Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2007-09/Placenames stopgap

Importance as a criterion

I really believe that importance (of a place or a person) is a good criterion for Wikipedia, but not here. The criterion was linguistic. I agree that it must be changed, but the new one should be linguistic too (e.g. Confucius, White House, Le Havre and France should be accepted because they are words (or can be considered as words), George Washington or Washington Street should not be accepted, because they cannot be considered as words). Of course, this should be refined, but you can see the idea. Lmaltier 07:13, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

I agree. Importance has nothing to do with it, and we should not be entering into debates on notability (although, note that all cities, towns, villages, etc. with any population on any census records are considered notable on Wikipedia. This suggests that importance can be defined rather broadly). The problem is that a word is a word if it has usage in it's particular language, not if the thing it represents is important. Is "frtyu" an important place name? It might qualify, since that's the word that I just coined for "France," a notable place. This is an absurd example, but I would say that adding many other "important" place names would be similar coinages. As I've said before, I believe that "Melekeok" is not a word that can be fairly said to have entered the English vocabulary. This does not mean that the capital of a sovereign nation is not an important place, but if in all of JSTOR, there is not a single reference to it without parenthetical explanatory context (i.e., what you would do when introducing a foreign word that is not translatable), I would say the word is not important. In terms of a dictionary, trying to construct a criterion for inclusion on the basis of the real-world importance of the concept a word refers to, and not the word itself, is necessarily arbitrary, and encyclopedic. Dmcdevit·t 08:00, 16 September 2007 (UTC)

I've moved these posts to Wiktionary:Beer parlour, and subsequent comments should go to the central discussion, I think. Dmcdevit·t 10:13, 16 September 2007 (UTC)