Wiktionary:Information desk/2022/October

discussion rooms: Tea room • Etym. scr. • Info desk • Beer parlour • Grease pit ← September 2022 · October 2022 · November 2022 → · (current)

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How to remove the thumbnails in the search results?

I don't want then. 恨国党非蠢即坏 (talk) 04:06, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

I would like to know, too! (For anyone who hasn't noticed: both Wikipedia and Wiktionary now show a little picture beside every single search result. It doesn't work well for us, because most of our entries, especially inflected form, don't have a picture: so they still get a sort of "missing picture" image which wastes space.) Equinox ◑ 04:08, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

The long-term solution is to post to phab: and have mw:Extension:SearchThumbs uninstalled. You can edit Special:MyPage/common.css and mark at least the class searchResultImage-thumbnail-placeholder as display: none; and maybe the classes searchResultImage, searchResultImage-thumbnail, and searchResultImage-thumbnail-placeholder. You should be able to do this by adding [class='foo'] {display: none;}. Note that I haven't tested this, but I'm 90% on it at least not displaying these placeholder thumbnails. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:17, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Just in case somebody wants to remove it site-wide: I affirm that it should be done since the pictures are for people searching information about the things but on Wiktionary people search linguistic information, moreover a page often contains unrelated entries for multiple languages, so developers should realize it was not a reasonable idea in the first place to add thumbnails, as well as it has been on certain other Wikimedia sites. Fay Freak (talk) 19:01, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

@Fay Freak: Are you going to post to phab:? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:20, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

@Koavf: No, I have never done such a thing. Fay Freak (talk) 19:25, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

Do you want me to do it? —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:28, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

@Koavf: Well I guess so if other people of Wiktionary find it equally compelling. They likely don’t read this here though but the Beer Parlour. @Soap seems to accept the feature as given on Talk:slut § Photo in this entry. Fay Freak (talk) 12:29, 9 October 2022 (UTC)

See eg. tsammalex (MPI) for a visual dictionary approach. Given the common reading direction, placement in second position rhs looks nicer. The two problems are "click-traps" and IMO also bandwidth. 141.20.6.62 12:49, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

@ Justin, Fay Freak: This has also been raised at w:en:WP:VPT#Images with search results et seq. Xaosflux has created phab:T320337. Looks like a patch is in progress. Oddly, I'm not seeing the images at Special:Search here on Wiktionary. Pelagic (talk) 10:26, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

That is a change from when this was first being discussed. The worst part of the "feature" was that it unexpectedly rendered avoiding NSFW images impossible, which could have gotten people in trouble. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:48, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

Fully featured search, where the is it?

The quick-search at the top of each page leads to a results overview when no exact match is found or if javascript is not available to redirect the browser to the exact match. How, other than searching bogus that would never match, can I get to the overview which also allows selecting search criteria?

Searching for "" (ie. nothing) does the trick, but that's bogus because no one in there right mind would do that. Yo dawg I heard you like search so we put a search in your search so you can research the search while you search the research.

You ought to have a text link either close to the search field or in the side-bar. I mean, clearly! How's that not obvious? The search-story is something arcane and not at all well documented anyway, so maybe I'm preaching to the choir. 141.20.6.69 11:21, 8 October 2022 (UTC)

I agree. Just clicking on the magnifying glass without input also goes to Special:Search. At least the tooltip could say "advanced search options" when nothing is selected. Welcome to bizarro MediaWiki-land. – Jberkel 14:57, 11 October 2022 (UTC)

I routinely prepend qq to the search term and then edit it out after selecting the search criteria. This works without fail (: except for fois :).  --Lambiam 13:23, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

Why can't i search a specific language by meaning?

Wiktionary seems to only allow searches one way: You know the word and you want to know its meaning. Is it possible to search for a meaning in a particular language and if not, why not? I should be able to specify that I want to know the word for "lion" in a target language like Latin for instance and have the search engine spit out "leo, leonis, m. lion" I explored the advanced search options etc. and did not see this ability available. Wiktionary would be a much more powerful tool if this were allowed. 162.212.107.134 14:20, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

There is no direct way to do this, but for single words and phrases you can look up the English entry (lion), where there is a translation table (or a link to it). You can search for a specific word in specific languages by searching for something like incategory:"Latin lemmas" lion, but this will return any Latin entry that contains the word "lion", regardless of whether it is given as a definition or not. — SURJECTION ^{/ T / C / L /} 16:34, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

then wiktionary will only ever be half useful i guess 162.212.107.134 13:26, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

It's a volunteer project, you get it 100% for free, what have you ever contributed? Equinox ◑ 14:38, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

How do you propose users formulate the meaning of the term being sought? As a phrase in natural language? One user may search for "an expression of great sadness", another for "an exclamation used to express pity or regret", while a third may formulate the query as "an expression of sorrow or grief". We cannot make a database of all conceivable ways users might formulate such meanings. It will take an advanced AI to figure out these queries are possible definitions of the interjection alas.  --Lambiam 11:48, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

It would be cool to support real reverse dictionary lookups, we have enough data to build something powerful. But even the current search could be improved by adding more weights to certain fields. That in turn requires that the search engine understands our entry structure. The only short-term solution is to build something externally. Maybe something for the Community Wishlist, if you still believe in it. – Jberkel 11:59, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Separate etymologies for parts of speech

I've noticed that for some entries, like walk, there is a separate etymology for the verb and noun even though they come from the same root. For most entries, like dry, all parts of speech are under the same etymology as expected. Do we have a policy on this kind of thing? Ioaxxere (talk) 16:52, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

There is no policy, but there are a few people who believe very strongly that this is the way it should be done. Others disagree. Chuck Entz (talk) 17:18, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

@Chuck Entz Maybe it would be best to settle it with a vote. Ioaxxere (talk) 19:55, 14 October 2022 (UTC)

It's something that we probably need to tackle more comprehensively, as derivative senses often have interesting etymologies in their own right. Theknightwho (talk) 19:43, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

How to add another meaning?

For specifically the word amictic, I'm trying to add that it's non-mictic, in the sense of asexual reproduction. How would I do that?

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/amictic

TypistMonkey (talk) 20:09, 15 October 2022 (UTC)

You click on edit next to Adjective and add one (or more*) definition lines in accordance with our style guide. Preview, and, if you're satisfied, publish your changes.  --Lambiam 09:50, 16 October 2022 (UTC)

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*Note that Merriam-Webster gives two distinguishable senses.

RfV Alerts

If an RfV (request for verification) is raised against a lemma, should its non-lemma forms be tagged with a warning that there is an RfV? If so, how? ---RichardW57m (talk) 14:28, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

I have never seen that actually practiced. Non-lemmas are already soft-redirects. I think tagging them would just be overkill. Of course they should be deleted if a term fails RFV but we already remove anything linking to the deleted term. Vininn126 (talk) 15:39, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

You're assuming that non-lemmas don't serve as reminders - a user may look a non-lemma up, see a summary gloss which provides the one-stop service of reminding the user what the word means, and proceed no further. At that point, the user has not been told that adding his text (if it qualifies) to the main lemma would be useful. It's particularly worrisome if the non-lemma is an alternative citation form, which perhaps should be a special case for this question. --RichardW57m (talk) 16:33, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

What non-lemma contains such a gloss? That is not standard practice. Vininn126 (talk) 16:35, 17 October 2022 (UTC)

It's not banned or officially discouraged either. After a quick survey, it seems to be far commoner for Pali than in other languages, but that's because I've been adding Pali inflected forms when I find they clash with other terms. As a result, most Pali non-lemmas contain a gloss. So too do a lot of subsidiary lemmas. --RichardW57m (talk) 11:19, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

(A serious issue is that quite a few subsidiary, non-Roman Pali lemmas contain a full definition, instead of explicitly directing the user to a Roman script lemma. Even in such cases, I believe there is a link thither.) --RichardW57m (talk) 11:19, 18 October 2022 (UTC)

Delimiting Languages

Where, if anywhere, are the boundaries between languages defined, or at least, sketched? Should one look for the boundaries between languages in the series WT:A<CODE>? I was looking for the boundary between Mon and Old Mon, which should be defined by the boundaries of Middle Mon, which does not have a 2- or 3-letter code or an article in Wikipedia. --RichardW57 (talk) 13:01, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

For something like that a cut-off date is usually set, often found on Wikipedia or in books on the language - with Mon that might be a bit harder to determine. Vininn126 (talk) 14:31, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

And once a cut-off is determined, editors should probably document it in the "About Foo" / "Foo entry guidelines" page, as Richard suspects. I would also document any other cases where someone might reasonably expect Foo to cover Bar but it doesn't, e.g. WT:ADE has a collapsed list at the bottom of things which are sometimes called German dialects but which have their own language codes. - -sche (discuss) 20:01, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

Deleting Hard Redirects

How do I get a hard redirect deleted? Normally I get ones I created deleted, but in this case someone created the original page and yet another person made a request for its speedy deletion, which would then have resulted in the loss of remediably inaccurate information. This request was rejected and the requester told to make an RFV. Since then, the page has become a hard redirect.

What I have done is to put the RFV for the hard link on the page it redirects to, but I am not sure this is right. The redirected to page in question is ஸாரம் (sāram). --RichardW57 (talk) 21:53, 24 October 2022 (UTC)

Adding Classical Guarani

Last time (six years ago, when I had null knowledge of how to work with Wiktionary) I used the beer parlour to get help from anyone kind enough (and with the knowledge and permissions) to add Proto-Tupian to Wiktionary (and it worked!). Now my editing skills have improved but they're still relatively basic. I am looking forward to adding Classical Guarani now. Once this is done, I plan on adding a lot (and I mean a lot) of lemmas from the whole Guarani subfamily (together with etymologies, declensions, conjugations, etc.) as well as Proto-Tupian lemmas with their descendants for facilitating comparative studies. The script for this one would also have to be Latinx. Thanks in advance! ~𝔪𝔢𝔪𝔬 (talk) 06:08, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

stint

Hi, I want to add a similar definition under the English section for stint. The first definition under "noun" is A period of time spent doing or being something; a spell. I want to add under that a similar term (not a separate definition) that stint is also used in motor racing to signify the period of time between a pit stop or being on the track between two pit stops. He's on a good stint, I'm going out for my stint are examples of the use of the word. I just don't know what tempalte to use, there's {{ux}} for examples and {{quote}} for quotations but I don't know the one for similar terms. If someone could point me in the right direction that'd be great. Thank you. X750 (talk) 20:22, 25 October 2022 (UTC)

See an earlier thread above, How to add another meaning?.  --Lambiam 21:07, 27 October 2022 (UTC)