Talk:Moscow

RFD discussion: November–December 2020

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Moscow (2)

RFD all senses from #4 onwards, i.e. all the tiny places. People can look in Wikipedia for this (other encyclopedias are available). It is not dictionary material. Mihia (talk) 22:43, 14 November 2020 (UTC)

• I would definitely keep the city in Idaho, as it's not tiny (population about 25,000 and home of the University of Idaho). I'm indifferent about the genuinely tiny places, but many of them, if kept, should be moved to different etymology sections as their names are not from the Russian city. —Mahāgaja · talk 23:03, 14 November 2020 (UTC)
• Keep them all, in fact I added one. These are the briefest of entries - if a user requires more info they can then refer to Wikipedia. @Mahagaja: I am against multiple etymology sections as the page would get rather messy, as has happened with other place entries (for US counties). Any different etymologies can be included under one heading. DonnanZ (talk) 13:06, 15 November 2020 (UTC)
• Keep all. The criterion of tininess is arbitrary and thus contentious and does not work for historical languages (how many people lived in each Βερενίκη?). Besides, I found the gloss “Brandon Estate” (as is occurring in many raps) useful, and it is inconsequential to delete whole villages when one should keep the names of mere buildings. We should have a template to add coordinates for all such entries. Fay Freak (talk) 16:18, 16 November 2020 (UTC)

Geographical coordinates can be found in the Wikipedia articles, and I have resisted the temptation to include them (too cumbersome), but I do add Ordnance Survey grid references for British places (but not for Ireland and Northern Ireland, which have a different grid system). DonnanZ (talk) 11:27, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

• WT has many more entries with many (rather) unimportant cities and towns, e.g. at Washington. So it wouldn't only apply to Moscow, and be a bigger issue.
• "said to be named after Luis de Moscoso Alvarado" -- that does indeed sound like at least ===Etymology 1=== and ===Etymology 2=== are needed, as Moscoso seems to be unrelated to Russian/Sclawic and thus the current single etymology is wrong for this place.

--2003:DE:371B:BD24:91F7:9E70:8932:41CD 14:52, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

I believe that we should non-arbitrarily exclude ALL place names that have purely geographical and hence non-dictionary-relevant definitions, such as "town in X" or "village in Y". Exactly defining what kinds of non-geographical information can justify an entry may require some thought, but e.g. "capital city of a country" could be one. Mihia (talk) 15:11, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Etymology justifies. This is the same with for- and surenames, which are even less “dictionary-relevant”. Besides, note – to step away from Eurocentrism – only a limited set of scripts in the world distinguishes upper and lower case, which makes it even harder to make out in the first place whether something is a term one should look up in an encyclopedia. Happens often when you learn a language written in a unicameral script, that you search a word you happen to know but then find out, fretfully, it’s just somebody’s or some place’s name you don’t need to memorize for your daily vocabulary dose. In other cases, placenames are so uncertain that they do not fit as well into encyclopediae, and creating dictionary entries would go faster/smoother than creating encyclopedia entries: it’s a different thing, for in order to create a dictionary entry one would just need to know where it is and perhaps when it was used and perhaps quotes, while for Wikipedia I know not what one needs, the encyclopedia rules are much more complicated, and yet the encyclopediae aren’t complete either: There is this article about كلَة in the Encyclopedia of Islam (see there) which names many Malaysian place names which I could not even identify because now all is renamed or other things so that I only gave two meaning possibilities for that place name. And, to answer IP, etymologies can also be sorted under parts of speech, there are fans of this here, although it rarely happens (IP shall search the discussions if those are sought, I got stuff to do); apart from the fact that one etymology section can treat multiple senses of a word, and both is better than annoying people with forty etymology sections. Fay Freak (talk) 18:38, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

The issue of multiple languages does raise the further spectre, which I believe has been mentioned before, of not only listing literally millions of place names in English, but multiplying these by every language that exists too, possibly with numerous duplicates as things are arranged at present. For example, presently we list our multiple Moscows as "English", but wouldn't the names of these places, should they ever be referred to, also be written "Moscow" in numerous other languages that use Latin script? Surely we would not want to list them separately under every language? Mihia (talk) 20:06, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

I didn't realise that there's no translation section, but no, it can be spelt differently in other languages, e.g. German Moskau, and Moskva in several languages. DonnanZ (talk) 20:25, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Oops, there is a translations section, which was misplaced (now fixed). But there is no reason why Moscow in Maine can't be written in the spelling of a different language. DonnanZ (talk) 20:41, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

Yes, the Russian capital would poptentially be differently written in different Latin-script languages, but whether this extends to the tiny places in the US I'm not sure. We would have to look on, say, a German map. In any case, whether the same or different, the point remains that we would, if we took things to their present logical conclusion, multiply every place name in the world by every language in the world in which maps are published. It doesn't bear thinking about. Mihia (talk) 20:51, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

@Mihia: It has been mentioned and the argument expounded by me at Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2019/March § Attestations of native toponyms mentioned in Latin texts and Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2019/October § Place and given names in other languages, and a bit on Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2019-11/CFI policy for foreign given names and surnames. Fay Freak (talk) 20:53, 17 November 2020 (UTC)

I think the utility of listing the truly tiny unincorporated places is limited, but it has some utility: tiny places sometimes have (distinct) translations, e.g. the unincorporated Appoquinimink is Ahpukwënëmink in Unami, and this kind of thing is lexically interesting to record via translations tables. I am weakly inclined to keep (at least the incorporated places, and it does seem to be our practice to keep them all). Regarding "Surely we would not want to list them separately under every language": we could consider mentions of English placenames in other languages to be something akin to code-switching, like we might consider a Friulian newspaper article about Saúl Hernández to not be using "Hernández" as a Friulian surname. - -sche (discuss) 10:01, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

Most definitely there is utility and interest in the etymologies, "translations" and just the recording of place names, however small. My issue is whether a (general) dictionary is the place to do this. Even though the "swamping" effect will probably be less apparent here than in a paper dictionary, I still feel that this is the province of a dedicated "Dictionary of place names" project, where there can be proper tailored support, such as integration of maps, and where there need be no concerns about including everything, however minor. Mihia (talk) 23:37, 19 November 2020 (UTC)

If we allow every dot on the map somebody will write a bot to create entries for every dot on the map. We see that sort of behavior on Wikipedia. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 08:30, 20 November 2020 (UTC)

Nor is every dot on the map recorded in Wikipedia. I looked in vain for Piano Flat in NZ. The name is intriguing enough. DonnanZ (talk) 09:30, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

NZ Topo Map came up trumps for Piano Flat. It looks like the flat area is shaped like a grand piano... DonnanZ (talk) 22:02, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

I support a regularly running a bot creating entries for every dot on the map at least to a certain level of detail, subject to the requirement that the data sources applied have suffered sufficient human review, and of course that we have a map linking system with coordinates. E.g. if someone is going to create every community, city district, named body of water, forest or castle, vel sim. in Germany based on OpenStreetMap, I support that if it is ensured that only data is used that is old enough to be hardly hoaxical; and perhaps we need to categorize such toponyms more specifically lest the German proper nouns list be drowned. How does @Dentonius stand on this radical solution? I do not support such general inclusion of street names because this would introduce names of individuals through the back door, on the other hand they are just repetitive numbers in the United States and we have reasonable policies concerning the exclusion of numbers, and because it is too much data sizewise, out of the scope of this project – also in regard to the allotted funding. I also doubt this is ever viable for Arabic, it would require vocalized datasets that we would at best only have from one country, apart from the issue of the gender of place names, and I took Germany as an example because I know that there we have reliable data, which is well not the case in less developed countries (although surely parts of the Gulf are more developed than any area in Germany; don’t know about Jamaica). If we have all places then next it is much more likely that people come write etymologies for places. Maybe also @Vahagn Petrosyan would find that particularly helpful if such additions happened in his region under the said requirement. Fay Freak (talk) 11:57, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

Hi, Fay. I'm all for automation in general. If we can automatically insert data which would make meaningful dictionary entries, I don't see why we shouldn't. This matter and the Arbër Highway matter are bound to come up again in the future. It seems we as a community are stumped about this because nobody here knows precisely what's dictionary-worthy in these cases. The solution might be something as silly as setting a population count threshold: if the feature in question is in an area with a population lower than 100,000, don't include. We should probably have a BP topic about this. -- Dentonius (my politics | talk) 12:26, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

Sorry, but I don't like the idea. Every toponym entry should be created and supervised by a human, otherwise quality will suffer. I am for quality versus quantity. --Vahag (talk) 18:27, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

• Keep -- Dentonius (my politics | talk) 09:56, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
• I think place names should be subject to the same CFIs as any other word. Can we find three mentionsuses of Moscow referring to Moscow, Idaho, from three independent sources in permanently archived media over more than a year? Probably so. What about referring to Moscow, West Virginia? No? Then delete it. —Mahāgaja · talk 12:01, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
  • @Mahagaja: I don’t think so. In the end it is not that such cites do not exist, but that we don’t find them, sitting on our computers and trying our luck with free search engines. But is absolutely sure that every community and lake and forest and castle has such cites in Germany, presumably even including historical names in the last quarter of a millenium, but it is really otiose to go browse the local press archives to see about happenings at that lake or in that forest or to forage that literature about medieval castles which surely includes all of them. I remind that we are concerned with reality checks and the purpose of those citation criteria is to exclude terms that are not so real, that is ghost words and protologisms, terms that have not actually been used and terms that have not caught on enough to be included (because anyone on the internet can make new words, right), and we aren’t that many and not that well paid, so this “permanently archived media” stuff is neither as ideal nor as practical as you let it appear, and tbh it also tends to be insulting if constantly good efforts are curbed by that sword of Damocles of whether somebody can find. Fay Freak (talk) 12:32, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
    • @Fay Freak: I don't think the purpose of the CFI is solely to exclude protologisms and other made-up words, but also to meet the general rule "A term should be included if it's likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means." If Moscow, West Virginia, is mentioned less than 3 times in permanently archived media, it isn't likely that someone will run across it and want to know what it means. —Mahāgaja · talk 14:17, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
      • @Mahagaja: You are doing as if people only consult this dictionary after reading permanently archived media. But maybe someone is in West Virginia and hears about the town but couldn’t ask so he looks for example here. Besides it is a strawman. You can’t know from the airchair that a community is mentioned rarely enough to be so unlikely enough come across as to be not inclusionworthy, apart from fact that we can assume the opposite that communities are mentioned in the local newspapers three times, and that appearing three times in permanently archived media is hardly an indication of being likely to be come across (which is a relevancy criterion that is agreed not to be the purpose of that clause). Fay Freak (talk) 14:44, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
      • @Mahagaja I should remind you that property, tax, birth and death records, as well as censuses are all durably archived. So are a large number of local newspapers and street directories. I can guarantee you that every place in the US that was inhabited at the end of the 19th century can be found in published records available at any genealogy website. Then there are the durably archived and published US Geological Survey maps that record a vast number of named geographical details covering every square mile of the US. I'm sure the same holds true for many other countries. Attestation is not a barrier for anything that shows up in official records.
      • The problem is that the names of certain things exist in sufficient quantities to be simply impossible for us to include. We have to draw a line. Aside from the memory limits and the limit of 2 MB of wikitext per page, we have to consider whether we want to have an entry for "main street" or "first street" that lists every city and town in the US that has one- that would make a phone book look like poetry by comparison. I would say that towns and villages are about the limit. I don't want to include miniscule geographical features just because there's a published deed that refers to Such-and-such Creek four miles from so-and-so's place. Chuck Entz (talk) 15:32, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

• Keep. Reminds me of Paris, Texas. – Jberkel 12:11, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
• Keep "A large number of places" but delete the list of places (subsenses of sense 4, sense 5, sense 6). (Leaving aside places with a distinct etymology.) I do not think we should list instances of names unless they are clearly in widespread use. Moscow, Russia is clearly in widespread use — if you say "Moscow" much of the English-speaking world would hear "a city in Russia". Moscow, Idaho is not (although I had heard of it). We might already have English definitions of all of the cities that are clearly in widespread use. For keeping the name defined as "a name of some cities", I see two ways to go:
  1. Follow the same vague principles we use for personal names, where common names are included but very rare names are not. (A Dutch editor uses an arbitrary threshold of 1,000 people. I have declined to add an English name borne by only about 100 living people.)
  2. Require three durable uses for the name, which would qualify any name that has been used for an incorporated municipality in states where they are chartered by state statutes (which are durable). Mentions on maps do not count. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 15:37, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

     I must point out that maps are publications, often with ISBN numbers. I own hundreds of them. DonnanZ (talk) 10:23, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

     I have many maps, each of which mentions the name of many places. They are analagous to dictionaries or word lists, which are not sufficient to attest well-documented languages. Suppose you have a map of Nevada. The label by the dot reading "Las Vegas" is a mention of the name of a city while the sentence in the margin saying "Las Vegas is a great place to lose money" is a use. Vox Sciurorum (talk) 14:52, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

Sure, you can buy maps that show big cities as dots. Or you can go for larger scales such as 1:50,000 or 1:25,000 for much more detail - the "Master Atlas of Greater London" has a scale of 1:19,000, and even larger for central London. Web pages like Topozone for Las Vegas are interesting to look at - you can zoom in or out or go whole screen, if only to block out the ads. I assume you can buy these maps. DonnanZ (talk) 19:52, 26 November 2020 (UTC)

• The problem with arbitrary inclusion is that one never knows what mentions of the name a user might come across. This happened to me with Andover, California, a former settlement mentioned in a book I have. Even if a place becomes a ghost town or loses its population and buildings, the location can still be known by the name it had in the past. For that reason, I find it better to include all places with the name, regardless of population or the lack of it. DonnanZ (talk) 10:23, 26 November 2020 (UTC)
• Keep. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 19:15, 27 November 2020 (UTC)
• I'm almost indifferent about this. However, I would just like to mention that the argument of "Number of dots times Number of languages" is irrelevant. This is a Wiki site and so the space does not matter in the way the argument suggests. Heavens! If What3word [1] can label every 3x3 meter square in the world with only 3 words, and do it in various languages, then I cannot see the validity of the "slippery slope" argument here. Yet again. -- ALGRIF talk 16:39, 2 December 2020 (UTC)

Keep — town/village names are absolutely dictionary material, no matter how small or unpopulated. Send any dubious ones to RFV for verification. PseudoSkull (talk) 19:06, 11 December 2020 (UTC)

RFD kept — Dentonius 10:52, 16 December 2020 (UTC)

RFD discussion: November 2020–March 2021

The following information passed a request for deletion (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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Moscow

Rfd-sense: (metonymically) The government of Russia or the Soviet Union.. The sense was added and citations added by User:Stephen G. Brown, no longer active.

I'd like to review this sense and if it does apply here, then it would also apply to many other capital cities. E.g. using Berlin when talking about the German government, Beijing when talking about the Chinese government. This kind of metonymy is very common. In my opinion, we should delete this sense. --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 00:59, 3 November 2020 (UTC)

• Keep -- This is precisely the purpose of a dictionary -- to inform people about these kinds of usages. -- Dentonius (my politics | talk) 18:26, 8 November 2020 (UTC)
• On balance, despite the potential open-endedness of this kind of metonymy, I think we should keep this particular entry. Mihia (talk) 14:47, 15 November 2020 (UTC)

Do we need to add the country sense to each country city just for the heck of it and because we can? (sarcasm). --Anatoli T. ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 00:50, 24 November 2020 (UTC)

I am inclined to delete' per Anatoli because this metonomy is very productive, but I'm also open to a merge into a single definition. On the other hand, I would keep such a sense for Brussels, so perhaps that is a little inconsistent... probably not though. ;) For one, Brussels for "EU/EC" often is misapplied for institutions that aren't the EU/EC or are not even based in Brussels. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 11:01, 17 December 2020 (UTC)

Keep. Not SOP, meets WT:CFI (or else move to WT:RFVE). In English it's common metonymy, but what about other languages? Do Russian, Japanese, Chinese, Italian, Latin, Gothic, aboriginal languages ... do have the same metonymy? --幽霊四 (talk) 15:27, 24 January 2021 (UTC)

Keep, definitely. Berlin, Beijing, Canberra, Paris, London, Washington, etc. all have that sense defined. "Washington was concerned over Berlin's natural gas deal with Moscow". Facts707 (talk) 14:53, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

• RFD-kept. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 08:41, 7 March 2021 (UTC)