RFC: Adopt Define namespace

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CLOSED:

T247172 has now been filed. Thank you everyone for your participation! –MJLTauk 18:28, 7 Mairch 2020 (UTC)[Replie]

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

It's mostly there on the page, but I'll reiterate it here. Sco.wiki is in major need of some form of wiktionary because spelling conventions have ebbed and flowed over time. Sometimes, words can mean different things in different contexts, but we have no method to get these definitions in Scots while on wiki. Therefore, while we can always use English Wiktionary to find out that bleck in Scots means black in English, we have no method of figuring out the reverse.
Having a dedicated namespace would both fulfil this need while also avoid splitting sco.wiki in two. That's the idea anyways. –MJLTauk 23:32, 22 Dizember 2019 (UTC)

Comments

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Rich Farmbrough (tauk) 11:24, 20 Februar 2020 (UTC)[Replie]

@Rich Farmbrough: Can you elaborate please on number four? Are you talking about edits like this? –MJLTauk 20:20, 20 Februar 2020 (UTC)[Replie]
Yes, that is exactly what I had in mind for 4(b). Of course it's more complex than it looks as some languages, for example, have one word for both "rabbit" and "hare", as well as more subtle differences - Modern English languages often have synonymous or near synonymous terms for common objects, one from the Norman and one from the Saxon, etc. Rich Farmbrough (tauk)

The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.


Note: the result of the above is that Sco.wiki now has a "Define" namespace. See, for instance, Define:Ferlie. --R. S. Shaw (tauk) 18:32, 27 September 2021 (UTC)[Replie]
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I just can't support this. Maintaining a dictionary is an entirely different project, this is massively expanding the scope of this wiki for little, if any, discernable benefit. This wiki in particular has a very poor track record with Scots, so non-native speakers trying to establish it as a authoritative source for Scots is frankly a bit insulting. A bad dictionary can do far more damage to perception of a language than a bad encyclopedia.

Analysis of how a language is used just is not the same thing as writing articles in a language. The only way I could support this is if it was backed by native or near-native speakers with academic backgrounds in linguistics (ideally on Scots specifically), in which case why should it be a wiki? my_hat_stinks (tauk) 19:58, 8 September 2020 (UTC)[Replie]

Issues and Opportunities

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Topic Raiser

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I'm an Englishman, and I see no need for me to learn Scots. I may be induced to make my contribution to Wiktionary more compatible with the Scots wikipedia. @MJL:

Multilingual Issues

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I've seen that some of my contributions for the infrastructure for Pali in the English wiktionary have been technically pirated hither - they're being used in breach of the attribution clause! (English Wikipedia attempts to solve that with en:Template:Copied, but administrators are not well-trained in its implications.) If your aspiration is to document every word in every language, you're going to run out of memory with internationally common words like a. English Wiktionary is hitting this problem already. RichardW57m (tauk) 12:43, 15 Apryle 2021 (UTC)[Replie]

There is a solution, but you might not like the interface implications. That is to have a page for each combination of language and word. You can do it by using a naming convention Define:lang:word, where lang is the ISO-693-like code for the language. For user convenience, you might want to keep it to Define:word for Scots words, while English 'a' would be on page Define:En:a, but see below. Note that as a wikipedia, the first letter is automatically capitalised. This has made a lot of seemingly currently functioning Wiktionary modules and templates relatively inaccessible to editors. RichardW57m (tauk) 12:43, 15 Apryle 2021 (UTC)[Replie]

Casing

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English Wiktionary has fully case sensitive page names. The first character of names on wikipedia pages is not case sensitive. This will make importation from wiktionaries difficult. However, if you require a page name for dictionary entries to have the language name, then that problem goes away. You can see some of the problems with the declension table at Define:ka#Pali. Algorithmically derived case forms start with 'K' because the page name does. Overrides to the algorithm have been defined with initial 'k', and that difference shows in the generated declension table. RichardW57m (tauk) 12:43, 15 Apryle 2021 (UTC)[Replie]