Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2003/October-December

Greek text?

I know enough Greek to supply some translations and etymologies. In the interest of not generating a trail of unreadable characters or unusable links, how should I enter Greek text for maximum compatibility? May I cut and paste out of my word processor, a process which appears to create accurate text: (όνομα), should I create the whole business with the painfully slow ampersand-codename-semicolon route (óνομα), or some other process? Have I missed the document explaining all this somewhere? (I am new to the world of Wiki as of a couple of days ago. I have so far slogged through the editing pages and enough convoluted discussions of multi-language issues to know that debates still rage. What I want is simply a functional answer so I can contribute with confidence.) Thanks! Dvortygirl 06:53, 29 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Cut and paste should be fine. In your ampersand example the oacute is not technically correct. The proper entry should be ό (numeric 972) or an equivalent ό (numeric 8057). A number of other choices are available for different accentuations on the omicron.

Eclecticology 08:22, 29 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Tamil display

Lastely I have put some Tamil words in Wiktionary but there is some problem with their proper display in Wikipedia. You can check it with this example: if you take the word for ant, எறும்பு and cut it and paste it in Google, you'll get several Tamil pages containing it but if you go into them and search for the word with the Find tool, you can see that the display is different. It happens with every vowel containing e, o, u, ai, au and with some containing i. I don't think is great problem so far but it would be useful to fix it if possible as Tamil is an important language and likely to join Wikipedia sooner or later. - Piolinfax 20:41, 29 Oct 2003 (UTC)

Is this a Wiktionary problem or a Google problem? The Find tool can also be browser dependant. While you're at it please consider entering these words at Wiktionary:Tamil index.

OK. I'll do that. - Piolinfax 14:06, 1 Nov 2003 (UTC) Anyway, I don't think there is any problem in google. The proper display is the one shown in the Tamil pages it collects (you have to get into the page). The display in wiki is just additive, it doesn't "melts" the information into a proper display. - Piolinfax 14:17, 1 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Wikification?

The word for ring finger in Bulgarian is "среден пръст". Do I have to wikify it as среден пръст or as среден пръст ? Webkid 04:57, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

For what it's worth, I would do this: среден пръстPolyglot 08:38, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

It depends on whether you feel that a separate article will be needed for the two word expression. Eclecticology 09:17, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

OK, another question about wikification. Should "noun", "translations", "personal pronoun", "synonyms" etc be wikified and if yes - why? Webkid 21:23, 15 Dec 2003 (UTC)

No. These are part of Wiktionary's own operating meta-vocabulary, so no real purpose is served by linking them so frequently. Eclecticology 09:17, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

OK, then I'll start unwikifying the adjectives, nouns etc. Webkid 12:33, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

Capitals again

In cases where there is an acronym that doubles as a regular word, should the two share one entry, or should they be separate? The example that popped up is VAT. (There is currently no definition for the noun vat; a search for it takes you to the acronym.) -- Ortonmc 00:49, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)

This is a continuing problem which can only get worse. The policies on this issue, which worked quite well in Wikipedia, are a big problem here. vat in the current system is forced to become Vat. In our multilingual environment the forced change is not applied consistently. It is only used for latin letters without diacritics. The forced change does not apply to accented characters; "é" is not automatically changed to "É". It is not applied to other scripts that have capitals in their language, Cyrillic, Greek, Armenian, Georgian.

I've thought of developing a style rule to the effect that all entries are presumed to be lower case unless otherwise indicated, but I don't find that to be an entirely satisfactory solution. It has been argued that the present software avoids the problem of what to do when an otherwise lowercased word begins a sentence. I think that there are other ways of doing that. One can accept having a sentence begin with a lowercase latter, one can use piping when a word begins a sentence (i.e. [[vat|Vat]], or one can develop some kind of markup that forces the first letter to be represented as a capital when we want that. The latter solution could also be varied to apply to the first two letters to deal with some situations where a word could begin with a digraph, but that's a secondary problem.

As things stand making the change now while we have a mere 26,000+ articles will have a disruptive effect, but the problem will just be twice as big if we wait until the article count exceeds 52,000. Brion already knows how I feel about this issue, and I fully respect the amount of work he has done on the overall technical side. He has also been very good in answering the questions that people ask of him. What this may require is that more of us let our feelings be known, both here and on the Wikitech mailing list.

I suppose I could suggest a vote on the simple question, "Wiktionary should abandon the practice of forcing the first letter of an article title to be a capital letter," but I wouldn't want the voting process to be anything more than a survey. I still think that consensus decision making is the best for all of us. Eclecticology 18:41, 20 Nov 2003 (UTC)

For better or worse, here's how we handled VAT: Create a new article Vat for the noun, and include the acronym in it. Then change the VAT article to a redirect. I suspect that if the original VAT article weren't there, the redirect would be unnecessary. -- Ortonmc 03:23, 22 Nov 2003 (UTC)

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I see that the capitals are still in place on Sep 8th, 2004. Aren't there languages where capitalization is significant? e.g. German? I'm still a new user, but every message I've seen on this issue is supportive of a change. Is there a place where the opposing view has been recorded? It seems like a fairly obvious positive change... Without pointing fingers or causing problems, who's objecting? Is it a technology problem? -- CoryCohen 03:20, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

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Oops. I finally found the bulk of this discussion at Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/case-sensitivity_vote. See what happens when you're a new user and you can't find something? :-) You step in it. :-) I have a better understanding now, and will rightly abstain from something that's this politically charged until I know what I'm talking about. -- CoryCohen 07:11, 9 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Word forms (genders, plurals etc)

If a language has genders (for example Bulgarian has three), do I have to write all the genders of a word? I mean, is it enough to write only the masculine gender of a word or is it necessary to write the masculine, feminine, neuter AND plural form of the word? I guess most of you will agree that this is important for the nouns, but what about the adjectives? They've got genders as well. Webkid

• I think it's a good idea to show the forms for all parts of speech that are inflected. What I'm not so sure of is whether each form of the word needs to have a separate entry in Wiktionary. (I would prefer not to, except perhaps in the case of irregular inflections.) Ortonmc 04:36, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)

• • So you suggest that I write all the inflected forms, right? Does this include the plural form? And one more question: can you see properly the cyrillic characters using a browser with default settings? Webkid 13:07, 14 Dec 2003 (UTC)
• Showing the gender variation is probably more important for adjectives than for nouns. Case endings are also important. My tendency is not to show all these forms when the word follows a regular pattern, but to be more elaborate if it has an irregular formation. This is all much easier for English. :-) Eclecticology 09:17, 17 Dec 2003 (UTC)

So, for the swedish word penna (= pen or pencil), I might write a table

penna	pennor
pennan	pennorna

with the swedish equivalents of

pen	pens
the pen	the pens

and add that this word is c (common, the swedish 4:th genus). And a similar table for adjectives. Did I understand you correctly, Eclecticology? \Mike 22:53, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

I would like to see all the inflected forms as links to other entries. Regular or not. Plurals, diminutives, comparatives, superlatives, alternate forms/spellings, conjugations, flexions, etc. Preferably in a way that is standardized and that makes it clear what form it is. Either by means of a label or set up in a table. Polyglot 23:17, 2 Mar 2004 (UTC)

We should decide a standard now. I started adding plural/past participle/past tense/comparative/superlative to articles since I saw you were doing it but now I've just noticed at least one of mine being deleted on the grounds of being regular. I don't mind which way we decide but I don't want to waste my time on stuff that's going to be deleted shortly after. Actually I think we should show all forms - including 3rd person singular present and present participle - but that we should mark the irregular forms in some way, perhaps an asterisk or bold. Hippietrail 10:58, 9 Mar 2004 (UTC)