Wiktionary talk:Requests for verification/Archive 2

This page contains archived threads from Wiktionary talk:Requests for verification from 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013 and 2014. Archived Requests for Verification (discussions of the attestation of individual words) are found on the words' talk pages or WT:RFVA.

The problem with RFV is...

It takes a lot longer to cite one of these entries than to create a new one. Of note that WT:CFI doesn't require the article to have three durably archived citations on it, just that there be three durably archived citations available. I also think it's good practice to withdraw one's own RFV if it's clearly attestable, a bit like a politician who concedes a vote when he knows he can't win. Also, what is a "durably archived citation"? Mglovesfun (talk) 16:56, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

People do withdraw them. Also, I have closed out RFVs as cited when there clearly are sufficient citations or when someone links to three such even without adding them to the entry. I've tried to avoid doing so when the one whos o linked was myself.  :-) ) To answer your last question, dunno, but we've accepted Usenet (but other discussion-forum) citations archived at http://groups.google.com and book, journal, and magazine articles archived at http://books.google.com, http://scholar.google.com, or your local library, and not accepted blog entries, Web pages (even old ones at Internet Archive), or last week's shopping list.​—msh210℠ 18:12, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

I seem to think there's a WT page relating to this, but I can't think of the name off-by-hand. Mglovesfun (talk) 19:07, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

Part of the point of the RfV process is to generate citations in cases that seemed disputable to enhance the legitimacy of our entries, which suffer from under-documentation among their many weaknesses. Conflict over entries seems to energize contributors. That energy can be well harnessed to improve entries.

Weblinks not fully satisfactory because they require a separate click and the citations do not appear next to one another for comparison with each other and with the sense they supposedly document. They also are supposed to appear under the external links header, where their connection to a specific definition may not be clear. If bare links are placed in proximity to the definition, they create mysterious white space and not useful information.

I would be inclined to not accept challenged definitions if the proponents failed to provide the evidence in a form which facilitated review of the citations. I would even go so far as to not accept citations put on this page and not in the entry. For longer entries, it should be made clear on the citation page which definition the citation was offered to support.

WT:ELE does not contemplate invisible citations. DCDuring TALK 22:26, 12 January 2010 (UTC)

It seems to be Wiktionary:Searchable external archives, which I found by accident. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:31, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

While you're correct, DCDuring, that ELE does not allow for citations added only to the RFV page, such citations do satisfy one purpose of citing, which is to make sure the entry is inclusible. So I allow its inclusion (this note serves an excuse for my — as I mention above — passing such RFVs, answering your comment). Of course, such citations do not satisfy the other purposes of citing, which is showing usage examples (and dates, etc.), or the third, which is advertising to readers that we're not including made-up entries, but once we know it's inclusible I pass the RFV.​—msh210℠ 16:35, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

My intent is not to further burden the process of closing out RfVs (a tedious process at best), but rather to discourage a lazy practice of entry advocates. DCDuring TALK 20:29, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

But again — speaking now as someone who's found citations — those who find the citations don't necessarily have any stake in the entry: their advocation is only for the sake of improving the dictionary. I myself, admittedly lazily, have pointed to citations without doing the further work necessary to copy them into the entry. It's obviously far from ideal, but it's better than nothing.​—msh210℠ 20:41, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

Indeed. There seems to be a range of behaviors; at one extreme are editors who first claim "clearly widespread use" and then, when that doesn't pan out, start providing large numbers of links to non–durably-archived mentions of related words, such that no one has the patience to look through them all and try to separate the wheat from the chaff (or, more often, to confirm that there is nothing but chaff), and at the other extreme are editors who will do absolutely everything except the final copy-and-paste into the entry. Needless to say, I have no problem whatsoever with the latter extreme — if we could clone a few dozen copies of BD2412, for example, RFV would become a non-issue — but the former extreme is very problematic, in that they don't actually help cite the entry, but rather, serve only to delay the closing of the RFV by creating a lot of busy-work for whoever handles the closing. —Ruakh_TALK 22:19, 18 January 2010 (UTC)

I can't speak for everyone, but I have closed several RFVs and from my point of view the onus is on the participants in the discussion to make it apparent whether a term has passed or not. If when I get to the conversation (12-18 months after usually) if I can't tell what the conclusion was then it is a failure. If the entry and the citations page lack citations then the RFV failed. There really aren't so many of these terms that it is unreasonable to cite them. If one person committed to trying to cite one word a day the list would probably barely support the effort, if four or five people committed to twice a week there would be no queue at all. I am not willing to commit to that because I am all kinds of flaky about making time to edit, but I know there are people around who could take on a 10 minutes twice a week project and succeed at it with flying colors. The most important thing is that the citations are placed on the citations page when found, if they are hidden on the talk page or poorly formatted in the entry they hardly count, as they are often not even seen. Lastly if you determine a conclusion has been reached with a particular RFV, by all means strike the title and slap a bold statement at the bottom stating the conclusion. Those get cleaned up very quickly. - [The]DaveRoss 22:39, 2 February 2010 (UTC)

Access to Usenet

As far as I know, Usenet is only available using Google Groups. Is there a way to have only Usenet stuff on Google Groups? GG has a lot of stuff, and a lot of the time I search for something and get 600 hits, and only three or four of them are Usenet. Cutting out the other 596 irrelevant hits would save masses of time, thus making it easier to cite some attestable terms. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:38, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

• Do you mean things like "soc.genealogy.britain"? I use Outlook Express for that. SemperBlotto 16:41, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Google is perhaps the only way to access Usenet over HTTP (Web pages), but Usenet is still available over NNTP as it has always been. For example, BT Internet users can connect to Usenet in a news client (Outlook, Windows Live Mail, Opera, etc.). Personally I use Eternal-September [1]. However, I'm not aware of any way to search the Usenet archives other than via Google. Equinox ◑ 16:45, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

When you do a Google Groups search, try choosing "Google Groups" at the top instead of "All groups". You'll still get some non-Usenet stuff, but not as much. Equinox ◑ 16:45, 10 September 2011 (UTC)

Oldest tagged RFVs

Some of these have been tagged since 2007, but never added to the RFV page. If someone is bored enough, he/she could add all of them to the page. -- Liliana • 12:40, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

I do add a few, the problem is there are so many! It would 'flood' RFV to add all of them. How many are we talking about? Over 100 I think, maybe 200 or 300. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:43, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

A couple of months ago, I and others hacked away at them until the youngest ones in the list (notary, Synoptics, fifamigo, rmv) were from 2011. If someone added everything older than golokostnik, it would be a large (137 entries) but AFAICT exhaustive treatment if all the pre-2010 RFVs. Dozens would be easy to dispatch: they're either already cited or were previously discussed (see WT:RFVA) and should have been deleted. I won't be so bold as to flood WT:RFV yet, but if someone else wants to, he or she can feel free to copy-and-paste (and modify as needed) User:-sche/RFV. - -sche (discuss) 21:40, 1 December 2011 (UTC)

There are now only 46 entries which have been tagged but not listed; I have them at User:-sche/RFV. - -sche (discuss) 21:30, 12 April 2012 (UTC)

Can we please break up this page into subpages by month?

Can we please break up this page into subpages by month? On some computers it takes a really long time to load. Thank you, -- Cirt (talk) 20:49, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

See Wiktionary_talk:Requests_for_verification#Split_by_month.3F. This is evidently only two months of posts. BenjaminBarrett12 (talk) 22:08, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Actually, at this point, there are currently 58 entries on the page from last year, 12 from January, 38 from February, and 99 from March... i.e. half the volume is the current month. The argument made against splitting this and other discussion pages such as WT:BP by month is that old, unresolved discussions would easily be forgotten and never resolved. (Look in this history of this page: a few months ago, even with all the RFVs on this page, hundreds of old entries were being ignored.) We're between a rock and a hard place, really: we'd like the pages to be smaller, but we also want centralised discussion fora. One idea is to structure the page like the Etymology Scriptorium, where the page is only a directory, and the discussions take place on the talk pages. - -sche (discuss) 22:52, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

Oh, no... that's worse than subpages; people would have to watchlist every talk page to follow all the discussions. Ah, rock and a hard place... - -sche (discuss) 23:10, 22 March 2012 (UTC)

How about dividing it by quarter? bd2412 T 03:33, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Doesn't User:CodeCat have an experimental implementation going on right now at WT:GP? Presumably she has faced some of the issues and has some insight. DCDuring TALK 03:49, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

How about… we stop being lazy and start closing these more often :-P — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 04:10, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

Not everybody is interested in following every discussion. If you are one of those, the watchlist becomes useless as it continually pops up regardless. In my opinion, older posts get even more forgotten than they would on sub-pages. A list of links would be shorter and consequently templates on the list marking old discussion needing more input would be more noticable. SpinningSpark 06:40, 26 September 2012 (UTC)

We could institute a rule that any entry for which verification is not provided within some set time - say, sixty days - would be closed as failed, and deleted. Maybe such a rule would light a fire under people to verify those things that are verifiable. Of course, it would considerably shorten the list. bd2412 T 00:51, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

There are also many pages that nobody can bother to verify or that we just don't have the knowledge or resources to verify. For example most of our current Zulu entries would likely fail in that way, because nobody has enough knowledge of the language to find citations and verify them. —CodeCat 00:57, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

They can always be readded later. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 00:59, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Would you take that chance when core vocabulary is involved? I would rather not. It doesn't reflect well on us if we have to delete a basic word like "to eat". —CodeCat 01:00, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

I don’t think anyone is going to RFV core vocabulary in bad faith just for the hell of it. People should nominate only words/definitions they genuinely think might not exist, at least this is what I do. Also, I don’t think that enforcing a deadline would change much; if a word is RFVed and no one adds citations it will eventually be deleted. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 01:07, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

Not in bad faith maybe, but it can still happen. A while ago I nominated several Old Saxon terms for verification, and they ended up being deleted, not because they didn't exist, but because nobody bothered to check. —CodeCat 01:10, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

We could establish a page in project space or appendix space, much like our lists of protologisms, where we maintain lists of words or senses that have been deleted for lack of verification, along with the unverified definitions. Anyone with an inkling to could peruse those lists at their leisure and provide citations for words they believe to be citable, but the mainspace entries would remain deleted until there was a reason to restore those entries. bd2412 T 03:57, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

That would be a good idea. —CodeCat 11:39, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

That’s a pretty good idea. To help enforce that, we could have {{rfv}} automatically add the page to WT:SD after the deadline. — Ungoliant ^(Falai) 00:59, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

There would need to be a process to stop bad faith or, dare I say it, stupid nominations being deleted in that way. SpinningSpark 18:39, 27 September 2012 (UTC)

I think 60 days is time enough to deal with any of those, even if someone goes on a rampage. bd2412 T 15:11, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

How does this work when senses of common words are rfved, rather than the whole word? This could especially be a problem when the rfved sense is hard to separate from a mountain of hits for the other senses, discouraging efforts at verification. See WT:RFV#Zion for a recent example. Chuck Entz (talk) 21:39, 28 September 2012 (UTC)

It would work the same. 60 days with no verification and the sense get deleted, and added to the project-space list of deleted senses. bd2412 T 00:47, 29 September 2012 (UTC)

Pitzilemum

What do you think? πr² (talk • changes) 02:24, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

Could be attested in Vatican documents, though Pichilemu isn't the see of a Roman Catholic diocese. To judge from the WP article, Pichilemu has been a named settlement since at least the 16th century, so it's also possible it's mentioned in a Latin-language encyclopedia of that era. Will probably be very difficult to verify, but it's not inherently implausible. —Angr 05:49, 31 May 2013 (UTC)

There's also Pichilemum. How likely is it that both of these are verifiable? Pichilemum is used on the Latin Wikipedia, but that seems to be it. πr² (talk • changes) 16:36, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Um, shouldn't this thread be at WT:TEA, WT:ES, or the main WT:RFV page? Unless I'm much mistaken, this page, Wiktionary talk:Requests for verification, is for talking about the RFV page or process, not about individual requests for verification.

Cheers, -- Eiríkr Útlendi │ Tala við mig 18:34, 1 June 2013 (UTC)

Oh Gawd, this showed up in my watchlist and I didn't even notice it was in the Wiktionary talk namespace! Is this a mistake or did the original poster intend to do this? Mglovesfun (talk) 21:46, 2 June 2013 (UTC)

Fictional universes (and WMF)

I find it quite humorous that the Wikimedia Foundation is treated as a fictional universe. What's the point of including something like userbox if we have to find citations that don't refer to actual userboxes, but to a 'metaphor' or 'attributive' meaning. Mglovesfun (talk) 18:11, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

If other non-WMF projects start to use userboxes, it would become eligible. Equinox ◑ 18:19, 27 May 2010 (UTC)

Would you expect touchdown to be cited outside of American football without reference to it? How can citations simultaneously show the correct meaning if they're not even referring to what the entry is about. IMO just allowing citations from reliable independent sources is enough, as long as they're not published by the Wikimedia Foundation itself. Mglovesfun (talk) 09:09, 28 May 2010 (UTC)

Small problem with "Closing a request" step 4

How to "archive" a discussion here? Referering to Wiktionary:Requests_for_verification#iahen, it passed the request. I removed the template in iahen and added a note on the discussion-page. Thank you, --WissensDürster 11:03, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

It did not pass. There are no quotations showing its use anywhere. -- Prince Kassad 12:13, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

The quotations are at Citations:iahen. (Some editors, including Mglovesfun, feel that only expert users should be allowed to see quotations.) —Ruakh_TALK 19:58, 22 June 2010 (UTC)

Thanks for the link Citations:iahen, I wondered how you guys note references to certain meanings. So after Ruakh created the citations-page, did it pass now?? kind regards --WissensDürster 12:04, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

To clarify: I did not create the citations-page, which has a number of problems, including:

• It attributes a 2008 use of German iahen to a Spanish novelist who died in 1616.
• It does not include translations of the quotations it contains.
• The entry doesn't link to it, so it might as well not exist.

Anyway, the request won't be "passed" until a German-speaker examines the citations to confirm that they're independent, that they're uses rather than mentions, that they're in the specified sense, that they span at least a year, and so on. (See Wiktionary:Criteria for inclusion.)

—Ruakh_TALK 17:18, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Best I can do without speaking more than a little German. Also, citation pages can be useful to avoid cluttering definitions and therefore making the definitions easier to find (perhaps the most common complaint on WT:FEED). Obviously that's changed a little in the last few weeks so that quotations are automatically hidden. Ruakh, seems like you strongly oppose the Citations: namespace. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:31, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

I think many of us who supported the original proposal for the Citations namespace -- as a sort of incubator for words/senses that might not meet CFI -- are unhappy with what it has become. There's no putting the wine back in the bottle, but I would certainly have voted differently if I had been able to foresee how the namespace would be used. -- Visviva 22:46, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

@Visviva: Word. —Ruakh_TALK 01:43, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

@Mglovesfun: I'm sorry, I was way too harsh. You put in effort to cite the word, which no one else had done, and you deserve credit for that. I shouldn't complain that you didn't do it exactly the way I would have. But in the future, when you add citations to a Citations: page, could you at least add {{seeCites}} to the entry? Covert citations don't actually add anything to the dictionary; if nothing else, you're wasting your own energy by adding them. —Ruakh_TALK 01:43, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

I've fixed up the cites a bit, and the entry has also gotten a clean bill of health from Zeitlupe, so I think we can now consider it passed. -- Visviva 22:46, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

In this case, since I speak almost no German, it was an "incubator" for someone to come and cleanup the citations, which is what has happened. Mglovesfun (talk) 22:56, 23 June 2010 (UTC)

Hi, as you might noticed, I'm a German native-speaker. I was wondering why User:Prince Kassad added the entry to the RFV because he is a German-speaker too. Please be patient with me as I don't know all rule yet. I understand that the quotations in Citations:iahen are not yet translated - I can do this. But where is the problem about the Spanish novelists ref? And what you mean by "The entry doesn't link to it"? regards --WissensDürster 15:28, 24 June 2010 (UTC)

It's me again, I added some Google-books-links as ref for the 2 synonyms. Is the usage in those books enough to prove their existence? I am full of confidence to work on other entries on my own, once after being instructed properly. Thanks for your endurance, --WissensDürster 07:17, 25 June 2010 (UTC)

Rename to Wiktionary:Requests for attestation

Not that it's a massive problem, but users do sometimes post little questions here like "what's the IPA?" "Is it dated or obsolete". We don't use this page to verify entries so much as to cite/attest them. That said, like I say, it's not a big deal. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:04, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

A better idea would be to split the RFV page by month. That's much more needed. -- Prince Kassad 13:22, 26 July 2010 (UTC)

I said above that I'd support that, and I still do. Mglovesfun (talk) 12:18, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

When to archive 2010?

2011 has been here for awhile, will we eventually split this off from last year's verification requests to make this giant page easier to navigate? Alternatively, could we maybe create subsections so that people might just view the sub-page and conserve their bandwidth? Dictabeard 23:41, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

Part of the problem is that we do not have an organized way of reaching a conclusion, either for or against. Very often there is a more or less lengthy exchange of opinions which does not lead to a clear decision, and the backlog gets longer and longer. Perhaps there should be a jury of admins which from time to time would make decisions on the died-out discussions. --Hekaheka 13:14, 30 November 2011 (UTC)

pur sang

Is tagged that it is listed at rfv, but it isn't. And it has, I hope, sufficient cites. Rich Farmbrough, 22:49, 25 September 2012 (UTC).

Proposal: mandatory notification

A proposal that affects this process has been initiated at Wiktionary talk:Page deletion guidelines#Proposal: mandatory notification.   — C M B J   08:41, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Why isn't the watchlist good enough? In any event, this would be a matter for WT:BP and a WT:VOTE. DCDuring TALK 10:28, 5 June 2013 (UTC)

Let's close out 2012.

By my count, there are only sixteen discussions to be resolved and archived, and we'll finally be done with all of 2012. Several of these actually seem to be effectively resolved already, too. bd2412 T 18:17, 31 July 2013 (UTC)

RFV with no requests open for more than a month

The dream is within reach! I didn’t feel comfortable with closing some requests, so they still need to be dealt with:

• 坉;
• shenanigan;
• of Koranic proportions;
• 汐実子;
• gaplapper;
• shark fin;
• -x;
• balneam;
• malatang;
• behind;
• antirational;
• lakenlood;
• ephemeris;
• allotted;
• thyme;
• zilch;
• teinipeili;
• 隱身;
• -ut-;
• braggie;
• 正山小.

— Ungoliant ^(falai) 06:12, 17 July 2014 (UTC)