Talk:black pill

RFV discussion: December 2018–May 2019

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

Failure to be verified means that insufficient eligible citations of this usage have been found, and the entry therefore does not meet Wiktionary inclusion criteria at the present time. We have archived here the disputed information, the verification discussion, and any documentation gathered so far, pending further evidence.
Do not re-add this information to the article without also submitting proof that it meets Wiktionary's criteria for inclusion.

---

black pill

Rfv-sense: "(slang) Something that enables or compels a person to overcome illusion and perceive harsher reality. (referencing the term red pill/take the red pill)". Familiar with the latter, not so much the former. --Robbie SWE (talk) 18:04, 29 December 2018 (UTC)

It's one of those Reddit incel-type terms, denoting a bleak pessimistic attitude. Does exist, almost certainly not per CFI. Equinox ◑ 04:14, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

PassAMethod??? Khemehekis (talk) 07:26, 30 December 2018 (UTC)

RFV-passed. Well surprising, it has been the only sense I know. 8 quotes for @Robbie SWE, including an extra in Swedish, and also 6 for the verb. One can search endlessly to find more media reports using the word. Fay Freak (talk) 04:01, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

@Fay Freak, you've outdone yourself ;-) Thank you for the quotes (not sure if the Swedish one should be used to validate the English word though). --Robbie SWE (talk) 19:10, 6 January 2019 (UTC)

Shouldn't we wait a week before we strike it out? Khemehekis (talk) 03:12, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Indeed. Some people may object that those sources are not durably archived.... Kiwima (talk) 04:18, 7 January 2019 (UTC)

Reopened. The Swedish cite doesn't belong under an English header, Medium and 21st Century Wire are not durable and I'm also not convinced the others are either except maybe The Independent. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 12:14, 10 January 2019 (UTC)

Swedish cites belong under an English header if they evidence English words. On Medium authors can delete articles but it is rare (?), anyway this one I have only added for informal proof. I cannot think of a reason why the durability of 21Wire would be diminished. Else what is with Mic, The Daily Wire‎, TheJournal.ie, Vice News? No reason to cast doubts upon them. WT:ATTEST says: “Where possible, it is better to cite sources that are likely to remain easily accessible over time.” This bids a prognosis, not that the texts need to be on paper, CD, cassette, microfilm etc. – which might become more or less or even absolutely inaccessible too, so web sources are even better to show use (also a different understanding is an evaluative contradiction for a community that rummages digital corpora to find printed sources – the CFI of other language versions like e.g. the Russian one even command more explicitly to provide web-accessible sources for accessibility). Also note that all the quoted sources are on the Wayback Machine and on archive.today. Plus the supreme rule is to include words that exist in communities (as distinguished from ad-hoc formations or protologisms) (”all words in all languages”) and I have verified this existence in a pending procedure so that the case is to be closed, which would means that the term has to be included even if WT:ATTEST is not met (what I deny), since nowhere in the WT:CFI it stands that WT:ATTEST is the only way to evidence terms processually. § 1 pr. of the CFI rather suggests the contrary: “A term should be included if it's likely that someone would run across it and want to know what it means. This in turn leads to the somewhat more formal guideline of” – so WT:ATTEST states a regular case (which I also fulfilled, as I claim) and other cases are admitted. How can one even get an idea that a term should perhaps be removed if a linked Quartz article includes an investigation into the origin and a graph counting usage in thousands? (It is mention, but one that points to perception of use, unlike mentions which derive from other mentions, or dictionary entries that could be copied, which is what the “use-mention distinction” in the CFI aims to exclude.) That words can be proven informally in a pending procedure can also be seen by the hypothetical case of a reverse RFD where people would vote to undelete a term given its quotations (assuming they are on the Citations page or else given in that procedure) after which the term cannot be deleted again by the procedure because it has been undeleted by consensus. So the Argumentum a maiore ad minus is that even against a formal RFV procedure a term has to be kept if there is no consensus against it (which there shouldn’t be as I said as I have given copious example to become acquainted and everyone find more in the non-durable web proper). Also competition with other dictionaries through coverage of internet slang suggests to keep terms that are shown to exist at any given point, since “professional dictionaries” track terms of informal appearance: Dictionary editors witness terms, they decide to include them. You aren’t applying the CFI correctly, @Lingo Bingo Dingo. RFV-passed, and  Keep.

I am aware that people might opine that for such an inclusion practice the CFI should be formally reworded, but nonetheless I hold that what I have stated is already the lex lata. And I am not the first one either to believe the same – the rule has always been in many editors’ hearts and what newbs are told: “Just add words that exist.” And those incel guys understood this (not PassAMethod who also defined strangely etc., that is a different problem) and hence did nothing wrong in including those here so-called “not-attestable” terms. Wiktionary editors have perverted the meaning of the words attestable and to attest. I have attested the word, in convenient form. Fay Freak (talk) 19:56, 11 January 2019 (UTC)

Durably archived is well understood; the case law is clear. As is attestation, which we have a sense specifically for this case. Personally, if I were told to produce an attestation (sense 1, the general sense), I would expect to have to follow some weird rules, be it signing in particular ways or notarized by a public notary or involve an expert in some way; I would not expect any random format I used to be acceptable.

If you object to the rules as applied, I do not think this is the place and way to challenge them.--Prosfilaes (talk) 05:49, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

I don't see how this can be called "RfV-passed". The cite problems included failure to be durably archived, ambiguity as to meaning, mention rather than use, foreign language. DCDuring (talk) 14:09, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

Responding to some parts of that post:

Swedish cites belong under an English header if they evidence English words.

In this case the first two attestations in Swedish are mentions, the others take Swedish plural articles so can hardly count as English.

On Medium authors can delete articles but it is rare (?), anyway this one I have only added for informal proof. I cannot think of a reason why the durability of 21Wire would be diminished. Else what is with Mic, The Daily Wire‎, TheJournal.ie, Vice News? No reason to cast doubts upon them.

If authors can delete articles it isn't durable. 21st C Wire is an alternative "independent news" site that is little more than a group blog and is almost certainly not included in electronic databases. If the others are included in such databases they might be durably archived, but that is not a settled matter at all.

WT:ATTEST says: “Where possible, it is better to cite sources that are likely to remain easily accessible over time.” This bids a prognosis, (...).

This is only a recommendation, and doesn't qualify what is considered durably archived.

Also note that all the quoted sources are on the Wayback Machine and on archive.today.

The Web Archive isn't considered durable, because of its robots.txt exclusion policy (though this isn't followed strictly anymore). ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 15:01, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

It would be interesting to find out whether each citation for this RfV was in well-funded, well-indexed internet archives, and whether one could somehow find the relevant passage within a reasonable time.

"Durably" implies more than resistance to deletion by authors. It also implies that institutions of some degree of permanence will keep the material accessible. For print publications that means libraries. For usenet that means the various entities that host copies of it. The pace of change in electronic media has meant that there has been a high degree of mortality among the companies that publish electronically. Institutions like the Internet Archive are dependent on grants and don't have histories comparable to those of libraries. It is not unusual to find dead links in such archives or to be unable to locate the exact text one requires due to incomplete indexing.

In any event, this is not an RfV matter. It may be worth bringing it up again now at BP because it is important to us. DCDuring (talk) 17:28, 14 January 2019 (UTC)

@DCDuring Apart from Mic and the Swedish site (which block archiving services), all cites are in the Wayback Machine and archive.today:

• Independent: [1] [2]
• Daily Wire: [3] [4]
• Journal.ie: [5] [6]
• Vice News: [7] [8]
• 21st Century Wire: [9] [10]
• Medium: [11] [12]

The Wayback Machine isn't durably archived however, because they sometimes obey robots.txt. The FAQ of archive.today on the other hand states that they do not respect robots.txt, but that some content may be deleted if it violates their hoster's rules. ←₰-→ Lingo ^Bingo _Dingo (talk) 09:34, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Let's take this to BP. We need to have some way of dealing with non-print publications that respects the basic objective of reliable attestation. Also, tt would be handy to have step-by-step instructions or an automated or semi-automated tool for efficiently getting a link to a durable archive after having gotten the cite from a fast search engine. DCDuring (talk) 13:02, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Wikihow has the basics here. Is there a tool (template, script, etc) available that can take a link from a fast search engine, eg, Google News, and find the link in a "durable" archive, eg, Wayback Machine/Internet archive? DCDuring (talk) 13:09, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Of all media, the reliability in what can concerns Wiktionary is highest in Wiktionary itself. You’ll witness that those quotes are real, that you didn’t let yourself be fooled by ad-hoc inventions. If in hundred years all the quotes are gone, we can say: Well Fay Freak, DCDuring & Co. looked into them, the quotes are real, the existence of the term is already demonstrated, case closed, ne bis in idem. We somehow need to get the terms that don’t have an intersection with Google Books or Usenet. I bet anyway that for any of the web quotes given some printed newspaper had the same term and we just don’t know which, we don’t reach out to them without disproportionate expenses, but what’s even the meaning of “languages well documented on the Internet” if it does not mean the internet taken as a whole, used to demonstrate words in a verification proceeding, since we all are working for free on the internet and the willingness of unpaid editors to go into far libraries to browse the pages for words is already mostly theoretical and the more so if the word does exist demonstrably online and its existence in the language is thus is shown in easier fashion. Google-Books and Usenet are for languages that use complex scripts (those that need complex text rendering) crap anyway, it probably does mean the web hence and since the language of the internet is directly the investigation object of Wiktionary, not via media in other form. The question is not even if a word exists in certain formats, if it exists on cassette or CD or only online, this is not so interesting, people care to have words in a dictionary that exist (sufficiently widely) anyhow, that the dictionary is reliable in any way. This is assuming that the section “Number of citations” does not contradict what is written before it in the CFI. Anyway surely one should fix the CFI formulation, going to the BP, since the way the CFI are written the application of the CFI has become detached from the goals of Wiktionary. You see: When people pursue verification requests though they are convinced that the term exists, rethinking many things is due. Fay Freak (talk) 15:21, 15 January 2019 (UTC)

Again, these types of argument should go to the Beer Parlor, not to RfV. There's lots of discussion to be had about open Internet citation, but this is not the place.--Prosfilaes (talk) 03:47, 16 January 2019 (UTC)

• RFV-failed: I don't see even one durably archived quote, and no one has made a serious argument that we have three durably archived citations, in the sense that "durably archived" is understood here. —Granger (talk · contribs) 00:25, 26 May 2019 (UTC)