Welcome! edit

Hello, and welcome to Wiktionary. Thank you for your contributions. If you have edited Wikipedia, you probably already know some basics, but Wiktionary does have a few conventions of its own.

This is not Wikipedia; it is run in a very different manner, and assuming similarity may get you blocked for causing disruption. This has happened too frequently in the past, which leads to a (possibly unfair) prejudice about your motives and actions here. You should note particularly that being bold is not encouraged where it goes against any of our policies or against the community consensus, which is generally strong. Changing policy pages on Wiktionary is very strongly discouraged: if you think something needs changing, discuss it at WT:BP, following which we may formally vote on the issue. (You can get more of a glimpse of the Wiktionary mindset at Help:Interacting with humans.)

Our two main policy documents are Wiktionary:Entry layout explained ("ELE") and Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion ("CFI"). ELE describes our standard layout; unlike on Wikipedia, all entries must follow this layout, even if they are not yet complete. (You can get a feel for our standard layout by looking at existing entries.) CFI describes what is allowed in the dictionary, and disallows (for example) most names of specific persons or places. We generally follow ELE and CFI closely.

If you do create a couple of entries that are not properly formatted, someone will be glad to clean up after you. But if you do it repeatedly, you might get blocked as a temporary measure to give you a chance to read ELE.

Some other differences between us and English Wikipedia:

  • Entry titles are case-sensitive and do not have their first letters capitalized unless, like proper nouns, they are ordinarily capitalized. So we have mercury for the substance and Mercury for the planet and the god. (We do not use parentheses in titles: there's no Mercury (planet).)
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Also, a "citation" on Wiktionary is the same as a "quotation" and is evidence of a word being used; we use these to construct dictionary definitions. See WT:QUOTE. A "reference", on the other hand, which is called a "citation" on Wikipedia, references another secondary source, such as a dictionary, and is used predominantly for verifying etymologies and usage notes, not the definitions themselves. (That we don't use another dictionary as our source for the existence of a word is largely so that we don't fall into the trap of adding "list words", words that, while often defined, are never used in practice.)

I hope you enjoy editing Wiktionary! If you have any questions, then see the help pages, add a question to one of the discussion rooms or ask me on my talk page.}​—msh210 19:15, 4 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Index:Dutch edit

If you can confirm that Dutch is sorted in the same manner as English (or indeed if it is sorted differently and you let me know exactly how) I can add Dutch to the set of indexes generated by User:Conrad.Bot which will save you having to add words by hand - at the expense of having to wait for a week for the thing to be updated. Conrad.Irwin 02:45, 6 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

It appears that User:Jcwf has done something about them instead. Conrad.Irwin 09:40, 6 November 2009 (UTC)Reply
All right. Well, thanks anyhow.

your entries edit

They're nice, merit inclusion and are interesting but please take some time to see the changes I have made to (deprecated template usage) Judezmo and (deprecated template usage) Judaeo-Spanish and also perhaps WT:ELE. Thanks, 50 Xylophone Players talk 23:47, 10 November 2009 (UTC)Reply

Thanks for the heads-up. I'll work to comply with that standard in the future (I'm still trying to keep all the rules together in my head). Regards, Mitchell Powell 02:41, 11 November 2009 (UTC)Reply