User talk:Daniel Carrero/2011

January 2011

rule of three, Rule of Three

I noticed that the Wicca definition was on both pages, I am thinking it should probably only be on the Rule of Three page. Thoughts? - [The]DaveRoss 20:34, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Citations:rule of three contains both "rule of three" and "Rule of Three" as meaning the Wiccan tenet, so the existence of that definition on both pages seems natural. Another reasonable alternative would be defining one of these entries as an "Alternative spelling of..." --Daniel. 21:05, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

As a rule I don't trust usenet cites to evaluate accurate capitalization, there are probably more "george bush"es than "George Bush"es, as an example. For discerning meaning usenet can be helpful, for proper grammar it is mostly useless. Do Wiccan texts and edited works use one over the other? - [The]DaveRoss 21:47, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

I, differently, trust Usenet cites to evaluate accurate capitalization if and only if the writers in question use accurate capitalization in the rest of their texts, particularly if these texts are long.

My personal analysis is that the orthography of the current citations of Citations:rule of three is trustworthy.

In addition, after a quick search by Google Books, I noticed that both capitalizations appear on multiple books. The poem "Ever mind the rule of three, what you give out comes back to thee." appears in various books with this capitalization, while Rule of Three is also common. --Daniel. 23:03, 7 January 2011 (UTC)

Inflection > Headword line

Wiktionary:Votes/2010-12/Renaming categories for inflection or headword templates has passed. Could you update {{tempcatboiler}} to accept the new naming system? --Yair rand (talk) 01:01, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

Sure. Done. I also created Category:English headword-line templates with that template. --Daniel. 01:39, 13 January 2011 (UTC)

February 2011

prefixcat

Two years ago, you created {{prefixcat}} and Category:English words prefixed with pre-. The entry pre- is four years older and contains a list of words having this prefix. The category links to the entry, but the entry doesn't link to the category. Shouldn't it? Are there any good examples for how to do this? --LA2 00:35, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

You can use {{prefixsee}}. --Yair rand (talk) 00:38, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Wonderful. Thanks! --LA2 09:26, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

More topical category trees

Yes, I think everything should be in all parent categories as well as its own category. If that makes "overcrowded" categories, well, that's just an issue of how the software displays them on a screen; we'd need to find a better way to display them, splitting the items into many pages, or using a zoom feature, etc. The categories will be accurate, i.e. everything in each category really belongs to it. (Think of taxonomies: if I'm a Felis silvestris then I am a Felis. Yes, the top levels like Plantae may hold thousands or millions of items, but that's valid, and pernickety software restrictions shouldn't change the categorisation.) Equinox ◑ 20:55, 2 February 2011 (UTC)

Start et al.

My main question is why would this be Start and not start? Mglovesfun (talk) 16:28, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

It is Start because I've attested Citations:Start. Why not start too? --Daniel. 16:45, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

{{list}}

The list template doesn't appear to be able to take more than 40 syn parameters (See {{list:Latin script letters/hu}}). Would you be able to fix this? --Yair rand (talk) 07:57, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, done. --Daniel. 14:10, 7 February 2011 (UTC)

Entries with no definition

What is the point in adding loads of entries with no definition. Why not just add an entry to Wiktionary:Requested entries (English)? SemperBlotto 19:33, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

I don't see much difference between mentioning undefined English terms as new entries or as items of Wiktionary:Requested entries (English), except the fact that creating and formatting these entries is a natural part of this work that ought to be done sooner or later. --Daniel. 19:42, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

The difference is that you get a blue link for an entry with no definition, and a red link if it's only in the wanted list. SemperBlotto 19:48, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Both the ability to turn all links to a page into red text and the existence of that page as a member of Category:Definitionless terms are pretty good ways to show that a term is not defined yet. The latter is particularly more likely to be found by people, especially because my entries with {{rfdef}} are not linked very much from other pages.

Ah, we also have café noir as a blue link but without an English section... Until I created that section seconds ago. --Daniel. 20:09, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

I think you should avoid creating entries with no definition. A minimum entry should contain a definition. --Dan Polansky 22:16, 9 February 2011 (UTC)

Well, surely I am already avoiding creating entries with no definition; if I remember correctly, I barely added {{rfdef}} into one hundred entries in 2011, and approximately 0 in previous years. And, differently from what you said, Dan, a minimum entry may be definitionless and contain categories, inflections, a link to Wikipedia perhaps... as long as it is expected to have a good, simple, and preferably uncontroversial sense in the future. I try never using {{rfdef}} to ask for controversial definitions such as place names or anything from fiction. --Daniel. 00:33, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

I sometimes, rarely, create entries with no definition, but only if there is something that can help other editors to define it, like a citation or two, or three, pronunciation, etymology. For an entry to be better than nothing it can't have no definition and no other linguistic information at all. Mglovesfun (talk) 01:05, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

Coke

I'm pretty sure this can also refer to soft drinks other than Coca-Cola... --Yair rand (talk) 11:24, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

As a "by extension" sense, maybe. Anyway, we should have a sense of "Coke" meaning "Coca-Cola". For an example of this usage, see this: [1] --Daniel. 11:32, 15 February 2011 (UTC)

obrigado

I'm pretty sure that this edit is wrong. Can you confirm? —Internoob (Disc•Cont) 03:06, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

This edit is definitely wrong, so I reverted it. --Daniel. 03:10, 18 February 2011 (UTC)

symbcatboiler/theList

{{langcatboiler}} seems to still transclude {{symbcatboiler/theList}}, despite it not existing anymore. --Yair rand (talk) 00:01, 28 February 2011 (UTC)

Yes, {{langcatboiler}} was still transcluding {{symbcatboiler/theList}}. It isn't anymore. --Daniel. 11:50, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

March 2011

Template talk:pt-noun/new‎

What would you do with this? I'd prefer like {{fr-noun}} that it always gives a plural by default, and it always gives the feminine plural when the feminine is specified. The way I've currently done it is ugly; in fact I've just spotted a 'bug' that could be solved with even more #if: expressions, but I'd rather not solve it that way, but rather in the way I've given above. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:10, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

The code can be found at Template:es-noun/new, simply changing es to pt and Spanish to Portuguese. Mglovesfun (talk) 11:25, 2 March 2011 (UTC)

I basically like this template and how it makes easier to type plurals with -s or -es.

I've fixed a link that was pointing to Category:Portuguese adjectives.

However, the book Moderna Gramática Portuguesa, by Evanildo Bechara, is a well-known book and an authority on Portuguese grammar, and it specifically affirms that nouns of that language don't have inflected forms, only derivations, to address different genders (37th edition, page 132). In the absence of opposing views, I propose removing the parameters for feminine forms, or at least never using them by now. --Daniel. 06:02, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Masculine nouns can have feminine equivalents. I don't think we should be removing information that is both lexical and useful to the reader. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:10, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Feminine equivalents would be antonyms or hyponyms of masculine nouns, like in English. --Daniel. 17:38, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

Template:headtempboiler:suffix

This templates using this aren't categorizing entries. --Yair rand (talk) 00:33, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

No, they are. --Daniel. 06:05, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

I can't find the standard {lang} suffixes categories in the entries that use it. Note that {{en-suffix}} isn't using this anymore... --Yair rand (talk) 14:03, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

The entry -mente is categorized into Category:Portuguese suffixes by {{pt-suffix}}. --Daniel. 17:40, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

It looks like it's only capable of categorizing when option=masculine_feminine_singular_plural; so it works for Portuguese, but not for English. —Ruakh_TALK 18:29, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

I believe it would work for English as well, because |#default=[[Category:{{langname/cat|{{{lang|}}}}} suffixes|{{#if:{{{2|}}}|{{{2}}}|{{PAGENAME}}}}]], but there isn't any English template that uses {{headtempboiler:suffix}}. --Daniel. 18:53, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

As Yair said, {{en-suffix}} was using it, but had to be changed, because the categorization wasn't happening. We're not just speaking theoretically here. (I think the code-snippet that you just listed is nested within the wrong number of {{#switch:es, so doesn't do what you think.) —Ruakh_TALK 19:25, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

You was right, Ruakh, there was a bug of switches. I've fixed it, so {{headtempboiler:suffix}} became able to categorize English suffixes properly. --Daniel. 20:41, 4 March 2011 (UTC)

template:alternative form of

Since you've converted this to use deftempboiler, it's opaque. (That is, one used to be able to look at the source code of the template and see what the parameters did, so documentation wasn't quite as necessary as it is now.) Please fix the template or add its documentation.​—msh210℠ (talk) 17:26, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

Well, you can still look at the source code to see what the parameters are. Anyway, OK, I'll try to remember to make a documentation within the next few days. --Daniel. 14:29, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Protecting old vote pages?

Why?

There are plenty of good reasons to edit old vote pages. I don't think they should be protected.

—Ruakh_TALK 14:23, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

My personal interpretation is that presumably the 17 old vote pages that I protected would be easy targets of unwanted edits if the proposal of WT:BP#Sourced policies is implemented. The additional proposal of protecting them was introduced in that very discussion. --Daniel. 14:27, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Unwanted edits can be reverted. Those pages are not policy, they're just informative. —Ruakh_TALK 14:30, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

OK. From your participation in that BP discussion, I see you want to unprotect them. Be my guest. --Daniel. 14:33, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Sorry for commenting here before there; I saw the protections before I saw your comment there.
By the way, I should add — the reason that WT:CFI etc. are protected is because editors were making sensible changes, and we have a rule that even sensible changes are forbidden. They weren't targets of vandalism, or anything like that. So I don't think it's likely that the votes that they link to will be targets of vandalism, either. But if one or more of them do become targets of vandalism, then sure, we can protect them at that point. (Or, more likely, semiprotect them.)
—Ruakh_TALK 14:35, 31 March 2011 (UTC)

April 2011

In case you're still looking for more types of categories to template-ify...

...the subcategories of Category:Requests for audio pronunciation still don't have a template, and it would be helpful if they did, IMO. --Yair rand 00:47, 4 April 2011 (UTC)

Done. Enjoy. --Daniel. 02:28, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

symbcatboiler categorizing bug

{{symbcatboiler}} is categorizing incorrectly on Category:American Sign Language symbols. --Yair rand 05:15, 5 April 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. Its parent is Category:American Sign Language rather than "Category:American Sign Language language" now. --Daniel. 17:45, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

Poll subsections

Please do not add subsections to a poll that I have created. I dislike the subsections in your polls, but there I do not remove them. --Dan Polansky 10:20, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

I see. Sorry for adding the subsections to the poll that you have created. I won't alter the design of your polls in this manner again until further discussion. I may, however, formally ask for multiple opinions of the community about this subject, to know if there is a format more comfortable for everyone, and then expect it to be applied if possible. I, personally, just find a little harder to spot the right place to edit when a poll is big and subsectionless. --Daniel. 11:36, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

I acknowledge that finding the right place to place your vote is a bit harder in a poll without subsections. But there are also significant benefits to avoiding subsections. The L3 headings of the subsections are too conspicuous in the table of contents. Without L3 headings, each poll takes only a single line in the table of contents. Furthermore, the way you design the subheadings, each L3 heading repeats the heading of the poll, and is immediately followed by a longer text in boldface, which introduces a lot of redundancy and a typographically busy page. Using only text in boldface makes it possible to make a longer statement of an option, a statement that would be too long in an L3 heading. --Dan Polansky 12:07, 6 April 2011 (UTC)

Sequences of edits

Would you consider reducing the number of edits when creating a new entry, such as in Wikisaurus:fictional character, which has been created in 16 edits? I was making needlessly many subsequent edits for a long time, but I have been trying to reduce the number of edits recently. One thing is, the revision history gets longer. Another thing is, each revision is stored as a new copy in the database, so Wikisaurus:fictional character now has some 9 kB. The latter consideration is one on which most people have already given up, I guess; Beer parlour is crazy in this regard. Anyway, this is just a hint at what I think would be an improvement of practice; slowing down a bit could save you several edits, so the number could get down to 5 to 7 in WS:fictional character. IOW, not a big deal. --Dan Polansky 09:22, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

That page probably doesn't have some 9kB, because it's compressed. Nonetheless, yes. I surely can avoid making needless streaks of subsequent edits. --Daniel. 16:47, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

When you download a compressed dump with revision history and uncompress it, you get the uncompressed size on the disk, with each revision stored as a copy rather than as a diff. --Dan Polansky 17:08, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Wikisaurus:Aries

I am bit scared of seeing individual constellation in Wikisaurus.

That aside, the def "astronomy; the constellation" seems odd, as, in definitions, semicolon separates synonymous definitions.

What makes you think "Zodiac" is a hypernym of "Aries"? --Dan Polansky 09:27, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

OK, the defs of WS:Aries and WS:grammatical person can be changed to something better. Maybe the contexts "astronomy" and "grammar" should be between parentheses?

While I don't see the possible existence of 88 WS pages for modern constellations as a particularly scary phenomenon, these pages may become very big if the community decides that α Ari and similar names aren't SOP. Anyway, I thought it would be a good idea at least list Hamal, Sharatan, etc. together.

I thought of Zodiac and Aries as particular areas of the celestial sphere, to conclude that one of them is... well, a holonym of the other. Sorry for listing it as an hypernym; it's fixed now. The set of definitions of constellation explains that Aries may also be defined as the group of stars instead of the area surrounding them, in which case Zodiac would be a holonym too. --Daniel. 16:38, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Okay, so can you turn the defs into real defs? Neither "astronomy; the constellation" nor "grammar; linguistic reference" looks like a def; I don't understand the latter def in the least. --Dan Polansky 17:03, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Yes; done. --Daniel. 04:57, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Greek mythology

When you add long lists of trreqs, please put them in alphabetic order. --Hekaheka 15:25, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

When I add long lists of trreqs, yes, I always put them in alphabetic order. However, if I remember correctly, Greek mythology was the only exception, because... Don't we have a bot to do that? --Daniel. 16:14, 15 April 2011 (UTC)

Wikisaurus:moon of Eris

Huh? Eris is "the most massive known dwarf planet in the Solar System (provisional designation 2003 UB313)". What for does a thesaurus need a page with moons of a dwarf planet?

The other entries for particular instances that you have created in Wikisaurus are ridiculous. "Wikisaurus:country of Central America‎" does not need to exist at all; countries could be meronyms of "WS:Central America".

So after you have been prevented from creating mess in the mainspace, you move into Wikisaurus, right? I am so tired of you! --Dan Polansky 07:56, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Please. When I try to replicate the psychological reasoning that apparently made you angry with me, I get "Bwahahaha! I'm so evil that I'm going to make perfectly appropriate contributions, and I'll make sure that people will disagree with some of their titles!", find it ridiculous and stop.

I've added a few technical synonyms to Wikisaurus:moon of Eris. "Eris I" smells like SOP, but I'd say not, simply because it refers specifically to Dysnomia. I may change my mind if we possibly get a good astronomical definition of I. However, at least we have Sol III since 2009.

When you moved to "Wikisaurus:South America" from "Wikisaurus:country of South America‎", you created an incomplete page in the process; South America has other things, such as dependent territories. In fact, it has rivers and forests, possibly making the existence of a number of Wikisaurus pages justifiable. One possibility is having simultaneously WS:country of South America, WS:dependent territory of South America, WS:forest of South America and WS:river of South America. Alternatively, we may implement your already implemented proposal of WS:South America listing countries, and perhaps add dependent territories to it as well, and create separate pages for other things of South America.

The coverage of place names in the main namespace, when compared to the coverage of place names in Wikisaurus, suggests that the latter is a very immature project. Any of these ideas may be implemented if necessary and accepted. And these are all good ideas. I can see merit on supporting and improving yours, despite your rude remarks being poor arguments.

One advantage of having "WS:country of..." is making it clear what geographical boundaries should be listed and what should not. If fact, by keeping things that are not countries away, one can flood the pages with old names of countries such as Yugoslavia, instead of flooding them with names of dependent territories. Again, there are many different possibilities, such as even creating WS:former country of Europe, which w:Category:Former countries in Europe suggests that would be huge enough. --Daniel. 16:26, 16 April 2011 (UTC)

Having simultaneously "WS:country of South America", "WS:dependent territory of South America", "WS:forest of South America" and "WS:river of South America" is inappropriate for a thesaurus, as is "WS:former country of Europe". Having "WS:South America" is already questionable. I am horrified that you sincerely planned to create "WS:dependent territory of South America" and the other mentioned entries. As I said, when you cannot continue in the mainspace, you move to Wikisaurus. You know very well that your creation of tiny categories has turned controversial and that some of these categories were already deleted.

Place names do not need to be covered in Wikisaurus at all. Wikisaurus is a very incomplete and fledgling project, to be sure, but the last thing that makes it incomplete is lack of coverage of geographic names.

Can you tell me which thesaurus you have consulted as an example to follow when creating WS:country of South America? What thesauri have you have had a look at, if any? --Dan Polansky 08:20, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Wikisaurus:Portuguese language‎, Wikisaurus:English language, and Wikisaurus:Irish language? Are you crazy? I ask you to immediately stop adding entries for names of specific entities to Wikisaurus. --Dan Polansky 08:34, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

No other thesaurus comes to my mind, and I don't have the intention of adding geographic names to Wikisaurus if they're inappropriate content. I've already ceased to edit countries and continents per your complaint, and I can also stop to edit names of languages until further discussion.

One result of this old discussion between two people was the decision to eventually create a neat yet complex categorization scheme for place names of various levels, which I didn't do after months. My plan was to take advantage of the Wikisaurus scheme to organize the place names before categorizing them, if they should be categorized.

One rationale for using Wikisaurus is naturally the fact that these places have a considerable number of meronyms and holonyms. Since we have relaxed criteria for including place names, and many entries defined as place names, it seems natural to display their relationships, either at Wikisaurus or somewhere else. A reader of the entry "Minnesota" may want to see a list of other names of US states. This reasoning applies to a number of languages as well, with their multiple names, dialects, families and macrolanguages. --Daniel. 08:52, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

I am exploring the possibilities of including names of specific entities in Wikisaurus and arguments for and against various approaches. It takes some time, hence no further response from me so far on this subject. I still think there should be no "WS:country of South America" and no "WS:moon of Mars".

Re: "One result of this old discussion between two people was the decision to eventually create a neat yet complex categorization scheme for place names of various levels, which I didn't do after months. My plan was to take advantage of the Wikisaurus scheme to organize the place names before categorizing them, if they should be categorized.":

My tentative reading: You had a discussion in July 2010 with User:Dick Laurent AKA Opiaterein AKA RIC after which you had decided that you were going to create a neat yet complex categorization scheme for place names of various levels. You decided that you could use Wikisaurus as a working ground or workplace before you continue to create categories for geographic names, meaning things named "Category: ...". Is that right? If so, what makes you think Wiktionary editors would be okay with that? Have you published that categorization scheme anywhere so its application to Wikisaurus can be discussed? --Dan Polansky 17:04, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Creating a complex categorization scheme and creating the resulting categories are different things, and the approval of other Wiktionarians is expected to occur exactly between these two steps, or earlier. So I don't have to present anything yet to other people, and I would certainly propose clearly the new categorization scheme once I'm ready, as I've been doing multiple times.

Differently, I assumed that adding proper nouns to Wikisaurus was already inherently appropriate, for aforementioned reasons and the fact that proper nouns existed there before my interference, so I didn't bother to ask for that specific approval. --Daniel. 17:46, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Wow. Can you tell me which proper nouns had entries in Wikisaurus before you started? Furthermore, "moon of Jupiter" is not even a proper noun; it is a non-elementary sum-of-parts term that selects individuals based on their class and based on their relationship to an individual. Were there any entries before you started on which the creation of "WS:moon of Jupiter" could be modeled? --Dan Polansky 18:03, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

You added names of moons to WS:moon, names of stars to WS:star and Milky Way to WS:galaxy. The name "WS:moon of Jupiter" could easily have been written as "WS:Jovian moon", which is similar to various other sum-of-parts names such as "WS:promiscuous woman" and "WS:card suit". --Daniel. 18:42, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Well yes, I have placed some proper names inside of entries of common nouns. You see the difference to what you are doing with Wikisaurus:Aries, Wikisaurus:Botein (not even in the mainspace) and WS:country of Africa, right? "Jovian moon" looks superficially similar to "promiscuous woman" but it is fundamentally different in that "Jovian moon" really only means "moon of Mars" and is a relational term, one that picks objects by their relation to another object. The number of such relational terms is huge. Also, there should be as few terms like "promiscuous woman" as possible; the term has one-word synonyms rather than instances in the entry, and is used only for the sake of clarity of the headword. WS:card suit is a term of disambiguation; "WS:suit" could be used otherwise and is the page name under which I have created the entry before you have moved it elsewhere. In general, sum of parts terms should be used with great caution in Wikisaurus. --Dan Polansky 19:00, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

I interpreted the existence of listed proper nouns as an implied permission to list more proper nouns. This fact applies to all parts of speech, by the way. However, now I see more clearly that whether Wikisaurus should fulfill the function of being an abrangent or complete compendium of proper nouns that are attestable and have a number of semantic relations is a delicate subject.

I added a few new pages of proper nouns (Few, really! From the point of view of someone who disagrees with their existence, they probably must have been a lot, but I see them as a small bunch of pages today. I'm sorry if this cognitive conflict that I described is accurate.), learned about your disagreements, got the chance to discuss them, and exposed a number of relevant proposals to you, at least.

One example of Wikisaurus page of a "relational term", as you described it, is WS:European. It means person of Europe. If all pages created by you are appropriate, and if there are a number of arguments able to prove that "WS:moon of Mars" is inappropriate by comparison with pages created by you, this is not one of them. If, more specifically, you actually was criticizing the concept of a list of proper nouns that are related to another proper noun, then this is really a novel concept along with the basic idea of creating Wikisaurus pages defined as proper nouns. In this case, I acknowledge that there is a huge number of possible relational lists and support the generic idea of don't creating Wikisaurus pages for most of them. This reflects in the fact that my proposals don't involve the existence of "WS:moon of the Solar System" and "WS:state of South America", which would be redundant with closer relations such as "WS:Brazil" and "WS:Venezuela" with states and "WS:South America" with countries.

I support, however, an inclusionist approach that, from my current long-term mindset, involves the creation of at least one Wikisaurus page per country, among an even higher number of other pages for certain groups of proper nouns, which I believe you dislike. Like I mentioned before, many place names, including countries, have a high number of meronyms, an arbitrary number of holonyms, a high rate of inclusion in the main namespace and the perceived need to list these holonyms and meronyms somewhere; appendices are a fairly good place to do that, except for the fact that this alternative proposal involves making the appendices function as Wikisaurus pages, which is a function better fulfilled by actual Wikisaurus pages. --Daniel. 09:09, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ "abrangent" is not an English word; have you not noticed? You must know very well that I have to look up that word and find that it is not in the dictionary, right? See also “abrangent”, in OneLook Dictionary Search..

Few pages? You have added 50 Wikisaurus pages between 15 April and 19 April that either represent names or terms for specific entities or are meant to group them under one sum-of-parts head: WS:Hercules, WS:Andromeda, WS:Pisces, WS:Aquarius, WS:Sagittarius, WS:Capricornus, WS:Scorpius, WS:Aldebaran, WS:Virgo, WS:Leo, WS:Zodiac, WS:Ophiuchus, WS:Bharani, WS:Scottish Gaelic language, WS:Irish language, WS:Cancer, WS:Botein, WS:English language, WS:Portuguese language, WS:moon of Eris, WS:moon of Earth, WS:United States, WS:Carina–Sagittarius Arm, WS:Orion–Cygnus Arm, WS:Mesarthim, WS:Sheratan, WS:Milky Way, WS:Hamal, WS:universe, WS:Gemini, WS:Venezuela, WS:Brazil, WS:Central America, WS:Oceania, WS:Asia, WS:Africa, WS:Europe, WS:South America, WS:North America, WS:Taurus, WS:Moon, WS:Dysnomia, WS:moon of Haumea, WS:moon of Saturn, WS:moon of Pluto, WS:moon of Neptune, WS:moon of Uranus, WS:moon of Mars, WS:moon of Jupiter, WS:Solar System.

You are not going to claim that "European" is a sum-of-parts term, are you? It is in a way a relational term, I admit, but it is not a sum-of-parts one, and it is there to host such hyponyms as "Frenchman", which is a common noun.

You have created "WS:state of South America", yet now you claim that it is not part of proposal. After correction: my mistake, you have created "WS:country of South America". What you are saying is that you have not intended to create such list pages for any meaningful combination of common noun and a proper noun.

Your pretense that your actions were an extension of what was already being done in Wikisaurus is ridiculous. --Dan Polansky 09:51, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I must have mentally mixed Portuguese with English by accident when typing one word. When I said "abrangent", I meant "comprehensive".

My actions are indeed an extension of what was already being done in Wikisaurus. They don't have to be in order to be acceptable, but they are. "European" is not a sum-of-parts; "moon of Mars" is. However, last year you said "A Wikisaurus entry does not stand for a term or a syntactic entity; it stands for a semantic entity or a semantic cluster." I perceived a semantic entity and created a Wikisaurus page for that. Your disagreement came later. --Daniel. 10:15, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Sure, it was a mere accident. That is why you have written this, including the wikilink to Portuguese "abrangente": "The Wikisaurus version is more restricted and more sophisticated by displaying various types of relationships of English nouns ([...]), and the topical category is more abrangent and more simple by simply listing all the terms that involve tea in the easily readable and editable standard used by numerous sites powered by MediaWiki. --Daniel. 20:24, 17 April 2011 (UTC)". I see you have invented a new form of obscurantism. You are trying to tell me that, when entering that wikilink, you have not found out that there is no "abrangent" in English, right? --Dan Polansky 10:57, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

DCDuring inserted the link into the sentence you quoted from me. There is no link in the original discussion. Diff: [2]. --Daniel. 11:10, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

As a side note: Who cares about one mistaken word, especially one subsequently immediately clarified? You listed few Czech names of planets instead of English ones on Wikisaurus, among a number of other minor mistakes and I'm not accusing you of "inventing obscurantism" for this reason. I corrected them quietly. You must know very well that my skills are "en-3", since you read babel boxes enough to ask people to add them to their user pages. By the way, you are being needlessly aggressive. I prefer when you aren't. Now let me re-answer one of your questions: Wikisaurus pages that were created by you, and whose main purpose is listing proper nouns, include WS:Titan and WS:astrological sign. --Daniel. 03:23, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ I admit that I am angry and picking needless minor fighting points, of which "abrangent" is the clearest instance. Sorry for misreading your post; that is what happens when people modify other people's posts without notification.

WS:Titan is a common noun (mainspace says it is a proper noun but I do not see why) and non-relational one, meaning not like "country of Africa"; it is like listing some names of stars in WS:star, which I did. I have placed names of specific entities to some entries for common nouns rather than relational terms. I was not in the process of flooding Wikisaurus with names of specific entities. You said that you have created a "few" Wikisaurus entries when you have in fact created 50. I see no retraction or correction on your side. You continue to create entries for single countries in Wikisaurus. You are taking advantage of the fact that I am not an admin and that very few people take interest in Wikisaurus, so you can flood Wikisaurus with exactly that content that people reject in categories, including entries dedicated to individual stars.

You have not had a look at any other thesaurus, and you continue recklessly expand Wikisaurus along any line as you see fit, just because the relations of meronymy and holonymy and the unclear rules of the game as regards scoping allow you to do so. Yes, I am angry because of that. --Dan Polansky 07:45, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

You said that I am taking advantage of the fact that you are not an admin. However, I fail to see this particular point, because: (1) I am not using admin tools against you, such as blocking you, and (2) using admin tools against me, such as blocking me, would be a poor strategy of solving disagreements.

It is unfair to say that people reject categories that would contain the contents that we are discussing; nonetheless, it would be equally unfair to assume that people support these categories. The reason is: as far as I know, such categories were not exposed and discussed yet. However, a simple poll could hopefully display a consensus, or tendencies of consensus. Both you and me have experience in creating polls, so if this idea suits you, please be my guest and create one.

You questioned the existence of entries, and Wikisaurus pages, for individual stars, in a current RFDO discussion. It seems fruitful. --Daniel. 08:48, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ The RFDO discussion does not seem fruitful at all. I wholly reject the arguments made by you and MG in that RFDO request. For me, that discussion and this discussion with you is mostly a waste of my time and attention, that is, my scarce resources. I engange in this discussion in the hope that it will have non-zero effect on the usefulness and greatness of Wikisaurus, but that is a very uncertain proposition. --Dan Polansky 09:15, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

You may always counterargue the arguments that you reject. Unfortunately, this does require time and attention. On the other hand, one possible, optimistic long-term result for your plans would be setting rules in stone for Wikisaurus, that would only be able to be undone by votes, for example. Just note how CFI and ELE are virtually eternal in essence. --Daniel. 09:36, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ Re: "You may always counterargue the arguments that you reject": Which is just another waste of resources and, in addition, does not necessarily lead to conviction of other people. Obviously, you have too much time on your hands for endless discussions (so do I, in a way); your university courses are not making you busy enough. Setting up rules for a thesaurus via RFDO is the last thing I would like to do. I would like to discuss with people who have shown the ability to create real and good Wikisaurus entries, and have taken the bussiness of building a thesaurus seriously enough to study other available thesauri. --Dan Polansky 09:46, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

I'd appreciate if two of your assumptions about my life from your last message were clarified. First of all, did I someday reveal publicly on the Internet that I am currently engaged in university courses? Second, I did read other thesauri and studies about semantic relations; I did not, however, see the list "country of South America" in any of them before introducing it to Wikisaurus. --Daniel. 10:03, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ As regards the first statement, I arrived at it in my own way; feel free to deny it.

The second statement is my reading of your answer to my two questions, your answer being "No other thesaurus comes to my mind, ...". Feel free to clarify this by stating which thesauri you have consulted. --Dan Polansky 10:56, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Wikisaurus:afterlife

What the heck is this?

• Wikisaurus:afterlife
  • Synonyms
    • afterlife
  • Hyponyms
    • Heaven
    • Hell

Do you sincerely believe that "Heaven" is a hyponym of "afterlife"? I have seen so many similar bad edits in Wikisaurus from you. You have no idea of semantic relations. I would be so relieved not to see you editing Wikisaurus again. --Dan Polansky 19:30, 19 April 2011 (UTC)

Technically not yet, because it isn't defined on Wiktionary; "heaven" is. The version with the capital letter has yet to be created and attested. The list of terms you copied from WS:afterlife is not, however, erroneous. If afterlife (or a similar name, such as Afterlife, Hereafter or the Other Side) simply means the universe inhabited by deceased people, and usage implies that Heaven is the only form of afterlife of a belief or doctrine, then Heaven is a hyponym of afterlife. Same thing with Hell. The common belief of Heaven and Hell as two simultaneously existent places in, for example, Catholicism, would make them able to be meronyms of another, more strict list of semantic relations, which is highly unlikely to be created but could be named "WS:Catholic afterlife". One simple way to list all forms of afterlife together at "WS:afterlife" would be using the keyword "Various"; however, ideally, all varieties should be explained eventually. Another simple way of listing them all together would be adapting the page named "WS:afterlife" to cover the alternative meaning of "any of various places believed to be populated by deceased people" (whose plural is "afterlives") and where all versions may be listed as instances. --Daniel. 07:37, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Great; you do not figure the thing even after I point it out. "afterlife" is "life after death". "heaven" is "the paradise of the afterlife in certain religions, considered to be the home of the god or gods of those religions, and often the home, or one of various possible homes, of souls of deceased people". Heaven is a place while afterlife is not a place. Hence, heaven is not a hyponym of afterlife. QED. --Dan Polansky 09:47, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Afterlife is a place. By saying otherwise, I assume you dismissed my last message of this thread. Your definition of afterlife is also correct. --Daniel. 10:20, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

afterlife is defined as a place neither in Wiktionary, nor in MWO, nor in Encarta. --Dan Polansky 10:37, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Now it is defined as an entry of Wiktionary, and attested. I didn't check the other sources that you mentioned. The Wikisaurus page, however, had a good definition mentioning a "place" even before you started this discussion. --Daniel. 11:55, 20 April 2011 (UTC)

Point taken: some authors refer to "afterlife" as if it were a place, whether that attests to a new sense that has "place" as a hypernym or not. --Dan Polansky 07:28, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Wikisaurus entries for countries

I find it rather doubtful to create individual Wikisaurus entries for countries, as WS:Ecuador and WS:Venezuela. The entries for countries that you have created contain a lot of redlinks. What makes you think that these entries, which will amount to some 200 judging from Wikipedia, can host interesting thesaurus content? What sort of meronyms are you planning to list? --Dan Polansky 08:01, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

I created and populated the hidden Category:Wikisaurus items with red links, which shows the fact that many entries listed on Wikisaurus have red links. The first-level administrative divisions such as states and provinces seem to me good information to be listed on pages of individual countries of that namespace. And they are interesting content. Other interesting information, that can be found on WS:Brazil, includes: Northern Region and BRIC, which are terms directly related to that country. --Daniel. 09:00, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

The distinction between "contain a lot of redlinks" and "has at least one redlink" is one that you should be able to make. The category contains the latter while I spoke of the former. For instance, WS:diagram listed in your category has two redlinks among many bluelinks.

Okay, so you intend to list at least states and provinces of some countries as meronyms. Should there be a Wikisaurus entry for every country in the world, per your plan? Should there be a Wikisaurus entry for each state of the U.S., per your plan? What is the estimated number of entries for place names that should be created in Wikisaurus, per your plan? --Dan Polansky 09:10, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

"contain a lot of redlinks" is a subset of "has at least one redlink". Logically, the category contains both possibilities. Pages with many redlinks include Wikisaurus:anticonvulsant, Wikisaurus:bird, Wikisaurus:bird of prey and Wikisaurus:chav. However, in addition to the fact that Wikisaurus pages with many redlinks are not unheard of, there is the fact that the number of redlinks is meaningless if they are attestable. The pages may simply be created, and that's one purpose of categorizing their respective lists together.

Category:Wikisaurus has 1173 pages. In other words, there are approximately 1100 WS pages if we don't count the entries of proper nouns and few anomalies such as an archive of beer parlour listed there.

I tried to reach an approximate result for your numerical question, and ended up with a very high number, reaching four digits too. I acknowledge that this would be an extreme flood of proper nouns in comparison with the current contents, and I see this as a very strong argument against suddenly creating these WS entries of geographical divisions. However, places to list and organize proper nouns are still needed, they are interesting information, are connected by semantic relations and already flood the main namespace extensively. Wikisaurus is still better than appendices like Appendix:Place names in France that would be expected to serve the same purpose. These Wikisaurus pages could, however, in principle, be completely replaced by categories such as "Category:States of Brazil" to display the same relations of holonymy/meronymy if you prefer Wikisaurus pages to avoid a huge set of proper nouns. I can see a number of reasons for wanting Wikisaurus devoid of that content, including but not limited to the arguments you said to me in various discussions.

As you mentioned, having one page for each state of the U.S. would indeed fit my plans of using Wikisaurus to display relations of geographical divisions, because the main namespace contains definitions of subdivisions of these states (for example, Saint Paul as the capital of Minnesota).

First of all, the current, relaxed practice indicates that Wiktionary accepts two levels of administrative divisions per country. Here are some examples:

• country > province > city
• country > state > city
• country > federal district > city
• country > state > town

Judging from your estimate of 200 countries, and the approximate fact that they tend to have 30 first-level divisions each, and 30 second-level divisions for each first-level division, then it amounts to 180000 definitions in the main namespace. Wikisaurus pages would be restricted to the first-level entries, resulting in 6000 WS pages or equal categories to list the 180000 aforementioned main namespace ones.

I didn't count third-level and fourth-level divisions, such as subdistricts and municipalities, because their physical existence and their coverage are more irregular; and the current results are irregular enough. --Daniel. 10:34, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

┌────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘ This high number of Wikisaurus entries that you are about or at least pondering to create raises two key questions: (a) why are these pages important for a thesaurus AKA word finder, and (b) why is it important to have them in a dictionary? Related questions: (c) what thesauri contain such pages or so many pages for geographic names, (d) what thesauri have you had a look at, and (e) what dictionaries contain pages that interrelate geographic names by meronymy? --Dan Polansky 10:48, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

{{list linker}}

{{#switch:{{FULLPAGENAME}}|{{{1}}}|{{{2}}}=<!--
-->{{#if:{{{cat}}}|[[Category:{{{cat}}}]]}}<!--
-->{{#if:{{{cat2}}}|[[Category:{{{cat2}}}]]}}<!--
-->}}

I'm a bit confused by this piece of code in {{list linker}}. The second parameter given from {{list helper}} is the language code, so I don't think this gives the intended result. I'm not completely sure what the intended result is, but if it's to check whether any of the parameters given to list helper match the page name, wouldn't it simplify the whole thing to just do that through one large switch function in list helper, rather than having many small switch functions in every list linker, so that it could minimize the use of parserfunctions and not have to pass the cat/cat2 into list linker every time in the first place? --Yair rand 16:11, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

May 2011

category idea

Hullo sir

¶ Since we have Category:Informal, should we also have Category:Formal? I just thought I would propose this before it is creätèd.

Regards, --Pilcrow 05:19, 6 May 2011 (UTC)Pilcrow.

If you can be so kind as to provide a few examples of possible members of Category:Formal, it would be immensely easier to support your proposal. --Daniel. 05:23, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Please note that Wiktionary:Votes/2011-04/Lexical categories proposes splitting "Category:Informal" into "Category:Informal terms by language" and "Category:English informal terms", which certainly doesn't exclude the idea of a category for formal terms, but it might be named "Category:English formal terms", for example. --Daniel. 05:54, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

¶ Exemplorum gratia: whom (already tagged), sir, madam, may (versus can), child (versus kid), urinate, discussion and discuss (versus talk), welcome or greetings (versus hey or sup), canine (versus dog), congratulate (versus congrats) how are you doing (versus what's up). ¶ You may express yourself as you like; I will not be upset if you decline. --Pilcrow 06:04, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your examples, and for being prepared for not being upset if I decline your proposal. That said, I liked your choice of terms, and I personally support the idea of having a category for formal terms. --Daniel. 06:12, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

Making verbatim copies of Wikipedia content

Hey, I don't understand at all the purpose of this page. I reduced it to a redirect to Wikipedia, as it appears a verbatim copy. If new information was added to the wikipedia article, the wiktionary article would become obsolete, as the editor has no way of knowing the information has been duplicated to the wiktionary. Unless you can provide a good reason not to, I will ask this page to be deleted and render the sole backlink in escalator to a normal inter-wiki link as well. Thanks, --Hydrox 22:00, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Copying contents between Wikimedia projects isn't per se wrong. That said, feel free to ask for the deletion of the appendix in question; the right place to do it would be Wiktionary:Requests for deletion/Others. However, please don't blank that page before doing that, because by doing so you give the impression (to people that fail to see the history) that you are merely wanting the deletion of a needless soft redirect to Wikipedia. I'm going to revert your reversal in order to facilitate any future decision. Thanks in advance for understanding. --Daniel. 22:16, 7 May 2011 (UTC)

Template:humorously

Isn't this sort of redundant to Template:humorous? TeleComNasSprVen 05:56, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

No. One is an adjective and other is an adverb. Please see the "what links here" page of both templates to check how they are used. --Daniel. 06:01, 11 May 2011 (UTC)

He isn't talking about part of speech - {{figurative}} redirects to {{figuratively}} for example, and has done so for years. --Mglovesfun (talk) 12:27, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

I know he isn't; I am. --Daniel. 12:35, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Twice-borrowed terms

In theory, any entry that has {{etyl|xx|xx}} where xx is the same in both cases, is a twice-borrowed term. Dutch mannequin is an example of that, and it's categorised in Category:nl:Dutch derivations. Do you think it should be a subcategory of twice-borrowed terms? —CodeCat 10:36, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Sure, apparently the two categories that you mentioned are supposed to have exactly the same terms (since I can't think of any entry that would justify a Category:Dutch four times borrowed terms, for example.)

In this case, perhaps {{etyl|xx|xx}} should categorize entries automatically into Category:Dutch twice-borrowed terms, rather than into Category:nl:Dutch derivations, because the latter is very ambiguous. --Daniel. 10:46, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

I tried that, but Ruakh just reverted it with no explanation. :/ —CodeCat 11:19, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Wow. By reading only the quick exchange between you and Ruakh, it would be difficult to know what you two were thinking; I, personally, see a comedy of errors.

Well... I suggest explaining this simple proposal at BP before doing that change to a highly used template. A little bureucracy usually works well for noncontroversial changes here. --Daniel. 11:32, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Etymology categories

Now that we have a special category tree for etymology, do you think the derivation categories should be moved under them as well? It would probably need a vote, but it does make sense under the circumstances. —CodeCat 11:37, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

I, personally, would require further discussion before supporting a merger of categories of derivations with the new category tree of etymology (such as, for example, making "Category:French derivations" be a member of "Category:French etymologies"). It is a complex proposal, and we don't need to rush.

That said, feel free to take a look at Wiktionary:Votes/2011-04/Derivations categories, which is good in essence but has very much room for improvement, just like the current categories of derivations. --Daniel. 11:46, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

I meant it the other way around actually. That French derivations would be renamed to something like "English derivations from French" and be placed under English etymologies. I think that it also should be placed under the French tree somewhere, but I don't know where. —CodeCat 12:03, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Renaming "French derivations" to "English derivations from French" is already a huge enough project because it involves moving literally thousands of categories (since I strongly assume that many other names would be consistently implemented too, like "German derivations from Japanese").

While I basically like this proposed new naming scheme (it seems to be the most natural choice, really), I (and presumably other people) would feel much more inclined to support it if I knew exactly what would be the place of each and every category. The vote in question has some ideas to consider. --Daniel. 12:23, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Ok let me see... currently, the top category for (as an example) Dutch is called "nl:Etymology", but we now also have "Dutch etymologies. So at the very least, we should rename the former so that it fits into the latter. How does "Dutch terms by etymology" sound? Or maybe "Dutch terms by origin"? That category would then contain the categories of the etymology tree. We could leave it at that for now and just integrate the two etymology trees into one.

If we decide to make the tree match the rest, then we would need to rename the subcategories as well. As a rule so far, all language-specific categories have names that begin with the name of the language of the terms it contains. So that means that all etymology categories containing Dutch terms must begin with "Dutch" instead of "nl:". We currently have "nl:Indo-European derivations", so we might rename it to "Dutch terms derived from Indo-European".

But then there is the second tree, which is the tree of the language of origin. Currently that tree overlaps with the English terms, so it's a bit of a mess. One top category might be "Terms derived from Indo-European by language", or a similar but more concise name. The category containing Dutch terms derived from Indo-European would then be in both that category and the category of Dutch terms by origin. In short, we would have two trees, that overlap one another, as we do now more or less, one sorted "by origin" and one sorted "by language". —CodeCat 20:24, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

I propose that for the time being, we create a template {{derivcatboiler}} which would replace {{topic cat}} for etymology categories. Its parameters would be two language codes, like {{etyl}} - the first would be the source language, and the second would be the target language. So, Category:nl:Indo-European derivations would use {{derivcatboiler|ine|nl}}. Or maybe the parameters should be the other way around, since other boilerplate templates have the target language as the first parameter? For now, we wouldn't need to make this template work any differently from how {{topic cat}} currently does, except that we can make the internals work before we start changing the category names themselves. It would give us a bit of a head start by having a working template. Ideally, we would make the internal 'storage' of the tree in such a way that it can be used in both the original and the new situation. —CodeCat 20:30, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Having a an additional template named {{derivcatboiler}} is a great idea, and its parameters should be {{derivcatboiler|nl|ine}}, in this order, for "Category:Dutch terms derived from Indo-European", at least for the reason you gave.

In particular, I disagree with your last idea: creating a template that is not {{topic cat}} and works with the current categories of derivations (such as "Category:nl:Japanese derivations) is just unnecessary work if they're going to be changed en masse anyway and the current template works just well, although not perfectly.

I naturally support eventually renaming "Category:nl:Etymology" to fit "Category:Dutch etymologies", but again I'd prefer if ideally everything else were decided first, so the former name may act as a perfect cleanup category when the moment comes.

In my opinion, the category "Dutch terms by etymology" to fill that gap is a really bad choice because it is so generic it could be identical to "Dutch etymologies" or "nl:Etymology". Your other suggestion, "Dutch terms by origin" is not bad, but I think I have a better, more intuitive, idea:

Having "Category:Dutch terms derived from Japanese" with at least two parent categories: "Category:Terms derived from Japanese" and "Category:Dutch terms derived from other languages". --Daniel. 09:28, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Ok, so we have this proposal now for the "origin" tree:

• Dutch etymologies
  • Terms derived from Dutch (< Dutch derivations)
    • English terms derived from Dutch (< Dutch derivations, just the entries)
    • Japanese terms derived from Dutch (< ja:Dutch derivations)
• English etymologies
  • Terms derived from English (< English derivations)
    • Dutch terms derived from English (< nl:English derivations)
    • Japanese terms derived from English (< ja:English derivations)
• Japanese etymologies
  • Terms derived from Japanese (< Japanese derivations)
    • English terms derived from Japanese (< Japanese derivations, just the entries)
    • Dutch terms derived from Japanese (< nl:Japanese derivations)

And for the "target" tree:

• Dutch etymologies
  • Dutch terms derived from other languages (< nl:Etymology)
    • Dutch terms derived from English (< nl:English derivations)
    • Dutch terms derived from Japanese (< nl:Japanese derivations)
• English etymologies
  • English terms derived from other languages (< Etymology, just the non-language categories)
    • English terms derived from Dutch (< Dutch derivations, just the entries)
    • English terms derived from Japanese (< Japanese derivations, just the entries)
• Japanese etymologies
  • Japanese terms derived from other languages (< ja:Etymology)
    • Japanese terms derived from Dutch (< ja:Dutch derivations)
    • Japanese terms derived from English (< ja:English derivations)

That leaves just two points left to figure out. Does "Dutch terms derived from other languages" have a parent other than "Dutch etymologies"? Since it is a sister category to "Dutch blends" which is in "Blends by language", the natural choice would be "Terms derived from other languages by language". And parallel to that is the question what parents "Terms derived from Japanese" has other than "Japanese etymologies". It is already a "by language" category even if not named so, so "Terms derived from Japanese by language" would be the same category. I'm not sure where it would go. —CodeCat 12:01, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

That's an excellent category tree in my opinion. The umbrella categories are a relatively minor issue, that can be resolved this way: "Terms derived from other languages by language" is good enough, so we can have them.

I copied these ideas to Wiktionary:Votes/2011-04/Derivations categories. --Daniel. 07:20, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

The source language categories still don't have an umbrella category, though. Which category will contain "Terms derived from Dutch", "Terms derived from English" and "Terms derived from Japanese"? —CodeCat 09:53, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

Then I suggest having "Derivations by target language" and "Derivations by source language". I updated the vote to mention them. --Daniel. 10:10, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

I just realised something. We've looked at the 'leaf' categories for individual languages, but we haven't considered what to do with the categories for language families, such as "Germanic derivations". Under our new system it would be renamed to "English terms derived from Germanic", which in turn would go in both "English terms derived from other languages" and "Terms derived from Germanic". But where would the latter category go? Since Germanic isn't a language, there is no "Germanic etymologies". Perhaps it would be necessary to distinguish languages from families in the tree, so that we can categorise accordingly. There is a Category:Germanic languages category, but does every language family have its own category in that way?

Furthermore, now that we're looking at it, maybe we should distinguish the names of language families as well? Perhaps instead of "(English) terms derived from Germanic", we could make use of the fact that the template will 'know' that Germanic is a family, and name it "(English) terms derived from a Germanic language" instead? —CodeCat 19:52, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

2cents: "(English) terms derived from Germanic languages" sounds better to me than "(English) terms derived from a Germanic language". If you're crazy specific like I am, the latter seems potentially misleading. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 20:16, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

I would say the former is more misleading since it gives the impression that the words may be derived from several languages at the same time. And there is also the special "Substrate" language which is an unknown language that influenced another language. "Terms derived from a substrate language" sounds better to me than "Terms derived from substrate languages". —CodeCat 20:26, 15 May 2011 (UTC)

(unindenting) Yes, our tradition indicates that every language family should have a category like Category:Germanic languages (e.g. "Category:North Germanic languages", "Category:Romance languages", etc.) As few exceptions, we have anomalies like Category:All constructed languages where "all" doesn't mean anything, but this huge problem doesn't have to be discussed now.

We can have "Category:Terms derived from Germanic languages" without an additional "Category:Germanic etymologies", because we don't want to create the common etymological subcategories for families, such as "Category:Germanic calques" or "Category:Germanic neologisms".

OK, I'm going to edit the vote again to conform with my new conclusions drawn by this discussion. Feel free to agree with me, or change the vote too, or whatever.

"(English) terms derived from Germanic languages" sounds better to me than "(English) terms derived from a Germanic language". If you're going to say that the plural version means strictly "two or more", then the singular version means strictly "exactly one", so both names would be technically untrue. However, we simply don't need to make that distinction, because the only actually useful quantity is "nonzero" Germanic languages, and the plural version indicates that nicely.

(In addition, there are endless possibilities if one wants to unnecessarily challenge the accuracy of these names: one may argue that "(English) terms derived from Germanic languages" is a category only for terms that don't have any other family among their roots, which would be a false assumption too.) --Daniel. 10:52, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

The vote I just created would help in making this work, if it passes. That way we could read the derivation tree information from the language templates themselves, and we wouldn't need to keep a separate tree just for {{derivcatboiler}}. —CodeCat 12:06, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Since the system needs to know that "Germanic" is a child of "Indo-European", then I assume that the vote is supposed to create subpages for family codes too (like {{etyl:gem/fam}}. This fact should probably be mentioned there. There are other issues that can be discussed when the time comes. --Daniel. 12:16, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

But that would create a chicken and egg problem, because then the calling template would need to know the type before it can find the template (since it uses a prefix). I think we should get rid of prefixes on language templates altogether, to be honest. But that might need another vote... —CodeCat 12:22, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

And if we drop prefixes, it would mean we can no longer distinguish between 'gem' as the Germanic family and the current practice of using the language family code for that language's common proto-language. So we would need new language codes for proto-languages. —CodeCat 12:24, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I have started a discussion here. —CodeCat 12:30, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

nonstandard - slang

Hi Daniel. Why would Category:Danish slang be in Category:Danish nonstandard terms? Is slang per definition nonstandard? What exactly is meant by the term "nonstandard term" anyway? I would presume nonstandard forms, -spellings and -terms was synonymous terms. We don't have (thankfully) Category:Slang by language in Category:Nonstandard terms by language.--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 11:56, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Hi. We also don't have Category:Noun forms by language in Category:Nouns by language; not categorizing umbrella categories inside other umbrella categories is a de facto practice — at least, it's my style, and it's just widely implemented by people who use templates created by me.

The page Category:English nonstandard terms already contains a description of what "nonstandard term" means. I made that description but I did not introduce the use of that term on Wiktionary, so I may have been wrong when describing it; but I don't think I am. Something is nonstandard when it is not standard. I just assumed (with help of old descriptions of categories) that the point of view of standardness is the "formal and pedantic language". --Daniel. 12:10, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

About umbrella categories: That depends whether they are meant to include pages, or just categories. I like to traverse the category tree when I'm looking for something I just can't remember what's called. So I'd actually prefer Category:Noun forms by language in Category:Nouns by language, as is Category:Plurals by language and other like it.

About standardness: How on earth should we decide whether slang is standard or not? (and why?) There's loads of slang in standard Danish. Most entries in Category:Danish slang and all except one in Category:Danish colloquialisms are standard Danish terms, despite being in a subcategory of Category:Danish nonstandard terms. Should we re-categorize them to fit your system? I.e. if it's standard it can't be slang too.

I'm sorry, but I think your systematic-ism is bordering on the ridiculous sometimes.--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 13:00, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Since you categorically said that "There's loads of slang in standard Danish.", then you probably are able to answer all your questions from the last message in a manner that proves part of my categorization system wrong, which would be a good thing. I never said that my work is perfect or complete; feel free to revise it.

Nonetheless, Wikipedia's Slang says slang are "not considered standard", while Wiktionary's slang says they are "outside of conventional usage", which agrees with the current descriptions and categories. There's nothing wrong with being simultaneously systematic and precise, if preciseness can be achieved. Notably, having hundreds of language-specific categories for slang is something rather systematic anyway, especially since "slang" is an English concept used here to represent groups of foreign words, which certainly have different notions of "standardness", "pedantry", "formality", etc. You may want to provide examples of standard slang, to make it easier to reconsider the details in question. --Daniel. 14:23, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Have you noted the amount of hostility that your efforts to impose categorization attract? Doesn't that bother you? Do you assume that those who oppose are wrong and you right? In this case you clearly have a non-standard understanding of the English meanings and relationship of "slang" and "non-standard". DCDuring TALK 14:56, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Accusing me of "imposing categorization" out of nowhere in the middle of a conversation does bother me. --Daniel. 15:07, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Well, maybe I was a bit categorical. I consider terms included in DDO for standard, but since some are marked as slang it is arguable. They are "more standard" than those found exclusively in a slang dictionary. Also some include argot and jargon, others specifically excludes them from slang. Some of the terms in "Danish slang" like daler and femmer, may not be slang at all. I so wish we could have context labels, rather than a tree of categories, for this kind of stuff.--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 15:14, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

I think that the label Slang in DDO is a recognition of the fact that some might consider them non-standard, not that they necessarily are non-standard, which is the core of my concern. It is impossible to define.--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 15:24, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

Ideally, in my opinion (that seems to be more or less like yours in this particular aspect) context categories should not be used as the primary source of information; they should merely list entries which already do a good job at explaining everything about their words. (I find it rather annoying when an entry is a member of "Category:English slang" [or other category] but I can't find what definition is slang, just because the editors neglected to add a context label or somewhere.)

However, the context label {{slang}} links to Appendix:Glossary#slang, which explains to some extent what "slang" is. So there are efforts to elaborate context labels in a detailed manner that is generic enough to apply everywhere, in all "slang" entries of all languages. These efforts extend to categories too; they certainly could use small explanations of how the members were chosen to be categorized.

The best descriptions I could write for Category:English slang, Category:English colloquialisms, Category:English disputed terms and Category:English hypercorrections include the concept of "nonstandard" in one way or another, so I literally contraindicated them all against use in formal writing, such as the style I am mostly using now.

This may have not been the best choice, so for now I'm going to remove this specific generic direct categorization between slang and nonstandard terms per your proposal. However, I don't feel inspired or enlightened enough to replace the description of the slang categories with a better one, so feel free to do that, if you will. In particular, your distinction of "some [authorities?] might consider them non-standard, not that they necessarily are non-standard" might simply be part of it. --Daniel. 16:10, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

The remaining lexical categories

There are a few lexical categories that haven't been moved over yet, the most prominent is Category:Dialectal, and its 'sister' Category:Regionalisms. Maybe the former should be merged into Category:Regional English? There is also Category:English ethnic slurs which I moved over but I'm not sure if I did it right. Then there are Category:Hyperforeign, Category:Cant, Category:Borrowed words by language, Category:Buzzwords, Category:English placeholder terms, Category:Jargon, Category:Short forms by language, Category:Text messaging and especially Category:Slang. Could you see about creating new categories for those, I'm not sure how. —CodeCat 18:37, 12 May 2011 (UTC)

BTW I think it should be Category:English Internet slang with a capital 'I' for Internet. See Internet and {{Internet slang}}. Though, internet is usually considered a valid alternative. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:45, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Internet is a proper name in theory, but it is a normal noun at the same time. People sometimes talk about internets without trying to be silly. And I think overall, the lowercase form is used a lot more. Forcing users to type it in uppercase is just being pedantic IMO. :/ —CodeCat 12:57, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

@CodeCat: While I already have a very good grasp of what categories lack templatization, it's certainly useful to have a list. Thanks for that; I'm working on them when I have the time. Also, if you try to templatize them on your own, I may simply improve them later as I've done before. In particular, "Category:Regionalisms" would need to be renamed to "Category:Regionalisms by language", but it would require a new template created virtually from scratch, because this category tree has specific characteristics. And Category:Jargon remains untouched by this project (although it can be improved in other ways) because it contains names of literary styles (despite it being described as containing names of jargons).

@Mglovesfun: I, personally, don't mind having either "internet" or "Internet" in category titles as long as we choose only one of them for all categories. Adapting them can be done, but it will take some (not much) effort, so at least it would be appropriate creating a poll for that — a poll, not a RFM discussion, because this matter is so trivial it can be quickly resolved by a democratic vote, instead of a pseudodemocratic discussion punctuated by boring arguments. The lowercase version is just the status quo. And it's prettier too. In fact, I like it more. --Daniel. 13:15, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

If Jargon is going to stay, it would need to be recategorised at least, because as far as I know Category:Lexicons is going to be deleted, right? —CodeCat 13:23, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Right. --Daniel. 13:33, 14 May 2011 (UTC)

Re: Orange things

Oh, I see. I wasn't aware that the intention was to have a second example of the colour. Commons:Category:Curry might be a good choice. But if you want to stay away from food, orange autumn leaves might do. --Mephiles602 12:08, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

OK. --Daniel. 12:18, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

poscatboiler

{{poscatboiler}} still uses the older system with a switch containing all the possible values, whereas your newer templates seem to use {{catboiler}} and subpages instead, which is much faster. Are you planning to migrate {{poscatboiler}} to the new system sometime soon? —CodeCat 12:08, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, eventually. --Daniel. 12:11, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Is there a way that I can help with that? Perhaps by creating the subpages already? —CodeCat 12:19, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I see you already started to do that. OK, that would help. --Daniel. 14:28, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I noticed that in some cases, there is something called foreignparent. What is that for exactly? How does it work in the new system? —CodeCat 14:34, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

And apparently there is also {{poscatboiler2}} which has its own list. Is there a reason for that? —CodeCat 14:44, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

A "foreignparent" is a parent category that is recognized by a name, not by a code. It is used to have categories such as "Category:English language" as a parent. {{poscatboiler2}} is just an excuse (of someone else) to have categories named "Category:<language> numbers" before a real consensus on the issue of numeral/number can be achieved. --Daniel. 15:10, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Ok, so can probably ignore it. I think foreignparent becomes parentbyname in the new system? Oh, and I noticed a few templates have a subtemplate called OPTION. Is that important at all? —CodeCat 15:27, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Correct, parentbyname. OPTION is deprecated. --Daniel. 15:36, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I noticed that {{langcatboiler/theList}} still transcludes {{phrasecatboiler/theList}} so that it can put the description on the page. I'm not sure how to fix that, could you have a look? —CodeCat 15:55, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Done. I fixed this issue simply by writing a definition. (Rather than by transcluding a template that does that.) --Daniel. 16:00, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

Will you still be needing the old lists? I think they aren't used anymore... —CodeCat 20:20, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

No, I won't need the old and deprecated lists. As far as I'm concerned, {{phrasecatboiler}}, etc. can be deleted. --Daniel. 20:57, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

I just found there is {{posappboiler}} which is used on one page. Were you planning to use that for anything else? It still uses the list template. —CodeCat 19:27, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

No, I don't intend to use that specific template, posappboiler, anymore; it was just a test. There are better ways to do what it does. --Daniel. 19:32, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

A problem with catboiler

There is a strange problem with catboiler. It marks categories for languages that contain an apostrophe as invalid, even though the names are right. So as a result, Category:Categories needing attention is now full of entries... —CodeCat 12:37, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

I could fix that easily by implementing a small back-end kludge. This problem should disappear in a moment, once the server purges all the affected categories. --Daniel. 12:54, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It looks like {{suffixcat}} suffers from the same problem in Category:English words suffixed with -'s. —CodeCat 13:42, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

It's a bug of the software (MediaWiki) which I had to circumvent more than once in my experience. I fixed Category:English words suffixed with -'s too now. --Daniel. 14:07, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Categorizing hyphenated words.

Hola.

¶ May I inquire if it is acceptable to categorize hyphenated words? [[3]] has existed for a while, but it has rarely been utilised; I suspected that it has to be used for specific forms. ¶ Would it be too troublesome to quickly categorize hyphenated spellings? --Pilcrow 18:49, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Categorizing together all English terms that have a hyphen would be useful to fill a specific gap: it is not possible to search for them using Special:Search.

However, since this project apparently involves editing thousands of entries at once, please add a little explanation at WT:BP (like you explained to me now) to make sure people agree (or at least don't oppose) with that. --Daniel. 19:01, 18 May 2011 (UTC)

Irregular nouns category

Hey there Daniel,

I noticed a while ago you deleted pages like Category:Aramaic nouns with irregular plurals and replaced links to it with categories like Category:Aramaic irregular nouns, but pages like Category:Aramaic irregular plurals (which was the sister to the "nouns with irregular plurals" category) were kept. Is this now standard practice? There are categories like Category:English nouns with irregular plurals (for singular forms) and its sister Category:English irregular plurals (for plural forms), but there is no Category:English irregular nouns. To put it less confusingly:

• irregular nouns: Aramaic (exists) - English (never existed)
• nouns with irregular plurals: Aramaic (deleted) - English (exists)
• irregular plurals: Aramaic (exists) - English (exists)

The "irregular nouns" category is a little ambiguous, since it doesn't specify what part of the noun is irregular. Other irregularities besides plurals exist, for example, Category:Spanish nouns with irregular gender (Aramaic should also have an irregular gender category like this).

I'm thinking there should be a general "irregular nouns" category, then have all those other ones (nouns with irregular plurals, irregular plurals, irregular gender) as subcategories, with some subcategories obviously overlapping onto others. What do you think? --334a 03:41, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

I acknowledge the existence of these inconsistent categories, and I would appreciate if they could eventually fit a bigger system like most of our categories do.

In my experience, nobody (except a number of Wiktionary editors) ever says that the contents of Category:Spanish nouns with irregular gender are "irregular nouns" or have an "irregular gender", because irregular nouns have irregular inflection. Most of these Spanish nouns have regular inflections. They just have endings that make their genders unintuitive.

I like the idea of having a "Category:<Language> irregular nouns" for every language that have irregular nouns, without exception. However, the categories of "irregular genders" don't count for that purpose as irregular nouns. They should, in my opinion, be adapted to something more precise like "Category:Spanish nouns with counterintuitive genders" (and/or, even better, many categories like "Category:Spanish masculine nouns ending with -a").

In particular, the names "Category:English plurals" and "Category:English irregular plurals" are bad because they could have members that are not nouns. A list of names that are better to me would include "Category:English noun plural forms" to mimic existing categories, and the more natural version "Category:Plural forms of English nouns". --Daniel. 12:13, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

In theory, you could say that having a certain gender means that the noun is predicted to have a certain kind of inflection as well. And if the inflection doesn't match the gender, it is irregular. —CodeCat 12:41, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

I think I agree with CodeCat, if I understand him/her correctly. I don't understand the point about "irregular nouns have irregular inflection" and gender not falling into that category. Gender is a grammatical category (like number) and is a part of inflection. You can also have nouns that have irregular inflection in other places apart from number or gender, like case (e.g., Ζεύς). It's a little odd to only include number and case in the broad term "inflection" and leave gender out.

I'm not sure how something like "Category:Spanish masculine nouns ending with -a" would work for languages not using the Latin alphabet. Would the "-a" part be in the native script or transliterated? What if a language marks gender in a different way? Say, an infix or a circumfix or some internal sound change? Something like "Category:Spanish nouns with counterintuitive genders" might be the better/more consistent way to go, though I still prefer the "irregular gender" one.

I agree that "Category:English plurals" and "Category:English irregular plurals" are ambiguous. Something like "Category:English plural noun forms" and "Category:English irregular plural noun forms" might be better. --334a 20:14, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

If two languages (say, one that uses and other that doesn't use the Latin script) have two conflicting needs of categorization, we can simply do both. Consistency is not a goal, consistency is a tool.

The grammatical properties "gender" and "number" can, indeed, be represented by inflections in a number of words in a number of languages. However, Category:Spanish nouns with irregular gender is not, I repeat, a list of words that have an irregular "inflection of gender".

In this case, the gender is simply a convention of, among other things, deciding which of two definite articles should be used before a word.

In Spanish, there are masculine nouns (preceded by "el") and feminine nouns (preceded by "la"): palabra, for example, is a feminine noun because you would say la palabra; idioma, differently, is a masculine noun because you would say el idioma. Both are also regular nouns because their plurals are formed by the addition of a letter -s, as expected: palabras and idiomas.

Since most Spanish nouns that end with a letter "a" are preceded by the article "la", it is a good thing to have a list of nouns that end in "a" but are instead preceded by the article "el". It would be more-or-less like having a list of the English nouns that begin with written vowels but are preceded by the indefinite article a, such as a user and a university.

Note: In Category talk:Spanish nouns with irregular gender, the name of the category was shortly discussed between 2006 and 2007. --Daniel. 20:56, 19 May 2011 (UTC)

Phasebook categories in Category:Fundamental

I noticed that the subcategories for phrasebooks are being put in the Fundamental category, even though they should go in Category:Phrasebooks by language. Could you have a look at that please? Thank you! —CodeCat 23:29, 23 May 2011 (UTC)

By comparison with many other categories, I think the misplaced categories should be found at Category:All phrasebooks. I fixed this problem this way. The server should take a while and just display the categorization correctly. --Daniel 19:27, 25 May 2011 (UTC)

antifeminism

I am attempting to restore neutralise the feminist bias present in a this ([[4]]) wikipedia article. Having seen your contribution in clarifying the definition on wiktionary, I was wondering if you could help. Dantai Amakiir 21:32, 24 May 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I think I'm better at improving Wiktionary than improving Wikipedia. That said, I'm not particularly interested in editing that article. In fact, I simply added a link to Wiktionary from it. --Daniel 03:05, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Affix categories

I noticed that a few languages have a category for 'roots', and a while ago I created {{rootcatboiler}}. But now I realise that the affix and root categories have something in common, they are all related to the morphology of a word. So do you think it would be a good idea to replace {{affixcatboiler}} with {{morphcatboiler}} so that it is more general?

I was also wondering about possible categories for suffixes that create specific parts of speech. Such as noun suffixes, verb suffixes and so on. Since they combine morphology and part of speech, which catboiler template should they go in? —CodeCat 11:02, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

I support the idea of replacing {{affixcatboiler}} by {{morphcatboiler}}.

We already have Category:Finnish verbal suffixes and Category:Finnish nominal suffixes, instead of Category:Finnish verb suffixes and Category:Finnish noun suffixes. I support the basic idea of having categories for these concepts, as long as all languages use the same naming system.

The best catboiler for "Category:English verb suffixes" or "Category:English verbal suffixes" would be {{morphcatboiler}}, not {{poscatboiler}}, because suffixes are not parts of speech, regardless of their properties of forming parts of speech. --Daniel 18:17, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

I've created {{morphcatboiler}} and moved the list entries from {{affixcatboiler}} into it. But I wonder what the top-level category should be called. Should it be morphology, morphologies or something else? And how do I make it so that it's called morphology if that's the case? —CodeCat 18:38, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Ok you already answered the above question... But I have another. What should be done with the affix categories themselves? I have now put its subcategories into morphemes instead, so that makes the old category redundant. I think it's better that way because most languages won't need a roots category, and in that case affixes would be the only entry in morphemes, which is a bit silly. —CodeCat 18:54, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

I agree with your idea of deprecating "Category:English affixes" that way. We don't need it anymore, because we have "Category:English morphemes" as a better top-level category. --Daniel 18:58, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

I noticed that a few affix categories contain entries rather than just categories. They are now in Category:Categories needing attention. Could you have a look at that? I'm not really sure what to do with them, most of them use 'Affix' as a part of speech header too. —CodeCat 19:11, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

Apparently you solved this problem by recategorizing "Category:<language> affixes" to"Category:<language> morphemes". Good job. I think it would be a good idea to do the same for the last of these categories: Category:Mandarin affixes. --Daniel 06:26, 29 May 2011 (UTC)

Category:Portuguese verbs needing conjugation

Do you fancy having a go at some of these? I don't mind doing some, it's more that I can only assume for verbs such as combinar that it will be {{pt-verb|combin|ar}}. Where as you will know for sure. Mglovesfun (talk) 10:54, 28 May 2011 (UTC)

OK, I'm helping with that piecemeal. Many of these, however, are just populated by {{pt-verb}}, and their parameters can be copied from {{pt-conj}} of the same entries. --Daniel 18:03, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

{{ja-kanjitab}}

Just curious - what are you going to do about entries with more than one kanji in some parameters, such as 煙突掃除夫? Ultimateria 00:47, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Subdividing these parameters into individual kanji, of course. It's a kanji tab, not a derivation tab, and as far as I know the project of making it a derivation tab was one-sided, undiscussed and only implemented on a small number of Japanese entries.

The entry 煙突掃除夫 already mentions 煙突 and 掃除夫 in its etymology. The tab should simply mention 煙, 突, 掃, 除 and 夫 separately. --Daniel 01:32, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

I'll start splitting them up and deleting categories with multiple kanji. Ultimateria 01:46, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for your help. --Daniel 02:44, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Could you get the template to accommodate 14 kanji? For 慢性原発性副腎皮質機能低下症. Ultimateria 16:28, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Of course I can. It's done. --Daniel 16:43, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Thanks. Ultimateria 16:45, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

I thought you should know that in the Japanese spelled with _ categories, where it should link to the character, it shows the character correctly but actually links to 1#Japanese. Ultimateria 18:18, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Ugh. I fixed the template now. It should take a moment for the software to update and fix all categories automatically. --Daniel 18:29, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Buridan's ass

Why do you think that Buridan's ass is a proper noun? It is usually classified as a noun, though I have seen the form "Buridan's Ass". I noticed that you didn't change Schrödinger's cat to a proper noun.--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 09:42, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

Since I received your message, I provided some citations to the entries, as examples of: "Buridan's ass" as a proper noun, "Buridan's Ass" as a proper noun, and "Schrödinger's cat" as a noun and proper noun. --Daniel 11:10, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

OK. I can't see how a sentence beginning with "A hypothetical donkey" can describe a proper noun, though it is somewhat reasonable to regard (the name of) "a philosophical paradox" as such. (I still say noun, but don't really care).--Leo Laursen – (talk · contribs) 13:09, 30 May 2011 (UTC)

about normal re‐directions

Hola senhor Carrero.

¶ A point I did not mention earlier was that I could not understand why typical re‐directs such as this are permitted even if they may not be widely linked to, but template re‐directions are more reserved. Unless I am mistaken in this assumption, may I please know the reasoning for this? ¶ On a different note: I should also thank you for your patience with myself, and I am sorry about my dramatic comments. When I am depressed, I feel very pessimistic. --Pilcrow 01:06, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

There are popular types of redirects and reasons to create them. Notably, phrases with variable components often have redirects written with pronouns: save his bacon and save her bacon redirect to save someone's bacon.

Both A− to A- should exist as nonredirects, because both are (hopefully) attestable. I turned the redirect into an "alternative form" entry after you sent the message above.

Alternatively, I could just leave the redirect from A− to A- simply because they are the "same" entry: arguably, they are written with exactly the same characters. Possibly, all printed sources that attest one of them also automatically attest the other, because what separates these entries is virtually only their codes in Unicode. This argument could also be used to turn "..." into a redirect to "…", among a number of other examples of possible redirects by identicalness.

This alternative rationale is especially valid for the long s: If I remember correctly, a consensus of many months ago indicated that perſon should be a redirect to person.

This alternative rationale is not, however, valid in all situations and all languages. In Japanese, "々" is simply a repetition of the last character, but even taking this fact into consideration, we have both 人人 and 人々 anyway as individual and arguably identical entries.

As different examples, pl. is a redirect to plural, and R.I.P. is a redirect to RIP. They are "permitted", but not encouraged; having redirects is better than having nothing, so deleting them is not an option. The redirects are attestable abbreviations, so they should eventually become individual entries.

You're welcome. --Daniel 02:45, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

¶ You mentioned re‐directing between forms with ſ; in many of the citation‐pages I creäted, I will include the forms with the long‐s in them, such as this and this. I was thinking I should leave them out of the {{citations}} templates because it might be redundant. --Pilcrow 03:09, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

This is a minor issue, so I think you can decide by yourself. I suggest, however, doing what I did at Citations:solœcism to make "ſolœciſm" be black text rather than a link. --Daniel 03:49, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

¶Ah, that is how to do it! Originally I wanted to make it dark text rather than a red link, but I could not figure out how to since the methods I used would mess up the appearance. Thank you, sir! I will adjust my other citation pages accordingly. --Pilcrow 03:54, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

---

¶ I noticed that the citation pages I changed now contain the category ‘Citations of undefined terms’, which I do not desire. Is there a method to work around this without re‐moving the other ſpellings mentioned in the citation templates? --Pilcrow 05:42, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

I fixed this bug now. I think this miscategorization won't happen again. --Daniel 06:37, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

A small change to catboiler

I've made a small change to catboiler, so that the umbrella root category is now always sorted at the top of the fundamental category. It makes it a little easier to find. —CodeCat 21:28, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

OK. --Daniel 05:06, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

June 2011

a thought

¶ It may be worth mentioning in ‘God’ that it is the central deity of all Abrahamic religions, that could make the mentioning of Islam, Christianity, or Judaism redundant. --Pilcrow 17:59, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Good idea; I've done that. Thanks. --Daniel 18:05, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

This has been a great victory for Wiktionary ^_^ Happy dayyys.

Daniel, do we have boiler templates for names categories? — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 18:14, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Category:English given names and Category:English surnames have a catboiler. Derivations of names between languages such as Category:English male given names from Hebrew don't have a catboiler. --Daniel 18:22, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Poo. I guess I don't need to go so crazy about names right now, anyway. Though they are fun to add lol — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 19:27, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

If you're just looking for work to do, I suggest starting by adding your use of "poo" to poo. q: --Daniel 19:48, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Haha nah, I can think of tons of things I should be doing... but I'm lazy. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 20:09, 2 June 2011 (UTC)

Grandfathers...

Don't you think it's getting a little bit silly now? —CodeCat 23:19, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Maybe. Do you have a better idea? --Daniel 23:22, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm just wondering if all of these are actually citable... —CodeCat 23:22, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

I too was wondering this; and I discovered they are. I've been quickly checking Google Books while creating each of these entries. The shorter ones are actually pretty common: "my great-great-great-grandfather" returns 3900 results. --Daniel 23:35, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

I remember that great-great-great-granddaughter is in a song, too... —CodeCat 23:37, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Maybe this[5] song. Which I didn't hear. I just Googled for the lyrics. --Daniel 23:47, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Yep that's it! —CodeCat 23:50, 3 June 2011 (UTC)

Adding 'alternative parent' to catboiler

I just realised that some categories automatically add a parent even though that parent would never contain more than that category in some languages. For example, the category 'noun plural forms' has 'noun forms' as its parent, but in many languages the only noun form is the plural form. So I was wondering if it would be possible to specify that one category should be used as the parent only if another one doesn't already exist. That way, if a language has no need for 'noun forms', 'noun plural forms' can be categorised directly in 'nouns'. —CodeCat 11:11, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

It is possible; templates can be programmed with "ifexist" to make this happen. However, that's a potentially big change that touches directly on the controversial issue of "Category:English plurals" versus "Category:English noun forms", so I'd expect at least a BP discussion or poll or whatever to implement it. You may use this potential function as an argument to defend the latter, for example. --Daniel 16:40, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

An appendix idea.

Hola senhor Carrero.

¶ I should probably post this in the Beer Parlour, I had this idea for an entry but I do not know where it is appropriate to ask for præviews; I would like to see your opinions, though. I was worried this entry would be quickly deleted so I simply experimented: here is a prototype. It is about English words containing ph, but are not (closely) related to Greek. ¶ I am sorry if this seems random, but I do not desire to rush into making something I suspect may be deleted. --Pilcrow 12:55, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

We have few rules or prospects for what should be in appendices. Apparently, nobody cares whether appendices are used as sandboxes or big projects, as long as they have so much as a hint of usable contents.

Please use "Ancient Greek" or "Hellenic languages", though, to clarify the scope of the appendix. "Hellenic language" sounds as if you are mentioning the language called "Hellenic". Here, for purposes of consistency of names, Greek is a language (Category:Greek language) or a script (Category:Greek script), Ancient Greek is a language (Category:Ancient Greek language) and Hellenic is a family (Category:Hellenic languages). --Daniel 13:26, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

Eu gosto tanto de como ele disse "hola" :D — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 13:55, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

"Hola senhor" was a nice example of Portuñol. I like it too. --Daniel 13:59, 4 June 2011 (UTC)

¶ I could make the appendix whenever, but I am having trouble thinking of an acceptable name. Should it be “English terms containing ph not derived from Hellenic”? That probably sounds exceedingly lengthy. --Pilcrow 12:41, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

No. The name would be "English terms containing ph not derived from Ancient Greek", because the distinction between languages and families is serious business here. Having a "lengthy name" would be a poor reason for deletion, so presumably this appendix might simply be created, and kept, and improved, and someone will shorten its name eventually if necessary and reasonably possible. --Daniel 14:59, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

¶ It would seem that the aspirated p is no longer spoken in Greek, so “Ancient Greek” is correct. I apologize for my error. --Pilcrow 23:56, 16 June 2011 (UTC)

No problem; I don't blame you for your previous apparent lack of information. Thanks for contributing to the appendix namespace. --Daniel 10:22, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

Username change

Hello Daniel,

I just see that you are wanting to change your username on every project. So let me advise you this page, it will surely help you ;)

Moreover, you can request the renaming of your account on every project with no active bureaucrat on this page.

Have a nice day ! -- Quentinv57 (talk) 18:59, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Probably I will not change my username on every project; just the ones where I've been at least more-or-less active, such as the English Wikipedia and here. That said, these pages surely will be useful. Thank you very much for kindly linking to them. Have a nice day, too. --Daniel 19:16, 5 June 2011 (UTC)

Ecclesiastical terms

Do you think this is a topical category or does it belong in lexicons? —CodeCat 21:43, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

It's a usage context with a relationship to Christianity and theology that is unclear to me. Much of it has been inherited from Websters 1913, AFAICT. DCDuring TALK 22:25, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

So the template should really categorise terms in 'Christianity' then? —CodeCat 22:30, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

If inspection suggests that no violence would be done thereby, that might be satisfactory. I have little experience with these topics or contexts and only a passing familiarity with some of the instances of Websters usage of the term. When I am home I can look at Webster's second and third to try to suss out how they use it. DCDuring TALK 22:38, 7 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, "Category:Christianity" looks like a good name to me, too.

Notably, the distinction at hand is like saying that "Category:fr:Mathematics" is a topical category while "Category:French mathematical terms" is a lexical category. Whether a category is topical or lexical oftentimes can be changed by applying that simple logic of choosing names, though apparently people are prone to prefer making categories always "topical" when possible. --Daniel 12:30, 8 June 2011 (UTC)

in the driver seat

Are you sure about this form? I've only heard of (deprecated template usage) in the driver's seat. Equinox ◑ 00:42, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I'm pretty sure about that one. However, I don't have time for attesting it right now, so I opened a RFV discussion for it. --Daniel 16:15, 9 June 2011 (UTC)

Template:ja-kanjitab

Hi,

Your latest experiment with Template:ja-kanjitab and filling categories "Japanese terms spelled with ..." looks interesting. If there is an agreement, perhaps you could that with Template:zh-hanzi and Template:zh-forms as well? --Anatoli 12:59, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Thank you for appreciating my work. Ultimateria helped me a lot, too, by providing cleanup work and feedback. Yes, I can adapt Template:zh-hanzi and Template:zh-forms to categorize terms by their characters. --Daniel 19:43, 12 June 2011 (UTC)

Hi again, after nearly two years, I'd like to revive this discussion. Tooiroonic didn't like the idea, he said there are just too many characters. The templates are now called Template:Hani-forms and Template:zh-hanzi. I think having Mandarin terms by individual characters categories would be very beneficial for learners and editors. Is it possible to autogenerate categories, though? --Anatoli ^{(обсудить}/^вклад) 05:14, 17 April 2013 (UTC)

Comment

Started you had started a comment and withdrew it. I've gotten some feedback on an entry from and editor named Equinox, as well as on the Talk page of the entry where this issue arose santorum. I'm afraid that Wiktionary seems a bit confusing to navigate at the moment. I am familiar with Wikipedia, but I can't seem to find a lot of the same mechanisms and processes here, so I'm just taking a stab at it. -- Avanu 02:44, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Why use singular nouns in catboiler?

I've been wondering for a while why you created catboiler to treat its parameter as a singular and pluralise it automatically. Wouldn't it be easier if the parameter would always be plural? Or is the singular form needed somewhere? —CodeCat 17:18, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

I just copied the good and old syntax {{infl|en|noun}} to {{poscatboiler|en|noun}}. It seemed simple and elegant at the time. Then I copied it to affixcatboiler, shortcatboiler, and so on. I wouldn't mind changing everything to make the parameter be always plural. The only problems would be making everyone being used to such a huge change. (In addition, "always typing a few more characters everytime" could be an additional problem, but I don't think so.) This is a huge proposal, so why don't you create a vote for that? --Daniel 20:26, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

The proposal would mostly involve bot work, though. A bot could easily replace all the thousands of uses with the plural form if needed. —CodeCat 20:52, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, bot work, and everyone using new parameters thereafter. --Daniel 22:52, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

Topic cat with the new catboiler system

I've made a new template {{topiccatboiler}} which I hope will eventually work as the older {{topic cat}}, except that it uses the same catboiler system that other templates now use. So far it seems to work well for the language-specific pages, which are the vast majority (see Category:osx:All topics). It still breaks on the umbrella categories (categories with no language code), because the description doesn't match and the categories are wrong too. —CodeCat 20:08, 13 June 2011 (UTC)

I see you are a skilled fan of {{catboiler}}. Don't forget that umbrella categories by default have a generic description. See Category:Nouns by language. --Daniel 00:33, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

derivcatboiler works now

{{derivcatboiler}} works now for cases where the destination language (the first parameter) is provided. You can see it on Category:English terms derived from Dutch. The way it formats the names is reasonably simple... it first checks if a template {{label}} exists for the given label (the second parameter) and if so it treats it as a language, using {{languagex}} and {{langfamily}}. If not, it treats it as a language family and prefixes it with etyl: and using {{family}} instead. If the family templates of either sort returns nothing, it categorises into the root category Category:English terms derived from other languages. I haven't tested the umbrella or fundamental categories yet, but since they're not part of the vote anyway there is no rush. —CodeCat 20:00, 14 June 2011 (UTC)

The umbrella categories now work, as well as the fundamental categories. There is only the issue of the umbrella categories of language family derivations, such as Category:English terms derived from West Germanic languages. Currently it gets categorised into Category:Terms derived from West Germanic languages, but I'm not sure if we want that?

I've rewritten quite a lot of the earlier code. What I did is basically reuse much of what was already there before, but with one difference. There is now a setting in {{catboiler customize}} that controls whether everything is controlled by one subtemplate per label, or a single subtemplate called ALL that handles all labels. {{derivcatboiler}} has a subtemplate {{derivcatboiler/ALL}} that does this. The difference between those two methods has been abstracted using {{catboiler getproperty}}, which fulfills the role that {{temp}}/{{label}} used to. —CodeCat 00:03, 15 June 2011 (UTC)

Other

what can you do about: 結界, 魔法, 封印, 変身 + 気#Derived terms — This comment was unsigned.

I can read, edit, move, protect, delete, unprotect and undelete them. --Daniel 19:11, 17 June 2011 (UTC)

I mean that I tried to add them to tr: to them and it would not work. — This comment was unsigned.

You will have to be more specific. tr: is the Turkish Wiktionary. --Daniel 06:58, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Hey dude, format question

I have a feeling you know this better than I do, but what's our current "proper" formatting for Cardinal numbers and their categories? — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 13:27, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

There is no consensus on a "proper" formatting; just common practices. In English, typically, the POS header is "Cardinal number", or just "Number", or even "Numeral" and the category is Category:English cardinal numbers. There are some anomalies such as hundred, whose POS header is "Noun", and whose cardinality is mentioned between parentheses; and thousand's POS header is "Numeral" and umpteen's is "Determiner". --Daniel 13:50, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

There is a topic in the Beer Parlour about this right now, but it seems to have been ignored somewhat. —CodeCat 13:54, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

There were dozens of topics in the Beer Parlour about this over the years that seemed to have been prematurely abandoned... The most recent one, in particular, deals with a number of related subjects. The existence of Category:Arabic numerals is a moot point, because it should not exist. Given its contents, its standardized name would be Category:Translingual numerals in Hindu-Arabic script/Category:Translingual numbers in Hindu-Arabic script. --Daniel 14:22, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

No it wouldn't... there are numerous different Arabic and Hindu numerals. Western Arabic 123, Eastern Arabic as used in Persian, then Hindu, Bengali... I can't think of any numeral system used in common by Arabic and any Indo-Iranian language. Anyway. Since nobody can make up their minds, I'll use ===Number=== and {{cardinal}} and {{ordinal}}, fuck it. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 14:31, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

I did not contradict the idea that "there are numerous different Arabic and Hindu numerals". I just said that the standardized names would be the aforementioned ones. We have Category:Hindu-Arabic script and Category:Hindu-Arabic script characters (and Category:Latin script and Category:Latin script characters). --Daniel 14:41, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Deleting Harry Potter subpages

Hello Daniel, do you think you could delete Harry Potter subpages, in accordance with the vote Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2010-10/Disallowing certain appendices? They can be found in prefix index. --Dan Polansky 15:56, 19 June 2011 (UTC)

WT:BP#Renaming proto-language codes

Could you take a look at this discussion and maybe give some input? Thank you! —CodeCat 20:32, 20 June 2011 (UTC)

I think we should just rename the templates. Ruakh is the only one to object, but he seems to have general objections against the idea of merging different kinds of code template into a single namespace. I'm not sure what his reasoning is but it seems to me to go along the lines of 'they are different, therefore they should be as different as possible'. Whereas I think that things that can be the same should be the same if it gives no problems and doesn't make things needlessly complicated. I think the case with the distinction between language and family codes, and between regular and proto codes, is exactly a case where it is needlessly complicated. —CodeCat 22:30, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Apparently Ruakh and Ivan have questions, rather than specific objections. You answered them. Since this issue continues nonetheless, I asked Ruakh now if he has more questions, or objections. We don't need to hurry. Ruakh has the right to know why "gem-pro" is a good idea. --Daniel 22:49, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Derivation category vote

It looks like it will fail now unless two more people vote support... —CodeCat 18:58, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Not anymore. --Daniel 00:28, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Old derivations categories / templates

What's the plan for getting rid of these? Should the old categories be redirected to the new? The old topic cat helper templates also need to be deleted. The interwikis for the old categories should also be moved. Nadando 00:57, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

The topic cat templates (e.g. Template:topic cat parents/French derivations) are already de facto deleted, because they are not used anywhere. Their actual deletion might happen anytime; we don't need to hurry, yet some people already are hurrying with the deletion work nonetheless. I asked the owner of User:MalafayaBot, now, whether he can handle the interwikis; I'm waiting for a reply.

No, I don't think the old categories will be redirected to the new. In Wikimedia Commons, for example, redirecting categories seems to be serious business. Clearly, its page [6] for "Category:Dog" is a big blue soft redirect to "Category:Dogs".

On the other hand, categories of Wiktionary seldom are redirects; and {{movecat}} says "If any pages link here, please update the link, as this page may be deleted.", indicating that even the redirects are expected to be deleted eventually. This is an aspect of Wiktionarian culture. You might try to change it if you want, perhaps by suggesting the addition of the Commons' big blue template to thousands of our deleted categories. I would support that proposal. --Daniel 14:03, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

{{Portuguese personal pronouns}}

Hi Daniel,

When you have a chance, could you take a look at [[Wiktionary:Tea room#lhe]]?

Thanks in advance!
—Ruakh_TALK
02:31, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

✓ --Daniel 06:04, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

re: Derivações

Olá, Daniel.

Respondi lá na minha discussão no pt.wikt. Se calhar, vou começar a responder aqui para acelerar o diálogo... Abraço, Malafaya 18:26, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Bem, os interwikis seriam para constar na categoria nova. Na antiga, sendo um REDIRECT, eles serão ignorados.

Mas o REDIRECT só por si já corrigirá o problema. Os interwikis na categoria nova seriam apenas para aumentar a probabilidade de não perder a ligação em definitivo. Concluindo, se não quiserem ter demasiado trabalho, o REDIRECT na antiga ou os interwikis na nova chegam. Se não se importarem de perder mais uns segundos por categoria, então os 2 garantem mais o resultado. Malafaya 18:40, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Ah, e os REDIRECTs são temporários. Com tudo prontinho, podem ser apagadas as categorias antigas. Malafaya 18:41, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Penso que ainda falte atualizar {{proto}}, porque páginas como شدن ainda têm categorias na forma antiga. Malafaya 22:52, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Sim. Obrigado pelo aviso, mas eu e outros colegas já sabíamos que ainda falta atualizar {{proto}}. Deve demorar um pouco mais para atualizá-lo, porque falta resolver um problema técnico. (Acontece que ainda não temos códigos individuais para idiomas como "Proto-Germanic" e "Proto-Indo-European.", e tais códigos são necessários para as categorias do novo sistema.) --Daniel 22:58, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Ah, ok. Pensei que teria ficado esquecido :). Malafaya 23:00, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Replacing langscript

Is it really necessary to replace langscript itself? It could stay in use in the same way that {{language}} does. —CodeCat 22:04, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I think so. Removing {{langscript}} (eventually, when everything else is ready for that removal) is removing an unnecessary layer of complexity. Editing templates is easier to me if I don't have to consider its existence. --Daniel 22:09, 23 June 2011 (UTC)

Maybe it would have been better to keep {{langscript}}, because of all the extra calls to {{langprefix}} we now have to add... —CodeCat 00:18, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Maybe the work you're doing is still in progress but categories such as Category:Mundolinco language are not entirely correct (text, cats). Malafaya 00:26, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

True. That ought to be fixed soon, too. --Daniel 00:28, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I don't think that replacing "langprefix" by "langscript" is better... Both alternatives make you and me type something behind the language code anyway.

Moving Template:proto:gem-pro/family to Template:gem-pro/family, that would have been better. --Daniel 00:28, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

I would prefer moving {{proto:gem-pro}} to {{gem-pro}}, but Ruakh doesn't agree. —CodeCat 00:30, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

One thing at a time. There are reasons for the existence of the prefixes of "proto:gem-pro" and "etyl:gem", therefore deprecating them reasonably involves deprecating the reasons too.

Is there any reason for the prefix of "proto:gem-pro/family" and "proto:gem-pro/script"? I don't think so. --Daniel 00:41, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

It's to conform to the rule that the script and family templates are always subtemplates of the language template itself. —CodeCat 00:47, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Then that's a bad rule. Just my opinion. :p --Daniel 00:51, 24 June 2011 (UTC)

Acronyms categorized as terms spelt with .

Hola senhor.

¶ Do ye think that acronyms should be included into [[Category:English terms spelled with .]]? As it appears now, only abbreviated forms might be permitted. I assume this category might possess (secret) restrictions; similar to how affixes may be un‐welcomed in [[Category:English terms spelled with -]]. Although I do not know if that is official. ¶ Would you recommend if I inquire this in the Beer Parlour instead?

Obrigado e gracias. --Pilcrow 05:44, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Yes, I think Category:English terms spelled with . should contain abbreviations, partially because apparently most abbreviations are not spelled with dots anyway. Yes, please ask in the BP if more people have something to say about this categorization. --Daniel 06:11, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Category:script languages

104 categories that are broken somehow... --Yair rand 07:44, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Fixed. Apparently, langcatboiler simply could not handle "None" as a value of script. Now it can. --Daniel 08:03, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

The culture in Wiktionary...

is why this is a second-class dictionary still instead of being a uber-valuable companion to Wikipedia. Usability takes a back seat to someone saying "what about expert users of Wiktionary?" Dictionaries aren't supposed to have expert- and basic- level users. It is supposed to be simple for people. And the idea that you can't simply have an English dictionary here is silly also. I have to wonder how Merriam-Webster ever accomplished it so well, when there is so much contention here. Good luck, you'll need it. -- Avanu 10:58, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

You're doing it wrong. First, you show me your credentials as the Master of Usability, and I show you mine as the High Dictator of Wiktionary. Then, your rant would make sense. If I cared about it under my dictatorship, which I wouldn't. --Daniel 16:52, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Kind of off topic there. Hyperbole isn't accuracy. I've been dealing with improving usability for decades. Maybe you've been a dictator for decades, although I hardly see how that is relevant. There's no such thing as "Master of Usability", but there is common sense. Obviously you just didn't care to hear a rant, that's fine. I probably shouldn't have bothered. You can't fix all the problems in the world, but the culture over here is vastly different from Wikipedia and the guidance for getting things done is in unfamiliar places under unfamiliar names. -- Avanu 13:26, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

My talk page is not a place to be ranting nonsense. First, because that attitude makes me distrust your judgement by default. And, second, because you basically have to convince the whole community before doing something extreme like changing the titles of entries that way. I'm not the only one who opposes your idea, and I have no idea why you chose me. You sounded as if my opposition alone had prevented the implementation of your big usability plan (or, conversely, that you had to have my agreement in order to do things), hence the "master of usability" and the "high dictator" analogies. --Daniel 21:28, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

This "second-class dictionary", while by nature impossible to complete, is and has the potential to be pretty god damn comprehensive. For example, besides the Lithuanian wiktionary, it's probably the only place online where you'll find extensive Lithuanian conjugation and declension. Same for Romanian, if you don't speak Romanian, same for a number of minority-Romance languages. I'd be so bold as to say we're probably the best resource for Eastern Armenian, for Hungarian, one of the better in English for Icelandic. We've got fucking thousands of entries for Italian and French... If you think Wiktionary sucks so much, maybe you'd be better fit somewhere less awesome. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 15:22, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Its great that you have so many entries. Why are they in the English Dictionary and not their own? -- Avanu 23:09, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Have you never heard of a bilingual dictionary? Huhduhhhhhhrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr. Read our front page. All words, all languages. Don't like it? Well, then this isn't the place for you. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 23:12, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Let me just add, while this new awareness is fresh in my head, that you've just hugely contradicted yourself. You say you're so so worried about usability when you apparently expect users to venture into foreign-language monolingual wiktionaries to find the information I described to you above? You think that would be at all useful to anything but more advanced learners of languages? I want to look up this word in Lithuanian! Ok, so I'm on their wiktionary looking at the conjugation of this new verb I'm trying to learn. But I can't read any of their fucking grammar tags. Būtasis dažninis laikas? tiesioginė nuosaka? What the fuck are those things? Luckily, that's really easy to find out here on the English wiktionary. būtasis dažninis laikas. tiesioginė nuosaka. So maybe you should rethink certain parts of your philosophy? — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 23:27, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Well, this explains the whole attempt to merge capitalizations. Avanu, it is very clear that you're not at all familiar with what Wiktionary is, and knowing what the project is is generally a prerequisite to changing how everything is done. The English Wiktionary is a multilingual free-content dictionary intended to include "all words in all languages", and "not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it", with the information given in English. --Yair rand 23:40, 29 June 2011 (UTC)

Yair, thank you. You're the first person to really have a reasonable answer among this little crowd on Daniel's page. Although this might seem clear to some of your fellow editors, and makes sense via your explanation, I would say this isn't very clearly explained via the front page of this Wiktionary. Given that this is actually not just an English dictionary, I can see the arguments making slightly more sense to avoid the proposal I put forward about merging. My impression was that en.wikt meant that this part of Wiktionary was for English words, and there would be corresponding areas for other languages. Thanks for being polite and reasonable and helping your fellow editor to better understand how this project works. -- Avanu 03:32, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Avanu, it's good to know you know Wiktionary better from Yair's explanation. However, you still got some facts incorrectly. First of all, politeness is not an one-way road, so you shouldn't expect the best social treatment anyway. Dick and I were reasonable and helpful, so saying we weren't is wrong.

What Yair said, while being reasonable and helpful too, is explictly explained on the main page, in the following statements:

• Welcome to the English-language Wiktionary, a collaborative project to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary.
• We aim to include not only the definition of a word, but also enough information to really understand it.
• This is the English Wiktionary: it aims to describe all words of all languages using definitions and descriptions in English. For example, see dictionnaire (a French word). In order to find a French definition of that word, you would visit the equivalent page in the French Wiktionary.

What Yair said is also heavily implied in the following portions of text of the main page:

• 2,539,057 entries with English definitions from over 400 languages
• Browse: All languages
• Index Albanian • Ancient Greek • Aramaic • Armenian • Bulgarian • Catalan • Crimean Tatar • Czech • Danish • Dutch • English • Esperanto • Estonian • Finnish • French • Galician • German • Greek • Hebrew • Hiligaynon • Hindi • Hungarian • Icelandic • Ido • Indonesian • Irish • Italian • Latin • Lithuanian • Old Armenian • Old English • Old French • Persian • Polish • Portuguese • Romanian • Russian • Scottish Gaelic • Serbo-Croatian • Spanish • Swahili • Swedish • Turkish

--Daniel 05:25, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but the phrasing on that is not as clear as it could be.

For example:

"Welcome to the English-language Wiktionary, a collaborative project to produce a free-content multilingual dictionary."

Might be re-phrased as:

"Wiktionary is available for English-speakers here. Words and phrase entries can come from any language, but the definition or explanations are solely in English here. To find Wiktionaries for other languages, please review the links below, and welcome!"

Yair happened to be the most insightful and most willing to acknowledge that a great deal of the problem and frustration might have been the complete misunderstanding of this Wiktionary. He didn't respond to my frustration with more of it. So for that ability, which I myself sometimes lack, I give credit where credit is due. -- Avanu 06:08, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I, personally, don't think your proposed text is better than "This is the English Wiktionary: it aims to describe all words of all languages using definitions and descriptions in English."

What the main page says is basically what Yair said anyway, and you apparently understood the facts very well from his explanation.

I did, however, move this statement closer to the introduction of the main page now, to improve the chance of people seeing it immediately. --Daniel 08:46, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I like when I agree with you, Yair. Have a cookie. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 00:20, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

To all, thanks for getting me on the right track in understanding this Wiktionary a bit better. I still think the combined entries would be nicer for English words, but considering the number of loan words English has, and also the fact that this is a multilanguage dictionary, things are a bit more complicated than I first realized. -- Avanu 06:18, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Avanu, apparently you are becoming wiser. I appreciate that. --Daniel 08:46, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

For the record, I think the combined entries would be nicer for all languages with bicameral scripts, not just English. —Ruakh_TALK 12:58, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Too bad it wouldn't work for Turkish, German or Greek. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 13:11, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Assuming that by "wouldn't work" you mean "would work perfectly", then I don't see what's "too bad" about it . . . —Ruakh_TALK 13:12, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Luckily for me, your assumption only makes an ass of you and I can make an ass of myself! So, let's jam. It might work ok for Greek, except that they usually don't use accents when everything's written in caps, so without some change to the software, searching would be made at least a step more difficult. The German ß (which would have to be written SS in caps) and Turkish ı and İ have been discussed elsewhere. This proposed attempt to increase usability would rape it for some major languages. So you're like totally right! Nothing too bad about that at all. Except that you know, it definitely would be. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 13:49, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

No one is suggesting all-caps anymore. The idea was raised offhandedly by Lmaltier, Daniel ran with it, discussion raised several issues, that issue is closed. You're arguing against a straw man. —Ruakh_TALK 14:17, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

So what, all lowercase? — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 14:26, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I think so. Alternatively, Lmaltier suggested using first-letter caps (like the Wikipedias); and we could even consider title-case. There are a number of options. But personally, yes, I think I prefer all-lowercase. (Needless to say, we'd also want to consider some changes to our format; currently the H1 at the top of the page is usually a fairly decent indication of the headword — within limits — but with any implementation of case-insensitive titles, I think we'd want the actual headwords to be more prominent and the H1 less prominent or perhaps completely suppressed.) —Ruakh_TALK 14:59, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

We did away with first-letter caps once, and I really just don't think that our capitalizations are the worst thing about our systems. In fact, I think that's probably the least important thing at the moment. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 15:38, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I agree that capitalization is not our biggest problem. —Ruakh_TALK 20:30, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

(In response to something you said above, Daniel) I know in this discussion I've been more reasonable than I usually am, but you don't have to pretend my behaviour qualifies as normal haha. I had some pretty marked moments of snide animosity. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 12:34, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I do generally get pissed off with editors that come over from Wikipedia without knowing anything about Wiktionary and start contravening our common practises. For example someone once tagged an Arabic entry for speedy deletion, not realizing that we allow multiple languages here. I think if you come from a non-Wiktionary backgrouns, jump into Wiktionary with your eyes closed, you deserve whatever criticism you get. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:44, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Dick, I was not pretending anything when I said you have been "reasonable" and "helpful". In fact, I don't care whether your behavior is "normal". --Daniel 22:38, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

I'll take it. :) — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 22:44, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

Categoria obsoleta

A Category:es:Latin derivations ainda tem artigos. Para corrigir, é só mudar a categoria neles sem fazer mais nada? Malafaya 15:35, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Também a Category:fi:Italian derivations. Malafaya 15:38, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

"Só mudar a categoria, sem fazer mais nada" funciona bem.

Porém, o ideal para corrigir o verbete ciervo é fazer o seguinte, em dois passos, se você puder:

1. Remover "Category:es:Latin derivations".
2. Na etimologia, substituir "Latin" por "{{etyl|la|es}}", sem aspas; "la" significa latim e "es" significa espanhol.

Ao fazer isto e salvar, o texto etimológico aparece automaticamente, e a nova categoria, também. --Daniel 15:57, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Relativamente a sudaca, está na categoria de derivações do latim, mas a descrição da etimologia não me parece consistente. Malafaya 16:03, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

Você está certo. A etimologia não diz que "sudaca" seja derivada do latim, então removi a categoria em questão. Talvez "sudaca" seja, sim, derivada do latim, mas creio que a categoria deva refletir o conteúdo da página. --Daniel 16:58, 27 June 2011 (UTC)

July 2011

Categoria "estropiada"

Olá, Daniel.

Hoje, encontrei esta categoria em muito mau estado. Deve ter novamente a ver com as predefinições que foram alteradas recentemente. Malafaya 12:34, 2 July 2011 (UTC)

Você estava certo. Um bug estava afetando todas as categorias com ancestrais, como Bislama, que menciona "from English". Estas categorias estão consertadas agora. --Daniel 16:03, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

my request

Hola.

¶ I am grateful for your compliance, but that summary is still visible on: this page. Is there another way to extract it? --Pilcrow 07:22, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Apparently, I can hide a summary from the history, but I can't do the same thing from the log of new pages. I don't know why. I guess it's just a catastrophic bug of the software.

I solved your problem by deleting the entry and recreating it. --Daniel 07:48, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

Category:Appendices encompassing all languages

That's not a particularly useful way to describe these appendices. How about instead Category:Translation table appendices? --EncycloPetey 15:43, 3 July 2011 (UTC)

OK. I like your suggestion. --Daniel 08:19, 6 July 2011 (UTC)

Documentation of templates that use catboiler

I think using standardised documentation that is the same for all templates is a bit too restrictive. For example, the new {{famcatboiler}} template has only one parameter instead of two, but to change the documentation we would have to make all kinds of adjustments. While if it were just a documentation page, it would be easy. I think it would be better if we removed the documentation and relied on each template to provide its own, instead. —CodeCat 19:53, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

I replied on your talk page. --Daniel 20:04, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

{{list}} categorizing

Was it intentional that {{list}} not categorize hypernyms and synonyms? That kinda drives me crazy. Could it be "fixed"? — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 21:36, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

That template should categorize all synonyms, and no hypernym. "week" is not defined as a day of the week, so it can't go into Category:en:Days of the week. (In fact, "week" is not an hypernym of "Sunday", but that's just the wrong name of the parameter.) Please tell me at least 2 examples of broken categorization of synonyms to be fixed, so I can fix them all. --Daniel 21:48, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

Only one I can think of offhand IS {{list:quarks/ru}}. I see your point on the hypernyms, i"LL JUST ADD THOSE MANUALLY> Haha that was an accident, but it's so funny I'm going to leave it. — [ R·I·C ] Laurent — 22:44, 5 July 2011 (UTC)

And that's done. Sorry for taking a long time to start doing what you asked. In the end, I just spent some 60 seconds to edit that template. --Daniel 07:13, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Chip's Challenge

Hello, myself. Please format Appendix:Chip's Challenge in the near future. --Daniel 16:18, 7 July 2011 (UTC)

✓ --Daniel 22:29, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

I do not understand.

Daniel, could you please tell me how exactly ‘follow common practice’ is “good advice”? It is not descriptive or very informative; it is (highly) subjective. Am I seriously expected to exhaustively analyse ∼60.00% of entries and duplicate the type of layout which is most frequent? What about any specific restrictions? Translations are (supposedly) only allowed in English sections, why not for other sections? Why are some genitive cases acceptable while others are disallowed? Those are examples; I am not trying to propose any new policies here. ¶ The more I think about this, the more frustrating it is; this recommendation does not describe anything in particular, it is supposedly important but for no apparent reasons, and since I cannot extract those complaints from my talk page, I have to think about them. --Pilcrow 06:19, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

If everybody follows common practice perfectly, then you should only have to copy the layout of 1 entry. Or, perhaps, you should compare 10 entries to see their common characteristics. This should not be a problem to you: you know hundreds of entries.

For more specific questions, which can't be answered merely by looking at the hundreds of pages you know, such as why some genitives are allowed and others not, you can simply ask them at the WT:BP or the WT:ID. Probably, the answer will either be "Why not? We don't have a rule for that! You can add genitives to any of these languages if you want!" or "Because the contributors of this language want genitives and the contributors of this other language don't want genitives." The latter may even be followed by a justification, such as "...only in this language, and not this other, genitives are sums-of-parts" and "we have had this vote and this other vote".

Translations are allowed only in English sections. That's true. Why? Short answer: Because everyone does that. Either you follow their lead or you give convincing reasons to do otherwise. Long answer: I talked about the reasoning of English-only translations here in 2008. --Daniel 09:02, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

derivcatboiler

Daniel, you should fix these problems of {{derivcatboiler}}:

• its poor documentation
• its futile "edit" button, which should be useful for someone who wants to edit its generic descriptions
• its complexity that makes it relatively impossible to be edited and copied to other Wiktionaries
• and the fact that Category:English male given names from French can't use it

I know you can do it. Start doing some work here: {{derivcatboiler/sandbox}}. --Daniel 11:24, 8 July 2011 (UTC)

Closing decision discussions where one has been an advocate

I think it is bad practice to close decision discussion in cases in which one has been an active advocate for one side or the other, unless one is closing on the opposite side from one's advocacy. I cannot point to any written statement to that effect, let alone a voted-on policy, but it nevertheless is a practice that is customarily followed. I think the logic is fairly obvious, but would be happy to make it explicit. The principle might be overridden for very stale discussions. We also have {{look}} to draw attention to discussions that need more input. DCDuring TALK 13:59, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

{{look}}, statistically, just doesn't work. Wiktionarians apparently follow a proud tradition of ignoring all, or almost all, discussions older than a few days or weeks. Yes, I only close stale RFDO discussions. Its talk page suggests waiting just one week, but I usually wait at least a month; sometimes, many months.

I don't think I would be particularly more diplomatic, or more fair, if I only closed discussions on the opposite side from my advocacy. I do that oftentimes, but not always. If everyone only did that, always, without exceptions, then logically discussions with unanimity would never be closed. Other levels of consensus merit an eventual closure by whoever volunteers to do that as well.

Please note that I don't often archive discussions that I close, (I just let someone else do it, and that someone else typically is Mglovesfun) so they are de facto free for more input, not to mention new discussions. --Daniel 14:39, 9 July 2011 (UTC)

ler

If you have time, we need a verb template for ler like {{pt-verb/crer}}. —Stephen ^(Talk) 12:11, 13 July 2011 (UTC)

Per the request in the Tea Room, I set up a template for the conjugation of ler (Portuguese). Could you double-check my work? (especially the imperatives) I would have used the crer template, since as far as I know the two verbs share the same pattern of endings, as is also true in Galician. However, I wasn't sure that all the endings were the same, and the crer template has the "cr-" embedded in the endings values, so it would have meant more work as well to adapt the existing template. If they do share all the same endings, then the two templates could still be combined with only a little more work, I suppose. --EncycloPetey 05:37, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for that conjugation, EncycloPetey. I double-checked it, and only made a small change to conform to the most recent orthographic reform.

I think it is a good idea to have separately Template:pt-verb/ler and Template:pt-verb/crer (and Template:pt-verb/ver), because Template:pt-verb/er is already taken as the ending of regular verbs. --Daniel 17:33, 17 July 2011 (UTC)

{{citation}}

I believe your edit on June 1st broke Category:Citations of undefined terms. Nadando 02:11, 14 July 2011 (UTC)

request for permission

Hola.

¶ Could I please have your permission to extract this topic? Should I also ask someone else in advance?

Obrigado. --Pilcrow 14:22, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

I just did it for you. It's "hidden" in the history now. --Daniel 14:47, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

It's not really hidden. You hid some of the page's history, but the text that was added during that time is still available via many of the later versions that you didn't hide. —Ruakh_TALK 21:34, 26 July 2011 (UTC)

I think both "hidden" and "extract" are ambiguous words in this conversation. Anyway, thanks for explaining the situation better, Ruakh. I think everybody already knew what happened from observation, but verbal clarification doesn't hurt. --Daniel 01:19, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

¶ I am grateful. I would like to request for extraction of other topics (such as this), but I was afraid it was too ‘early’ for that. --Pilcrow 19:10, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Done. I extracted that topic for you. --Daniel 19:25, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

¶ I am pleasantly surprised at how compliant you are beïng. Did ye do this in spite of any personal disagreements ye have? --Pilcrow 19:33, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

Good. However, It's not the first time I've been compliant to you. No, I don't disagree with my actions. --Daniel 19:57, 27 July 2011 (UTC)

The topic User_talk:Pilcrow#Etymology_in_inflected_forms is back. What am I supposed to do? --Pilcrow 08:21, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

Ask Dan Polansky how long does he want that discussion to stay in your talk page. If he replies with a deadline (or other criteria) that you find reasonable, then you two got a "consensus", and this problem should be over already. If, on the other hand, he says something you disagree with, then you have an endless number of choices, such as talking with him to seek a consensus. --Daniel 12:22, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

I really do not want to speak to him, because he is one of the most inconsiderate and rude individuals I have met. Worse: nobody cares about how he treats me, so that means his behaviour is acceptable here. Considering that he re‐inserted that topic because “the section shows what kind of person this is”, it is quite clear that he is only doing this to further humiliate me. Why would he possibly care about what I think? --Pilcrow 16:07, 3 August 2011 (UTC)

catboiler helper with mask

Don't forget to edit the contents of Category:catboiler helper with mask, to allow pluralized masks ({{{mask}}} parameters). You're late. --Daniel 07:18, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Japanese syllables and whatnot

When you're done with the other tasks, there's still some work left here in this big list: User:Daniel Carrero/jap.

Don't worry, the hard part — the intellectual part: figuring things out, writing texts, etc. — is over. Now you should simply mechanically copy things over and over to a few hundreds of entries. Piecemeal.

Oh, and go figure out some etymologies, and the Cyrillic script, too. --Daniel 07:28, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Number POS for 1, 2, 3

The proposal WT:BP#100 is a number passed, weeks ago. You may start editing the entries anytime. There are 84 of them, now. --Daniel 08:03, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Combining Diacritical Marks

Make all entries linked at Appendix:Unicode/Combining Diacritical Marks exist as redirects, and double-check the Unicode boxes of their targets, too. --Daniel 17:14, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Template:character info

I haven't reviewed all the changes you've made, but I like that it supposedly works better with unsupported characters. However, I don't think we should make this display taller, and the new line "Character ..." I don't think adds much. See User talk:Yair rand#TabbedLangauges question 823 for related ideas. --Bequw → τ 17:20, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Thanks for approving my work concerning unsupported characters.

I created WT:BP#"Character" row to discuss the "Character" row; and I already gave a few reasons to keep it. Feel free to contribute to that conversation.

Since you linked to that discussion, I read it. Currently I don't have anything to say about what to do with {{character info}} with Tabbed Languages active. --Daniel 17:27, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Unrelatedly I like you how you've treated your talk page like a micro-blog. I've thought before about doing it. Maybe I'll start as it lets people know what one is thinking about. --Bequw → τ 20:53, 28 July 2011 (UTC)

Yep, I think that was a good idea. That way, it's easy (for me and whoever else) to keep track of my tasks, especially the longer ones. And, naturally, I'm not the only person who uses my talk page to ask me to do things, anyway. --Daniel 00:22, 29 July 2011 (UTC)

Basic Latin unicode boxes

Make sure all characters of Appendix:Unicode/Basic Latin have Unicode boxes with name, codepoint, and "previous" and "next" links. Typically, this means just addint the prev/next links to an existing box, or creating one from scratch. Control characters are an exception; they shouldn't be "defined" in individual entries. --Daniel 08:32, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

Done. --Daniel 21:15, 2 August 2011 (UTC)

form[er] and latt[er] fit better than "previous" and "next". Lysdexia 20:20, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Why? --Daniel 20:27, 12 September 2011 (UTC)

Normalization

Double-check this:

• K, ;, · and Template:normalization

--Daniel 11:10, 30 July 2011 (UTC)

August 2011

Deletions

Hi, I had two categories listed on my userpage, Category:English rare terms and Category:English spellings by character. I noticed you recently deleted them, but I'm confused as to why? There's no reason given for either. -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 15:02, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Hi. According to this discussion, "Category:English rare terms" should be deleted because "rare" implies that all senses are "not common". It was moved into "Category:English terms with rare senses" per that discussion.

However, according to this subsequent discussion, even the new name is inaccurate, for the opposite reason: it implies that some senses are rare and some aren't. (One proposal to fix that would be creating "Category:English rare terms or with rare senses", eventually.)

"Category:English spellings by character" was moved to "Category:English terms by their individual characters" because, among other reasons, I felt it provides a better contrast with "Category:English terms by their sequences of characters". --Daniel 16:51, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Ahh, thanks for the explanation, makes sense. But shouldn't the deletion summary at least give the new name of the category? -- OlEnglish ^(Talk) 18:33, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

That's a good idea, which is almost never done in Wiktionary, though. Maybe we are just forgetful en masse, or we expect people to ask someone else where did old categories go. (For comparison, in Commons, apparently it's standard practice leaving thousands of category redirects, including commons:Category:Dog, for example.) You're welcome. --Daniel 18:51, 6 August 2011 (UTC)

Template:pt-adj-mf

Is this needed, can {{pt-adj}} replace it? Curiously it calls on the subtemplate of {{pt-noun-mf}} which failed RFD a few months ago, so those templates should really be removed from it. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:26, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

There are plenty of Portuguese adjectives that are simultaneously masculine and feminine (a word like this is called "adjetivo de dois gêneros").

Yes, we need Template:pt-adj-mf or any other way to replace it.

Yes, Template:pt-adj can replace it, and already replaces it. See doente. --Daniel 14:03, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

What I think you mean is, it won't be needed if/when all such pages use {{pt-adj}} instead, right? Mglovesfun (talk) 14:10, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Right. --Daniel 14:12, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Page moves

When you move a page could you please include the reason for the move? I don't understand why you moved HP1 through 7 (Harry Potter abbreviations) from appendix into mainspace. Equinox ◑ 16:52, 20 August 2011 (UTC)

Depending on the move, I may or may not write down the reason for doing it.

No, I wouldn't write a summary explaining about moving Appendix:Harry Potter/HP1 to HP1, because the whole context of what is appropriate for what namespace is too big and complex to fit there. "I believe the main namespace is better than the appendix namespace for this entry" is more-or-less explicit already, and good enough. Nice additional reasons would be "I've seen people using 'HP1' somewhere in a manner that would meet CFI and whatnot" and "That's an abbreviation; who cares?", which are heavily implied, given a certain level of knowledge of Wiktionary, which you have. Actually, the former may be false, since in my experience it's easier to find "HP 1", etc. than "HP1", etc. in a manner that meets CFI, so probably these entries will have to be moved again to include a space there, or more research will have to be done to justify these exact spellings. --Daniel 17:34, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

I don’t mean to sound negative, but…

Why are you so nice? --Pilcrow 03:30, 21 August 2011 (UTC)

If you were offended, I will gladly retract my comment and apologize. --Pilcrow 17:31, 22 August 2011 (UTC)

Taking back a question about the niceness of someone after offending the nice person with it? That would be weird. Very, very weird.

I guess different people have different criteria for niceness. Stephen G. Brown, Jesus Christ and Superman are very nice, in ways I'm not. I think I just see the point of being nice, and don't see the point of being mean. Except when the latter is fun. --Daniel 03:01, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

¶ It took ye a while to respond, so I thought myself sounded inappropriately interrogative or rude, so you were ignoring me. Yo creo tú creer mí desconocido, no amigo, so it would be inappropriate das información personal a mí. (did I get that right?) --Pilcrow 03:38, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

FYI, in the older forms of English that I think you're trying to follow, it should be "it took you a while to respond" and "ye were ignoring me": "ye" was the subjective, like "I/thou/he/she/we/they", and "you" the objective, like "me/thee/him/her/us/them". (That's not the only attested "ye/you" alternation, but I think it's the one you want.) —Ruakh_TALK 13:50, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

@Pilcrow: I'm not very good at spotting errors in Spanish to try to reply your "did I get that right?" I just understood perfectly what you said. That's very considerate of you. A little paranoid, as expected, but considerate. --Daniel 16:39, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

If it's meant as Spanish, then no, it's not right. My Spanish is not great, but maybe "Temía que me considerara como desconocido, no como amigo, y que por eso fuera poco apropiado darme información personal"? —Ruakh_TALK 17:10, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Por Daniel: yo no cierto por que usted designado mí cuando considerado, porque mía Español estoy no bien, yo creo.

Por Ruakh: perdóname. --Pilcrow 18:52, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Now I barely have a clue about what you said. I think you should try talking to me in English. --Daniel 19:53, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

¶ I thought Español and your mother‐tongue were intelligible with each‐other. Here is my re‐phrase: ‘I am not certain why ye call me considerate, since my Español is not good, I think.’ --Pilcrow 22:35, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Since your Spanish is not good, it is possible that I misunderstand something when you misplace prepositions or conjugations or other things, as I believe you have done. But I may not know exactly how to correct you.

To be fair, when I read "yo no cierto por que usted designado mí cuando considerado, porque mía Español estoy no bien, yo creo", I did understand exactly "I am not certain why ye call me considerate, since my Español is not good, I think.", so your Spanish can be serviceable to talk to me, while English would be the optimal choice.

However, the sentence does not make sense in any language, so I just have assumed that I could not understand what you were saying. Your considerateness and your lack of fluency can coexist. --Daniel 22:58, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

The above has been somewhat entirely fascinating... Vă rog pe ambii să continuați. — [Ric Laurent] — 11:20, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

"You"... "Both"... "Continued"... Damn, I give up; you probably were just talking to yourself in Romanian, anyway.

Yep, fascinating things are fascinating. --Daniel 16:39, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Vă rog pe ambii să continuați. = I ask (of) you both to continue. — [Ric Laurent] — 17:02, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

OK, that makes sense. :) --Daniel 19:53, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

I think Pilcrow is Razorflame. — [Ric Laurent] — 22:12, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

I see some differences. Razorflame is bolder, in a bad manner. And he has no soul. --Daniel 22:58, 24 August 2011 (UTC)

Bahaha <3 — [Ric Laurent] — 02:13, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

phrasebook

Hi,

Could you add Portuguese translations to what are you doing, are you OK and what's your job, please? --Anatoli 03:16, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

✓ --Daniel 03:24, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

Obrigado, don't give up on phrasebook translations :). --Anatoli 03:26, 25 August 2011 (UTC)

October 2011

Wiktionary:Votes/2011-10/Categories of names 3

Because you voted in Wiktionary:Votes/2011-07/Categories of names, I'm informing you of this new vote.​—msh210℠ (talk) 01:52, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

OK, thanks. --Daniel 09:56, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Fancy being a judge?

Hi Daniel.. So they didn't choose you to be the judge for Brazil's Top Model. Nevermind, you can still live out your dream, and be one of the judges in the upcoming story-writing competition. Are you interested? You may of course enter as well as judge. --Rockpilot 09:44, 24 October 2011 (UTC)

What a boring dream. I'm sure just watching the girls would be better than having to judge them, because those formal rules of female beauty are so far from my personal views... Besides, I'm sure the hottest girl in Brazil didn't ever pursue the career of a model.

Now to the point: My answer is yes. --Daniel 03:16, 25 October 2011 (UTC)

Please state you preference at WT:FUN. --Rockpilot 10:36, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

✓ --Daniel 07:57, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

topic cat

Hi Daniel, I am working on implementing the topic cat system in the Hungarian wiktionary. I copied all the necessary templates and it seems to work except a weird side-effect visible here hu:Kategória:af:Földrajz. The page is suddenly added to a hidden category (see Rejtett kategória:magyar-afrikaans szótár at the bottom of the page, basically it's the index of the language) and I was not able to figure out what's causing it. Your thoughts would be appreciated. --Panda10 19:07, 30 October 2011 (UTC)

I think I figured it out. The language template {af} adds the word to the hidden category. It is how it was designed and the topic cat system reuses this template. I'm not sure how I will resolve this. I can't create a new set of language templates because I can't duplicate the language code templates. And I don't think the Hungarian editors would want to remove this hidden category from the language template. --Panda10 11:31, 31 October 2011 (UTC)

Maybe you should replace this code of hu:Template:af...

<includeonly>[[Kategória:magyar-afrikaans szótár]]</includeonly>

With this...

{{#ifeq:{{NAMESPACE}}||[[Kategória:magyar-afrikaans szótár]]}}

--Daniel 17:13, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I made the change in hu:Template:af but I don't see any difference here hu:Kategória:af:Földrajz. But thanks for responding. --Panda10 23:34, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

I don't see the hidden category anymore, so presumably the edit I recommended was successful. Daniel. 01:40, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

You're right. It seems that it took a while, not sure how long, for it to disappear. It was not immediate. But it works and thank you for finding the solution! --Panda10 22:46, 29 November 2011 (UTC)

November 2011

Possible?

Would it be possible to change instances of "e" to "ɛ" in Romanian IPA templates? That'd be super awesome if you could make that happen :D — [Ric Laurent] — 16:50, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I dunno. I barely know what are the specific needs and quirks of Romanian here. Please show me one page that would be affected by that change, and hopefully I'll understand your whole request in a second, like a genius. --Daniel 17:10, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Pretty much just e > ɛ, like this — [Ric Laurent] — 17:19, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Are you sure that's a good idea? I believe the usual practice among linguists is to use only "e" for languages without distinct /e/ and /ɛ/ phonemes. —Ruakh_TALK 17:47, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Where did you hear that? it doesn't make any sense. -- Liliana • 17:48, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

[after e/c] I didn't hear it anywhere, but I've observed it to be the case. Incidentally, I just now checked w:Romanian phonology (which I should have done before!), and found that it follows the practice I describe, explaining: "Although e̞, o̞ are written above with diacritics to show their mid height and ä with a diacritic to show its central backness, in virtually all phonetic transcriptions of Romanian these characteristics are implied and the symbols are written without diacritics. The same convention is applied in this article." So I should modify my statement a bit: perhaps linguists would use "ɛ" for a language with a distinctly open-mid vowel, even if it lacked a close-mid counterpart. (I don't know if such a language actually exists, but presumably one does.) —Ruakh_TALK 17:57, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

addendum: however, what you're proposing doesn't seem to fit with w:Romanian phonology. -- Liliana • 17:49, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Why the fuck do I bother trying to make wiktionary more correct. Fucking whatever.

Daniel, how are you with the js that User:Conrad.Irwin/creation.js uses? I made a request for Albanian there that's gone unanswered, I was wondering if that'd be something within the scope of your skillz. — [Ric Laurent] — 18:04, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Sorry, I didn't mean to anger you. I do support correctness, I'm just not sure that it's "more correct" to use "ɛ" where experts use "e". —Ruakh_TALK 18:13, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Wikipedians as experts. Lold.

Feel free to completely disregard my 4 years of speaking Romanian. I'm youngdumb and for the most part self-taught, I can't possibly know what the bloody hell I'm talking about. — [Ric Laurent] — 18:17, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I'm sorry, but you're reading criticisms into my comments that simply aren't there. (Oh, but for a criticism that is really here: you're being a total hypocrite. When I raised this same issue about Hebrew, you insisted on using "ɛ" anyway, even though my Hebrew was and is a hundred times better than yours. I think that we should follow common linguistic practice; but if you genuinely believed that we should follow the opinion of experienced speakers, I'd at least understand that. But that's not what you believe; you believe that this is a decision that should be made by you, both for languages that you speak well and for languages that you don't, and fuck everyone else.) —Ruakh_TALK 18:54, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I used ɛ for Hebrew because that's what the sound is. Lazy people can use o and e in place of ɔ and ɛ all they want, but I'm not going to do that if it's not what I hear being pronounced. "Common linguistic practice" means shit compared to what people actually say. As the only experienced speaker of Romanian who's familiar with IPA and the sounds of numerous languages, I'd say my opinion's one that should be respected. (God I hate using that word about myself.) The difference between my using ɛ for Hebrew and you suggesting we shouldn't use ɛ for Romanian is that I knew something about Hebrew, and I'm assuming that everything you know about Romanian you got from wikipedia. Your argument's full of holes. — [Ric Laurent] — 19:09, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

The question is not "what people actually say", the question is how to represent what people actually say. For that, we must turn to common practice among experts. (Unless you want to suggest that, unlike those lazy people who use IPA, we should introduce our own phonetic alphabet that is completely correct because we say so?) —Ruakh_TALK 19:12, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

The IPA was made to be specific. For us to "represent" sounds for which there are actual IPA symbols with symbols that mean other things in the IPA... is frankly just stupid. — [Ric Laurent] — 19:14, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

Perhaps ideally that were so, but in this world, I think that your proposed use of "ɛ" for Romanian and Hebrew would wrongly imply that those languages distinguished "ɛ" from "e". IPA is designed to be not just specific, but language-specific; in ordinary transcription, the choice of symbols depends not just on the sound itself — or how an English-speaker such as yourself perceives the sound — but on how the sound fits into the sound system of the language as a whole. And anyway, I don't really trust your opinion that the sound "is" [ɛ] rather than [e]; in a precise, language-independent transcription, Wikipedia states that it would be [e̞] (that is, halfway between [ɛ] and [e]), and to gainsay that, you would need not only knowledge of Romanian (which I'm happy to trust you on), but also a much better knowledge of IPA than you actually have. (I know this, because you cite "what [you] hear being pronounced"; if you were really making an expert judgment, you would instead cite spectrograms, scatterplots of F₀ and F₁, and so on. To a specific speaker such as yourself, it might sound like [ɛ] rather than like [e], but that has as much to do with that speaker's language background as with any objective reality. For information on objective reality, consult spectrograms, or consult the experts who have consulted spectrograms.) —Ruakh_TALK 19:44, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

It's a good thing you know so much or the world might not be as perfect as it is. — [Ric Laurent] — 20:11, 9 November 2011 (UTC)

I made an old and simplistic search-and-replace script one day, so I can use it to convert "e" to "ɛ" in every Romanian IPA, just one time, if people decide it is a good idea. --Daniel 09:37, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

The opinions of wikipedia editors always trump people who speak something here. Especially for lesser-spoken languages like Romanian. — [Ric Laurent] — 12:19, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

• I just came across this blog post, by John C. Wells, author of Accents of English and the Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, which makes explicit the usual practice of using "e" to transcribe an "ɛ" sound in languages that do not distinguish /ɛ/ from /e/. Liliana may find it interesting. Ric will presumably ignore it. (By the way, I don't claim that Wells' justification for the practice is compelling; only that it is the usual practice, and that it doesn't make sense to claim that a deviation from said practice would somehow make us more correct.) —Ruakh_TALK 20:06, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

You're lazy and unpleasant. Lol. — [Ric Laurent] — 20:23, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

"Unpleasant", coming from you, can only be taken as a compliment. "Lazy", perhaps not; but I suppose they cancel out. —Ruakh_TALK 20:39, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

"An important principle of good phonetic transcription is simplicity" - ignoring the complexity of natural language?

Why do we use IPA at all? Why not have a nice simple individual system for every individual language?

"For points 3, 4, and 5 please wait until tomorrow." - See? Too lazy to even make his points. As far as I'm concerned, everything in this man's blog post supports my assertion. He brings up [l] and [ɫ] specifically, so should we differentiate those? If the argument is for simplicity, why do we distinguish between [ø] and [œ], [ɤ] and [ʌ], having the same basic distance from each other as e/ɛ and o/ɔ? Yucatec doesn't have [b], so why don't we use [b] for their [ɓ]? French doesn't have [r], so why don't we use that for [ʁ]? Where do you draw the line, exactly? Is it limited to ɛ and ɔ, or should we start simplifying our IPA for everything? Is it unreasonable for me to want to represent any particular language's sounds as accurately as I can? — [Ric Laurent] — 20:59, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Re: ignoring complexity: I don't think an open-mid vowel is any more "complex" than a close-mid vowel. Simplicity of transcription lets us reserve complexity for the case where there is actually a complexity to convey.

Re: why use IPA: Because it is a well-understood system, with well-understood general principles. Some aspects of IPA are unfortunate, such as the general use of /e/ and [ɛ] to designate a certain phoneme and phone, respectively, in many languages where the former is pronounced approximately as the latter — but that's how it is. If you want to make up a more complex system, be my guest; but you might want to avoid calling it "IPA", since that term is already in use. ;-)

Re: points 3, 4, and 5: I think he postponed them because the post was growing long, not because he was too "lazy" to post them the same day. (After all, had he preferred to post everything in one entry, he could have pushed off points 1 and 2 until he had written the rest.)

Anyway, I'm not saying, a priori, that we can't decide to do things differently from the normal linguistic practice; our needs may be different. You could certainly make a case for our using /ɛ/ in languages where /e/ is generally pronounced [ɛ] (though Romanian would not be the best example of such a language, since external sources describe its /e/ as being pronounced [e̞]); but you haven't bothered to make such a case, because you're simply not interested in acting like a rational human being for even five minutes. Which is unfortunate for you, and unfortunate for those of us who find ourselves in the position of trying to have a conversation with you. My initial comment above was:

Are you sure that's a good idea? I believe the usual practice among linguists is to use only "e" for languages without distinct /e/ and /ɛ/ phonemes.

And your initial reply was:

Why the fuck do I bother trying to make wiktionary more correct. Fucking whatever.

which belies its own claim as well as anything could. "Fucking whatever" is right.

—Ruakh_TALK 21:22, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

I wish you wouldn't pretend that you may at some undefined point in the future actually take me seriously, regardless of my present demeanor. The fact that you ignored the bulk of my last message basically proves it. — [Ric Laurent] — 21:44, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

I didn't ignore the bulk of your last message; rather, the bulk of your last message is covered by the bulk of my reply. You ask about a number of specific IPA symbols, and ask how we should apply them, to which my default response is, "the same way that linguists do". I'm open to reasons that we should depart from usual linguistic practice, and obviously there are many cases where there's no one practice that can be considered standard; but your arguments so far amount to "linguists are tools, I can do better". (And I do take your comments seriously, not just in the future but in the present. Many of your comments are calculated to insult rather than inform, and obviously those comments are useless, but that is by no means true of all of your comments. You're a smart guy, much as you try to conceal it.) —Ruakh_TALK 22:04, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

The laze of linguists shouldn't trump what people actually pronounce. — [Ric Laurent] — 22:47, 28 November 2011 (UTC)

Contextual separation

This might've gotten lost in the fest-of-suck that became my last request, so I'll copypaste the one I made after I realized I'd wasted my time with the first one:

"Daniel, how are you with the js that User:Conrad.Irwin/creation.js uses? I made a request for Albanian there that's gone unanswered, I was wondering if that'd be something within the scope of your skillz."

I really wish I knew how to do these ones myself, because I'm constantly thinking of stuff that could (and should) be accelerated.... Alas, javascript is Mongolian to me. — [Ric Laurent] — 12:02, 10 November 2011 (UTC)

This time, I'm going to be useless to you. I'm not so good with JavaScript as I am with MediaWiki. --Daniel 12:57, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

No worries dude, I don't blame you, that shit is ridiculous to even look at. It makes no sense whatsoever to me.... — [Ric Laurent] — 13:45, 17 November 2011 (UTC)

to be continued#Japanese

Hi, It was amusing but I have deleted the Japanese section. --Anatoli 04:50, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

OK. --Daniel 09:40, 11 November 2011 (UTC)

book

prone, supineLucifer 02:50, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

It took me a few seconds to realize what were you talking about... Nice choice of words, though. Thanks. --Daniel 05:25, 13 November 2011 (UTC)

deixar

You may be able to help out at [[WT:ID#deixar (pt)]].​—msh210℠ (talk) 20:50, 27 November 2011 (UTC)

December 2011

direção

Hola. I am taking another break, but I had to log back on because I really want to know if these are intentional, namely:

1. If the plural is really «dirçãos»
2. If ‘He were’ enstead of ‘He was’ is appropriate.

I am not assuming anything, I am just wondering if these are correct to you. --Pilcrow 04:59, 21 December 2011 (UTC)

The plural was written "direçãos", but the correct one definitely would be "direções". "He was" is the appropriate wording. Thanks for letting me know about these mistakes. Fixed. --Daniel 20:01, 21 December 2011 (UTC)