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Wiktionary:Votes/2006-05/WikiSaurus name and namespace

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Discussion moved from Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2006/May#Pushing for the definitive WikiSaurus name and namespace.

Purpose of this thread is to achieve both the following:

  1. A final decision on whether to keep WikiSaurus as the definitive name for the Thesaurus part of Wiktionary.
  2. The establishment of an independent namespace for it, instead of the current pseudo-namespace. This also for WikiSaurus talk of course.

Personally, I'm neutral to the first. I don't like it (it reminds me too much of prehistorical creatures), but I don't have a valid alternative right now. I didn't find any threads about it, but then, I didn't look very well. The second is an absolutely necessary beginning in the current developments that should bring the Thesaurus out of its pre-embryonic state. —Vildricianus | t | 12:30, 12 May 2006 (UTC)....So, would thesaurus also remind you of prehistoric creatures?[reply]

Is the 'S' capitalized? Davilla 15:46, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Why not simply Thesaurus: ? There is no need for the Wiki part in the name (too much a dinosaur name...) and Thesaurus is more intellegible. - Dakdada 15:58, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

That's what I like. Voting without bothering to put forward arguments! :-) Before perhaps actually considering what a name is used for. Before all the arguments are put. Will you later read the additional arguments put, and reconsider your vote?--Richardb 01:54, 14 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

I think the thesaurus name should be preserved in some way. For uniformity, preferably in the same way "encyclopedia" is preserved in Wikipedia, and "dictionary" is preserved in Wiktionary.
It's part of "marketing". We need a name which both fairly obviously means thesaurus, but also is our unique name for it. There are already approximately 12,000 external links to "WikiSaurus". How are people going to refer to our Thesaurus ? Are they going to have to have links to the "Wiktionary Thesaurus". Bit of a mouthful. And currently, do they refer to the "Wikipedia Dictionary", or to Wiktionary? --Richardb 01:54, 14 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comments:
I believe the "WikiSaurus" can grow to be more than a "simple" thesaurus, as it is not bounded by the paper limitations of a Thesaurus. So I would not like to see us limit our thinking by adopting a limited thinking name of "Thesaurus" with all the baggage that carries. (A publication, usually in the form of a book, that provides synonyms (and sometimes antonyms) for the words of a given language.) --Richardb 17:36, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Calling a thesaurus a thesaurus can only help people visiting what the sub-project is all about. Calling it a Wikisaurus seems to only cause confusion. The topics that I've seen debated about it were all about criteria for inclusion/what line-in-the-sand to use, or about formatting/layout. I haven't heard any suggestions about it becoming anything more than a thesaurus, to date. It is still small and fairly easy to correct now - why wait? --Connel MacKenzie T C 17:52, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Hands up anyone else who is confused by the name WikiSaurus/Wikisaurus ? Are you also confused by the names Wikipedia and Wiktionary ?  :-)Is that supposed to be a real argument Connel ?--Richardb 01:54, 14 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
There have been a number of extension suggestions, certainly beyond synonyms and antonyms to all manner of other realtionships. Whether they are valid or not I am not sure. Possibly those relationships should be put in the main word entry. One suggestion was to have a "range" realtionship, eg: freezing, cold, tepid, warm, hot, blistering. This is a minor part of the argument for the name though.--Richardb 02:00, 14 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Well I'm sure, Richard, that you know what thesaurus literally means: treasury, or storehouse. I certainly think that, whichever direction it is we decide to follow, this name is quite suitable. —Vildricianus | t | 18:29, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Jay Leno once did a joke that scientists had discovered a new dinosaur called the thesaurus, which defended itself from predators with flowery language. bd2412 T 18:49, 12 May 2006 (UTC). Is that an argument for or against anything??[reply]
This seems like a non-issue when we lack content to such an appalling degree. Don't spend time thinking about the name or debating it, spend time making up lists of semantically and thematically related words, then make WikiSaurus into something deserving of a name at all. - TheDaveRoss 19:03, 12 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The name itself, indeed, is not very important. WikiSaurus being a real namespace is. But we need a settled name before applying it, right? —Vildricianus | t | 19:15, 12 May 2006 (UTC) Totally support Vildricianus that it is better to settle this as early as possible, before the thing gets much bigger. Already Connel is asking is it too big to rename now.--Richardb 01:54, 14 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Good, that's at least 6 votes, which is remarkable! On a technical note, though: how are things with the namespace manager thingy? Is this available to us, and if so, who has access to it? Developers, bureaucrats? —Vildricianus 21:21, 20 May 2006 (UTC)

Meta indicates that Bureaucrats should have it at the very bottom of their Specialpages. --Connel MacKenzie T C 02:14, 22 May 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I just checked, and it's not there. Eclecticology 08:46, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
True. Meta has documentation on how to do it here. —Vildricianus 13:57, 2 June 2006 (UTC)
Forgive me for being thick! But then sometimes we do need the perspective of non-techies to keep things grounded. In theory, as a bureaucrat I should be able to do this, but it looks as though I'll need a step-by-step walk through. Let's begin with the namespace "Appendix", about which there was broad agreement a long time ago. I went to the Meta page indicated and was immediately stumped by "Goto /includes/DefaultSettings.php" Eclecticology 16:56, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I don't know, can bureaucrats change LocalSettings.php? I thought I read that somewhere, but I may be wrong and in that case, it's a developer thing. Whether it's the former or the latter, you may want to ask on the wikitech-l mailing list, unless anyone here knows the ins and outs of it. — Vildricianus 18:44, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
The thing that let's B'crats mess with them is listed at meta:Help:Namespace manager and looks like it hasn't been opened up to all sister projects yet? At any rate, it is not present on en.wiktionary.org after all, so it looks like we need someone to pester Brion for it. The question is, do we tell him that we want to add one per week (or such) or do we rather want him to just presto-whamo make all of the pseudo namespaces? Also, should we order them any particular way? Alphabetical perhaps? --Connel MacKenzie T C 01:27, 5 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
  • NS:100=Appendix:, NS:101=Appendix talk:, NS:102=Index:, NS:103=Index talk:, NS:104=Transwiki:, Transwiki talk:, WT:, WT talk:, Thesaurus, Thesaurus talk:, Shared:, Shared talk:, Concordances:, Concordances talk:, Quotations:, Quotations talk:, Rhymes:, Rhymes talk:, Requested articles:, Requested articles talk:, Webster 1913:, Webster 1913 talk:. (Even are "content pages" odd are "talk" pages.) --Connel MacKenzie T C 01:27, 5 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]

Here are all the case varieties of the above: Appendix: Concordance: Index: Requested articles: Rhymes: Shared: Talk: Template: Template talk: Transwiki: WT: Webster 1913: Wi: WikiSaurus: Wikisaurus: Wiktionary Appendix: Wiktionary Appendix Suffixes: Wiktionary Index: Wiktionary appendix: Wiktionary-Appendix: concordance: rhymes: transwiki: wS: wT: webster 1913: wikiSaurus: wiktionary Appendix: ws:

Continuing the debate edit

Here's what I'm thinking right now:

  • WikiSaurus/Wikisaurus is not the right name for the namespace for these reasons:
    • It's confusing. People do think of a dinosaur. Let's keep it easy, clear and simple please.
    • It's not appropriate to append Wiki- to everything (cf. Rodasmith above). That'd become silly. So why do it for our thesaurus part? Because it is said that Wiktionary is the free dictionary and thesaurus? That's invalid. Our thesaurus is only part of the project, as are our Appendixes, Indexes, Rhymes, Quotations subpages, Concordances etc. All of these, or most, are absent from standard dictionaries, like a thesaurus usually is. So why allow exactly our thesaurus to become more Wiki than everything else? Already we have way more Rhymes: pages than WikiSaurus: pages. WikiRhymes? No.
  • WikiSaurus/Wikisaurus is the right name for the following reasons:
    • It's unique. Granted, every Google search that turns up "WikiSaurus" has to do with our project. And there are 13,000 search results. Most of these, though, apart from the mirrors, seem to profit from the huge amount of vulgar language that's in WikiSaurus, so it's rather defaming to have 13,000 Google hits.
    • There's too many infrastructure in place. Mmm, perhaps. On the other hand, there's relatively little infrastructure in place, compared to, for example, the number of different English inflection templates that are in use across our dictionary content. But we're still going to change them all, aren't we? Yes we are. So never mind a couple of WT: pages and links.
    • There's no burden or baggage from what people expect from a Thesaurus. True, we can fill in the idea according to our wish. But we can do that just as well when we use "Thesaurus" instead of our own unique name, can't we? Actually, I own a couple of thesauri, and all of them seem to have a unique interpretation of the concept. That's right, a thesaurus is "a treasury of words", and it's up to its creators how to interpret that.

Summary: no problem for me to have Wikisaurus as the definitive name, as long as there's a definitive name. But personally I support Thesaurus:, per the above arguments. —Vildricianus 17:09, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

I was writing a message on Dave's talk page and was slightly annoyed that I had to be so verbiose with the links. Creating wikilinks to the main namespace is easy - just some brackets. WikiSaurus needs spelling out the entire name plus capitalized S. Now, would there be a way to easy-link to the Wikisaurus namespace once it gets that status? I mean something like a shortcut to the namespace, like WS:xyz that automatically redirects to Wikisaurus:xyz (without having to manually create the WS:wyz page)? —Vildricianus 21:03, 30 May 2006 (UTC)
I still somewhat favour "Wikisaurus" with the small "s". It reminds us that we are allowiong for other types of relations than just those found in a traditional thesaurus. Eclecticology 08:46, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
I am also in favor of maintaining "Wikisaurus" (small letter, this will be moot in all but appearance with a namespace). Thesaurus is a bit boring and the connotation is there from the countless other thesauruses that it will list only a few things, whereas I hope that Wikisaurus will grow to include all kinds of information and realtionships that transcend the paper thing on the bookshelf that people only go to when they have to find another word for "happy." As for people getting confused about the name...I really hope that isn't a common problem (I have more faith in humaity than that)...but if people have to look twice to understand it that isn't entirely a bad thing. From a branding and name recognition standpoint Wikisaurus is better than thesaurus by leaps and bounds, Thesaurus is one of many, Wikisaurus is unique, and associates itself with wikimedia in name, rather than having to call it "Wiktionary thesaurus." I think there is a significant difference between Rhymes: and *saurus:, Rhymes is more of an appendix, another style of dictionary, rather than *saurus which is an independant work, with an independant purpose. - TheDaveRoss 18:10, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
Good, "Wikisaurus" at least avoids the clumsy second capital letter. After re-reading this topic again, I perceive some kind of concensus on that name. If we / Ec can find out about the how-to of custom namespaces, I guess it is "Wikisaurus" we're heading for. — Vildricianus 20:08, 2 June 2006 (UTC)[reply]
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