namespace to the Appendix namespace (incidentally also where most other language projects have them). @Benwing2, any thoughts? Helrasincke (talk) 07:52, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

I have no problem with pruning. DCDuring (talk) 14:07, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

• Delete: The usefulness of this namespace has been rightly questioned since 2004. — excarnateSojourner (talk · contrib) 04:04, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Delete. Thadh (talk) 12:22, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

Delete per the above. Theknightwho (talk) 12:04, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

• Delete per my analysis of the namespace's contents at Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2022/February#Concordance namespace?. This, that and the other (talk) 22:22, 3 October 2023 (UTC)

• I love to delete whole namespaces. Don't forget Concordance talk: namespace too P. Sovjunk (talk) 07:00, 5 October 2023 (UTC)

  I think it's not possible to delete one without deleting the other, but I'm not totally certain. Theknightwho (talk) 18:25, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

• Move the Sherlock Holmes content to an appendix, keeping it as separate pages. It's worth keeping and is the only properly complete concordance we have. The rest can be moved to an appendix as well but it doesn't list the word frequencies so it isn't as useful. Essentially this is a keep vote for the content but I have no objection to disabling the namespace in the software. —Soap— 19:03, 8 October 2023 (UTC)

  @Soap do you really think pages like Concordance:Moby-Dick/Chapter 33 and Concordance:Engines/Engines7 are worth keeping? I'm not even sure we need to keep the Holmes concordance; of what possible use is it to this project? This, that and the other (talk) 03:21, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

• Keep all because I disagree with the "when in doubt throw it out" principle espoused above. It is inherently antithetical to how Wikis work. Purplebackpack89 03:47, 19 December 2023 (UTC)

Deleted. Pinging @Erutuon, Surjection, Chuck Entz, This, that and the other who are most likely to know the best way forward in terms of carrying this out. From above, it looks like the best thing to do is to move the Sherlock Holmes content into an appendix, and to simply delete the rest. We'll need to file a ticket somewhere to remove the namespace, though. Theknightwho (talk) 23:51, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

Forgot to ping @Benwing2. Theknightwho (talk) 23:52, 25 December 2023 (UTC)

We should file the ticket after emptying the namespace. Feel free to ping me when this is done. (Link to Special:AllPages/Concordance: for reference.) This, that and the other (talk) 10:26, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

Also "Concordance talk" has to be emptied: Special:AllPages/Concordance talk: This, that and the other (talk) 10:27, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

I got rid of all the talk pages (mostly mundane deletion requests) except for three. The Sherlock Holmes one can be moved with its parent page, and the other two can be deleted when the parent pages are. This, that and the other (talk) 10:42, 26 December 2023 (UTC)

 Done The Concordance namespace is now empty, aside from redirects to the Sherlock Holmes concordance's new Appendix home. I also moved the Foucault's Pendulum concordance to the Appendix (Appendix:Foucault's Pendulum), as it is linked from Wikipedia and seems to have got a decent amount of editing over the years. I'll file the Phabricator task soon once all links have been updated. This, that and the other (talk) 11:42, 10 January 2024 (UTC)