text:
User talk:Ruakh/2009

= January 2009 =

Palestine
You have added these two senses for the word Palestine: I haven't heard them before, nor do I find these senses in dictionaries. Would you be able to provide citations? --Hekaheka 19:40, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) The modern Palestinians, taken as a whole.
 * 2) The modern Palestinians of the West Bank and Gaza Strip, taken as a whole.

 * I was probably thinking of uses like, where doesn't seem to refer to any specific region or government, but rather seems to be a sort of backformation along the lines of Israeli:Palestinian::Israel:Palestine. ("Backformation" is the wrong word — a real backformation would have produced "Palestinia" or something — but hopefully you see what I mean.) The definitions I gave may have been wrong; they were my attempt to capture what seems to be meant by these sorts of uses. Feel free to modify or remove them. —Ruakh 19:55, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

Hebrew dual forms
Many Hebrew words are plural in meaning despite being dual in form, so I'm a bit uncomfortable with listing them as "dual". What do you think? (Note that there two issues: the inflection line of the singular and the definition line of the plural/dual.)—msh210 ℠  21:16, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

 * I'd list them as plural. It might be worth noting somehow that they're dual in form — either in an etymology section, or by having a separate sense line for "dual" — but they're plurals. (I only place duals on the inflection line for nouns like pa'am where the dual and plural are distinct and the dual is common.) —Ruakh 22:15, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for your input.—msh210 ℠  22:51, 5 January 2009 (UTC)
 * Hm, see the duplicate categorization on גרבים, one from and the other from .—msh210  ℠  22:55, 5 January 2009 (UTC)

 * Neither of those categories seems right to me; I should think that either we'd want a single flat category, Category:Hebrew noun forms, or we'd want appropriate detailed categories, Category:Hebrew plural indefinite nouns and so on. Wouldn't we? (I've been using the former approach, personally.) —Ruakh 01:59, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Equative
I've submitted the entry. Hope that's okay. :) YngNghymru 21:32, 6 January 2009 (UTC)

Whitelisting
Thanks for this. †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 01:53, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

 * You're welcome, but it's pretty meaningless: you were de facto whitelisted anyway, in that I would always mark your edits patrolled without bothering to look at them, and I don't think I was the only one. (You were previously de jure whitelisted, but Connel removed you at some point for supposed revert-warring — which for all I know he might do again.) And non-admins shouldn't really be paying attention to the whitelist, since it's a tool for admins rather than anything meaningful about the listees. But, if you accept all those caveats, then you're welcome. Don't spend it all in one place. :-)  —Ruakh 02:57, 7 January 2009 (UTC)

 * Revert-warring? Was that in re the débâcle? I just noticed the change to my user rights or somesuch, clicked on the link to Whitelist, and then discovered what had happened. Caveant accepted… ;-) †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 02:18, 8 January 2009 (UTC)

This could be suicide
Hello Ruakh -- Concerning this edit to the entry for "suicide", there are, of course, differing schools of thought concerning when ellipsis points should be used. But in academic writing--at least in the humanities [you never know what social scientists are liable to write]--it is usually considered unnecessary and even undesirable to include ellipses at the beginning or ending of quotations. According to this school of thought, quotations embedded within a sentence shouldn't need ellipses, since they should simply be incorporated into the syntactical flow of the sentence. And quotations in the form of block quotations (basically what we're doing in wiktionary) shouldn't use them either, especially when the block material consists of a grammatically complete unit. So it is OK to extract a grammatically complete unit from a larger sentence and render it as a self-contained sentence (changing the initial lowercase letter to an uppercase and ending with a period), as long as one does no violence to the meaning, without using ellipses. This view is supported by The Chicago Manual of Style, 14th ed., section 10:15: "If a quotation that is only part of a sentence in the original forms a complete sentence as quoted, an initial lowercase letter may be changed to a capital." Section 10.61 (When Ellipsis Points Are Not Used) goes on to say: "Readers will understand that a quoted phrase, sentence, or longer passage, unless it is the beginning or end of a work, will have been preceded and followed by additional material in the source. It is therefore seldom necessary to use ellipsis points in the following situations" and then includes among these situations (a) "before a block quotation, whether it begins with a grammatically complete sentence or not" and (b) "after a block quotation ending with a grammatically complete sentence." That pretty much covers what we're doing in wiktionary. Anyhow, I apologize for my pedantic nature and rantings (but that's why I call my self Wiki Pedant ) and, as always, am grateful that you are one of the few able to endure them with equanimity. Keeping the wiki-faith -- WikiPedant 05:38, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

 * But we don't give quotations for the same reasons that other people give quotations. It seems to me that our main goal is linguistic accuracy, and I don't think we should quote a subordinate clause as though it were a whole sentence. (If we had to go through contortions, I'd feel differently, but all we have to do is insert, so why not?) —Ruakh 15:31, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

Oh, Jeez, something else
Hello again Ruakh -- I'm fine with the change you made to sense2 of suicide. But an interesting (for me and maybe for you) talking point comes up with respect to the quotation from Melling you added to sense2. I'd be inclined to regard his usage of "suicide" in the singular in that sentence as either (a) a grammatical error (should have been "suicides") or (b) a byproduct of a quirky thing that Brits sometimes do, using singular nouns (here, "community") with plural verbs and plural forms of pronouns and possessive adjectives (e.g., "the jury are out" or, as Melling says here, "the Heaven's Gate community were "). Under interpretation (b), Melling seems to be saying that the community (singular) committed suicide (also singular) and is not focussed on the fact that we are actually talking about the suicide S of multiple individuals. It is easy to miss this, though, since the sentence also contains the plural forms "they", "themselves", and "their." Messy Melling writing, by my North American standards. -- WikiPedant 06:00, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

 * To me the use of undefined: to mean "an instance of multiple people committing suicide together" sounds perfectly natural. In most cases I'd probably prefer "mass suicide" or "double suicide" or whatnot for clarity, but "suicides" sounds really weird to me if it's in reference to a single event. ( does pull up some relevant hits, but pulls up a lot more.) —Ruakh 15:58, 9 January 2009 (UTC)

iùdhach
Hi, I don't know what the conventions are in cases like this: I found out we have this page with lower-case initial, which is wrong (even for the adjective, where the mistake is repeated). Do I create a (slighty improved ;-)) Iùdhach and redirect the lower-case page to that, do I create the upper-case one and ask you to delete the lower-case one, or do I simply ask you to rename it and edit afterwards? (The upper case applies to religion as well as nationality, so, as I just noticed, the same will have to be done for *crìosdaidh and *ioslamach). --Duncan 12:05, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

 * Hi Duncan,
 * > do I simply ask you to rename it and edit afterwards?
 * You've been here long enough that you can do that yourself. It doesn't require adminship or anything; you just have to have been around for a certain number of days and made a certain number of edits — I don't know how many of each, but you're certainly past them. :-)
 * One of the tabs at the top of each entry, between "history" and "unwatch", should be "move". This is like copying everything to Iùdhach and redirecting the lower-case page, except that it also preserves the edit history: any past edits to iùdhach will now look like edits to Iùdhach. If I understand correctly, this is important for GFDL reasons: editors retain the copyright to their edits, and one of the terms of their licensing is that their edits are credited. (I don't know the details, but the upshot seems to be that we can't delete a page that we've copied content from.)
 * Once you've done that, I'll delete the redirects, and you can make whatever edits are necessary.
 * —Ruakh 14:28, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

 * Great, it works! I'll have a bite now and then I'll finish this one and move the other two. BTW were you ever teaching or something? Just the other day I was reading (for another reason) this and came to the conclusion that moving a page is something so complicated I'd better never attempt it - in other words I couldn't make head or tail of three quarters of they say there - and you explained it briefly and sufficiently enough even for me! (I make no secret that things like writing "in italics" or using the basic templates here is just about as far as I ever got programming-wise ;-)). --Duncan 15:06, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

 * Glad I could help! :-)
 * I think it's easier to explain things one-on-one, when you have an idea what your reader's background is. It looks like m:Help:Moving a page tries to be all things to all readers, which probably makes it daunting to many readers …
 * —Ruakh 16:50, 11 January 2009 (UTC)

zone pellucide
Thanks for cleaning up the French section of. However, are you sure that the pronunciation is correct? –What’s with the weird capital and parentheses? †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 19:43, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

 * denotes a sound between the of elle: and the  of et:. It's typical in unaccented (i.e. non-terminal) syllables, but it's not a distinct phoneme — it's basically a context-dependent merger of the  and  phonemes — so maybe for a phonemic pronunciation we should prefer one of the latter? (If so, let's go with, which is the one given by the TLFi.)
 * The parenthesized schwas are because they aren't used in normal speech (only poetry and dialects and such); maybe we should just remove them? And the parenthesized is because I wasn't thinking about the fact that this entry is specifically about the singular; I've removed it now, thanks.
 * —Ruakh 20:26, 18 January 2009 (UTC)

 * So it’s an allophone? Let’s go with a lowered then (i.e.,  with a down tack, or ). I’ll take out the parenthetic schwas; distinct dialectal pronunciations should be given their own ccent lines and I think that pœetic variants are beyond the remit of our Pronunciation sections. †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 16:08, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

 * I'm not a fan of the downtack idea, because our pronunciations are supposed to be phonemic. I went with because I didn't want to choose between  and  — I didn't bother to check the TLFi until your question here — but if we're already choosing, then the diacritic seems clearly phonetic. —Ruakh 16:17, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

 * I agree. Let's use /e/.  That is the phoneme one hears in the word, though it is as you say often a little relaxed.  Ƿidsiþ 16:25, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

 * OK, NVRM. Should there be a usage note for this? †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 16:46, 19 January 2009 (UTC)

sysop+autopatroller
Just out of curiosity, why do you remove sysops from autopatrollers? I'm not saying they need to be there, but why spend the time to do so?—msh210 ℠  00:15, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

 * Mainly because of EP's second comment at [[Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2008-09/Whitelisted users autopatrol]]. He obviously considers Special:ListUsers/autopatroller?limit=500 to be important, so I figure we might as well keep it as "clean" as possible. It already has 249 users listed. (At some point, I might also propose keeping it even cleaner by automatically removing users who haven't edited in some amount of time, say 6 months or so, but for now I'm happy not to worry about that.) —Ruakh 13:24, 23 January 2009 (UTC)

Three minor questions
Hi, may I bother you with three questions? None of them is much important, they're just kind of slightly nagging me as I can't make out the answers...
 * The Editcounter tells me four of my edits have been deleted - I know one to be my infamous Down! but don't know how to find out which were the other three - the "browse" link ultimately leads to 404. (I guess they did deserve it, whatever they were, but not knowing them I may keep doing similar mistakes again, making people think "the bloody stupid is incorrigible" ;-)). Is there an easier way than just going backwards through my contributions and waiting for a red link to appear?
 * Is there a help page about "personal edittools"? Every now and then I see someone mention them but can't find no page describing how they're created. (Not that I think I'd make more than two or three like " * Scottish Gaelic: " for easier translations tables' edits).
 * Finally (and entirely out of curiosity, as even if the answer is positive I don't think I'd have time to do anything about it earlier than, say, 2012) - is there a way of listing words for a particular language which are properly formatted in translation tables but have no entries of there own?

Once again, sorry for taking your time, as of course I can easily live without knowing, but I just couldn't help asking. --Duncan 20:02, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

 * Re: deleted contributions: In fact, going backward through your contributions won't even work; your deleted contributions are shown on a separate page, Special:DeletedContributions/Duncan MacCall, that only administrators can see. But don't worry, they weren't mistakes; they were your moves of ioslamach to Ioslamach etc., which then became deleted-contributions when I deleted the redirects that were left over. (In general, deleted contributions don't mean very much; I have almost 500, and a large proportion are things like page moves, adding or, and so on.)
 * Re: personal edit-tools: That's a good question. I have my own hacked-together JavaScript (which you can see at User:Ruakh/monobook.js) that, among other things, customizes my edit-tools in a way I find useful; other people probably have different kinds of customization. I vaguely recall that Conrad.Irwin has a way to load in an edit-tools section from elsewhere, which would probably be closer to what you want.
 * Re: translations without entries: For a complete list, you'd have to either process the XML dump, or ask another editor to process it for you. (I can do this, if you want.) But we have a bot, Tbot, written and run by Robert Ullmann, that auto-creates basic entries from translations tables, using the foreign-language Wiktionary somehow, and puts them in subcategories of Category:Tbot entries; you might find it easier to work on improving those, and let Tbot handle the work of finding translations and creating stub entries. It already supports Czech, at Category:Tbot entries (Czech); to get it to support, say, Scottish Gaelic, you'd just create Category:Tbot entries (Scottish Gaelic) with the content, and it will magically notice and start doing its thing.
 * —Ruakh 20:24, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks, good to know I don't have to worry - and good to know there was no reason for my complacency which ran like "hey, only 1 deletion per 1,000 edits, not bad for a novice" ;-)
 * Thanks, I guess I'll leave it at that - too many more important new tricks to learn for this old dog ;-)
 * Thanks a lot. Silly me, having had Category:Tbot entries (Czech) in my list of future tasks for some time and not having put two and two together - but even so I probably wouldn't find of my own accord how to do the same for Scottish Gaelic, and I'll be certain now to do so, sooner or later, judging from the as-of-now-109 Czech ones that there probably wouldn't be all that many. --Duncan 21:16, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

 * You're welcome. About the 109 Czech ones: I think Tbot throttles itself, avoiding creating too many entries for any given language. As you work through the existing ones, I think it will create new ones. But, I'm not sure about that; it definitely did that at the beginning, but now that it's more mature, Robert may have decided that's unnecessary. —Ruakh 21:43, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

 * Alright, I'll see. Once I'm more or less through with Wiktionary:Requested entries:Czech, I'll start working these and if Tbot keeps pace with me I will, undaunted, ask Robert Ullman to tell me the nasty truth about their number at once (*one more wink*). --Duncan 22:12, 24 January 2009 (UTC)

Thank you
Thank you for the IPA conversion. RJFJR 16:58, 30 January 2009 (UTC)

= February 2009 =

interwikis and piped links
Thanks for fixing the link on Interwicket talk. It isn't the pipe: Interwicket works fine here, but so does he:User:Interwicket. The difference is that this is a talkspace page, and interwikis aren't abstracted and moved in talkspace. (VolkovBot isn't buggy, but it isn't and shouldn't be normally run on talkspace pages.) Cheers, Robert Ullmann 08:16, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Oh, oops, you're right. I actually knew that at one point, but forgot. Thanks for the note. :-)  —Ruakh 16:16, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Good afternoon, Rukah
How are you doing today? :-) Steel Blade 17:31, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the welcome, but...
So far, I'm afraid that I am not "enjoy[ing] editing here and being a Wiktionarian," see User_talk:SemperBlotto. I am grateful, however, for your even-handedness in undeleting both leftosphere and wingnutosphere. :) Simon Dodd 19:22, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

 * I'm sorry to hear that, but I'm guessing that you just feel "out of your element", so to speak. Once you get used to Wiktionary norms, it'll get easier. :-)
 * Just one note: "evenhandedness" has nothing to do with it; what matters is whether the word exists. It's quite possible that exactly one of the words will turn out to be in use, in which case we'll end up deleting the other one. (You may want to read Criteria for inclusion.)
 * —Ruakh 19:28, 1 February 2009 (UTC)

Active bureaucrats?
Greetings Ruakh, Do you know if Wiktionary actually has active bureaucrats who handle Change username requests? If not, I'm wondering if those functions should be delegated to the Stewards. --Jmkfi 10:51, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

 * That's a good question. You might want to nudge SemperBlotto, who's the most active editor in the Bureaucrats group. I don't get the impression he much enjoys Bureaucratic tasks (not that I blame him); he might be perfectly happy to let Steward requests/SUL requests handle things. :-)  —Ruakh 14:39, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks, I'll do that. Hope he won't take the nudging as pestering :-) --Jmkfi 16:17, 6 February 2009 (UTC)

mangerai / mangerais
Hiya Ran. Do you have any thoughts on this conversation: User_talk:Pharamp. It centres on the pronunciation of -ai and -ais in French. Ƿidsiþ 20:03, 9 February 2009 (UTC)

etyl suggestions
Re: Template_talk:etyl, I'd love to hear your ideas. I had one idea that the language templates that need a special wikilink could store it and then {etyl} could check for instance {etyl:Late Latin|link=1}. My other idea would be to just add the redirects on Wikipedia because they seem to like them (especially for one letter differences like "-s"). Your thoughts? --Bequw → ¢ • τ 07:16, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Yeah, my thoughts were similar to yours. French is a disambiguation page because the word has so many other meanings, but Niger-Kordofanian and Late Latin are just redirects to the right articles; and I think that's fairly typical for most cases we need. So, the first branch of can do something like this: , which will separately call , , and . (BTW, this code removes the calls to , since I don't think they're necessary here, but if I'm wrong, we can probably find a way to restore them.) Most {{etyl: code }}-s can just ignore the parameter, and always return the same thing; where necessary, they can have something like  . It's nice that these templates don't have to be  -able, like normal language templates do; it gives us more flexibility in loading them up with parser functions. :-)   —Ruakh 20:48, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

 * P.S. Do we want the linking for these, like with normal language templates? (I mean, where the caller has to do  to suppress linking?) I notice that  currently has that. If we want it, that's easy enough to add into the above. —Ruakh 21:01, 10 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for welcome
Hello, Ruakh. Thanks for your welcome! Pity, I can't contribute here due to my lower understanding of the English language! There's nothing I can say, but wish you the best in entire of your contribution along with your life! See you someday. Cheers.--Wikipedian Activist (talK 2 mE) 06:13, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Likewise! —Ruakh 12:45, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

Epic of evolution
Thanks for the helpful comments, I'm trying to learn 'the wiki way', there's far more to it that I realized going in. But the discipline I'm learning is good for me. I appreciate your guidanceJlrobertson 13:44, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

׀
Would you mind checking over this entry for definition-line accuracy? I think I got it right, but would appreciate another pair of eyes.—msh210 ℠  18:40, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

 * I have absolutely no idea. I learned the ta'amim to exactly the extent necessary to read at my bar mitzvah, and that's it. So, I could tell you how Sferadim pronounce the paseq, but not why. And until I looked it up just now, i couldn't have told you that it was called "paseq". But oddly, though I (like you) think of it as a cantillation mark, Unicode classifies it as punctuation, and Wikipedia agrees: it's covered at Hebrew punctuation rather than at Cantillation. Other sources also seem to agree; for example, http://wlco.hebrewtanakh.com/, which bills itself as "consonants only" (cf. wlc and wlcv), includes the paseqs as well as other punctuation. —Ruakh 20:44, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Bah. Well, I assume Unicode's classification is because it's a spacing character rather than a diacritic. Still, the "evidence" from WP and hebrewtanach.com is disturbing. I haven't time to look into this in authoritative sources (not even sure what those are for this issue), so for now I'll flag the entry for attention and leave it the way it is.—msh210 ℠  22:04, 12 February 2009 (UTC)
 * Actually, WP discusses the symbol only briefly at Hebrew punctuation, and also briefly at Cantillation (s.v. "Munach").—msh210 ℠  22:14, 12 February 2009 (UTC)

jenž
Hi, could you help me again? I tried to change the ending of the "script" (if that's the right word) of the declension table at this entry, so that it would make a collapsible gloss instead of one which, so to say, ends in infinity on the right side, but I haven't found the way... Thanks in advance. --Duncan 22:34, 14 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Sorry, I don't understand the question. :-/  —Ruakh 04:22, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Oh, I apologize, I found out what was wrong - and it was me. I had a look at it again (for about a fourth time) and only now noticed the long thingy which I'm accustomed to on the right side of the window used for scrolling, and which I naturally have seen before at the bottom of a window outside WT, but never before have I noticed it here (with the dimensions of the browser window I use), so it haven't occured to me to enlarge the window to full screen or to scroll to the right to see the [show v] button is there all right. (Glad I asked you, though - I guess you're by now as accustomed as I to my making an ass of myself every now and then ;-)). --Duncan 09:54, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Hmm. Now that you mention it, that is very wide — 971 pixels on my system, and on my system the page scrolls horizontally if my browser window is less than 1165 pixels wide. (Which it never is — I'm a full-screen type, myself — but certainly you're not the only one who needs to scroll horizontally to see the "show".) Do you think we should adjust to put the plural declension below the singular declension, instead of alongside it? —Ruakh 11:29, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Well it certainly could do no harm that I can see. I have to go to work now but I'll think about it and tell you at night (night CET, that is ;-)) if any reason against it occurs to me. --Duncan 11:57, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

 * I've been mulling it over and it really shouldn't do any harm. jenž is anyway AFAICT the only word that uses the template at the moment, and I don't think there's any rule saying plural forms must be listed next to rather than under the singular forms. OTOH I don't think it's too important - I may not be the only one who needs to scroll horizontally to see the "show" but I may be the only one blind enough not to notice the scrolling contrivance - so I'll leave it to you to decide whether the result would be worth the effort (I've no idea whether changing the template would be a matter of five seconds, two minutes or a quarter of an hour). Thanks whichever way you decide, though. --Duncan 23:28, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Is it better now? (It should now be the width of the page, whatever that is.) —Ruakh 23:51, 16 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Yeah, that's just perfect! --Duncan 00:13, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

{etyl} (not {etym})
I presume that your note was due to my frequent misspelling of {etyl} as {etym}… Thanks for the mnemonic – its has been duly noted at {etym} (I mean, !).

—Nils von Barth (nbarth) (talk) 21:26, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

singularia tantum
What's the difference between a singulare-tantum common noun and a ?—msh210 ℠  22:52, 23 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Good question. singulare tantum: seems usually (but not necessarily) to refer to uncountable/non-count/mass nouns, and I don't know what sort of tests linguists use to distinguish mass nouns from proper nouns in English, but I've found that "much ____" (uncountable common noun) vs. "much of _____" (proper noun) seems to work O.K. (I'm not totally sure — is "They don't speak much English" using English: as an uncountable noun? — but I don't know of a better way to tell. But either way, I guess it's kind of moot with "the leftosphere", since the always-definite thing kind of implies the "much of ____" thing: even *"he drank much the water" is impossible.) And I have absolutely no idea about non-uncountable singularia tantum. I think those must be very rare, since if there's a countable singular, I imagine it has to be an odd sort of word if people aren't willing to just tack on -(e)s to form a countable plural. —Ruakh 03:57, 24 February 2009 (UTC)

immanant

 * Note: this discussion is about recent edits to [[immanent]].

If you would make a blue link red for the sake of a template, then you should have created the entry. Aren't we sister projects? Why the xenophobia? -- Thisis0 18:03, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Don't be silly, the template supports Wikipedia links just fine, but that's not what was wanted here. If it's a real word, then we need an entry for it, and until we have that entry, links to it should be red. That's a feature, not a bug. (And if it's not a real word, then we shouldn't mention it.) —Ruakh 22:02, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

 * By calling me silly, you've avoided two central topics on which I would like to know where you stand.
 * The information and connectivity of that link was useful before, now it's dead to the world. There's something I don't understand about being willing to kill something useful, however precarious, without replacing/upgrading it, i.e. creating the entry yourself first.
 * Aren't we sister projects, supporting, utilizing, and connecting the information freely wherever it is best presented? -- Thisis0 22:40, 26 February 2009 (UTC)

 * The most useful thing we can have right there is a redlink, indicating that an entry should exist but does not. If you don't want to create the entry, you don't have to; but you've no right to badger me to do so, either.
 * Yes. I especially agree with the "wherever it is best presented" part. (BTW, we're sister projects, but most Wiktionary mirrors are not also Wikipedia mirrors, and vice versa, so interproject links are actually non-links for much of our userbase. They're useful, but they're no substitute for in-project links.)
 * —Ruakh 00:10, 27 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Badger you? o_O
 * I challenge the notion that red is better than any shade of blue. If the goal is to spur the creation of a wikt entry, doesn't the light blue do a better job? i.e., 1) that light blue link did get your attention and caused you to act, whereas you would have been indifferent to a red link.  2) light blue gives the necessary information with which to eventually create an entry, as opposed to lifeless red. -- Thisis0 17:35, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Well, your first comment here read in part, " you should have created the entry", and your second one read in part, "There's something I don't understand about being willing to kill something useful, however precarious, without replacing/upgrading it, i.e. creating the entry yourself first." So, yes, you seemed to be badgering me to create the entry.
 * No, the light blue doesn't do a better job. And I'm surprised at your suggestion that the Wikipedia article contains all the information a dictionary entry would need; if you believe that, then why are you bothering at all to contribute to a dictionary?
 * —Ruakh 21:40, 28 February 2009 (UTC)

 * Wow... it hurts to see what happens to the defensiveness quotient of good people like you when they've been here dealing with this kind of crap too long.
 * Sorry you felt badgered. Recognizing from the start that this a completely insignificant item, my concerns were way more general than the scope of this one edit.  Rather than "badgering" you to specifically create the entry, I really meant to point out my opinion (and get yours) on breaking something without fixing it.  I've gone about fixing/finishing an entire problem on here many times, when all I wanted to do was address a small issue.  I felt that if I had "broken" it, then it's my duty to finish "fixing" it.  In fact, even worse, this has happened before, when some admin killed (rather than fixed) something that just needed to be "upgraded", and I ended up pulling it out of the trash, rinsing it off and making it like the admin would have wanted, but wasn't willing to do himself.  It's the reason Appendix:Malapropisms exists, among a dozen others. It's about to be the reason immanant exists.
 * Likewise, in regards to the idea that this wikipedia article contains any dictionary info, or is well-developed at all -- of course it doesn't. Again, I wouldn't be putting forth any effort like this if I were thinking just about this specific case. Obviously immanant doesn't have great wiktionary info; to suggest I thought so, and along with it question my contributions, just showcases how the weight of this project has painted you into a corner and you've run out of good faith.  My point on the light blue links was that some info is better than none.  And we're sister projects.
 * I was hoping to engage on procedure/etiquette/the working of a free-public-collaborative project (which is a new, developing idea) and not actually this specific word. Anyway, sorry you got badgered. -- Thisis0 01:52, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

 * I'm sorry, I didn't mean to be defensive. Thanks for creating immanant. :-)
 * About a year ago, I started Links to address this sort of issue; it never became very comprehensive, but you might be interested in it (and perhaps in expanding it).
 * —Ruakh 04:17, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

 * cool! -- Thisis0 05:55, 1 March 2009 (UTC)

= March 2009 =

obnosis
Removing a rfv rfc tag from obnosis was done by you why? The required request pages have been noted? Please use the discussion page before wide sweeping edits and especially because this page is under edit war flags.

Also, a user lisakachold can edit their own comments on the discussion page. Really these are basic respectful use best practices. Removing of rfv sense and rfc tags that have not been resolved by an editor or administrator and repeatedly reverting past edits that were originally authorized back in october for rfv in attempts to move the word obnosis to a scientology only definition while whittling away media, web site and common use references (that do meet WT:CFI ) is censorship not editing and certainly not acceptable use under wiktionary. Lisakachold 10:26, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

Lisakachold 10:17, 2 March 2009 (UTC)

 * A minor point: What is the status of the Foster Report copy? It would seem not to be durably archived and is not from a neutral source. I personally believe it to be authentic, but I don't think its authenticity is beyond question. DCDuring TALK 01:56, 5 March 2009 (UTC)

כדור
There are now, inter alia, the following two senses: These both correspond to one of the senses we have at [[ball]]: Now, the latter needs expanding into two senses: — which are the two senses of כדור that I listed above. But be that as it may, neither of the senses given for כדור corresponds to yet another sense we have for ball: Does כדור mean that also?—msh210 ℠  19:17, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * 1)  A ball: a three-dimensional solid enclosed by a sphere.
 * 2)  A ball: the subset of a metric space that consists of all points within a certain distance from a given point.
 * 1)  A ball: the subset of a metric space that consists of all points within a certain distance from a given point.
 * 1)  The set of points in a metric space lying within a given distance (the radius) of a given point; specifically, the homologue of the disk in a Euclidean space of any number of dimensions.
 * 1)  The set of points in a metric space lying within a given distance (the radius) of a given point.
 * 2)  The set of points in three-dimensional Euclidean space lying within a given distance (the radius) of a given point (the center).
 * 1)  The set of points in a topological space lying within some open set containing a given point; the analogue of the disk in a Euclidean space.

 * That topological-space definition sounds fishy to me; unless I'm misunderstanding something, it seems to be equivalent to "A non-empty open set", i.e. "A non-empty element of a topology", and I cannot imagine anyone using the word "ball" that way. Especially since in metric spaces we speak both of "open balls" (which exclude their bounding spheres) and "closed balls" (which include them), not to mention "deleted open balls" (which also exclude their centers), and this topological-space definition would cover only the first of these. (Admittedly, there's no prima facie reason that a metric "ball" must be a topological "ball", but since every metric generates a topology, most topological terminology is consistent with metric terminology.) And Ball (mathematics) gives a very different topological sense, one that is consistent with the metric sense, and that does not seem to be equivalent to ours. But if you're sure that our topological-space definition is correct, then regarding your question about כדור:, my only answer is "your guess is good as mine". I've never taken a math class in Hebrew; I just went by what he: and w:he: had to say. Presumably if English has a certain mathematical sense, then Hebrew כדור: will have a calque of it, but I can't make guarantee that. —Ruakh 20:11, 11 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Er, yes, that definition is incorrect, actually. An open set can be homeomorphic to, well, whatever you like, whereas ball means something homeomorphic to a Euclidean ball (but not necessarily having Euclidean (or any) geometry). [[ball]] needs work. Anyway, thanks for the answer re: כדור.—msh210 ℠  20:18, 11 March 2009 (UTC)

< weirds about Frequency lists/Contemporary fiction in 60 categories >
I have no clue what that's about anymore. - Amgine/talk 22:41, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Oh, wow, I should have looked at the history. Yeah, that's weird. —Ruakh 23:20, 13 March 2009 (UTC)

Excuse me, sir
I have the Japanese kanjis for the word grand, but I don't know what kind of word it is can you help me? Thank you.

This is a list of kanji for the word GRAND: 壮麗な, 尊大な, 壮大-grand yuuen, doudou, gurando, gurande, soudai=grand

Can you decipher them accurately? Thanks. Steel Blade 02:53, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Sorry, but as you can see from my user page (User:Ruakh), I don't speak Japanese. —Ruakh 02:56, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

I'm not asking you to speak Japanese. I want you to translate it into an accurate result. Don't expect me to ask you if I said you are capable of speaking Japanese. Steel Blade 02:59, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Well, good luck with that. —Ruakh 03:06, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

What do you mean? I have the kanjis for grand right here. Steel Blade 03:08, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

 * I'm glad that worked out, then. :-)  —Ruakh 03:10, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Sigh. Sorry for wasting your precious time then, Ruakh. Steel Blade 03:11, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

Dimensia
You deleted my first article. I contribute a lot to Wikipedia Wikipedia:User:Daniel Christensen Daniel Christensen 15:36, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Welcome! Please see Criteria for inclusion. —Ruakh 17:05, 16 March 2009 (UTC)

delete, move, delete, restore
Afair, you don't need to delete to restore the previously deleted revisions. Just fyi.—msh210 ℠  16:45, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Oh. Good to know. Thanks. :-)  —Ruakh 16:46, 19 March 2009 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Votes/2009-03/Transwikis from other Wiktionaries
I voted support on "Parlez-vous allemand?" and "Thou shalt not cause languor", but despite my following the instructions in the, it made a mess. If you know how to add my support without this bug, feel free to do so. Equinox ◑ 00:59, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

 * I do see comments on the page, and they advise doing something other than what you said: "Enter here to vote in support of this proposed new policy." I used your simpler subst idea and it worked. Equinox ◑ 01:05, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Category:enm:Nonstandard
Hi Widsith,

Currently there are two entries in Category:enm:Nonstandard, both by the same editor, many of whose edits were vandalism. Could you take a look? (Is enough even known about Middle English dialects and registers to determine whether a given word was necessarily nonstandard?)

Thanks in advance!

—Ruakh TALK 03:02, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Er...the category is meaningless. There was no "standard" form of the language in Middle English.  Ƿidsiþ 09:43, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

 * O.K., I've removed it now, thanks! —Ruakh 11:58, 21 March 2009 (UTC)

Chaldean
Just so you know, Χαλδαϊκός is most certainly not the genitive of Χαλδαία. I know that this was ages ago, and that you would almost certainly put attention|grc on such an edit nowadays.......but I just had to vent at someone. Sorry to have bothered. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 07:27, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Oh, oops. :-/  Yeah, this was well before, so I just did my best to understand what the entry was trying to say … —Ruakh 12:29, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

In re Template:nonstandard
Thanks for this; had you seen this? †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 14:19, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

 * I checked the talk-page before making the change, yes. —Ruakh 15:18, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks again.  :-)   †  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 15:20, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

Merriam-Webster on same-sex marrigages (according to Stonewall)
Hi, not that I think it affects our entry in any way, and possibly you know already, but in case you don't this might interest you. --Duncan 17:17, 22 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks! I didn't know that about Merriam-Webster specifically, but I think every English-speaker who lives aboveground must know by now that "same-sex marriage", "gay marriage", etc. have entered the language. :-)  —Ruakh 22:15, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

Votes/2009-03/Transwikis from other Wiktionaries
Kudos. Well drafted.—msh210 ℠  17:03, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Oh, and two things unrelated to the title of this section: One, Wiktionary:Votes/sy-2009-03/User:Equinox for admin exists. Two, what is this TaskBag you use, please?—msh210 ℠  17:58, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

 * One, thanks for letting me know. Two, it's MediaWiki:Gadget-TaskBag.js; it adds two links the toolbox in the sidebar and one to the list of links at the top of the page (between "my preferences" and "my watchlist"). All are fairly self-explanatory. Someday I'll make it a bit less … rough. —Ruakh 22:13, 23 March 2009 (UTC)

 * One, you're welcome. Two: Based on my reading of the code, you add a page to a list or remove it while viewing the page, and can check the list, which appears wikified so it links. Did I get that right? If so, might I suggest that the ability to add a comment to the line of code encoding the page added to the task bag be added so as to remind the user what the page is listed for? (Without that ability, I frankly don't see the advantage of taskbag over watchlist, although that's probably my own lack of imagination in seeing the uses of taskbag rather than a fault in taskbag itself. Do you?)—msh210 ℠  17:07, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

 * You can add comments if you want, but you'd have to do it manually, so I don't suppose the TaskBag in its current form would be very useful if you expected to add a separate comment for every single item. But that's mostly because comments weren't something I considered very important (you'll notice that my TaskBag has only one); if you want them, it wouldn't be hard to modify the TaskBag to support them in a better way.
 * I used to use my watchlist as a TaskBag, but I found that it didn't work very well to use one list for those two purposes. (I imagine the TaskBag is more useful for me than for some editors, because I tend to be very slow about getting around to tasks.)
 * One advantage of the TaskBag over the watchlist is that if you're looking at a Category page, you can add all currently-listed members to your TaskBag with a single click. But of course, a similar tool could be written that would add them all to your watchlist instead.
 * —Ruakh 18:22, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks! —Ruakh 22:13, 23 March 2009 (UTC)
 * Welcs.—msh210 ℠  17:07, 24 March 2009 (UTC)

Evidentiary standards
Good question. -- WikiPedant 18:44, 25 March 2009 (UTC)

Cynology
Ruakh, I have entered two new historic English quotes with reference to cynology, see Mills, Hubbard. I'm afraid I have not done my homework, being a stranger to Wiktionary. (I occasionally make some edits on dog-related matters to the English Wikipedia) I would like to know if these Wiktionary quotes need some sort of verification to remain on record. Please see discussion page on Cynology. Cynology is a fairly rare word in English usage, I'm trying to correct the impression that has been made on the Wikipedia page that cynology is either bogus or non-existent. Sorry for taking up your time with something so basic. Thank you--Richard Hawkins 19:29, 31 March 2009 (UTC)

= April 2009 =

open sunshine
"They're supposed to have an open 'sunshine' meeting. They're supposed to have transparency"

Could I ask you to take another look at this? Why do you consider the quote to be irrelevant? DAVilla 06:34, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

 * Because it's not using the phrase "open sunshine": "open" is modifying "meeting", not "sunshine". —Ruakh 19:54, 1 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the requested entries
I see you've done a few of my REs recently. I appreciate it! Equinox ◑ 00:06, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

 * No prob! It's great to have requested entries that are real words — there's so much garbage in there sometimes, it can be convenient to just look at your listings and ignore the rest. :-P  —Ruakh 00:10, 6 April 2009 (UTC)

Thanks for the Hebrew text
Thank you for the interesting piece of information in your user page, it made me get some facts straight (it also made me ponder about the insanely large amounts of "Bamba" I used to consume!). :) LightBringer 20:25, 12 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I'd also like to thank you for your warm welcome. :) LightBringer 20:54, 12 April 2009 (UTC)

-ier verb not irregular
There is no irregularity whatsoever in the -ier verbs' pronunciation. The "i" is always pronounced, which is perfectly regular. The "e" in -ie finals is never pronounced, which is perfectly regular (cf. trémie:, manie:). And the potential schwas in -e, -es and -ent finals are in normal speech never pronounced in any verb either! martèlent:, martèle: and martel: are all homophones! And finissent: could be spelled undefined: that it wouldn't change the pronunciation (except for liaison, but that's irrrelevant for the most part). Circeus 15:58, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
 * "parle à Paris" and "parla Paris" are NOT homophones for amny speakers à:=, -a:=. (Grevisse expound shamefully little on this, though)
 * The -e in -ie verbs is NOT normally pronounced (at least in words whose spelling was not borrowed). Nor after any vowel in fact (though it could possible define digraphs, none come to my mind ATM). Grevisse 2007 (§29 a)) is very precise on thius point. He does note that informal spoken Swiss and Belgian French often has -ie and -ée as, but this is an extension (cf. the many diphtongs in informal Quebec French from other long vowels) of a broader modification that lengthen vowels followed by a mute e. This is a dialectal feature and is not really relevant on an overview page about pronunciation IMO.
 * In any case is a very odd pronounciation for -ie. In fact, I'm fairly sure it outright phonologically impossible to find that sequence after a consonant in French. Circeus 17:30, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
 * No we don't. "Differing in pronunciation in some dialects" is not the same as "having an irregular conjugation". This is not the same as payer: or assaillir: who have genuine variations in the conjugation! These features are not worth creating an artificial class of irregular verbs, though they may be worth noting an alternate pronunciation on the relevant articles. Circeus 17:46, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
 * I understand perfectly what you're saying. It's just that in the absence of any evidence that an actual dialect exist where the normal pronunciation of -ie is /-je/, a pronunciation that is normally impossible in all dialects of French, I have to assume that it's either a mishearing of some sort (and I'm assuming we're talking native speakers, not merely bilingual with native english: my own billingual english is fuill of quirks), an affectation, or possibly some tendency to emphasize the "schwas" (the very nature of that vowel is the subject of debate in French phonetics) to foreign speakers/learners.
 * Besides, I'd tend to assume such a feature would go hand in hand with extra emphasis put on pronouncing actual schwas in general (IIRC, this is a feature of most southern France dialects), which would make those after consonants pronounced too (aime -> etc.), and this simply creates a different pronunciation in which whatever pronunciation of verbs in -ier is still regular with the rest of the first-group verbs. The verb has to be irregular within its own system to qualify! You can't say "in dialect Y, verb X is pronounced this irregular way" if that pronunciation is regular with regard to that dialect (and regularly ensues from the standard spelling according to that dialect's phonology)!
 * Does this wall o' text makes any sense? I know I tend to ramble on in these arguments... Circeus 18:13, 18 April 2009 (UTC)
 * There might have been a bit of laziness and chauvinism involved (the "that's now how the French writers see it!"), neither of which are by themselves good arguments. I want to apologize about that. The discussion did bring interesting phonetic facts to my attention. Circeus 20:34, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Are you talking about the verbal ending specifically (mind you, it's a bit theoretical, given the lack of oral usage of the past historic) or the sound as a whole? The lost of several vowel oppositions has been spreading in France over the last century, and the a~ɑ, to my dismay, is particularly widespread. Circeus 22:15, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Unrelated note re: the revert
I do intend to come back to the appendix soon. I'm just busy reading something else ATM. I tend to multitask too much for my own good when doing wikiwork <__< Circeus 18:18, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

Third group verbs
BTW, I've been building a third group page at Appendix:French irregular verbs, and I'd appreciate if you could have a look and give me feedback. Circeus 22:22, 18 April 2009 (UTC)

speak to
Hi. Thanks for your help with clearing up my doubts on this entry. Re your last addition. Isn't that the same as speak defn. 3.(by extension) To communicate or converse by some means other than orally, such as writing or facial expressions. ? Cheers. -- A LGRIF </i ><font color="#FFD700"> talk 17:39, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

 * I don't know, I don't think so. But if it is, I think it's an important special case that bears mention. —Ruakh 23:39, 24 April 2009 (UTC)

katzefet
I've continued the conversation at my talkpage. TIA.—msh210 ℠  20:43, 29 April 2009 (UTC)

= May 2009 =

WT:ELE reversion
Was there any reason you reverted Ullmann's edit? I thought it was correct. . Conrad.Irwin 21:47, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

 * I also think it's correct, but see Votes/pl-2009-03/Removing vote requirements for policy changes. Any modification, even if unsubstantial and uncontested, requires a VOTE; and Ullmann actually strongly supports that requirement. (Technically speaking, I suppose a revert is also a modification, but I think the spirit of the rule requires reversion of un-VOTE-d upon edits.) —Ruakh 22:00, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Alright, I disagree strongly with your interpretation of the failed VOTE, but I suppose it's an issue that will need wider discussion. (And 60% is a pass anyway ;) Conrad.Irwin 22:12, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

 * My interpretation displeases me, and I'm very open to hearing a different one. Please speak up. :-)  —Ruakh 22:58, 4 May 2009 (UTC)

template:he-noun
Any particular reason you used div rather than span? Other inflection templates don't add linebreaks afterward, which allows for the use of, e.g., or  afterward on the same line.—msh210  ℠  23:28, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Fixed, thanks. —Ruakh 23:37, 5 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks much.—msh210 ℠  23:38, 5 May 2009 (UTC)

greenland wolf spider
Hi, thanks for taking the time out for me. I have moved the definition to the Latin scientific name, as it looks like it will fail to obtain a consensus to "keep". WritersCramp 22:56, 8 May 2009 (UTC)

Cleaning up RFD
Hooray! Thanks for looking at those; there really is an incredible backlog. I should probably look into the policy and procedures properly so I can pick them off myself in future. P.S. If you have any soul left after that lot, RFV awaits <tt>;)</tt> Equinox ◑ 23:12, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Variety is the spice of life. I'll take a stab at it. :-)  Of course, I'm only going to handle a drop in the bucket, but hopefully it will inspire other people to chip in as well. —Ruakh 00:16, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks. DCDuring TALK 00:19, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

 * I've now zapped a load of last year's hopeless RFVs. Isn't there a bot or something that automatically moves "struckthrough" sections to the appropriate talk page? I hope so, as this will make the page noticeably quicker to load. Equinox ◑ 22:56, 12 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Nice! Re: bot: There was for a while, but it looks like it's in its dormant phase or something. We'll have to do it the old-fashioned way. —Ruakh 00:59, 13 May 2009 (UTC)

hobo
I've been deleting adjective sections for attributive-use-of-noun-without-grading/comparison/predicative use unilaterally lately. Should I go back to RfVing? There seems little risk of harm in deletion. I usually move usage examples and notes, if any, to the noun. DCDuring TALK 23:37, 10 May 2009 (UTC)

 * If you've determined that the "adjective" use is just an attributive use of the noun, then you're not deleting, you're correcting. By removing. I give it a thumbs up. :-)  —Ruakh 00:13, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks. We certainly don't need unnecessary RfV/D clutter. DCDuring TALK 00:21, 11 May 2009 (UTC)

־ה
Would you mind checking out this new creation? It seems correct, but another pair of eyes (yours in particular) would be helpful.—msh210 ℠  23:04, 14 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Looks good. I've expanded it a bit. —Ruakh 02:03, 15 May 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks much. Concerning, would you say that it's ?—msh210 ℠  14:58, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Sounds good. :-)  —Ruakh 15:05, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

Context labels in ELE
Hi. I've made an abbreviated version of this proposal at Votes/pl-2009-03/Context labels in ELE v2. Please have a look. —Michael Z. 2009-05-17 18:08 z

 * Looks good! My only comment would be that "must not be used merely for categorization" should be "must not be used merely for categorization"; putting the stress on "must not" seems a bit rude or something. (I realize that RFCs actually capitalize MUST NOT and so on, but that's largely because those terms have specific meanings in the RFCs.) —Ruakh 19:11, 17 May 2009 (UTC)

 * You're right. I just removed the stress altogether.  The statement is clear, and there's no need for the guidelines to yell and make faces at our editors. —Michael Z. 2009-05-22 20:03 z

cuesport
LOL, are you turning to Usenet as a last resort? Do you think we should mark it "rare"? Equinox ◑ 02:17, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

 * For me, Usenet isn't a last resort: I prefer Google Books, but Scholar and News Archive are both fraught with questions of durability (in that a lot of their hits are Web-only, and it's not always easy to distinguish the ones that are from the ones that aren't), whereas there seems to be consensus that Usenet is durably archived.
 * Judging from, cuesport: is not actually all that rare, though it (like cue sport:) seems to be predominantly, even overwhelmingly, Indian English. But given the lack of Google Books hits, is probably warranted, yes, and I'd definitely support a usage note stating that cue sport: is much more common.
 * —Ruakh 02:31, 18 May 2009 (UTC)

RFV of PK / PKK
Well, PK should absolutely not have been reverted, it has been cited. As for PKK, it is used widely in more ephemeral mediums (in and out of game chats mostly) and is therefore harder to cite, but I found it pretty easily in a brief search. Wikipedia includes the term in their article on PvP, there are some video games which use the term in their scripts (.hack//GU) and I even found it on some t-shirts (link). Also I grew up playing online video games and know the term to be in wide use, across many communities. - 21:00, 21 May 2009 (UTC)

lex dubia non obligat
This is a phrase from English law, not from Latin law. I have cleaned up the entry accordingly. --EncycloPetey 17:14, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Well, neither English nor Latin has law, and it's a Latin sentence. But seeing as it's overwhelmingly used in English contexts, I suppose this is fine. Thanks for looking over it. :-)  —Ruakh 17:23, 24 May 2009 (UTC)

nif'al
Could you check out the dagesh/niqqud placements in נגמר? I spent a while making the template earlier, but I've already seen a few vowels I missed, so my confidence with it is faded slightly :D — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 18:01, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

 * The niqqud are all right (though I haven't looked at the template to see if it calls in exactly the right places). There are a few forms missing, which makes the 1=, 2=, etc. call structure unfortunate, but obviously I'm not going to convince you to slow down, so I guess I won't bother trying. There's also the question of how to handle the additional yuds in some of the forms' k'tiv male spellings, which I don't have a good solution for. (The ייגמר \ יִגָּמֵר seems a bit unwieldy in an all-out conjugation template, but leaving out the usual spellings seems decidedly worse.) Lastly, the blanket "These forms are uncommon in modern Hebrew" isn't totally true; the -na futures and imperative are indeed uncommon, but the -ten past is still common in writing and formal speech. (I realize that these problems aren't specific to your new template, but now that you've gone ahead and created the new template, you should be aware of them. They're the reason that I, at least, have not gone out and created a slew of templates, nor started using the existing ones on loads of pages. Personally, I preferred to fix these problems in the existing templates before copying them to new ones.) —Ruakh 18:26, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

 * So we can have a temporarily incomplete template that uses the admittedly unfortunate but not difficult, only tedious, to fix 1=, 2= - or one that says inf=, ms.pres=, fp.pres= to fully accomodate the imperatives later. I may be an accomodating person, but I prefer simplicity.
 * Notice that I haven't done or tried to do anything about pi'el or extra yud. I don't edit things I'm not mostly confident in.
 * "copying" the problems of existing templates to new ones is highly mitigated by the use of head templates like, . Change the issues in the head template, and voila, there's a neat little wave of fixes in all the subtemplates.
 * I wouldn't say I have created, or plan on creating, a plethora of templates. I'm just setting up the more simple ones in which I have more confidence. I don't plan on doing pa'al with gutturals or hollow roots or anything like that any time soon. I would just rather have something than nothing, and I think that with you being one of our more knowledgable Hebrew editors - if you aren't going to do it, who is? Most if not all of the issues you mention are pretty minor and will require such small amounts of imagination that it's almost no fun to try and even them out on my own. — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 19:05, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Well, some of the problems (such as the footnote issue) are mitigated by head templates, but some of them (such as the fixed support for a limited number of forms) are exacerbated by them. But if you're not planning on creating large numbers of templates, then don't worry about it; further use of the existing ones will likely help us address any problems before we start unleashing bots to handle inflected forms and such. Those bugs are hard! :-P   —Ruakh 19:12, 25 May 2009 (UTC)

breasticle
i'm sorry, but i have to ask: how is adding this word to wiktionary going to help the infrastructure of hebrew words?

 * It's not; rather, it falls under "fulfilling requests at Wiktionary:Requested articles:English". (Yes, believe it or not, someone asked about breasticle:!) And there's no need to apologize. :-)  —Ruakh 04:10, 26 May 2009 (UTC)

Template:rfv-archived
Seems very good idea to me. Only a tiny bit of nit-picking: shouldn't it say "The discussion ended in such a way that neither nor  is appropriate."? --Duncan 00:06, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Er, yes, yes it should. Fixed now, thanks! —Ruakh 00:25, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

חילל
Hey Ruakh :) I couldn't find a correct translation to the word חילל (ב). Is there such a verb in English which I, unfortunately, am not aware of? LightBringer 14:10, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

 * We just say undefined:. According to the OED, flute: itself can be used as a verb with this sense, but personally I'd never heard it used that way, and I'm not sure I'd understand it. —Ruakh 14:58, 30 May 2009 (UTC)
 * I see. Thanks for the help :) LightBringer 17:16, 30 May 2009 (UTC)

<tt></tt>
Mate – are you any good with templates? I want to create the one above for Mandinka nouns.....it should take two optional parameters, one for pl=plural and one for the stemstem-form, and the whole thing should probably be Latinx. Have a look at kuluŋo: for what the end result should look like. Can you help with this? Or shall I throw it out to the Grease Pit? Ƿidsiþ 15:08, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

 * Done. If pl= and/or stem= is missing, should the template add the page any sort of attention category? Should it support any special values, like <tt>-</tt>, to indicate that there simply is no plural and/or no stem?
 * Per GP discussions a while back, I've also updated to support the <tt>face=</tt> parameter, though it'll probably be a while before that propagates to all pages that currently use it.
 * —Ruakh 15:24, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

You're a legend, thanks. All nouns will have a stem form, but I don't know enough about Mandinka yet to know whether uncountables should be an option....probably.. I'll try and work that out. And I don't even know what "face" is, so I'd better go study the GP a bit! < class="latinx">Ƿidsiþ</> 15:28, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

 * By the way, I've added a <tt>sort=</tt> parameter, so that entries starting with ñ and such can be made to appear properly in the category order; but I don't have a good grasp on the order, so I can't devise a system to be used. The Peace Corps dictionary linked from here seems to use this ordering: a b c e f h i j k l m n ñ [ŋ/o] p r s t u ü w y, with "ñ" and the unexplained "ü" having their own sort positions and "ŋ" sharing a sort position with "o", but that just seems so unlikely … do you know how this is supposed to work? —Ruakh 17:44, 31 May 2009 (UTC)

= June 2009 =

IP block exempt
Re [], just fyi, admins are automatically IP-block exempt (according to Special:ListGroUprights).—msh210 ℠  18:36, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Yeah, thanks. I actually remembered that afterward (your original comment at GP/BP/wherever had mentioned that), but I decided it wasn't worth restoring-and-re-removing just to add a clarifying comment. :-P  —Ruakh 19:11, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Mandinka alphabet

 * Oh wait, I forgot the n. There's a normal n as well, between m and ñ!  < class="latinx">Ƿidsiþ</> 22:46, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Yeah, I guessed as much. :-)  BTW, you might want to change your signature to <tt><span class="latinx">[[User:Widsith|Ƿidsiþ]]</span></tt>, rather than explicitly calling . As of my change to it the other day, it's no longer very <tt>subst:</tt>-friendly. :-/   —Ruakh 23:37, 1 June 2009 (UTC)

Archiving RfVs
The policy that I generally try to stick to while cleaning up the old stuff is this: declare in the comment of the RfV page edit removing the section what the result was. This links the title of the discussion (almost always the entry in question) with the result. I also archive any substantive discussions on the talk page with the result listed as well. If I make a non-obvious decision (if I go and find cites myself, for instance) I make a note at the end of the discussion as I archive it, I try not to do this when the term is overly contentious but usually do it when it just seems like a straight forward term was overlooked. The last thing I like to try to do is make sure that every edit regarding the term shows the result. The edit to WT:RFV, the edit to the actual page when the rfv tag is removed or the deletion summary for deleted pages, and the edit to the talk page when the archiving takes place. Each of these generally state the outcome of the RfV.

For recent discussions (less than a few months old) I don't follow that route, I use the regular comment and strike out, then leave it for a week, but for the extremely old (I don't think I have gotten into anything less than a year old) I would rather not simply strike them out, as my purpose is both to clean up and reduce the size of the RfV page, which is excessive. Because the discussions have been stale for so long I just have to assume people have said their piece and those which were not clearly resolved I try to make the best judgment call I can and leave the evidence archived for anyone who would like to to second guess or overturn as they please.

I certainly am not looking to hide the results of any discussion, or make changes which contradict the consensus of the discussions which take place. Unless no discussion really took place the discussions are always archived on the pertinent talk page, the only discussions which are deleted outright are ones which either have nothing to do with the topic (and I generally keep those too, if they have any content) or where no discussion took place and the term was merely listed and never cited. - 20:11, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

 * "Done" and other non- pass/fail notes are usually regarding discussions which for one reason or another were not really pass/fail conclusions. Sometimes an entry merely needed cleanup or other similar, not a true RfV.  It isn't so much the extra work of striking and then archiving later, it is more that I consider these so long concluded that they don't need to spend any more time on the page.  I understand your desire to know how these discussions are concluded, but I like to think that the way I am doing it now is a somewhat happy medium which reports the outcome and retains discussion while still cleaning up the page in the most expeditious manner. -  21:04, 3 June 2009 (UTC)

...and RfDs
Would you mind taking a { {look}} at Requests for deletion?—msh210 ℠  21:29, 3 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks.—msh210 ℠  16:50, 4 June 2009 (UTC)

you - more work
Exactly why I didn't start any work before getting feedback! My thought was to revise all the core English pronouns this summer, but I'm not sure I have the stamina. --EncycloPetey 17:27, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Perfectly understandable. That's why I only did the one merge that I did: everyone seems to agree that we don't want the subject/object distinction, and I'm taking it for granted that no one would want to merge the one: sense with any other senses. —Ruakh 17:50, 10 June 2009 (UTC)

Ashkenazim
Hi Ruakh. Could you please add the proper Hebrew terms and transliterations to this etymology section please? Thanks. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 13:13, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks for that. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 14:46, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

 * You're welcome! —Ruakh 14:51, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

pa'al
I've put in what I can think to put in and pointed out what I can think to point out, but I have a feeling you could add to it before other entries for habinyanim get started. I would like to have the format be more-or-less standardized before adding the rest of them. Cheers! — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 18:38, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry, but this is definitely going to be deleted as is, if anyone who's in a deleting mood catches wind of it. If it's Hebrew, it's [[פעל]]; if it's a "transliterated form... used in English" then it's ==English==. If it's a transliterated form found only in italics, or otherwise definitely foreign, then we've time and again deleted those out of hand as not within our scope.   —msh210  ℠  18:45, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

 * That's the thing. The word is not English, but (as demonstrated by Mglovesfun, we need to have something for people who don't read Hebrew but can very clearly see the words pa'al, nif'al, pi'el, etc. written all over Wiktionary and any other place that talks about Hebrew verbs. This isn't just a random choice of "I'm going to add this transliteration". Not only is it common, but it's necessary, especially in the absence of a detailed explanatory appendix. — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 18:52, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
 * If it's only so people seeing the word as we use it will have a definition, then we can link every time it appears to appendix:Hebrew verbs.   —msh210  ℠  19:13, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
 * (....And add a definition to Appendix:Glossary.)   —msh210  ℠  20:12, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

 * "as we use it"? Here I was under the impression that it was a pretty basic term with a pretty basic function that "we" wouldn't need to alter. As for Appendix:Hebrew verbs and Appendix:Glossary, the former in its present state is next to useless and the latter... I can't imagine it gets a vast number of hits. I for one almost never use it. I think it's also worth noting that a vast majority of the words in the glossary have their own entries, which are generally more detailed than the little tidbits the glossary gives. Appendix:Hebrew verbs needs more detail to be of real use, but I was thinking of starting at the ground (with entries giving a few details about each binyan) before making detailed appendices. — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 20:29, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Yeah, this is a toughie. People definitely refer to the various binyanim when speaking (or writing) English, but they use the Hebrew names, and typically italicize them (at least in edited works). They also often capitalize or even uppercase them, setting them off even further. It seems unreasonable to exclude romanizations of these names, seeing as they're genuinely used, but since they're not used in Hebrew, and English-speakers don't seem to have accepted them as native, neither ==Hebrew== nor ==English== seems terribly appropriate. Overall, I think my preference would be to label them as ==English==, with abundant quotations of use, and a usage note explaining the situation. —Ruakh 20:41, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

WT:GP
Thought you might be interested; don't know whether you keep an eye on the GP.  —msh210  ℠  18:48, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

 * I saw it, thanks. —Ruakh 20:41, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

sack
hey just wondering how you were able to judge an ambiguous RFV discussion 'failed', and how you justified removing a sense and its three cites. What else do you think you need for a clearly widespread low-brow slang term? -- Thisis0 06:58, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

 * First off: No durably archived cites were presented; I looked for some myself, and failed to find any; and it doesn't seem to be in clearly widespread use. Ergo, it failed. I don't think there was anything ambiguous about it.
 * Second off: You'll notice that I left the discussion in place. This is standard practice: it gives people a chance to voice their disagreement. If you wish to do so, you should do so there, not here.
 * —Ruakh 13:14, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

Wiktionary:Requests for deletion?diff=6784805
I'm sorry, but this edit was completely inappropriate. It totally changed the meaning of my comment. If you're not willing to fix the template — totally understandable, not everyone wants to mess with template code — you should have removed the template, or commented it out, or something, not change my comment to say something completely different. —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 20:41, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

 * You needn't be sorry. I'm sorry that I didn't accomplish what I was trying to. The RfD page had been added to a category and I couldn't imagine that to be what you wanted to do. I also thought that the discussion was basically complete. I simply didn't want to bother you about something as trivial as what I thought it to be. I was trying to take the RfD page out of the category without changing your comment and without troubling you. I'm sorry that I failed and offended you. DCDuring TALK 20:53, 20 June 2009 (UTC)

 * No worries, I'm over it now. It was just a bit of a shock to see my comment changed in such a major way — especially since I almost didn't notice it (I haven't been following RFD very closely lately) — but obviously you weren't trying to change the meaning of my comment. Sorry if I overreacted. (What happened was, I was working my way through this huge diff, and saw multiple changes to comments of mine, and started to get really annoyed. But obviously that's not your fault: only one change was by you, and you had a good reason for it.) —Ruakh 00:59, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

 * I wasn't exactly blameless. As I recollect, I was rushing and didn't proofread my change. I'll try to avoid that kind of thing, but it's all too easy to slip up that way. I can understand your getting upset about such a thing. I would have been saddened if your anger had lasted. If you get angry once in a while, it proves you human. Anyway, thanks for the response.
 * You seem to have been busy lately. I've missed your participation in some of the discussions. You often add a good balance of knowledge and judgment to discussions, which many discussions would otherwise lack. DCDuring TALK 01:52, 22 June 2009 (UTC)

אחוז
Aren't the first two senses identical (and merely require a usage note that sometimes the plural is normal and sometimes invariant)?  —msh210  ℠  19:43, 24 June 2009 (UTC)

 * If you prefer. Meaning-wise, they're the same; and you see the same behavior with other fractions (e.g., vs. ) and other sorts of units (e.g.,  vs. ). Really, the current entry doesn't do justice to the variety of usage, because I wasn't (and am not) equipped to write an entry that does. —Ruakh 22:29, 24 June 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah, I do. I've combined. Thanks.   —msh210  ℠  20:21, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Displaying Wikipedia images on Wiktionary
Hi Ruakh. Can you tell me how to display images held on Wikipedia here on Wiktionary? I can’t get the link to work →|in this entry… <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 13:08, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

 * That can't be done; we can only display images from the English Wiktionary and those from Commons. However, since this image is in the public domain, you can upload it to Commons yourself, using commons:Commons:Upload. —Ruakh 14:05, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks, done. <tt>:-)</tt> BTW, <tt>See also</tt> sections go at L4 in entries with only one POS IIRC. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 15:06, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Commonshelper is a quick way to upload WP images to the Commons, by the way.   —msh210  ℠  20:23, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks. Noted. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 21:33, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Good to know! —Ruakh 22:26, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Huh, interesting. ELE seems to imply that "see also"-s, being a semantic relationship, should be at L4 and split by sense (using ). I would never have guessed that. I suppose that means I have to in "external link"-s, then (which many editors already do, but I'd always taken it as a matter of personal preference). —Ruakh 22:26, 25 June 2009 (UTC)

Improvements
Thanks for improving my entries, you may like this Liberapedia Article. Proxima Centauri 19:01, 29 June 2009 (UTC)

How about an all-in-one template so we won't need the extra stuff like and ? I should be able to make something simple that only needs a few unnamed parameters and one or two named ones. — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 16:36, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

 * Why? Given that each tense has unique properties (e.g., only the future-tense/imperfect-aspect/prefix-conjugation distinguishes third-person masculine plural from third-person feminine plural), the only reasonable way to create a without sacrificing functionality would be to have it test on the tense identifier and factor everything out into tense-specific subtemplates; and personally, as a user, I don't find  any more convenient than . —Ruakh 18:07, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

 * I forgot how pessimistic you are :p — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 20:31, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

 * It's not pessimism; it's that I'm quite happy with the current approach. The approach you describe is one I've taken before (e.g. with ), and I originally considered it for Hebrew, but ended up deciding that this approach would work better. Now, if you give me a reason to be unhappy with the current approach, then maybe I'll be pessimistic about our chances of creating a better one. :-P  —Ruakh 20:51, 30 June 2009 (UTC)

=July 2009=

+ plcons stuff to, please?
I'd do it myself, but at the moment I'm on one of those tiny Acer laptops and your style of coding is different than mine, so it'd be a combination of a lot of rather awkward stuff for me. — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 16:46, 1 July 2009 (UTC)

For the weak verbs
Do you think it would be worth having subcategories like Category:Hebrew ל״ה pi'el verbs? It'd be useful for someone looking for similarly conjugated verbs, I think. — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 21:38, 3 July 2009 (UTC)

 * If you think it would be useful, then sure. It's not like categories cost money. :-)  —Ruakh 14:43, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

 * Well yeah, that's true :) I was just worried the category trees would start getting complicated. Then again, Hebrew verbs tend to make my brain hurt some, so the tree of the tree would only really reflect the verb system :| heh — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 15:07, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

 * As long as they're all in the Category:Hebrew verbs top-level, I don't think it matters how complicated the category trees are, since they'll only be used by people who want them. —Ruakh 15:24, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

 * Alright, I think I've got it all set up. So to get the entries categorized, all you have to do is specify the פ, =ע= or ל= in the he-verb template. Enjoy :) — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 15:57, 4 July 2009 (UTC)

nitpael
Hi. First off, I hope you took no offense by any of my recent remarks at About Hebrew. I certainly meant no offense.

ז־מ־ן lists both נִזְדַּמֵּן and הִזְדַּמֵּן as derived terms (because I added them there ). These are synonymous — both mean roughly "was happened upon" — but both seem to exist (using the usual RFV methods of ascertaining that), with nizdamen seemingly more common. There are other "nitpael" verbs also, particularly in older Hebrew. Is this another binyan, differing from hitpael only in past tense? Is it just hitpael, but an it? I'd appreciate your views, or what you know to be traditional grammarians' or linguists' views. — msh210  ℠  22:39, 6 July 2009 (UTC)

 * No, why would I be offended?

 * I don't know much about these verbs. I don't think they existed in the Torah or earlier books of the Bible (?), and they're not very common nowadays. None of my grammar-books (all of which are for Modern Hebrew) seems to mention them. Of my dictionaries:
 * the הַמִּלּוֹן הֶחָדָשׁ (my only monolingual Hebrew dictionary) gives נִזְדַּמֵּן, without comment, as the hitpael of זמן, and doesn't mention הִזְדַּמֵּן (though if it gave full conjugation tables, instead of just the primary forms from which the rest can be divined, I imagine it would give הִזְדַּמֵּן as the gerund/bare infinitive).
 * Sivan and Levenston lists no nitpael verbs. (At least, I looked through all the נת־, נזד־, נסת־, נשת־, and נצט־ words — there aren't very many — and didn't see any.) It does list הִזְדַּמֵּן.
 * Likewise Zilberman.
 * Scharfstein doesn't list נִזְדַּמֵּן, only הִזְדַּמֵּן. Since it's organized by root, I can't tell whether it includes any other nitpael verbs. (I checked for נִזְדָּרֵז, נִסְתָּחֵף, and נִתְחַבֵּב, since they're in Ben-Yehuda and Weinstein — see next — and none of them are listed, though הִזְדָּרֵז and הִתְחַבֵּב are.)
 * Ben-Yehuda and Weinstein doesn't list נִזְדַּמֵּן, only הִזְדַּמֵּן; however, it does include various other nitpael verbs, including נִזְדָּרֵז, נִסְתָּחֵף, and נִתְחַבֵּב. (It also lists הִזְדָּרֵז and הִתְחַבֵּב, with almost the same definitions.) It doesn't explicitly state the binyan of any of these. However, it does have entries for הִתְפָּעֵל and נִתְפָּעֵל themselves, giving the former as “ h ithpa ’ el, the reflexive form of the intensive stem of the Hebrew verb” and the latter as “ N ithpa ‘ el, a  passive and reflexive form of the intensive stem of the Hebrew verb”. (I don't know what to make of all the subtle and not-so-subtle differences between those two translations.)
 * Gesenius (which I don't own a copy of, but is fully viewable on Google Books) can be filed under "ditto Scharfstein", except that it doesn't even have הִזְדָּרֵז and הִתְחַבֵּב.

 * So, make of that what you will.

 * —Ruakh 01:27, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

 * Bother. So Ben-Yehuda and Weinstein list almost the same definitions — but not, I gather, the same — for הִזְדָּרֵז as for נִזְדָּרֵז, and define nitpael and hitpael differently. Seems, then, like a separate binyan, no? (I, too, think vaguely of nitpael as somehow more of a passive than hitpael.) Do you know of a decent Rabbinic-Hebrew grammar? If so, I'll see if I can ILL it. I, too, am unfamiliar with these words from Tanach, certainly from the Pentateuch. Thanks for checking your books. —  msh210  ℠  16:12, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

 * Re: Ben-Yehuda and Weinstein defining הִזְדָּרֵז and נִזְדָּרֵז differently: Let me recheck that, and give you the exact differences. I remember that it defined נִתְחַבֵּב and הִתְחַבֵּב slightly differently, but in a way that I couldn't interpret: I think the former was "be liked, loved" and the latter was "be liked, beloved", or something like that.
 * Re: separate binyan: I don't know. I checked most of the dictionaries' prefatory material, and in their descriptions of the binyanim, not one mentions nitpael (or even the more common polel and hitpolel). Even Ben-Yehuda and Weinstein, which contains several nitpael verbs, and devotes several pages to verb conjugations, doesn't include a single nitpael conjugation, so I don't know if they'd have treated it as an irregular hitpael verb, or as its own thing. The dictionary that's most explicit about it is Even-Shoshan, which has only seven binyan abbreviations, and marks נִזְדַּמֵּן as hitpael. If we're going to rely solely on external authority, I don't think we could go wrong with Even-Shoshan, as it's by probably the most respected lexicographer of Hebrew. (Though I should check to see if it defines הִתְפָּעֵל and נִתְפָּעֵל themselves, and if so what it has to say about them.)
 * Re: decent Rabbinic-Hebrew grammar: I believe Segal's A Grammar of Mishnaic Hebrew is well respected, though I can only hope the field has progressed a bit since 1927. :-P
 * —Ruakh 16:48, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Re Segal: No need for ILL, then! He writes (in part) about hitpael and nitpael: "There can be no doubt that they are really one and the same stem. The preformative הִ— was in the course of time changed in popular speech into נִ—, on the analogy of Niph`al. In the popular mind ה became associated with the causative idea, through the influence of hiph`il, hoph`al, and נִ— with the reflexive idea, through the influence of Niph`al. This change extended only to the perfect. In the participle the preformative מִ— has maintained itself  through its firmly established nominal force. Besides, it would be unreasonable to expect that an analogy-formation of this kind should be worked out to its full logical extreme.
 * "The preformative הִ— survives only in a few cases. The Nithpa`el agrees with the B[iblical ]H[ebrew] Hithpa`el both as regards its meaning and its formation."
 * Assuming Segal's right that the one binyan morphed into the other, perhaps any differences in meaning are completely analogous to differences in meaning between the identical word in Biblical and in Mishnaic Hebrew. The fact that he calls them by different names despite saying "they are really one and the same stem" is, I think, not to be relied upon by us: he also calls דִּקְדֵּק "pilpel", whereas I think you'll agree we should consider it piel. (Right?) Cf. Even-Shoshan, which you said lists only the seven standard binyanim.
 * Perhaps, then, we should do as follows: Have a full entry for whichever form is more common, and the other as an it. If both are equally common, have both. And if the less common one has different meanings than the other, also have both. Thoughts?
 * Re polel and hitpolel: I've always thought of these as odd mishkalim of piel and hitpael respectively, but, as you know, I'm no grammarian. Segal lists them as poel and nitpoel, and includes the example נִתְרוֹקְנָה. But see my comment immediately above concerning his use of more binyanim than we need. A Modern Hebrew grammar would be as useful for this as Segal is, since these forms are common in Modern Hebrew also (histovev, e.g.). —  msh210  ℠  18:29, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

 * Re: "Perhaps, then, we should do as follows: ": Sounds good to me. I've never added much Rabbinic Hebrew, and am not about to start (I could see myself adding nishtaná around Pesakh-time, but that's it), so I'm very happy to follow your lead on this.
 * Re: pilpel: Yes, I definitely agree.
 * Re: polel and hitpolel: Right, I also consider them to be hollow/biliteral forms of piel and hitpael; but Strong's Concordance, for example, uses the labels "polel" and "hitpolel" instead of "piel" and "hitpael" where relevant. But that nitrokná example confuses me — it seems like a five-letter root, ר־ו־ק־נ־ה, but I've never heard of such a thing (discounting a few modernisms like טִלְגְּרֵף).
 * —Ruakh 19:17, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Fine, I'll codify the decision on nitpael at WT:AHE; thanks for the replies. Re nitrokna, the root seems to be r-k-n, in past tense 3-f-s, à la הִסְתּוֹבְבָה. Its existence argues against the inclusion of a binyan hitpolel: it would seem to be either odd-mishkal hitpael or hitpoel. That was my point in mentioning it. —  msh210  ℠  19:22, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

 * But isn't histovev from the root ס־ב / ס־ו־ב? The paal is סב, not סבב … bah, this is confusing. —Ruakh 19:50, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * . —  msh210  ℠  19:53, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

 * Oh. Is there a difference between the two, or are they synonymous? —Ruakh 20:16, 7 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Beats me. —  msh210  ℠  20:29, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

 * You seem to have reached a decision (and it sounds like a good one), but for completeness' sake, I looked up the various things that came up:
 * Ben-Yehuda and Weinstein translate הִזְדָּרֵז as "to be alert, be zealous", and נִזְדָּרֵז as "to be alert, zealous, conscientious "; נִתְחַבֵּב as "to be liked, be loved", and הִתְחַבֵּב as "to be liked, loved".
 * Surprisingly, Even-Shoshan doesn't have an entry for נִתְפָעֵל:, which seems like an oversight: even though the dictionary doesn't consider it a binyan, surely its name is used by other people and therefore merits inclusion? It defines הִתְפָעֵל: as "[b'dikduk] shem habinyan mima'arekhet ha“binyanim hak'vedim” hamabia p'ula pasivit, ul'itim k'rovot p'ula khozeret (refleksivit)" (" The name of a binyan, one of the set of “heavy binyanim”, expressing a passive action, and often a reflexive action"). Which is interesting, because I always think of hitpael as primarily reflexive and only secondarily passive (like the reflexives of European languages).
 * I don't even know what to make of its coverage of histovev (etc.). It does list the root as סבב, with subentries for savav, nasav, sovev, sibev, sovav/subav, histovev, histabev, hesev, hisbiv, and husav (listing them as pa'al, nif'al, pi'el-1, pi'el-2, pu'al, hitpa'el-1, hitpa'el-2, hif'il-1, hif'il-2, and huf'al, respectively). Sav it gives only as an adjective+noun (related to saba, savta), so I guess I misunderstood that term. Though I note that the two bets do merge (haplologize?) in some of the sub-entries, so I wasn't just nuts.
 * —Ruakh 02:34, 8 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks so much: yes, I was hoping for that info. —  msh210  ℠  16:59, 8 July 2009 (UTC)

Invitation to visit
Progress on Simple English Wikt is quite slow at the moment, and I was wondering if you and a few other thoughtful editors here would consider visiting for a few weeks. I know there's tons of stuff to do here, but it would be nice to have some interesting company at home for a spell.--Brett 01:46, 7 July 2009 (UTC)

Hebrew
I prefer to answer you here. I don't speak any Hebrew, but I was convinced that modern Hebrew was Ancient Hebrew (with additional words, of course). It was a real surprise to me when somebody, in fr.wiktionary, began to create entries in Ancient Hebrew, and insisted that they should be under Ancient Hebrew. But there was a separate ISO code, and he used it. His work brought us almost 3000 new entries we might have lost by prohibiting Ancient Hebrew as a header. We should encourage contributions, not reserve them to those with some particular linguistic opinion, whatever this opinion. This is neutrality. Work and let work... Lmaltier 20:58, 10 July 2009 (UTC)

 * (Sorry, this reply is kind of long … I won't be offended if you don't actually read all of it, but since you brought this to my talk-page, I feel like I should fully explain myself.)

 * I think you and I define "neutrality" very differently. The "work and let work" ideal is not a bad one (and is also very wiki-ish), but is nothing like how I define NPOV — and nothing like how the English Wikipedia defines it, either, for that matter. You seem to define "NPOV" as "the cabal has no POV", but I define it as "our content has a neutral POV".

 * We never had a specific vote here to ban Ancient Hebrew. The Hebrew contributors discussed it, and while no one seemed to feel very strongly about it, we ended up deciding it was probably best to treat it under Hebrew, and everyone since has agreed to that. There had previously been one contributor ( -slash- ) who added entries under the header "Biblical Hebrew", but since that contributor was long gone by this point, and anyway his/her entries were mostly unintelligible, we felt no compunctions converting those entries to "Hebrew".

 * For the record, I don't think SIL was wrong to distinguish "Hebrew" from "Ancient Hebrew". I mean, on the face of it, it's a silly distinction — SIL acknowledges that there's a lot of variety within what they call "Hebrew", and a lot of variety within what they call "Ancient Hebrew", and linguistically speaking, there's absolutely no dividing line. Heck, Modern Israeli Hebrew has actually revived some features of Biblical Hebrew that were absent in more recent forms of Ancient Hebrew. (Even non-linguistically speaking, there's no dividing line, since SIL doesn't give an explicit date, or other criterion, for when one ends and the other begins.) But for what SIL does, the distinction is pretty convenient; the great majority of Hebrew you'll find on the Web is clearly in the "Hebrew" category, and of the rest, the great majority is clearly in the "Ancient Hebrew" category, and I do think it's useful to distinguish those when you're talking about actual text. (Though the Hebrew Wikisource apparently disagrees with me: it includes both, without the least nod to SIL.) But our focus is individual words, not full texts, so for our purposes, the logic of uniting them seemed to outweigh the logic of dividing them.

 * If a knowledgeable contributor came in, wanting to add Hebrew entries under the header "Ancient Hebrew", and was otherwise willing to adopt Wiktionary norms (CFI, ELE, etc.), I for one would be quite happy to re-discuss it with him/her, and maybe we'd change our minds. I don't see that decision as set in stone. And I don't like that the Serbo-Croatian decision has come to a vote, because I don't think that decision should be set in stone, either, and votes tend to have a stony effect. But since it has come to a vote, the current contributors have my full support in their reasonable-sounding decision (even if one of those contributors is being a total jerk).

 * —Ruakh 00:03, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

 * I share your understanding of NPOV. But NPOV also implies that we should not make a choice between different opinions in issues generally viewed as very controversial, whether political, scientific or linguistic (I would be surprised if you disagree). Wikipedia never takes such positions. There is a controversy about some languages, that's a fact. And I don't want the project to be closed. Lmaltier 06:57, 11 July 2009 (UTC)

 * I'll grant that our decision to treat all these words under "Serbo-Croatian" is undoubtedly based mostly on the politically controversial view that these are all one language. However, for what it's worth, I'm not sure that our decision to treat all these words under "Serbo-Croatian" is itself actually taking said view. Basically, we're taking the view that for our purposes, it works best to treat these all under one language header and translation label. It's not exactly ideal from an NPOV standpoint, but I don't see it as the end of the world. Now, if we start actually defining Serbian: (etc.) to match that decision, then we'll have a serious POV problem. (The term "Serbo-Croatian" has such POV overtones that it might have been better to invent our own language header, such as "Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian", but the relevant contributors chose "Serbo-Croatian", and I've no wish to interfere.) —Ruakh 13:36, 11 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Treating the words under Serbo-Croatian is not really taking this view, you're right. But prohibiting sections with separate Serbian... headers is taking this view. This is my only concern. Please, don't reply (or not here), it was not my intention to create yet another discussion on this issue. Lmaltier 17:53, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

Xyzy and HTML XML etc
Cool, thanks! I was not looking forward to doing due diligence on the specs ;-) Robert Ullmann 02:01, 12 July 2009 (UTC)

fmt=?
tx!--史凡/ʂɚ˨˩fan˧˥/shi3fan2 (歡迎光臨/Welcome! 請也用/Please also use skype: sven0921為我/since I suffer RSI!) 14:01, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

 * "Format". It's like "clean up", but more basic (clean-up requires thinking about how things should be presented, whereas formatting just takes mindless application of the policies and guidelines). —Ruakh 14:06, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

ic-tx!:)--史凡/ʂɚ˨˩fan˧˥/shi3fan2 (歡迎光臨/Welcome! 請也用/Please also use skype: sven0921為我/since I suffer RSI!) 14:44, 14 July 2009 (UTC)

one-finger salute
Thanks for fixing it. I considering asking you, but someone else might have figured it out. I was hoping there was a gimmick. So I just have to rerun the search for the message number. DCDuring TALK 21:00, 25 July 2009 (UTC)

 * No prob. The major issue was that MediaWiki interprets <tt>"</tt> as ending the URL: [http://example.com/"foo"] is equivalent to [http://example.com/ "foo"] "foo", not to [http://example.com/%22foo%22] . While I was at it, I changed it to link to the individual message. When you're looking at a thread, each message has a "More options" link to the left of the date. One of the options is an "Individual message" link — which for some reason drops the search query, so you have to manually add that. (Now that I write it out, it sounds like a crazy amount of work, but in fact I do it so automatically now that I didn't even consciously realize how many steps were involved.) —Ruakh 22:12, 25 July 2009 (UTC)
 * Any reasonable workaround will do. Thanks. DCDuring TALK 00:12, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

Rostov-na-Donu and Rostov-on-Don
Thank you for nothing. Do you think that a million city and an administrative centre in Russia doesn't have a place in Wiktionary? Anatoli 23:38, 26 July 2009 (UTC)

 * Hi, thanks for your comment.
 * The problem is, no one demonstrated that the terms and  meet our criteria for inclusion. They denote a large and important city — a city which merits (and has) a good article on the English Wikipedia — but that does not mean that the terms themselves merit dictionary entries. For comparison, New York County (a.k.a. Manhattan) is the densest county in the U.S., with 1.6 million people, a major financial district, and a world-famous skyline; but the term  does not have, and should not have AFAICT, any entry in Wiktionary.
 * (I should say that I don't really like our current "attributive use" criterion; I think it's poorly thought-out, and we do a poor job enforcing it, and the only reason it's still in effect is that it happened to be in WT:CFI when that document magically became "policy". We as a community are really rather dysfunctional, but if we were at all capable of formulating any sort of consensus about anything, I believe this policy would be changed in a heartbeat. But even if we did change this policy, I hope we wouldn't change it to something that depended only on the referent's importance. Any important city will have a great number of names and nicknames, some of which will be very minor names that aren't worth including. For example, I live in a fairly major U.S. city called "Cleveland", whose residents sometimes jokingly call it "C-Town"; but the importance of my city doesn't necessarily mean that "C-Town" belongs in a dictionary. By contrast, I grew up in a rather small town, called "Kalamazoo", with only about 80,000 municipal residents and 325,000 metropolitan ones, but the name "Kalamazoo" is probably much more significant than the city's importance would suggest, because it's, and appears in various prominent bits of poetry for children. We might well want to include "Kalamazoo", while excluding, for whatever reason, names of some larger cities. It all depends on the criterion we come up with.)
 * Lastly, note that this RFV resolution is not final; you are still welcome to provide durably archived citations for either or both of these terms, demonstrating that they're in attributive use. (Please use Citations:Rostov-na-Donu and Citations:Rostov-on-Don for this.) Once you've done so, let me (or another administrator) know, and I (or (s)he) will restore the entries for you.
 * Thanks again, and I'm sorry if this whole experience has been frustrating for you. Please try not to take it personally.
 * —Ruakh 01:29, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

 * Sorry for being rude. Yes, I am very frustrated. I haven't written or supported the CFI and the rule is not really followed in Wiktionary. Any large dictionary includes proper names, especially if they are of large city names. You can't expect attributive usage for names in non-English speaking countries, if they haven't affected English speakers. Your examples are not convincing, since they show a combination: New York County and a non-standard term: C-Town, which may not be known outside Cleveland. I don't see any problem with inclusion of these names if they are often used and you can provide a reliable reference. Rostov-na-Donu is a full name as "Rostov" (without the suffix) is a name of another city. Anatoli 04:14, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

imo geonames need inclusion alredy4ipa![btw ruak-ilike urking-J!:p--史凡/Sven - Pl also let me use voice-MSN/skype as I suffer RSI and so cannot type very well! 06:18, 27 July 2009 (UTC)

birther
OK, this word appears in Wikipedia as well as being heavily used in the news. What more do you want?

 * See Criteria for inclusion. —Ruakh 20:10, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

 * Update: I've undeleted it. I don't think it meets our criteria yet (it's too young), but it may. See Requests for verification. Thanks for the note. —Ruakh 23:11, 28 July 2009 (UTC)

= August 2009 =

Index:Hebrew
Hi, I've just re-run the Hebrew index, having added support for and some forms of = parameters in template calls (there are cases that it just won't spot, but hopefully no-one uses them either). There seem to be problems with only four Latin pages, text is translated as he:sms, perpetual as he:Tmidi, ibex as he:yael nuby and Z"l with an . If there is more to fix, let me know. Conrad.Irwin 01:41, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

 * Great, thanks a bunch! :-D  —Ruakh 02:22, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

minor repair to
Hello Ruakh -- Earlier today I was editing lay down the law and added the 1828 quotation from Walter Scott and the 1908 quotation from Upton Sinclair. I used the template because other editors had already been using that template on that page. And I got some funny business. In each case, the chapter came out listing before the title of the book. Visviva created this template, and a number of others, but he hasn't been around since April. I lack the skills to edit the code in the template, but I bet you could fix it in a jiffy since you are one of the rare editors who is both a talented lexicographer and a skilled programmer. Could you fix that template so that the chapter lists after the title (and volume number, if given) but before the page number? (I also think that the word "chapter" should begin with a lowercase "c", but I guess that's more a matter of personal preference.) (PS -- By way of background, for public domain classics, various versions of which are all over the web, I believe it makes more sense to provide a chapter number rather than a linked page number.) Here's hoping you can help with this. Thanks for all your services, past and future. -- WikiPedant 05:01, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

 * It's not a simple matter as that. The template  calls, which has the "chapter" parameter in that position because it is designed to quote an authored chapter within an edited book.  To allow a general book to cite chapter in the way you intend might require a separate parameter with a different name. --EncycloPetey 05:07, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

 * Which reminds me why I usually avoid the templates. ...[sigh]... -- WikiPedant 05:12, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

 * Me, too — but in this case, Visviva has left a comment on the talk-page that explains what to do:
 * For chapter numbers, you can use <tt>section=Chapter 4</tt>, which I'll grant you is a bit backwards.
 * I've edited [[lay down the law]] accordingly. :-)
 * —Ruakh 14:38, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

 * Well, well, I should have dug a little deeper. I'm still pretty wary of these templates, though. Thanks -- WikiPedant 15:15, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

 * Word. I'm generally very pro-template, but these templates somehow just make things more complicated. —Ruakh 15:27, 4 August 2009 (UTC)

comment on the SC vote
Now that I see where this is going, I very much regret your decision of prolonging the vote for a week. You should've simply frozen or failed it, or leat Atelaes close it (I think he mentioned the intention of doing so in a manner that would "satisfy everyone"). Things could get very ugly, not only because of these dirty political labels such as "Yugo-chauvinist": That IP address whose comments you restored said "Ivan, I'm still digging on who you are, and after I found out we'll have a little chat on this piece of s*** you've put to vote" ^_^ Not that I'm afraid or sth...--Ivan Štambuk 02:06, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

 * Ah, sorry. I would have been happy to let Atelaes close it, if I'd known. (And thanks for the translation.) —Ruakh 02:16, 8 August 2009 (UTC)

Deleted revision
I found that http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy is violated, steward agreed with me and removed private data. SpeedyGonsales 17:57, 10 August 2009 (UTC)

hanzi
Ruakh, why did you flag hanzi? Anatoli 01:39, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

 * Two reasons. Firstly, a section was added by an editor who was clearly unfamiliar with our formatting conventions, and since I don't know Chinese, I wasn't sure if I fixed it right. Actually, now that I think about it, I'm pretty sure I fixed it wrong: I moved the pronunciation section up, but I'm guessing that the ""-s in the IPA indicate the tones, and if I'm interpreting the pinyin right, the noun and the proper-noun have different tones on their second syllables, so that needs to be fixed somehow. Secondly, I wasn't sure if that section should even be there; do we include non-tone-marked romanizations? If so, what are the criteria? I was hoping that an editor more familiar with our handling of Chinese would be able to take care of that. BTW, in the future, you don't really need to ask. People flag things because they're not sure of them. If you take a look, and everything looks good, you can just de-tag them. :-) —Ruakh 01:47, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

 * OK, I changed the pronunciation, that is, I added the toneless pronunciation and removed the flag. Anatoli 02:17, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

 * Great, thank you! :-D  —Ruakh 02:18, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

 * EDIT conflict, added rather than changing. I followed 东西 as an example, which has dual pronunciation. As for just removing flags when thinking it's right, I once tried to remove flags from Rostov-na-Donu and you know what happened. ;) Anatoli 02:23, 26 August 2009 (UTC)

Template:grc-cite
Thanks for fixing this. It works exactly as it should now. -Atelaes λάλει ἐμοί 13:08, 27 August 2009 (UTC)

WT:VOTE
Sorry about that, nothing personal. Mglovesfun (talk) 19:21, 29 August 2009 (UTC)

 * No need to apologize. I feel no qualms about supporting early, as long as I expect to be on-wiki when the vote for-real starts so I can change my vote if the vote changes in a way I don't like; but I know some people feel differently. I can always restore my vote once it starts. —Ruakh 03:09, 30 August 2009 (UTC)

= September 2009 =

closing a vote
Ruakh, could you please rectify Msh210's misleading edit which does not take into account the promulgated rules on closing this vote. The consensus is glaring - 24 for imposing the threshold against 6, in other words, 80% support. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 10:49, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

 * I did not promulgate rules; rather, I stated how I thought things should work. We didn't actually change the vote to work that way. You may notice that I voted for both options. And I don't think msh210's edit was "misleading"; it was applying the stated voting criterion. Finally, I'll note that it wasn't "24 for imposing the threshold", since 4 voters supported both, and 1 of the first-option-only voters voted after the decision, so it was actually only 19, partly divided between the two options.
 * Nonetheless, I've replied. I suggest you take this time to add your vote to option #2.
 * —Ruakh 11:41, 3 September 2009 (UTC)
 * But if the votes cast for both options by a single person are counted only once, then what is the point for me in voting for the second option? Nevertheless, I shall do so. The uſer hight Bogorm converſation 15:01, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

-latry related terms
Are you sure you meant to add -lator? The usual form seems to be ; e.g.,. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 13:54, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

 * Interesting. I spell it, and says I'm not alone (though  does seem to have been more common historically). —Ruakh 15:19, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

 * Hmm. It looks like the history of this word is far form straight-forward. I’ve sent you a screen-capture of the OED’s etymology sections for and ; important, I think, is the development of  in ecclesiastical Latin and the syncopic forms (omitting undefined:) early in the development of the Romance languages. It does seem that the  and  forms are, etymologically speaking, æqually valid; e.g., nota that whilst the OED only lists,  sees some, albeit little, use. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 20:41, 3 September 2009 (UTC)

Ruben
Anon added an etymology from Hebrew for several of the languages listed- could you look at this? Nadando 17:19, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

 * Done, thanks. —Ruakh 17:33, 10 September 2009 (UTC)

Actarus
Hello, Ruakh! Thanks a lot for your welcome. --Actarus (Prince d'Euphor) 14:09, 12 September 2009 (UTC)

Sysops deleted
How do admins do that explanation of deletion thing? It doesn't seem to be in the dropdown menu. Anyway, the old title looked a bit like a MediaWiki relict, hence I tried to make something that looked like real English. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:18, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

 * They use the "Replace text in deletion log comment" preference at Preferences. (Technical notes: It requires JavaScript, and is tied to your current computer and browser, rather than to your account.) Personally, I don't use it, because it always replaces the default deletion summary, and I don't always want that. So, I prefer to manually clear out that field when necessary. (Though if it always replaced the default summary except in cases of redirects, I might use that, since aside from that one case, the default deletion summary seems like a GFDL violation. It probably falls under "fair use", since it's so brief, but it just doesn't seem worth it.) —Ruakh 14:46, 22 September 2009 (UTC)

secretes
Hi, Regarding your edit ("Verb: rm RFC -- this applies to *all* of secrete's verb senses") are you sure that the quote also illustrates the physiological sense of secrete (i.e. the usually involuntary biological process whereby fluids are produced and emited)?--Tyranny Sue 14:42, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

 * No — in fact, I'm sure that it doesn't — but I don't see what that has to do with anything. We have exactly one definition for "secretes", and the quotation illustrates it. We don't need multiple definitions for "secretes". So, no cleanup is necessary. Honestly, the quotation is pointless — it's a regular verb, there's no oddness that needs to be pointed out or elucidated, so we don't need separate quotations for its inflected forms, and the quotation should just be at [[secrete]] — but I've no interest in removing it. —Ruakh 15:06, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

 * I just want to get clear - it sounds like you're changing your mind about the reason you initially gave for reverting my RFC?
 * I think clarifying the different pronunciations & usages of the heteronyms (especially given the situation with the back-formation) is important, and the quotations are very much needed.
 * Our definition of 'secretes' relies on our definitions - two quite different meanings - of 'secrete', so I don't know what you mean about having "exactly one definition". (And when you say we don't need multiple definitions for "secretes" do you mean quotations?)
 * Anyhow, I really just wanted to understand about your revision summary/explanation.--Tyranny Sue 15:39, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

 * No, I'm not changing my mind, sorry. (Not to say that I won't change my mind, just that I haven't, and am not in the process of doing so.)
 * The heteronyms don't have different pronunciations — "secretes" as in "secret" is pronounced the same as "secretes" as in "secretion" — and the different usages of "secretes" are exactly the same as those of "secrete", so [[secrete]] is the right place for that information.
 * We have exactly one definition of "secretes", because our definition of it has nothing to do with its meaning. When I say that we don't need multiple definitions for it, I mean exactly that. (I certainly wouldn't say that we don't need multiple quotations for it, because I happen to think we don't need any quotations for it — or rather, I think that any quotations for it should be at [[secrete]] or [[Citations:secrete]] rather than at [[secretes]].)
 * Do you understand about my revision summary/explanation now?
 * —Ruakh 17:21, 25 September 2009 (UTC)

Talk:onomatopoeia
What did you mean by this ? That doesn’t look like an RfV discussion, and the text lacks or. It’s been modified since then, which is why I ask. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 19:38, 28 September 2009 (UTC)

 * By "RFV discussion" is meant "a discussion at WT:RFV". If by "doesn't look like an RfV discussion" you mean, "looks like an inappropriate discussion for WT:RFV", then I agree, but obviously the original anon was less familiar with Wiktionary practices than we are. Since neither nor  was appropriate (and I hadn't yet created ), I just did a basic cut-and-paste move. —Ruakh 05:47, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

 * IC; that makes sense. I’ve fixed it now. Thanks. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 06:00, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

 * Looks good, thanks. :-)  —Ruakh 06:10, 29 September 2009 (UTC)

= October 2009 =

User:Ruakh/quotations
Would you be OK with having this moved/copied to template space (tagged as experimental)? -- Visviva 07:17, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

 * Sure, but if you do, please strip out all the options: for example, instead of a  option, there should either always be a border, or never be a border. (Take your pick.) The options were only there for demonstration purposes. (  can be kept, though, if you intend for these to be used in ====Quotations==== sections as well. That's up to you.) —Ruakh 15:15, 2 October 2009 (UTC)

"tough economic times|climate"
What's your take on tough economic times (or climate)? — msh210 ℠ 18:13, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Is economic an adverb? (Weird, if so.)
 * Or is tough economic an adjective? (That seems most likely to me, but then is it inclusible here as an entry?)
 * Or is this is just some standard feature of English: that two adjectives can follow one another to mean "such that the [noun of the second adj.] is [first adj.]"? (I don't think so. Certainly I can't think of many such phrases without hyphens. With hyphens, yes, of course: red-painted house. But that's different.)
 * P.S.: I've responded belatedly to your request at my talkpage on another topic. — msh210 ℠

 * That's a really interesting question. Looking at and, I'd say that tough is an adjective modifying "economic times|climate"; I'd also say, given the lack of plausible alternatives, that economic is an adjective modifying "times|climate". But it doesn't seem to be a predicating adjective: neither "times|climate that are economic" nor "times|climate, which are economic" makes much sense to me. Economic feels almost like an attributive form of the noun economy: the sense is  . —Ruakh 19:04, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Reasonable. Thanks for your (as usual insightful) input. — msh210 ℠ 15:34, 8 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Perhaps good medical condition and good working order are similar. — msh210 ℠ 16:26, 13 October 2009 (UTC)

 * Yes, I think you're right. And now I see what you meant with your suggestion that economic might be an adverb; "these are tough economic times" means the same as "these are tough times, economically [speaking]", just as "he's in good medical condition" means the same as "he's in good condition, medically [speaking]". That makes more sense than my "attributive noun" thing. But in both cases, I'm pretty sure that it's grammatically an adjective, even if semantically or pragmatically it behaves like something else. —Ruakh 17:24, 13 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Yeah (to your last point), but what I meant was more like that the adverb-like economic was attached to tough: "{tough economically} times". But no matter. — msh210 ℠ 18:07, 19 October 2009 (UTC)

Testing Opera's non-breaking space behavior.
The output is [33][160][33]. Just to clarify, that's Opera 9.64 on Windows XP, but no doubt it's the same everywhere. Equinox ◑ 04:09, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

theater/homonyms
Funny: I thought that page had been newly created at the point when I deleted it. Certainly didn't notice 50 revisions. Equinox ◑ 16:02, 22 October 2009 (UTC)

(And we do need to fix that thing, if only because one of the senses was clearly added by an editor who only intended to add it to [[theatre]], but was led astray by the edit-link.) —Ruakh 06:11, 25 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Ah, O.K. That makes sense, then. Thanks for letting me know. :-)

Replied at WOTD Nominations
My apologies for the long delay in response - I got distracted. - Amgine/talk 05:43, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

 * No worries. Thanks for the notice; I've replied there. —Ruakh 06:42, 25 October 2009 (UTC)

Stop errasing
Yahoud ruakh stop removing word please like נוֹגַה.

Hebrew translations
Hi Ruakh,

I wonder if it's possible to add a flag "missing transliteration/pronunciation" (or similar) for Hebrew entries. Many Hebrew entries/translations miss pronunciation info. E.g., I was looking at ore, saw a blue link at עפרה, was hoping to be able to see how it's pronounced. Sorry, I can't read Hebrew, even fully vowelled. Just didn't find time to learn yet another script. Do you see any value in this for users? --Anatoli 21:46, 29 October 2009 (UTC)

 * Hi Anatoli,
 * We do have Category:Entries missing romanizations of Hebrew, and an entry with, , or will automatically get added to that category if a transliteration isn't provided. However, I'm not sure if anyone is watching that category. I hadn't looked at it in months, and I see it's now got more than 200 entries … :-/
 * —Ruakh 01:55, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

 * I didn't phrase my question properly. Perhaps this entry - עפרה didn't follow that syntax. Thanks for fixing! --Anatoli 03:38, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

No usable content given
I'm not sure that deleting this was the best move as that was the only evidence of User:Mglovesfun's possible wonderfoolery. (See Requests_for_deletion) --Yair rand 15:46, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

 * Would someone care to create an entry at the boy who cried WonderFool? — <font face="Lucida console">[ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 16:12, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

 * The evidence remains in the deleted history. (Granted, only admins can see the deleted history, but still, it's not as though the deletion turns this into a "he-said-she-said" thing.) —Ruakh 16:36, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
 * Admins can see the deleted history? (without having to undelete the page or go through any other process?) Okay, no problem then. BTW, I wasn't the one to originally suggest wonderfoolery, it was a (formerly blocked) IP on the RFD page. --Yair rand 16:45, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

 * Yes; we can see the equivalent of <tt>action=history</tt>, and for any revision listed there, we can see both the wikitext and a preview. (And it seems to be kept indefinitely; the deletion logs go back to December of '04, and I can see the deleted revisions from then. Though oddly, the very first deletion-log entry is a restoration of an entry that doesn't seem previously to have been deleted.) —Ruakh 16:54, 30 October 2009 (UTC)
 * The deletion log anyone can see IIRC: special:log/delete. — msh210 ℠

 * Yes. I assume that's how Yair knew I'd deleted the entry. (When you visit a deleted entry, it shows the relevant entries from the deletion log.) What I'm saying is, I can see the actual deleted revisions going back all the way to the beginning of the deletion logs in December '04. —Ruakh 18:59, 30 October 2009 (UTC)

Hebrew/Yiddish root of caraïte
fr:caraïte seems to suggest it's seems sort of Hebr origin. The pronunciation is roughly /kar.ait/ if that helps. Mglovesfun (talk) 16:20, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

 * Yes, it's from Medieval and Modern Hebrew, with French . (The French is three syllables, BTW: . Hence the dieresis on the <i>.) —Ruakh 16:57, 31 October 2009 (UTC)
 * What's the English, if there is any? Mglovesfun (talk) 16:59, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

 * Karaite. —Ruakh 17:11, 31 October 2009 (UTC)

= November 2009 =

AWB Edit rate question
In your opinion, should I go all out and make as many of the changes as I need to as fast as possible to minimize flooding to the Recent Changes, or should I limit the number of edits I make a minute down to like 5-10 a minute? Which do you think is a good idea? <b style="color:#000">Ra</b><b style="color:#696969">z</b><b style="color:#808080">or</b><b style="color:#696969">fl</b><b style="color:#808080">ame</b> 23:28, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
 * If I may butt in, it might be more helpful to go slower so that you do not flood Recent Changes. L☺g☺maniac chat? 23:35, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Almost done now, so it won't be much longer. <b style="color:#000">Ra</b><b style="color:#696969">z</b><b style="color:#808080">or</b><b style="color:#696969">fl</b><b style="color:#808080">ame</b> 23:41, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

 * Yo, read the docs on the AWB page. It says not to edit too fast. Equinox ◑ 23:43, 5 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Sorry. I'm done now, so it shouldn't be a big deal. <b style="color:#000">Ra</b><b style="color:#696969">z</b><b style="color:#808080">or</b><b style="color:#696969">fl</b><b style="color:#808080">ame</b> 23:43, 5 November 2009 (UTC)

I would like to regain access to AWB. I will not use it for anything big without seeking community approval first. I've learned my lesson and am now wanting to be trusted to use AWB again. I promise to ask the community first before I start making anything that I think would impact the community. <b style="color:#000">Ra</b><b style="color:#696969">z</b><b style="color:#808080">or</b><b style="color:#696969">fl</b><b style="color:#808080">ame</b> 20:32, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

 * See also once bitten, twice shy. —Ruakh 22:25, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * That is exactly why I'm going to be more careful in the future. Thanks, <b style="color:#000">Ra</b><b style="color:#696969">z</b><b style="color:#808080">or</b><b style="color:#696969">fl</b><b style="color:#808080">ame</b> 23:18, 9 November 2009 (UTC)

 * Me, too. Thanks, —Ruakh 23:29, 9 November 2009 (UTC)
 * So I take it this means a no, then? <b style="color:#000">Ra</b><b style="color:#696969">z</b><b style="color:#808080">or</b><b style="color:#696969">fl</b><b style="color:#808080">ame</b> 01:43, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

 * This means a "not by me unilaterally". —Ruakh 02:37, 10 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Does this mean that I need to start another discussion at the Beer parlour? <b style="color:#000">Ra</b><b style="color:#696969">z</b><b style="color:#808080">or</b><b style="color:#696969">fl</b><b style="color:#808080">ame</b> 04:10, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

 * I don't know. —Ruakh 04:13, 10 November 2009 (UTC)

Non-babel userboxes
Why can't someone use non-babel userboxes in their own userspace? It isn't hurting anyone to have it there. Why such strict rules about them here? <b style="color:#000">Ra</b><b style="color:#696969">z</b><b style="color:#808080">or</b><b style="color:#696969">fl</b><b style="color:#808080">ame</b> 20:26, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

 * No clue, but see Votes/pl-2007-08/Babel userboxes and Beer parlour archive/2007/July. But really, yours doesn't seem harmful to me … if you restore it, I won't revert you. —Ruakh 20:35, 12 November 2009 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the links to those archives. I've decided to bring it up at the BP to make sure that I can use it first before I re-add it to my userpage.  Cheers, <b style="color:#000">Ra</b><b style="color:#696969">z</b><b style="color:#808080">or</b><b style="color:#696969">fl</b><b style="color:#808080">ame</b> 20:54, 12 November 2009 (UTC)

Main Page
I don't see how "from over 350 languages" conflicts with the fact we have 364 languages (which is more than 350, hence the round-up). -- Prince Kassad 16:07, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

 * Oh! Sorry. Your edit summary was wrong, then; see round up. I'll re-revert. —Ruakh 16:15, 16 November 2009 (UTC)

I was in a bad mood in early october...
...and I apologise for that. It wasn't the good place to write that. No place was good to write that. It wasn't a good idea to write it at all. True. I apologise.

I just wanted to let you know that your translation of my bullshit was very good. Very politically correct, but very clever : I recognise myself in your translation : bravo !

Regards. :)) --Szyx 18:41, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

 * But why are you apologizing to me? I don't think that I'm in a position to accept your apology, since your comment was not directed at me, and did not affect me more than anyone else here. I'm sorry. :-/  —Ruakh 22:05, 19 November 2009 (UTC)

African American Vernacular English
Sorry about the sudden move, but I'm having trouble getting my articles in the right categories. Is it possible to reorganize? Right now it looks like this:

Regional English North American English American English African American Vernacular English US Slang

Can it be reorganized like this instead?

Regional English North American English American English US Slang African American Vernacular English

Heyzeuss 14:32, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

 * AAVE is not slang, and Category:US slang is already in Category:American English; so it doesn't seem like any change is needed. (Am I missing something?) —Ruakh 14:43, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Chinese snooker
You're welcome. I forgot about having moved it; I probably just objected to a lower-cased chinese but was about to go to bed. It does bother me that, when the CFI-compliant citations require Usenet, capitalisation becomes a bit of a patchwork. I'm sure if the posters were asked to write the same posts in a formal context, they would capitalise. Equinox ◑ 22:59, 20 November 2009 (UTC)

Subera
Subêra is a real city in Mozambique; why does it not pass WT:CFI? Warmest Regards, :)--Thecurran 04:23, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

 * See Criteria for inclusion. —Ruakh 04:43, 21 November 2009 (UTC)

coup de maitre
Thanks for the enormous amount of work you're doing on RFV. Does the entry above pass? I say logically yes. It appears more often in dictionaries than in print, but I've added 4 citations. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:35, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

 * Yup. Thanks! —Ruakh 14:40, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

gẃraidd
Hi Ruakh. I replied on my talk page. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 18:48, 23 November 2009 (UTC)

"tosh"
See here: http://books.google.com/books?id=5blNPE6gQWQC&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_navlinks_s#v=onepage&q=semidiameters%20of%20the%20annual%20orb&f=false

Page 23

I said it was archaic, this book was published in 1702.

76.66.197.2 07:24, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

 * My apologies. "Semidiameter of the annual orb" did not get a single hit on Google, Google Books, or Google News Archive. I did not think to try "Semidiameters of the annual orb". My mistake. —Ruakh 14:02, 27 November 2009 (UTC)

=December 2009=

RFV archiving
Hello, I have seen you archiving RFV discussions to the entries' talk pages a lot and was wondering how exactly that is to be gone about. That is such a huge page and I'd like to know how to help reduce it some. :) Regards, L☺g☺maniac chat? 01:57, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

 * Hi Logomaniac,
 * Thanks for your interest.
 * I wouldn't recommend jumping right in with archiving; you should probably start by getting involved with the page, citing words, seeing how RFV works, and so on. It's a lot less open-ended than, say, RFD, but it's far more complex than I can describe in a single comment.
 * —Ruakh 02:59, 1 December 2009 (UTC)

and
Hi Ruakh. Regarding this revision of yours : note that redirects to, so your revision makes no difference. (I bring this to your attention so as to save you from unnecessary work in future.) <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 22:25, 2 December 2009 (UTC)

 * Interesting, thanks for the information. Does that mean that there are bots that convert improper uses of to, , , etc.? —Ruakh 01:11, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

 * I’ve seen bots correct after a numbering octothorpe (#) to, but never  to  because I’ve only ever seen  used in <tt>Pronunciation</tt> sections. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 06:42, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

 * I mean to,  to ,  to , etc. —Ruakh 14:27, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

 * Yeah, I think all those changes happen. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 23:41, 3 December 2009 (UTC)

Template:fr-conj
I notice that Template:fr-conj is protected. I would like to request a couple of edits (I would put the request on the talk page, but as it doesn't exist, it won't be watched).
 * The statement under Compound gerundive that says "Use the gerund of avoir or être followed by the past participle" is really quite superfluous: why don't we just put those verb forms in? It could just as easily be replaced by
 * There is a parameter passed to, which reads "Use the appropriate tense of  followed by the past participle". This text does not appear on the output, and so should be removed.

Also, I do want to ask, why do we put the message saying "Use the ... tense of followed by the past participle", rather than printing the actual forms? I notice that other languages do the same, so I am not going to suggest the change. But I am interested to know why. Thanks, This, that and the other 08:54, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

 * Hi This — may I call you This? — please raise this at Wiktionary talk:About French. I think the current approach is horrible; it actually draws more attention to these forms than to the forms the reader is probably looking for, and I think it's really weird-looking to give instructions ("use such-and-such") in a conjugation table. We should either include these forms (as you suggest) or omit them completely. But I don't want to make that change without giving people the opportunity to comment first. —Ruakh 14:19, 8 December 2009 (UTC)

 * See Wiktionary_talk:About_French. I didn't mention the removal of the unused text there; that is just standard uncontroversial maintenance. (By the way, I like "This". I get a lot of nicknames; I now regret choosing such a long username.) This, that and the other (talk) 09:52, 9 December 2009 (UTC)

re Use vs. mention
Hey, no worries, thanks for the helpful pointers! Cirt (talk) 06:59, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Ruakh, I made some fixes per your friendly suggestions. Better? Cirt (talk) 07:27, 13 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Great! Thanks again for the help, Cirt (talk) 14:47, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

Query
Sorry to trouble you again, but could I ask for you to just give a quick glance over some of my work and quality improvement efforts so far in the entries listed at User:Cirt/Contributions, and let me know how I am doing? Thank you very much, Cirt (talk) 19:30, 13 December 2009 (UTC)

 * I think you're doing well; however, several of those entries contain quotations that merely mention the headword, rather than actually using them (for example, the first and third quotations at Streisand effect, and almost all the quotations at Closetgate). There are also some quotations that don't contain the headword at all, even as a mention (for example, the second quotation at Alford plea and the second quotation at sporgery), and one quotation that's not even in English (the 2008 quotation at Closetgate). But don't worry, you'll get the hang of it. —Ruakh 03:29, 14 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Okay thank you - I will keep reading and lurking and poking around. ;) Cirt (talk) 04:02, 14 December 2009 (UTC)

Phrasebook
Do you know what the proper format of Hebrew phrasebook entries is? I don't see any way to have it be in the right font. --Yair rand 17:40, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

 * I just went through and formatted the entries in Category:Hebrew phrasebook; I'm not sure if that's quite the right format (I've never dealt with phrasebook entries before), but it should work. —Ruakh 18:36, 16 December 2009 (UTC)

Mathematical-notation question
Hi Ruakh. You know about mathematical notation, right? Which symbols are being used here (between the two highlightings) ? I guess “𝓢𝓤”, but I don’t feel at all confident in that, especially not about the “𝓢”; can you offer any help on this one? <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 21:37, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

 * Quite possibly; I wouldn't have guessed that they were bold (that is, I'd have guessed 𝒮 and 𝒰 instead of 𝓢 and 𝓤), but I don't have any real basis for that. Either way, as you surmise, they're definitely some sort of mathematical script/calligraphic form of SU. —Ruakh 22:13, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

 * OK, I’ll go with the unemboldened forms, if that’s what you reckon. Thanks. <font style="color:darkred">†  ﴾(u):Raifʻhār (t):Doremítzwr﴿ 22:35, 17 December 2009 (UTC)

stabil
Just curious: Why'd you move this, on failure, from RFV to RFD instead of deleting it? — msh210 ℠ 01:58, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

 * It was added, and defended, by a reliable native speaker, who attested to its commonness in two different regions he'd lived in, and who was able to find several uses online. The fact that he couldn't find durably archived uses probably says more about the amount of durably archived Czech text that's indexed online than about the validity of this word. (Put another way: I try to only take actions that improve Wiktionary, and I don't think deleting this entry was an improvement. I think there's value in having policies and standing by them, but sometimes I just can't bring myself to do so.) —Ruakh 02:10, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Perfectly reasonable. I'd not have deleted it myself either, given that the RFV discussion went the way you just described. (I don't remember it, I must say.) — msh210 ℠ 02:22, 18 December 2009 (UTC)

pl-decl-noun
Please look at ksiądz and protokół. Could you please revert changes to this template to my last edit? In this template one parameter ≠ one word, so we should wikilink in subtemplates. Maro 16:51, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

 * Reverted, thanks! —Ruakh 16:56, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

 * I've now altered the template in such a way that if all or part of a parameter is linkified, then the template won't try to re-linkify it. This means that cases like protokół will have to be fixed manually, but at least now they can be fixed. :-)  If you want, I can grep the XML dump for entries where this occurs. (At least, if someone will remind me where the XML dumps are!) —Ruakh 19:22, 23 December 2009 (UTC)
 * http://download.wikimedia.org/ . — msh210 ℠ 20:02, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

 * Thanks! —Ruakh 20:14, 23 December 2009 (UTC)

title: User talk:Ruakh/2009