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User talk:DCDuring/2010 QIV

Header images
Since you had commented on some of the related BP dicussions, I was wondering if you could lend your thoughts to WT:RFFF. Thanks. --Bequw → τ 19:35, 1 October 2010 (UTC)

Replacing derived term lists with categories
Hello DC -- Are you sure this is a good idea? Isn't it a pretty radical departure from current practice? -- Ghost of WikiPedant 16:47, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
 * It could be viewed as radical. In what way isn't it a good idea? What specifically is wrong with it other than radicality?
 * I don't think it is all that radical. Without objection I had used categories similarly numerous times for affix DT sections. Others had hard-coded enormous lists of DTs and RTs for an apparently random assortment of words. What is new so far is only:
 * using categories for compounds and for bases in affixation
 * using etymology-located templates to autocategorize words into the categories.
 * I had never understood:
 * why the category approach was limited to affixes,
 * why we confounded historic and morphological derivations,
 * why we accepted variabilty in completeness of RT and DTs.
 * why we accepted inconsistency between parent and child views of derivation. (ie, Why should populating a Descendants section of a Latin word not take advantage of work done in the etymology sections of various descendant languages?)
 * I really like the idea of having complete listings of derived terms both from and morphological and a historical perspective and in comparing the two, where that is possible. In many cases, the one sheds light on the other. I am fascinated by the way productive prefixes arise, often by a kind of back-formation.
 * Procedurally, I had surfaced the matter at WT:BP, met no opposition, and little interest. With help I have an architecture of templates and categories that is sufficient for demonstration. I have been running what amounts to a prototyping exercise. In implementing, I am surfacing some practical issues and associated conceptual ones.
 * Feel free to take a look at the more densely populated categories in Category:English derived terms for examples of various approaches. The use of categories is probably less dramatic than the presentation of "grammatical" and/or morphological information in Etymology sections. Soon more "Etymology" sections will approach the screen space taken up by Pronunciation sections. I am not at all settled on the right way to present the morphological derivation data at the leafy end of the tree. There are many inconsistencies/experiments at present. DCDuring TALK 17:29, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

 * Radical? Nah. I only wish irony were made of a nice wine, I'd be getting shitface drunk. — [ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 16:57, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I learned how much freedom one has to act without building consensus from that vote. DCDuring TALK 17:29, 3 October 2010 (UTC)

 * Daniel. works mostly in templates, appendices and not especially controversial categories. What you're doing is far more radical and I expect will be considerably more controversial. — [ R·I·C ] opiaterein — 18:01, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
 * He continues to do his work without documentation. He and his enablers generate many useful behavioral precedents. The general implication: One may as well be bold. DCDuring TALK 18:11, 3 October 2010 (UTC)
 * So DCDuring feels the inclination to be bold. How interesting. By the way, I have created and edited documentations for various Wiktionarian templates during the course of my life. Which other, undocumented, templates do you wish to be documented? Asking for the documentations or perhaps doing them yourself seem better alternatives than insulting the programmer. --Daniel. 11:30, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

 * DC, Getting back to the topic, what bothers me about the practice of shoveling derived terms onto separate category pages is that I don't think it is user-friendly. From an end-user's view, categories are not part of the entry and are (I strongly suspect) much more likely to be ignored or left unexplored than a (collapsible) section within the entry. I'm sure it's easy for an admin to automate this method of categorization, but that doesn't mean it is appealing or logical from an end-user's point of view. According to WT:ELE, which I see as a thoughtful guideline for how to structure a dictionary for end-users, derived terms are main-entry-level information, not poor cousins to be shunted off to an ancillary page. (PS: The "Daniel" vote was what it was, but I don't think any reasonable Wiktionarian should think a precedent has now been established giving every editor license to change the structure of the dictionary without consensus.) -- Ghost of WikiPedant 04:28, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Re: "shoveling ... onto ... category pages". Users can add items under the category. I take your point that the form is somewhat discouraging. There might be advantage in having the bare category under a show-hide bare. Even better would be a line under the show-hide that invited users to add any missing related terms.
 * The tradeoff seems to be between having something that can be maintained as new entries are added at the expense only of work on the new entry. Without this kind our utilization of morphological information, I don't think the morphological information is worth the effort, which is why is one reason why it has languished as a vague hope. The other reason has to do with the ambiguity of the meaning of "derived terms" (morphological/synchronic vs historic/diachronic).
 * I for one disagree with moving derived terms into separate category pages as it was done in this edit to "stage". Can someone point me to a BP discussion that proposed this? --Dan Polansky 09:51, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I, personally, agree with the idea of categorizing entries by their various roots, like how currently lists certain etymologically related entries.
 * As an initial suggestion, instead of simply linking from the entries to the categories, the current collapsible format from -ity (linking to ) looks better to me.
 * I noticed how the current category naming scheme that includes simultaneously "English derivations", "English derived terms", "English words suffixed with ness", "Hungarian derivations", "Hungarian nouns suffixed with -g" and "English words derived from: coach (noun)" is bound to be very confusing.
 * However, the existence of English words derived from: -er Etymology 1 implies that the common suffixal categories are being deprecated by you in the process of developing a plethora of etymological categories.
 * Since you are apparently going to rename more than 3500 categories, not counting the basic format of "de:Italian derivations" and "fr:Portuguese derivations", I strongly advise you to explain and seek feedback from the community about your vast project. Notably, I'm very curious about how derivations between two languages would be categorized, and if they would. --Daniel. 11:30, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I appreciate the suggestion and had considered it. What I like about and its sibling(s) is that the information appears quickly and on the same page, facilitating comparisons with other material on the same page. What I don't like about them is that they present the information in a one-column list, which limits the very advantage. I understand that it is not possible to make it a two- or three-column presentation. Secondarily, we would not have addressed GhostofWP's concern with casual-user-accessiblity. I have some thoughts on that point.
 * Is my understanding about multi-column presentation not being available correct?
 * I am agnostic on the naming scheme. Any naming scheme that allowed for both morphological and historical derivations would be fine. For languages that are well studied it would be useful to enable or, at least, not foreclose the distinction between the two kinds of derivations even for within-language derivations.
 * re: -er and siblings do not support Etymology/sense-level discrimination of category membership (nor the morphological/historical distinction).

-er was the first suffix that I ran across in experimenting/prototyping that had multiple etymologies that I was familiar with. I am not sure whether it would prove to be a good example. It is only a singular experiment. To some extent, it has succeeded in raising the question of this limitation of et al. I would much rather use/integrate the infrastructure of the affix templates than replace it.
 * I know that I need feedback. I wanted to both have something to display that didn't leave too much to the imagination. There are issues of presentation of the morphological information in the Etymology sections that we haven't touched on.
 * I have intentionally limited myself to within-language derivations in English so that the specifics of such could be addressed. English seems to have more use of DT and RT headings than other languages AFAICT. Therefore the maintenance and completeness issues arise in English before they do in other languages. My investment of time in deploying the scheme has not been so great that I would object to radical alteration in support of the desiderata it can help with. I think those are:
 * Clarification of the meaning of derivation (morphological vs historical).
 * Integration of information between the trunk and twigs of derivational chains.
 * Presentation of morphological information.
 * Completeness and maintainability of DT and RT lists.
 * Thanks for taking the time to address this so thoughtfully. DCDuring TALK 12:55, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Making and  present their lists in multiple columns seems a very reasonable goal, so I simply have edited both templates to implement this function (specifically, I decided to split the lists into three columns).
 * I, differently, believe that these two templates do address GWP's concerns expressed at this discussion. The derived terms listed by prefixsee and suffixsee are transcluded at each entry; they don't require going to a separate page to see the category.
 * Per WT:CFI and other conventions, a list of related terms at beautify may display together beauty, beautiful, beautifulness and beautifully; it may even contain beauty mark and beauty sleep, but maybe it would be incomplete without various derivations of "beauty" and of "-ify". Perhaps the best choice would be comprehensively listing all the derived terms of beauty and all the derived terms of -ify together as related terms of beautify.
 * Your proposals, as I understood them (including the implied prospects of categorizing derivations of any language, and between different languages), when completely effected, would necessarily deprecate the systems of Portuguese nouns suffixed with -a and pt:Etymology. Therefore, a consistent and logical naming scheme would necessarily cover them all. Let me number a few related thoughts:
 * By comparison with English terms spelled with Á, I personally see either colons or quotation marks as unelegant and unnecessary, in names of etymological categories.
 * The categories English words derived from: collective (adjective), English words derived from: bass Etymology 1 and English words derived from: bill (noun) Etymology 3 are named very similarly: To discern between the root and the part-of-speech, parentheses are used. On the other hand, to discern between the root and the etymology, a certain capital letter is used. I believe this system of similar causes with different effects is particularly user-unfriendly in essence. It could even be particularly distracting in possible categories with more capital letters, like English words derived from: Big Brother Etymology 1. I then suggest using only parentheses to keep the POS and the etymology together.
 * Let me express a simple logical analysis based on simplicity as a goal: Unless there is any reason to keep both "derived words" and "derivations" in etymological categories, only one of them should be kept. I, personally, prefer "derivations". In addition, I think there is a pretty solid consensus on choosing "terms", not "words", in names of categories whose members may include possible multi-word entries.
 * Finally, based on this discussion as of now, the final category tree may include: Category:English derivations from Japanese 漢字 (noun), Category:Portuguese derivations from English own (verb) and Category:English derivations from bill (noun, etymology 3).
 * No worries; improving Wiktionary is my pleasure. --Daniel. 15:53, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The change to is beautiful.
 * re: GofWP. Before seeing this post, I had posted on this talk page to ask for his opinion about the new, improved.
 * I am reluctant to include derivations based on affixes and clitics in related terms for single-word entries because it seems to draw in too many terms to make the related terms listing useful. Analogously, for multiword entries I would be reluctant to include any entries whose relatedness was based on prepositions, contractions, the close set of adverbs, and sometimes even the open sets of adjectives and adverbs. I am not sure what related terms should look like for any but the very simplest of multi-word entries.
 * Some other questions are:
 * how far to go up the same-language derivation tree to collect "related terms". My inclination is that what constitutes enough and too much varies greatly by entry. Some words
 * whether to include terms that are derived from related cognates.
 * I agree it would be useful to have a naming scheme that did not limit the application of the general scheme. I am not sure that every language would want to opt in, however. CJKV languages seem to have completely distinct naming conventions and needs for example. I don't know about agglutinative languages like Finnish and Hungarian and, for that matter, the special needs of English pharmaceutical and other chemical names.
 * I was very opportunistic and incremental in the prototyping stage about many things. I regretted choosing "word" at an early point. I like to visually differentiate the "term" from the preceding text and the following differentiators (PoS and/or Ety, so far). The differentiators need some separation from each other. One convention would be to have the word/term in italics and the differentiators in parentheses, separated by commas:
 * English terms derived from [langname] langword (etymology 1, noun, gloss)
 * [langname] would be omitted for same-language derivations. Italics would be unnecessary for non-Roman script. You have been dealing with such matters and probably have faced issues I have no idea about.
 * As to "final" in final category naming, I don't think that we can limit ourselves to two differentiators in the architecture. In Template talk:derv I mentioned this. Differentiation based on sense (for affixes especially) and possibly position/grammatical role (eg attributive role vs head role for nouns in noun-noun compounds) have already occurred to me. I don't think that exhausts the possibilities. For example, in Latin, there are the Pronunciation N headers, which are sometimes a substitute for Etymology. It would be unwise, IMHO, to not have some mode of extending the structure a bit.
 * I think there are very good reasons never to make simplicity a goal in itself rather than a important desideratum, a figure of merit, for architectural decisions.
 * We have not discussed one very important conceptual issue. In this case there is a fundamental distinction between historical and morphological derivation. The problem with not respecting it is the confusion caused. To take a very simple example in English, it is useful to know both that Marxism is historically derived from Marxisme and is morphologically Marx + -ism.
 * It is my understanding that some languages have no major potential for historical etymology. In contrast, in well studied languages we expect to be able to find etymologies for almost every base in the language. But even in well studied languages the historical and morphological derivations may be meaningful for the same word, as in the Marxism example. There are also cases such as disagreement where the morphological derivation has two possibilities, but we would probably seek to select a single one for historical derivation purposes. Shouldn't disagree and agreement both have both historical and morphological "derived terms" categories? That would mean the potential in the naming systems for having both kinds of categories would have to be retained. Perhaps morphological derivation should be the default for many languages. For English I don't know. DCDuring TALK 17:26, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * The possibility of easily seeing a list of terms derived from the roots of a word (like adding, , , , , and  at the Related terms of throw the baby out with the bathwater) is not entirely devoid of merit.
 * Yet, a limit must be set, otherwise many or all English words would conceivably be listed at the Related terms sections of all entries of that language. Your proposal of not adding related terms based on "affixes and clitics", "prepositions, contractions, the close set of adverbs, and sometimes even the open sets of adjectives and adverbs." seems very reasonable, and I'm inclined to support it.
 * I believe the phenomenon of listing only few related terms excludes categorization as a tool. That is, for instance, Category:English words derived from beauty would list too many derivations, thus it would not appear in the Related terms section of beautify, beautifulness and so on. I would also probably oppose the creation of Category:English words related to beauty or other similarly obscure categories. Therefore, lists of related terms would be written per entry, individually.
 * Can you please tell me why Category:English words derived from: load (noun) does not contain the word load?
 * As for the title of the category, it seems we agree on the format:
 * English terms derived from [langname] langword (etymology 1, noun, gloss)
 * However, I believe italics are not possible in MediaWiki category names.
 * Despite I favoring "derivations" over "derived terms" in a previous message, both versions are fine to me, so I may as well support your decision of "derived terms".
 * I am aware that different languages may have different characteristics, causing the categorization to be affected. Perhaps the best initial decision would be simply to perfect the English categorization (including common pairs of languages that include English, such as maybe Category:English terms derived from Old Portuguese zevra), to subsequently provide a basis for introducing other languages into the overall system. I particularly like how the parenthesized text may be eventually adapted or expanded to contain additional information, including possibly (pronunciation 2, participle, gloss).
 * Can Marxism be categorized into English terms morphologically derived from Marx, English terms morphologically derived from -ism and English terms historically derived from French Marxisme?
 * Or, alternatively, can Marxim be categorized into English terms indirectly derived from Marx, English terms indirectly derived from -ism and English terms derived from French Marxisme?
 * It may be that we should first work on the derived terms and defer related terms, on which there is less apparent agreement. "Derivation" may have two or three possible meanings. "Related" is more vague, with numerous possible meanings. "Cognates" can be a very large class indeed. For related terms we may be able to somehow learn from and piggyback on what we work out and gain consensus on with regards to derived terms.
 * Also, there is no point in getting everything worked out in detail before others have a chance to consider the ideas and contribute. There may be some surprises.
 * In addition, I would like to slowly roll out any proposal in one language, preferably with entries not now well covered with Etymology and Derived terms and possibly only with respect to English. When we address cross-language derivation, Middle English, Anglo-Norman, Old and Middle French, and, possibly, Old English would be desirable languages for derivations into English.
 * OTOH I don't want to do anything that is not potentially extensible to a wide range of languages. Certainly all category and template naming should ba consistent with as wide a range of languages as possible. DCDuring TALK 04:46, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I support all the proposals from your last message. Thanks for your work and for your thoughtfulness. --Daniel. 15:50, 7 October 2010 (UTC)

 * Could this perhaps be moved to the Beer Parlour? I was also taken aback when I saw this going on and only now find a conversation about it. < class="latinx" >Ƿidsiþ 15:59, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Of course it can. The whole effort emerged from BP discussions and the initial steps in the prototype/experiment were presented there without objection or even response. DCDuring TALK 17:26, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

I have a Question
Hi, thank you for the advice on my talk page. I'd like to ask - is there any use of references on Wiktionary, like on Wikipedia, or do you folks use common sense? I've seen the 'Citations' tab, but usually they're red links, so? Thanks -- George 2001hi   (Discussion)   18:20, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

 * Here, citations and references refer to two different things.
 * "References" is a heading appearing at the bottom of a Language section in an entry. Below it are the authoritative sources that have been consulted in creating and editing the entry and/or that the user may wish to consult. They may be associated with footnote numbers, but usually aren't.
 * "Citations" refers to cited quotations from "durably archived sources" that attest to the usage of the headword of the entry. The Citations tab is one place such cited quotations might be. The preferred place is in the entry itself under the specific sense that has been attested by the citations. On some entries you will see in small type "[quotations]". Clicking on this will show the quotations for the sense.
 * "Citations" tend to command more respect than references, partially because copyright law makes it difficult to frequently quote definitions from the small number of high-quality unabridged dictionaries that are available, even in English. The wording of out-of-copyright dictionaries such as Websters 1913 and Century 1911/2 tends to be quite dated BTW. Hope that helps. DCDuring TALK 18:52, 4 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thank you, it does help. Thanks -- George 2001hi   (Discussion)   20:13, 4 October 2010 (UTC)

Category:Forest products
Do you need the empty Category:Forest products for anything? There is already Category:Forestry. Could perhaps Category:Forest products get deleted? --Dan Polansky 19:39, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Where do you think Category:Paper sizes should go? For some reason it was in Category:Art. Forest products seems a subcategory of Forestry, but I don't get the principles of our topical classification scheme. Is there an explanation somewhere? DCDuring TALK 19:47, 5 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I don't know where Category:Paper sizes should go, but if you create a new category, you should populate it with at least five to seven members, I think. Wikipedia's Forest product says "A forest product is any material derived from a forest for commercial use, such as lumber, paper, or forage for livestock". So "paper", "lumber" and even "forage" could be members. To me, the category seems too specific or specialized for a dictionary semantic classification. I would probably never create the category "forest products" myself, but I have no strong stakes at getting the category deleted. When I have posted here yesterday, the category was empty; only now it is non-empty after you have added Category:Paper sizes to it.
 * I don't know of any explanation in Wiktionary of how topical categories are supposed to work. I have figured them out from looking around and seeking patterns and regularities. --Dan Polansky 10:02, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Do you think you could take a run at a Wiktionary page on Topic categories. Such basic points as the differentiation between lexical and topical categories need some illumination. Principles and practices of naming categories, too. From the fact that you were willing to take on Wikisaurus, it seems you have an ambitious and systematic approach to things, which makes you a good candidate to get this kind of thing going.
 * Such a page would be a way for people to grasp what you are doing, try to help, and avoid inadvertently undoing what you are trying to do. Some may have some specific constructive advice on some particulars or even sources of knowledge on similar matters. Based on my experience in trying to understand the implications of integrating Etymology and Derived terms, morphological vs historical derivation, and related matters, I understand how hard it is to make a complete proposal or even to decide on the proper scope of a proposal. As this is a wiki - and a relatively collaborative, non-political one - it is supposed to be OK to have incomplete pages for an extended period of time.
 * This just reminded myself of a book that has been sitting unread on my shelves:
 * Though the authors use health classification as their leading example (shades of respiratory disease ), they attempt to generalize and have a 30-page bibliography. DCDuring TALK 12:02, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * (unindent) I have rewritten the page Categorization a bit. The page was already there, explaining what major classes of categories there are in Wiktionary. Topical categories are dealt with in Categorization, a section that is redirected to from Topical category and Topic category. I have extended the section "Topic" a bit; a further extension may be needed. --Dan Polansky 12:28, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Wow! Is that ever out of date! For example, it doesn't mention the consensus practice on autocategorizing tags for obsolescence, rarity, and archaicness; register; dialect; and usage context, and with the less-generally accepted categorizion by grammatical category. The first trio, register, and dialect cannot readily be confused with topics, but grammatical categories and usage context can be and, apparently, are. We may need to clarify the distinctions explicitly. The widespread use of derivational categories, such as Category:English words suffixed with -ism, is not mentioned either. You may recall that MZajac even campaigned against topical categories as being outside of the purview of a dictionary. I suspect that we would benefit from some principles to guide our decision making about creating, naming, deleting, and structuring categories for sufficient consistency to help users and contributors. DCDuring TALK 19:52, 8 October 2010 (UTC)
 * Thanks. Wow! Is that ever out of date! For example, it doesn't mention the consensus practice on autocategorizing tags for obsolescence, rarity, and archaicness; register; dialect; and usage context, and with the less-generally accepted categorizion by grammatical category. The first trio, register, and dialect cannot readily be confused with topics, but grammatical categories and usage context can be and, apparently, are. We may need to clarify the distinctions explicitly. The widespread use of derivational categories, such as Category:English words suffixed with -ism, is not mentioned either. You may recall that MZajac even campaigned against topical categories as being outside of the purview of a dictionary. I suspect that we would benefit from some principles to guide our decision making about creating, naming, deleting, and structuring categories for sufficient consistency to help users and contributors. DCDuring TALK 19:52, 8 October 2010 (UTC)

-idae
Any idea what to do with the translations? Or should we make the entry Translingual? --Bequw → τ 01:19, 6 October 2010 (UTC)
 * For the translations how about WT:RE:fr and WT:RE:zh? As for Translingual, I wouldn't really want to go against EP's reasoned thoughts in this area, despite the sluggishness in getting coverage in Latin for New Latin. I suppose that users would expect us to have these terms covered.
 * Perhaps we need some kind of Appendix that explained enough about NL. taxonomic naming practices to allow someone not expert in Latin to make basic entries for the numerous missing terms. That would suggest some templates to mark terms that are only used in NL. and to mark classical terms used in taxonomic names. There is something strange about trying to keep nearly 2500 years of Latin under one language name. DCDuring TALK 05:07, 6 October 2010 (UTC)

user talk:msh210
I've responded to your posts at my talkpage, q.v., about the math-etymology book and about { {morph}}. —msh210℠ (talk) 16:55, 11 October 2010 (UTC)

Feedback on books and lists
Hey! Thanks for the feedback at the community portal. I have started creating vocabulary lists at my user page. Do you know of any templates I can use to separate columns horizontally over the user page or anything that can help? (I don't want to end with an enormous vertical list).

Thanks! --Smoken Flames 00:54, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

 * See, , , and , all used with and , and  (2 column, with show-hide button), used with  and . DCDuring TALK  01:14, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

Chunks, Collocations, etc.
Hi DC Here is an interesting link It is the third of three blogs on chunks and collocations from the Macmillan dict. web site. The body text contains links to the first two blogs, plus some other interesting links, such as to Macmillan’s new collocations dictionary. It touches on a point of interest for us, demonstrating that 1. collocations affect the meanings of words and 2. that chunks can be at least as common, statistically, as much ordinary single word vocab. All of which takes me back to the proposal to have a new tab on the entries for common collocations and lexical bundles containing the target word. Tell me your opinion when you get a moment. Cheers. -- A LGRIF  talk 09:37, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

 * Thanks for the explanatory blog links. They provide a good summary but fall short of being evidence. Has a linguist published on this concept yet? (I'd prefer a book to academic articles.) That Macmillan finds it worthwhile to publish a collocations dictionary is interesting. I wonder how it is selling. That context statistically alters the distributions of possible meanings would not, to my mind, warrant much effort on chunking. I find the production of unnatural phrases by language learners a better rationale. BrettR's objection to giving the matter high priority in language learning seems valid to me, but I have little experience with language learning. I am not sure that I could see how user would take advantage of collocations in their learning. Where is the advantage of having a dictionary of collocations over participating in conversations or watching television?
 * Do we need to make any distinctions between "chunks" that are the result of real-world "collocations" of things, their attributes, and their actions (eg, birds, songs, berries, insects, worms, perches, roosts, and nests; fly, perch, roost, peck, feed, flock, migrate) and those that are more purely linguistic? The real-world context activates a set of associated terms that are more useful for conversations about the context. An out-of-physical-context conversation requires some cues to put a listener "in mind of" the real-world context.
 * How would you envisage us populating the proposed tab? Do we have a single Appendix that demonstrates the application of the notion to a word like "crime" (ie, one not too common, but common enough)? DCDuring TALK 10:45, 17 October 2010 (UTC)

 * Thanks for your input. Food for thought as always. I am basically interested in finding a suitable place in the Wikt where learners and users can quickly find typical collocations which in turn leads to examples of how a word is used, particularly the words with multiple definitions. The how is almost as important as the meaning, and way more important than the metadata the entries now contain. Furthermore, the lexical bundles are very useful, I'm sure you would agree. There is a grey line dividing the collocations and lexical bundles that can be accepted as entries in their own right, and those that are rejected as SoP etc. I feel that a tab of some kind would be a good repository for all these items that are so common that many people think they could be separate entries. I am coming to terms with your idea of placing derived term lists in categories pages. I believe that you and I are thinking about the same subject, but on either side of the grey division line. I will try to clarify my own thoughts by putting together some example Appendix entries, as you suggest. -- A LGRIF  talk 11:03, 19 October 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm warming up to the tab/namespace idea for collocations. I suppose that it is not all that important for your intended purpose to make a distinction between real-world-knowledge-based collocations and more linguistically driven ones. I suppose that the academic rationale is the old idea of a semantic field. We are still cursed with the need to maintain some correspondence between our definitions and other parts of the entry using software ill-suited for the purpose. If more of our English-language entries were of higher quality, they would be more stable and glosses that helped users navigate would be more stable and reliable. OTOH, a rich population of collocations might facilitate the improvement of definitions for words and the identification of truly lexical collocations. (We still lack so many common lexical items: eg, yesterday I entered as follows.)
 * It would be very nice to be able to buy and deploy en masse collocations from COCA and BNC. How good are your grantsmanship skills? It is in the interests of the UK and US governments to facilitate worldwide learning of English, which includes lowering the cost of such learning. I wonder whether government or foundation grants might be available for such a purpose. If we don't go that route I don't see how we can rapidly (or ever, actually) populate such a collocation space. Do you have any ideas about how "crowd-sourcing" could be made to work for this purpose? DCDuring TALK 15:31, 19 October 2010 (UTC)

BNYA
I was about to speedy this as a clear protologism, but then I saw that you added the etymology. So, is this real? Should I RFV it? —Ruakh TALK 02:22, 5 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I believe I just formatted the material present. I won't object to its deletion. As we have no explicit standards for inclusion of abbreviations, I don't ever (well hardly ever) challenge them. I suppose a basic requirement might be the includability of the abbreviendum (!). I haven't found any evidence at Google Groups searching for "burned now you are" alone or for "BNYA" with any of a list of common English words. We have many questionable senses among our abbreviations and need some efficient way to winnow them. DCDuring TALK 14:19, 5 November 2010 (UTC)

/*Romace Etymologies */
Hi, what about the lacks in the etymologies in the deriving latin words? You sent me a message if you remember, we could collaborate :). write soon --Zoologo 18:28, 11 November 2010 (UTC)

swing shift
I don't understand why you added a second definition. How is it different from the one that was already there? < class="latinx" >Ƿidsiþ 19:29, 16 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I found the existing one mostly unintelligible, wrong in at least one particular, and without the salient detail of most likely timing, As I know the term and as the quote shows there is nothing irregular about it in most cases. I did find a sense in one other dictionary about some kind of shift that had an irregular schedule designed to achieve some kind of labor-contract-driven scheduling objectives, but I am not sufficiently familiar to improve the wording of the previous sense to make it fit. I certainly didn't see how one definition could fit both or how the existing sense fit what I knew. DCDuring TALK 22:53, 16 November 2010 (UTC)

Well, I will have to accept the responsibility for any unintelligibility. But as for the rest...I called it a ‘work shift between the standard day shift and night shift’, you called it ‘A work shift between a day shift and a night shift’; I said ‘especially one lasting from afternoon to late evening‘, you said ‘such as from 4PM to midnight’. I'm not seeing any distinction here. If you think I got something wrong, just replace the definition, don't add a new one. But please stick a tag in – it's not used here. < class="latinx" >Ƿidsiþ 21:35, 17 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I apologize for charging this entry with all the confusion I had with shift work, graveyard shift, night shift, and day shift. In this case, it was really the "irregular" and the other definition I found that came close to the "irregular" sense that threw me. DCDuring TALK 22:40, 17 November 2010 (UTC)

No worries, it looks good now anyway. < class="latinx" >Ƿidsiþ 06:20, 18 November 2010 (UTC)

Cleanup categories
I've been wanting some sort of clarity on this for ages. Do you consider bad categories to be clean up categories? Just in some WT:RFDO deletion debates you seem to want to keep some categories, not inspite of the fact they're bad/off topic, but because of it. What I understand from your comments (without being very sure) is that once the entries in the category are fixed, the category should be deleted. If I'm wrong, feel free to correct me. Mglovesfun (talk) 00:36, 21 November 2010 (UTC)
 * As a general rule, yes. I think that most categories have some information content which should be exploited even when the category is a bad structure for the information. Sometimes I can't put my finger on what the content is, sometimes not. Sometimes I am capable and willing to extract the content, sometimes not. DCDuring TALK 03:00, 21 November 2010 (UTC)

Requests for verification
What should I do with this? —Ruakh TALK 16:27, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * I suppose there is suggestive evidence in favor, though the DTs haven't been entered. DCDuring TALK 17:06, 26 November 2010 (UTC)

 * Thanks. —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 17:15, 26 November 2010 (UTC)
 * Back on the wagon? —msh210℠ (talk) 17:45, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

Phrasebook template placement
I think the standard practice is to place the template at the top, just under the language header. That's how it has mostly been used so far, anyway. —CodeCat 11:14, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It squanders too much screen space for such a placement, IMO. DCDuring TALK 13:09, 28 November 2010 (UTC)
 * It's a big, gaudy template. I think that's deliberate to an extent to make it visible, but a compromise would be to tone it down a bit - a bit smaller and a bit less gaudy. Mglovesfun (talk) 13:36, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

very well
I've posted thoughts at [[WT:RFD]] that you might be the best person to comment on. —msh210℠ (talk) 17:45, 2 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I'm still thinking. I am not getting my head around "[modal verb] very well [bare infinitive]". I think it is the "clearly" sense. DCDuring TALK 19:34, 2 December 2010 (UTC)

to death
Hi DCD. Could you have a look at to death when you have a moment? I want to make sure I'm on the right track, and would value your input. Thanks, Pingku 23:37, 4 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Good catch. Looks good to me. I suppose someone could argue that it is just a figurative or hyperbolic sense of death, but it still seems idiomatic.

bust ass cold
As a native US English speaker, is this idiomatic? It looks to me like bust ass + cold. We'd need a definition for bust ass, meaning "very". Mglovesfun (talk) 14:27, 8 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Exactly as you say. DCDuring TALK 15:32, 8 December 2010 (UTC)

Luso- et al.
Should Luso-, Russo-, Sino-, et al. be in a category of their own? (Note, we have category:Demonyms (which should be English demonyms, but that's another story) and category:Nationalities (which should probably be category:Nationality or deleted, but that, too is another story), but I was thinking of one just for these prefixes. What do you think? —msh210℠ (talk) 18:34, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Ah! I just discovered Appendix:Nationality prefixes. My question remains, though. —msh210℠ (talk) 18:38, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
 * More structure doesn't hurt. But this is a kind of mixed topical - morphological category that doesn't have much precedent AFAIK. I've thought that there is some rationale for special treatment of language names because this is a multilingual dictionary. That rationale could extend to speakers, but it seems a stretch. Other -nyms are Category:English eponyms and retronyms, for which a linguistic rationale exists. We also have English names, with two subcategories, and English toponyms. Most of our English categories have more linguistic rationale than this. An appendix that contained all Demonyms and language names and had the associated prefixes seems much easier.
 * BTW, Category:English language could use a little structure itself. DCDuring TALK 21:51, 9 December 2010 (UTC)
 * All right, thanks for your input. I'll leave off categorizing, and link to the appendix from each entry bluelinked in it. —msh210℠ (talk) 22:24, 9 December 2010 (UTC)

Fact
Ah sorry, I was not aware it wasn't used. Do we use the ((unreferenced)) one? I just figured using fact would take up less space and it was easier to remember. I'll try to remember the ones you put in, difficult to memorize them I guess. Dictabeard 00:29, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Our procedures differ from WP's. Here are the main tags:

- HTH DCDuring TALK 00:43, 10 December 2010 (UTC)
 * 1) RfV - Prove this is a real word.
 * 2) RfV-sense - Prove this word really has this definition.
 * 3) RfD - This does meet our standards for inclusion, even if it is used.
 * 4) RfD-sense - This definition does not meet our standards for inclusion.
 * 5) RfC - Clean up.

haltuunsa
You added an attention tag without explanation to this and a few other of my recent entries. What's the problem? --Hekaheka 21:55, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Probably because there is no category. Isn't it a postposition form? Mglovesfun (talk) 21:56, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Exactly. Sometimes I can take a stab at using to address the issue. I simply don't know enough in these cases to even make a suggestion. DCDuring TALK  22:29, 17 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Yes, I suppose this could be categorized as postposition form, because that's what it is. The problem is that the fi-form of -template has not really been designed for postpositions. I made a new attempt for formulation. Please check and comment. --Hekaheka 06:14, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I see what you mean about . One can use, in the inflection line, and/or , in the sense line when the better, more specific templates don't cover it. Someone who understands both the grammar and templates could check for all the instances of the use of these general-purpose templates and replace them with more specific ones or extend the existing ones as seems warranted. Is this a matter for Wiktionary Talk:About_Finnish? DCDuring TALK 12:04, 21 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I changed the header back to "Postposition" because somebody had tagged it non-standard. I think the current format is ok, at least I'm happy with it. I think it is a good solution to handle possessive suffixes and similar such as the interrogative suffix -ko:, which can be added to any noun (and in the case of -ko, to all words except conjunctions) in the etymology section. Somebody who knows how should still create a category for "Finnish postposition forms". --Hekaheka 08:21, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
 * I think that Kassadbot is doing what Autoformat used to do. So PrinceKassad might be able to take Postpositions off the bad header list, at least for Finnish. Jyril was someone who seemed to know Finnish and technical matters. Is he still active? DCDuring TALK 11:35, 23 December 2010 (UTC)
 * Sorry, I meant "Postposition form" was tagged nonstandard. "Postposition" is accepted as header. --Hekaheka 23:53, 23 December 2010 (UTC)

university
Thanks for your help! :D I noticed you changed the etymology as well. Good work, you're amazing! 81.68.255.36 14:00, 31 December 2010 (UTC)

title: User talk:DCDuring/2010 QIV


text:
nigier

Verb

 * 1) to nest; of a bird, to build a nest

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: nigier


text:
históricu

Adjective

 * 1) historic
 * 2) historical

title: históricu


text:
User talk:DCDuring/2011 QI

Garfield
Can you please explain this reversion? --Daniel. 03:20, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
 * You were adding back a thinly disguised sense that had failed, without troubling to add attestation or to ask for whatever help you might need in doing so. DCDuring TALK 03:25, 2 January 2011 (UTC)
 * My addition was not disguised, thinly or otherwise; I used an edit summary that was informative enough. Your reversion broke the categorization (including Category:Individuals, per the mention of James Garfield), but it's no big deal. I'm going to readd the categories and restore the more detailed sense of the fictional cat. I'm not going to restore the RFV-failed sense per your complaint, until gathering some quotes or deciding to formally mention that it is clearly widespread use. --Daniel. 19:55, 2 January 2011 (UTC)

Mickey Mantle
Beautiful page. If an anon had created it, even so beautifully, I'd have speedily deleted it as out-of-scope. Since it was you, well, you can delete it yourself. Oughtn't you? —msh210℠ (talk) 20:57, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
 * It is no more out of scope than, say, A Christmas Carol or 1 Kings. We have a long tradition of ignoring "scope" for essentially whimsical or tendentious reasons. I have cited it by the method advocated by DAVilla. I would be perfectly happy if ALL proper name entries and senses were deleted unless they had a clear meaning distinct from the proper-named referent. Feel free to RfD it. I wouldn't take it in the least personally. If someone else had done it, I probably would have RfDed it. DCDuring TALK 22:27, 4 January 2011 (UTC)
 * Done. —msh210℠ (talk) 18:54, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

Homer Simpsonian
I have a doubt concerning your opinions related to the subject of controversial proper nouns. I don't remember whether or not you answered it, so let me ask: Do you oppose the existence of the current entry Homer Simpsonian? It has some characteristics of some of those proper nouns, such as a short description of a fictional character, including his notable characteristics. On the other hand, I believe a mere "Of or pertaining to Homer Simpson." would not be informative enough. --Daniel. 03:41, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I have never objected to attestable true adjectives derived from proper names (ie, of singular entities). It is proper names referring to singular entities, real or fictional, that give us philosophically and practically intractable problems of definition and attestation. Even if someone could cut the Gordian knot in some way, as by proposing acceptable restraint on such definitions, no one here has done so, seems to be attempting to do so, or shows any signs of understanding the depth of the problem. Furthermore, a wiki doesn't seem to readily respect restraints that are the slightest bit subtle (as would necessarily be), no matter how well founded the restraint. The demise of the attributive-use standard is the case in point.
 * The morphology of terms derived from proper names by affixation to me is sufficient evidence IMHO to show that they are true adjectives. That a person could be "a Homer Simpsonian" does not necessarily make it worthwhile to have a noun PoS section, as most adjectives can be used as substantives with no essential semantic change.
 * Entries for eponymous words that are not themselves proper names require an etymological reference to the proper noun, which I believe is best achieve by linking to WP. I would even argue that the existence of an adjective is prima facie evidence of "notability", which counts for inclusion in WP. DCDuring TALK 10:22, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * As to the definition, if contributors took the trouble to start with citations, they would not overreach with excessively attribute-laden definitions. It seems a characteristic of many newbie and casual-contributor definitions that they emerge full-blown from their fevered imaginations or their idiolects instead of reflecting the attestable shared understanding of the population at large, any subgrouping, or any identifiable context. DCDuring TALK 10:31, 5 January 2011 (UTC)
 * When one starts with a bare unattested definition, the definition is supported only by one data point, one's own idiolect. The quality of one's own idiolect in turn depends on the richness of one's interaction with speakers and authors of the language of the term in question. If one starts with definitions from non-lexicographers, it's a bit better. If one starts with a monolingual lexicographer's definition, the presumption is that they have taken the trouble to examine usage. Old lexicographer's definitions (Century, Webster 1913) have obvious problems of missing current usage. Terms or senses not defined in other dictionaries require a lot more support than one idiolect, no matter what the quality of that idiolect. Such support can only reliably come from the evidence of actual usage. DCDuring TALK 10:44, 5 January 2011 (UTC)

disbelieve
You've added that this is from 🇨🇬 descomforter. I suspect this is a copy and paste error. Isn't the believe bit from Old English, so it was actually formed in Middle English part Romance, part Germanic? Mglovesfun (talk) 17:32, 14 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I certainly looks like my error. When it's that obvious, just change it. My mistakes of all kinds are numerous. DCDuring TALK 18:21, 14 January 2011 (UTC)

fit and proper
Is fit and proper a doublet too? I gives off a certain idiomatic shine, at least off the candle in my head. --Downunder 21:21, 15 January 2011 (UTC)
 * It looks like one, but I'm not 100% sure about idiomaticity.
 * I was thinking of adding an appendix for a all of the ones I find mentioned anywhere. I don't know if all of them are idioms and entryworthy, but an appendix may help clarify what the arguments for and against might be. We had a discussion of these once and it seems there are different types: synonyms ("dribs and drabs"), antonyms ("day and night"), complements/coordinates ("an arm and a leg"), sequences ("dead and buried"). Most are nouns linked by "and", but there are other parts of speech and some linked by "or". And there are triplets ("hook line and sinker"). There are some similar expressions of the form [all NP1 and no NP2] ("all hat and no cattle"). DCDuring TALK 23:49, 15 January 2011 (UTC)

Feck(!)
I'm familiar with its usage within Ireland, but it's hard to find references for unfortunately. Have added a link to an Irish Times columnist. Will try to find more! Anotherdave 19:31, 19 January 2011 (UTC)
 * An Irish-American friend of mine is familiar with this, from his mother. So I am quite ready to believe that it is not as rude as "fuck". An etymology showing that the interjection use is not from fuck would make that clear.
 * Sometimes a search on Google books "subject:fiction" or in Google news "location:Ireland" can help narrow the search for Irish English. DCDuring TALK 20:16, 19 January 2011 (UTC)

the company
Shouldn't this be the Company? And is the definition wrong - doesn't it only refer to the CIA? SemperBlotto 16:27, 21 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm certainly not familiar with it referring to any other intelligence service. I think it is normally capitalized in that sense. Maybe the neatest approach would be to add a proper entry at Company and RfV this entry in case someone could actually document such usage. DCDuring TALK 16:48, 21 January 2011 (UTC)

wifebeater
(No, not an accusation) I'd have left the citations for wife beater. Just because something appears on a cleanup list doesn't automatically make it wrong. In the same ways that could appear in a citation on. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:43, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * I'm just strict on the placement of citations in Modern English. No matter how I discovered it I would move such citations to the entry with the exact spelling. DCDuring TALK 23:50, 23 January 2011 (UTC)
 * That's why I said "I [would] have " it's really a matter of personal preference. Mglovesfun (talk) 23:54, 23 January 2011 (UTC)

MediaWiki:Deletereason-dropdown
Hi DCDuring,

Are you sure this is a good idea? Citations probably aren't copyrightable, and therefore not really subject to CC-BY-SA, but still, it seems bad to codify a precedent of moving content from one page to another and then deleting the former (thereby destroying the edit history).

—Ruakh TALK 01:48, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
 * No. I'm not sure. I take it you think not. I don't see the point of having the duplication in many cases, but, then again, why not? DCDuring TALK 02:43, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

 * I'm not in favor of duplication, but I think it's better to merge the page histories, so that all contributors to both pages are still credited. —Ruakh TALK 03:21, 26 January 2011 (UTC)
 * How does that kind of merge work? Is it "Delete entry page"; "move citations to entry"; "restore deletions"; "move quotes to appropriate location"? If so, I'll not be bothering; I'll leave it to those with higher-speed connections than I have. DCDuring TALK 03:28, 26 January 2011 (UTC)

OperaJoeGreen
Thanks DCDuring for your assistance with my Usage notes for in/on behalf of. I have visited COCA/COHA and it is a formidable tool. It's easy to see how you could use it to obtain the historical frequency comparisons between in/on. If you'd like to see how I made use of it, please visit the definition of masterful. I had previously added definition 3 (authoritative, domineering) to this article, with quotations. I have added Usage notes based on COCA/COHA. In this case the job was, I think, necessarily more tedious than for the behalf research. The differences between the meanings of masterful are defined by the full context of each citation and are not really accessible to any reasonable collocates filter. I basically had to read all the citations and tally the results. OperaJoeGreen 06:47, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes. Using either on BYU's COCA/COHA/BNC site and on Google, one has to read a great number of usages, preferably inserting some of the best into the entry to illustrate. My workspace is littered with such tallies. I didn't read very many of the citations for in/on behalf of, reasoning that the general pattern of usage could not have been so different as to completely invalidate the conclusion I had drawn that fashion accounted for the change in usage and that the semantic distinction is not really warranted by common usage.
 * BTW, for rhetorical reasons, I didn't bother to mention that MW Dictionary of English Usage (1989) in its article asserts that the OED's sainted Murray apparently misread Shakespeare's free use of "in" and "on" in the same construction at different places.
 * It requires a great deal of immersion into an aspect a PoS or Etymology section of an entry to derive meaning from actual usage. That is why there is so much imitation of other dictionaries and copying of Webster's 1913 and its contemporary the Century Dictionary. Even updating the language of these entries requires some confrontation with modern usage. The level of time and effort required to ensure coverage of all common usage of highly polysemous words (eg, common prepositions, "head"). I aspire to once in a while marshalling my energies to tackle one of these.
 * In masterful the citations of sense 3 are suggestive of the meaning shown, but could be read as saying that masterly skill caused deferential behavior. Do you have any citations that support "domineering" and not "authoritative"? That said, the entry now shows an important distinction, one that I might not have noticed when reading the works cited. DCDuring TALK 12:39, 3 February 2011 (UTC)

Shift and shift
I disagree with the idea of splitting between Citations:Shift and Citations:shift when the spelling differs but the meaning is the same. It just makes more complicated to view all the citations for a given sense. You even had to unbold some instances of this word, which makes the overall effect a little misleading, by not pointing out (that is, emphasizing) all the instances where the word appears. Similarly, plurals and other inflections are also supposed to stay with the lemma form, and not on separate citation pages.

The template is prepared to link to various pages at once; and it looks better this way. Compare with Citations:middle earth and Citations:rule of three. --Daniel. 23:13, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I strongly disagree. Each form stands on its own. DCDuring TALK 23:33, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Can you please elaborate "Each form stands on its own."? --Daniel. 23:34, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Each form stands on its own for RFV purposes, but it's useful to see them on one citations: page for usage purposes (seeing what preposition follows a given verb, for example). The other citations: page can then redirect to the one with the citations. Just my opinion fwiw. —msh210℠ (talk) 23:36, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I agree with msh210. "Each form stands on its own for RFV purposes, but it's useful to see them on one citations: page for usage purposes" is a good and succinct way of expressing my own opinion as well. --Daniel. 23:57, 3 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I certainly agree that it is useful to compare groups of citations, but I would like to compare the citations of sense 1 of word A and the citations of sense 7 of word B over time where they might be synonyms or antonyms or coderivatives or cognates in different languages. This type of comparison is far beyond our capabilities. We don't even have an adequate set of citations that are actually matched to individual senses of words. The arbitrariness of our selection of citations alone makes such comparisons meaningless. I would be happy if we actually did some basic things well.
 * The basic thing would be to establish the links between a sense and its citations and between a form and its citations. Adequacy in this endeavour seems necessarily prior. In my experience we often have an undifferentiated mass of citations on a page that merely creates an illusion of documentation. Such a presentation is often has the effect of concealing a lack of attestation for specific senses and forms. DCDuring TALK 11:25, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
 * We have a system of separating between senses of words in pages of citations; see Citations:be. As far as I see, Citations:Shift does not present any of the issues that you mentioned, and might be succesfully merged again with Citations:shift as they share the same sense; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong. --Daniel. 11:54, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Looks like a forking of content. DCDuring TALK 17:31, 4 February 2011 (UTC)
 * For an interesting read, see [[Citations:Imma]]. —msh210℠ (talk) 15:58, 4 February 2011 (UTC)

A dog barking
I've tried using another template for the sound of a dog barking at bark. Notably, it displays a "play" button, which I believe is an improvement. --Daniel. 22:14, 7 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Would you please elaborate what was "hideous" in that new template? --Daniel. 11:58, 8 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Since you disagreed with me and reverted my action, I would at least expect a response to my simple question. By the way, from your edit summary, I can infer that you have seen the box within this revision on the left-hand side, while it should be on the right-hand side if you cleared your cache. --Daniel. 00:59, 10 February 2011 (UTC)

liver
Hi DCDuring. As the expert on things adjectival versus attributive, I thought you might have advice on how to redo the entry liver. At the moment, the entry has an English adjective section which admits that it is the "noun as a modifier". It distinguishes however "made of liver" from "intended for the liver" and simply "concerning the liver". I am not sure if or how to move that information into the noun section. - -sche 19:14, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Thanks for asking. I'd forgotten what I used to do with this kind of thing. So I went to the entry, which reminded me. I don't think a sense line is particularly helpful. A usage note is a bit less misleading. Most helpful IMHO are usage examples (not necessarily citations) showing attributive use. I took a stab at it. DCDuring TALK 19:27, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the help. I added the true adjective (colour), I will now check again to be sure the other senses are not used as true adjectives and then begin to (re)move them. - -sche 22:09, 27 February 2011 (UTC)
 * I've always wondered whether most colors were really adjectives. We treat them as if they inherently were but most color words (but not any of the most common ones) there is not much evidence of usage that would meet the tests set forth in English adjectives (taken from CGEL). I just didn't want to get folks riled up about it. DCDuring TALK 22:26, 27 February 2011 (UTC)

Vote on formatting of etymologies
There is the vote Votes/pl-2011-02/Deprecating less-than symbol in etymologies, which would benefit from your participation, even if only in the role of an abstainer. Right now, the results of the vote do not quite mirror the results of the poll that has preceded the vote. There is a chance that the vote will not pass. The vote, which I thought would be a mere formality, has turned out to be a real issue. You have taken part on the poll that preceded the vote, which is why I have sent you this notification. --Dan Polansky 08:24, 10 March 2011 (UTC)

Somebody said that is against Wiktionary's practice, is it true? Ddpy 21:37, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

 * It was an experiment. It was not rejected where I used it in English, but it was not taken up with enthusiasm. It was not intended to be used in any other language, except by consent of those interested in the language in question. Although we have some practices that are uniform across all languages, some languages have rather distinct approaches. The CJKV cluster seems to have its own set of needs which has made the format for those very distinct.
 * I suppose that I should put up a warning about the experimental nature of its use. DCDuring TALK 22:50, 15 March 2011 (UTC)

 * Thanks for your reply.  is very useful.  It is easier to use for Mandarin entries because Mandarin roots of word are regular.  Please see this example for your information.  Ddpy 23:53, 15 March 2011 (UTC)
 * It is interesting that you find it useful for Mandarin, but the Mandarin community seems to be rejecting it. If you can discuss the matter with them, you may be able to understand their reasoning and they yours. DCDuring TALK 03:09, 16 March 2011 (UTC)

banned?
Is banned by Wiktionary's policies? Derv 12:33, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

 * I am not aware of any policy against it. But ask Dan Polansky, who deleted all the instances he could find. DCDuring TALK 12:41, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

 * Tooironic said that it is against Wiktionary's policy, please see here. But  is beneficial to users.  Derv 13:02, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

 * Each language could in principle set its own policy, subject to veto by an overall vote. In any event each language has its own consensus. TooIronic might well be able to express that consensus. I don't know.
 * was part of an experiment that some folks really disliked. I never intended for the experiment to be carried out against the wishes of any language's group of contributors. DCDuring TALK 15:33, 17 March 2011 (UTC)

en-phrase
Please explain this edit. --Daniel. 04:28, 21 March 2011 (UTC)

 * Phrasebook and phrase are not the same thing. is the tool for indicating phrasebook membership. That you are not sensitive to such matters ought to give you pause before you make changes. That it doesn't scares me. DCDuring TALK  19:14, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes, phrasebook and phrase are not the same thing, and is the tool for indicating phrasebook membership.  is the tool for indicating that a sense is a phrase, but it is categorizing entries within the umbrella of "phrasebook", apparently due to your edit. Please see the headword-line and the categories of who are you and what have you done with someone. --Daniel. 19:20, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

Consistency
I have found this: "Preference 4: Deprecation of topical categories. If you believe that topical categories should be deprecated at this time, with no further topical categories to be created after 20:37, 10 February 2011 (UTC). Symbol support vote.svg Support DCDuring TALK 20:37, 10 February 2011 (UTC)."

I do not believe you are being consistent. It does not seem that you want to let editors freely decide for themselves what they want to do. Ditto for geographic names: editors have freely decided in the mainspace what they want, yet you come top-down with unvoted-on CFI. Ditto for names of specific entities in general. If this is not imposition of rules, unvoted-on ones and unsupported by preferences of the community, I have never seen one.

Disclaimer: If you do not want me to talk to you on your talk page, please say so. If you want to block me, please say "stop talking to me or I will block you". --Dan Polansky 06:03, 22 March 2011 (UTC)

 * Your disclaimer is in the nature of an invitation to violate a rule or principle, eg, "If you don't like what I am saying, you can always beat my head in." Very provocative language. Mere hectoring doesn't rise to being blockable, no matter how annoying. I think that proper nouns are largely a waste of time if we want to have a good English dictionary. I believe votes on trivial matters are largely a waste of time if we want to have a good English dictionary. DCDuring TALK 12:58, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I think I owe you an explanation. I was blocked by MG for "disruptive edits" which consisted solely in my having posted on his talk page in a way that he did not like. Hence this disclaimer, which really does not have anything to do with you, but with the fear that MG and SB have succeeded in waking in me. MG's action was preceded by a threat by the supreme oligarch of this Wiktionary, with whom I do not really dare to fight.
 * The vote is not a trivial matter; to the contrary, it is likely to fail. If the vote fails, the time that I, above all, have spent on thinking about its wording and how to convince the opposers with sound arguments, will indeed have been at least in part wasted.
 * The disclaimer still applies, above all for MG and SB. --Dan Polansky 14:18, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Actually, you have admitted that the vote is not a trivial matter when you have said that you do not know whether people should feel free to replace ", from" with "<" in the main namespace. --Dan Polansky 14:20, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * You should have accepted the invitations to adminship when you had the chance.
 * I was unwilling to make recommendations to others, but I was willing to act on my own. I have many degrees of support for various edits, mass edits, bot edits, policies, language-specific practices, experiments, remnants of clearly failed experiments, arbitrary creation of pages. In this I follow the practice of Nobel Laureate Paul Samuelson who, whenever asked to sign a petition or an open letter (as he often was) would say that he was willing to the the Nth member of the MIT Economics Dept to sign, where the higher the N the lower his degree of support and the more corroboration from others he needed before being willing to support a given proposal. DCDuring TALK 17:34, 22 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Re: "You should have accepted the invitations to adminship when you had the chance": You know, I was thinking about it after I got blocked; I recalled your repeated offers. Be assured that I appreciate your offers, and that they have increased my confidence in a way that may have sometimes ironically turned against you. So thanks again. Yet I have arrived at the tentative conclusion that my being a non-admin has some positive repercussions. It has disclosed to me how unjust certain admins are; this would never be so clear if I were an admin. Because their threats of blocking me would have no power, they would be much likely to make no threats. MG's covert threat that "he thinks" that I should be blocked for "abusing multiple accounts" after I have used an IP address for the sole purpose of asking for unblocking shows that the person has impaired judgment and should not have the blocking tools. Another thing is, power corrupts, and I am not sure I am among the most incorruptible. I could soon find myself running around and blocking people for "harrassment", "stupidity" or whatever lame excuses there are on the list.
 * I have tried to think about the Samuelson sentence, but my parsing it has failed. I have made this rephrasing, but it still does not make perfect sense: "Paul Samuelson, whenever asked to sign a petition or an open letter (as he often was), would say this: I am willing to the the Nth member of the MIT Economics Dept to sign, where the higher the N the lower his degree of support and the more corroboration from others he needed before being willing to support a given proposal." I above all do not understand this: "I am willing to the the Nth member of the MIT Economics Dept to sign". Anyway. --Dan Polansky 08:44, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Sorry. Close the quotes before the where clause. DCDuring TALK 20:25, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
 * There is another consideration: from what I can tell, there is something wrong in the way you determine support for what you are pushing. You have been pushing attributive-use rule far beyond the support that you have actually obtained. It was a formal vote that finally disclosed how little support there really was for the rule. Whatever gauging process you are using for determining support for your actions, the process seems to need some improvements.
 * Re: "I was unwilling to make recommendations to others, but I was willing to act on my own": I for one do not really see how this is a good thing. It is an approach that contains nothing that leads to unification, while it directly serves diversification of practices and formatting. If the intent is to create an open ecology of formatting and practices, in which the environment for the blooming species, subspecies, and varieties is really mild and non-eliminative, then you probably succeed, but I cannot confirm this is a desirable thing. There should be both variation and elimination, not only variation. In brainstorming, you want to have a free phase and a critical phrase, not only free phrase. --Dan Polansky 12:22, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I still think that the change that you got through is taking us in the wrong direction. Daniel.'s silly additions are just the tip of the iceberg. You never took the trouble of thinking through the fundamental differences between encyclopedic and dictionary entries, not even the basic conceptual questions about multiple holders of the same name. DCDuring TALK 20:25, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I weigh my strength of feeling and the nature of other views, especially the source and reasoning. Why is this so hard to understand. You seem to be looking for an algorithm for my personal decision-making. It is naturalistic human decision making. It may be inconsistent to an outsider and may be inconsistent diachronically. So what? I mostly look for algorithms where they can save some time, as in WT:CFI (RfD), attestation (RfV), and cleanup (todo lists). There is no reason to hasten the evolutionary process. Consider what accelerated evolution did for such dog breeds as American German Shepherds, bulldogs, pugs, Wheaton terriers, etc. Genetic bottlenecks, peculiar breeding objectives governed by short-term fashion, and other phenomena have lead to significant health problems for many breeds. DCDuring TALK 20:25, 23 March 2011 (UTC)
 * You seem to have changed the subject to one that we may well want to discuss but that is distinct: "Is it good for a dictionary to contain names of specific entities?" The subject I was discussing was "Does DCDuring use methods of gauging support of other people that match what the cummunity really thinks?" and "are informal methods reliable in gauging the true community consensus"? You seem to act under the assumption that your judgment of what is good and what is not good for the Wiktionary is more important than the judgment of other people. From what I have seen in RFD and RFV, you are trying to act like a monarch to the extent to which the processes allow that and even beyond, rather than asking whether your actions are supported by the consensus of a larger editor community. You are imposing your views on the community, yet are opposing votes in the name of arbitrary editing freedom, that arbitrary editing freedom that you deny to Wiktionary editors in RFD. This is the contradiction that I wanted to highlight in this thread. Your proposals to deletion in RFD are blocked only by those editors who monitor RFD. Hence my monitoring RFD, of which I am really tired now. --Dan Polansky 10:24, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Tell me a little more about your own thoughts and feelings, attitudes and beliefs. DCDuring TALK 14:14, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
 * You seem to be using some sort of idiom or indirect communication that is easy to understand for natives, but not so for me. Would you perhaps refer me to a web site that explains what you are trying to say? In the absence of such an explanation, I would tend to interpret this response tentatively as "I've had enough of this conversation, so could we please end this". --Dan Polansky 16:50, 24 March 2011 (UTC)
 * You are so perceptive. I was wondering why you are pumping me so hard for answers on the details of my decision-making while offering so little about yourself. This is the kind of thing best learned in the real world, AFAIAK, so I am loathe to mislead you by trying to find a website for you. DCDuring TALK 16:57, 24 March 2011 (UTC)

Discussion re wikilinking in quoted text
I recently contributed to a discussion to which you were party five months ago (at Wiktionary talk:Quotations). I notify you in case you wish to respond. — Raifʻhār Doremítzwr ~ (U · T · C) ~ 15:51, 23 March 2011 (UTC)

My removal of derv
My mass removal of (template created and deployed by you) from some 450 entries was driven by the following principle, which looks perfectly sound to me:

 * If (a) a person deploys in the mainspace a radical deviation from the current formatting practice and ELE without consensus, and if (b) he also meets significant opposition, and if (c) the deployment has still not been removed several months later, and if (d) several months later, the person still has not tried to gauge consensus for his new radical deviation from common practice either via a poll or via a vote, and if (e) the person laughs in the face of consensus on his talk page, then (f) I should feel free to remove the said deployment without a formal mandate to do so. For the purpose of this principle, a post to a discussion in Beer parlour such that the discussion was not dedicated to the radical deviation does not count as evidence of consensus, even if the post was left without comment by other editors.

The discussion that allegedly was left without comment and thus allegedly shows that you were seeking consensus is this: Beer parlour archive/2010/September, September 2010.

Signs of disagreement can be found here:, October 2010. This thread on your talk page contains such gems as "I learned how much freedom one has to act without building consensus from that vote. DCDuring TALK 17:29, 3 October 2010 (UTC)"

--Dan Polansky 13:15, 25 March 2011 (UTC)

I see that your creative mischaracterizations seem to extend to your own motives and self-justification as well of others' actions. I'd be happy to see "principled" rationalizations, but instead I see a jumble of sublimated personal hostility toward me and the oligarchy you imagine. I already know that the hostility is being serially applied to the oligarchs, except to those whom you are actually afraid of. You seem to be outraged that I would find the behavior of Daniel. and others to be instructive about the value of bold action. You mischaracterize this as "laughing in the face of consensus on my talk page." Being bold is on of the maxims of wikiworld. But deciding when to be bold requires a judgment. I thought that et al might require boldness because of the creation of categories, but couldn't really tell because of the low level of participation in the discussion.

I will discuss your "principles" in turn:
 * (a) "a person deploys in the mainspace a radical deviation from the current formatting practice and ELE"
 * What is "radical" and what is a "deviation" from ELE? The appearance of etymology sections did not change except in a small number of cases (1, 2, 5? hard to say because the experiment has been destroyed), where I had both a diachronic and a synchronic etymology. The templates by which we achieve the appearance specified by WT:ELE are not specified as they are often language specific etc. and change from time to time. The use of categories rather than hard-wired lists is not specified in ELE.
 * (b) "he also meets significant opposition"
 * I met surprise (Widsith, Ghost of Wikipedant) and opposition to the notion of "synchronic" etymologies (Ivan Stambuk), but relatively little to the idea of creating a large number of categories, which was an express concern in the BP discussion. The question of minimum category size seemed to find a lack of consensus except at extremes (austenite). The deletion discussion surfaced the "ifexist" solution to your stated objections, which you ignored.
 * (c) "the deployment has still not been removed several months later"
 * This begs the question as to whether it should be removed. As to the longevity of failed experiments I draw your attention to the header for "Shorthand", which has survived for some years. DCDuring TALK 16:09, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
 * (d) "the person still has not tried to gauge consensus for his new radical deviation from common practice either via a poll or via a vote"
 * This begs the question as well. During the five or six months two users stated that they thought it would be awesome to have complete derived-terms type listings. But they were mere users, whom we by consensus ignore.
 * (e) "the person laughs in the face of consensus on his talk page"
 * If you have been hacking my computer's camera to catch me laughing, 1., please stop and, 2., please provide the footage showing that it was in the face of consensus that I was laughing. On reflection, I don't really mind such transparent mischaracterization. Indeed, I welcome it.
 * (f) "[then] I should feel free to remove the said deployment without a formal mandate to do so"
 * This is moot as you have done so while RFDO discussions were ongoing. As the result of your mass-reversion is only to destroy evidence potentially useful in those discussions, you violated our normal practice of waiting until such matters have been resolved. I assume you were attempting to undermine the ability of anyone to point to the actual experimental implementation in totality rather than the cases you selected for non-deletion.

Re only one point at this time, the boldfaced one: "you have done so while RFDO discussions were ongoing": This is not true. MG has sent derv to RFDO in this, from 12:57, 17 March 2011. I have completed my removal in 13:01, 16 March 2011. I have merely tagged derv as disputed without wishing to hurry it up via the deletion process, but MG removed my tag and replaced it with a RFD tag, after which I have put back my tag and a short revert war ensued, as can be seen in the revision history of Template:derv/doc. I admit that the content of the removed categories could serve as some evidence of the usefulness of the scheme. I have archived most or all of the content of the deleted categories, so I can post it somewhere, like to User:DCDuring/Derv categories, Template:derv/Sample categories or any other page that you specify. --Dan Polansky 17:26, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
 * That does not address the full issue as the experiment also included the appearance of the categories as deployed as derived terms and/or related terms. DCDuring TALK 18:13, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Point taken. However, there is still Category:English words derived from: load (noun) with 12 members and Category:English words derived from: load (verb) with 4 members. Can you deploy the categories in "load" in the planned way of deployment, so people can get an impression of what you were up to? Or are the categories insufficient for the demonstration purposes? (I can still place the content of the deleted categories to any page that you name.) --Dan Polansky 18:26, 25 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Oh, and a question: is there any statement that you have made that you want to rectract? --Dan Polansky 08:12, 26 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Do you have anything in particular in mind? DCDuring TALK 17:20, 26 March 2011 (UTC)

 * I don't think either of you are wrong; editors are free to use derv, or to remove it when they deem it preferable. Derv isn't outlawed until/if it fails RFDO, but it's but 'obligatory' either. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:18, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * Given the vast amount of work to be done, why remove valid etymologies instead of adding the missing ones? Why remove evidence of an experiment? Why not talk/ask first? The plausible reasons are not flattering to the remover. DCDuring TALK 23:35, 27 March 2011 (UTC)
 * I have several particular statements in mind that seem worthy of retraction. If you feel like answering my question, is there a recent statement of yours that you want to retract and declare to be an error or otherwise worthy of retraction?
 * Do you feel you would like to adjust "load" to show the technique that you are proposing, or are the categories that I have mentioned above insufficient for the demonstration purposes? --Dan Polansky 13:01, 28 March 2011 (UTC) . I have modified "load" entry to have collapsible sections for derived terms from categories. --Dan Polansky 14:19, 28 March 2011 (UTC)

title: User talk:DCDuring/2011 QI


text:
User talk:DCDuring/2011 QII

beastly
First letter was a Cyrillic capital T, identical (or very nearly) to the human eye. Mglovesfun (talk) 17:22, 9 April 2011 (UTC)
 * I thought it might be something like that. I noted that the heading was by someone who added Russian translations. Did my retyping finally fix it or does software prevent such a retyping from taking effect? DCDuring TALK 00:47, 10 April 2011 (UTC)
 * It fixed it; why wouldn't it work? Mglovesfun (talk) 20:35, 17 April 2011 (UTC)

Category:Importance
Please don't destroy half of my work in the middle of our discussion. I'm going to readd them, to illustrate my point of view here: WT:RFDO. --Daniel. 20:24, 17 April 2011 (UTC)
 * If you had created the category, it would have been RfD'd. Once the RFd is begun then activity ought freeze. DCDuring TALK 13:29, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
 * No. The RFD box says: "Please see that page for discussion and justifications. Feel free to edit this category as normal, though do not remove the until the debate has finished." --Daniel. 16:39, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Then I guess I can continue to edit as normal, including correcting categories, if we are just clinging strictly to rules. Why did you bother to chide me, if I can continue to edit as normal? DCDuring TALK 19:04, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Normal editing involves discussing disagreements. --Daniel. 19:20, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
 * So true. Similarly with tendentious redefinitions of core concepts like "topic category". DCDuring TALK 19:22, 18 April 2011 (UTC)
 * Failing (as of now) to present evidence of what defines your obscure "core concept", while negating the possibility of its nonexistence, is 2 times contrary to the idea of discussing disagreements.
 * Now, I really would appreciate if you or someone else could provide an ideally neat, reasonable and all-encompassing system of criteria for inclusion and maintenance of topical categories. I'm trying to do that, piecemeal.
 * "Category:Importance" makes very much sense in my view and fits nicely with a number of topical categories for various reasons, but since I can see a contrast with a number of other categories and people dislike it, then it gets deleted. No big deal. --Daniel. 19:47, 18 April 2011 (UTC)

net net usex
Hi DCD, net net usex ... adverb?? Cheers. -- A LGRIF  talk 13:05, 3 May 2011 (UTC)

en-proper noun
Unless I'm missing something, removing this template from these appendices doesn't improve Wiktionary. The appendices in question should just be deleted anyway, and seemingly futile revisions are just a tiny burden on the server and a waste of a few minutes of your time. I don't mean to be rude, and I'm not asking you anything — if you want to do it, for all I care, do it. But I don't see the point. --Daniel. 20:46, 5 May 2011 (UTC)
 * They aren't English proper nouns and don't belong in the category. That's why they are supposed to be relegated to a single appendix page. The individual appendix pages shouldn't be there at all. You should delete all of them. Why haven't you? DCDuring TALK 00:23, 6 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I should do what?! Next time you want me to do something, especially taking a huge burden like this one, please use some common courtesy, son. And certainly don't imply I'm under some sort of obligation, because I am not.
 * The common sense indicates that the appendices you edited in the last 24 hours indeed don't belong in "Category:English proper nouns". Whether the words defined on them are or not English proper nouns is meaningless (note: most of them are!), because CFI simply doesn't allow them in the main namespace until certain citations can be found. The erroneous categorization was probably a result of a recent edit of Prince Kassad to Template:en-proper noun.
 * Notably, "HP4" and other abbreviations, in particular, were moved from the main namespace to the appendix namespace, and fits the former very well until further clarification of the rules. The fact that many abbreviations defined as proper nouns exist without being accepted or rejected by formal decisions certainly makes room for improvement of our conventions. --Daniel. 01:02, 6 May 2011 (UTC)

freedoms and rights
First of all, and this is mostly out of curiosity, why did you think that the "freedom of..." or "right to..." entries that I had created were considered nouns instead of phrases? I, for one, consider them to be along the same lines as that of [[shut up]], having three distinct words in succession, each of which can be considered idiomatic by themselves, or along the same lines as that of [[all rights reserved]]. Second, given that most of these have been included in the Constitution of the United States, which is a legal document, and indeed many other c, constitutions worldwide, why did you remove the "legal" qualifier? The additional commentary is of course my thoughts on the matter, and you do not necessarily have to agree with them. TeleComNasSprVen 23:38, 12 May 2011 (UTC)
 * We have tried to use the most grammatically informative PoS header and associated inflection template possible. "Phrase" does not specify what syntactic function the phrase may serve, merely serving to point out that the entry has spaces between its components, which is particularly self-evident. In contrast "shut up" is a verb and all rights reserved is, arguably, an elliptical sentence, which, as it is not a proverb, can only be classed as a phrase in our "system".
 * The context tags, "US" and, especially, "legal" imply a limit on the intelligibility or usage of the terms which does not seem to obtain. Taking your argument to an absurd conclusion "right", "to", "bear", and "arms" are all used in the very constitutions you refer to, but do not and should not have any context tags as a result. DCDuring TALK 00:24, 13 May 2011 (UTC)

Etymology Problems
Hello, could you give me an example of the correct? For I do not know what are the correct templates to use. --Sekelsenmat 10:27, 17 May 2011 (UTC)
 * The template that caused trouble is . The documentation should explain it, but the second parameter should be the ISO code for the language section. I have made changes at canibal:
 * added language section separator. ("")
 * placed etymology section where our format wants it.
 * used for an etymon used in the etymology.
 * used for "spanish".
 * inserted "pt" as second parameter in.
 * changed to.
 * WT:ELE explains our format in general, but the terse style of etymologies is best learned by example. Some people, including me, like "from"; some like "<". Some people like to show many cognates; not I. HTH. DCDuring TALK 11:31, 17 May 2011 (UTC)

from English
The code was used deliberately to categorize the entry into Category:English twice-borrowed terms.

Your edit uncategorized the entry in question. --Daniel 03:14, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

 * You should let Bequwbot know, so it does not put such items on a cleanup list. Revert, correct my changes. DCDuring TALK 03:18, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
 * I did that; thanks. --Daniel 03:43, 27 May 2011 (UTC)

rfp, rfe
Fyi, adding  to  and  categorizes the entry better. (Well, more specifically, and IMO better.) —msh210℠ (talk) 18:25, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Alternatively we can make these templates assume the language is English when no language is given. --Daniel 18:31, 1 June 2011 (UTC)
 * We could, but others don;t want to: see [[template talk:rfp]]. —msh210℠ (talk) 18:35, 1 June 2011 (UTC)

Lassie
We should already know who Lassie is. That if anything is what the quotations are meant to show. At this point it's just a matter of distilling down the most relevant information. Why do you seek quotations for each trait easily verified by other means? That to me just sounds laborious. DAVilla 06:44, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Because we are a dictionary concerned with how words are actually used, not an encyclopedia providing relatively deep knowledge derived from authorities. A focus on usage would not be necessary if we were not being beset with encyclopedic content by contributors insensitive to usage. The fact is that dictionary definitions can and should be short because the actual meaning invoked in actual usage is not a whole panoply of attributes, but a very small subset. I think it might be very interesting to find more about which attributes of Lassie are actually evoked by usage of the name. Endless possibilities for lexicographic original research.
 * The meanings evoked by allusions to proper-named persons, places, and organizations and to animals and objects all seem to me arguably within the reach of usage-based lexicographical method. Of course it would be more wikiesque to simply copy and edit whatever appeared on the first line of the Wikipedia article. We have a choice of ways to go. DCDuring TALK 13:09, 17 February 2011 (UTC)
 * Someone put a lot of work into finding citations for Lassie. Then it was deleted anyway. If that's how you expect every entry to go before we can decide if it's worth keeping, then I have a lot of words for you that I can't put here. DAVilla 15:45, 10 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Among others, principally Daniel, I put in a lot of work on that page, sorting the citations by the attributes in the definition offered that they supported.
 * I don't recall deleting it. Did I? I sometimes forget such things and do things that I later disagree with.
 * I don't see evidence of that deletion in the history of the citations page or the deletion log, but I might not know how to find such evidence. DCDuring TALK 15:53, 10 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Well I shouldn't have let anger get the better of me, and I'm glad I never actually spouted any of those words. No, you weren't the one to delete it, and I don't blame you for the deletion. I don't think you even voted against it. But having put so much effort into citing it (and I'm sorry I didn't realize you were one of the people who had), doesn't it seem counterproductive to have such a high requirement for a term before we even accept its admissibility? DAVilla 05:57, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I sometimes don't even fully admit to having written without basic investigation, so I appreciate your response.
 * I think our "policy" on proper nouns is still under development. To me this one was a trial case about encyclopedic definitions. I was trying to see what attributes were normally associated with such well-known entities (real or fictional; human, animal, vegetable, mineral, etc). As I think about it, I'm not sure that I worked on getting citations as much as sorting them by attribute supported by the quotation. I would be in favor of definitions of proper nouns that included well-defined, attestable allusive meanings. A proper noun that had such allusive meanings would seem clearly worth including even under fairly exclusive CFI, as the proper noun was conveying meaning that was more than merely an specific entity. For example, Cato, when used as a pseudonym, had enough meaning among readers in the 18th century to convey something about the moral/political stance of an author. I think it was derived from the stories in Plutarch's Lives. I don't know what is feasible for a wiki in this regard. DCDuring TALK 18:13, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

tooner
Since only you have edited it: I wonder if you could cite tooner: (TV cartoon show). I had trouble finding anything just now. Tom and Jerry's Piano Tooners kept getting in the way too! Equinox ◑ 18:28, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * It's one of the numerous examples of the Variety -er as a suffix. A question is whether it exists in any other publication. If there are only cites from there, but with different authors, would each author's use count as independent? What if there are no authors shown? In any event I'll get started. DCDuring TALK 18:43, 18 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Cites added. Also two more senses. DCDuring TALK 20:09, 18 June 2011 (UTC)

Votes/2011-04/Derivations categories
This vote hasn't really had much attention, and it ends today. I thought you might be interested. —CodeCat 19:09, 22 June 2011 (UTC)

Pre-language images when only one language
As tabbed languages seems to be getting more popular, do you still wish to allow images to be above the first L2 header on pages with a single language? Otherwise I was thinking of bot-moving them down. Cheers. --Bequw → τ 16:13, 25 June 2011 (UTC)
 * I do prefer them there for purposes of providing a little visual variety for users of all top-of-the-entry languages. I also like such ostensive definitions. OTOH I don't think very many share my preferences. In addition, the trend seems to be against English exceptionalism here at English Wiktionary. So, I am willing to defer to your judgment rather than fight a losing battle. DCDuring TALK 01:42, 26 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Good to know. I think I'll try to cleanup pages with multiple language entries first. --Bequw → τ 22:28, 28 June 2011 (UTC)

Attention ja
Is there any reason in particular for this edit? --Daniel 05:27, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * Yes. It was not categorized, as should have been self-evident. DCDuring TALK 10:52, 30 June 2011 (UTC)
 * OK. I didn't notice that. --Daniel 10:59, 30 June 2011 (UTC)

title: User talk:DCDuring/2011 QII