Appendix talk:English unattested plurals

RFDO discussion: March–September 2017
I find it hard to see how/why this would be useful. It only has about 20 words, though it seems that any number of words could potentially be added. It is (again quite uselessly) linked from some stub entries in mainspace. Equinox ◑ 01:47, 21 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Delete --Daniel Carrero (talk) 01:51, 21 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Delete the appendix as such, but perhaps we could add a section to Redlink dumps for keeping track of partially cited words (all of these plurals have some citations already entered in the citations namespace), which we could periodically look for more citations of. At the moment I just keep a list of such entries in my userspace. - -sche (discuss) 09:51, 21 March 2017 (UTC)


 * Redundant to Category:English nouns with unattested plurals. The entries in the appendix are words that it wouldn't make sense to pluralize at all, so noting that the plurals are unattested seems worthless. DTLHS (talk) 04:34, 25 March 2017 (UTC)
 * Good observation; hence, delete --Tropylium (talk) 12:23, 8 May 2017 (UTC)


 * This seems like an example of a general missing-data problem. There are differences among:
 * those that don't have any citations in the entry
 * those entries that our template on the lemma page shows as being unattested:
 * those shown as unattested may be so shown because:
 * the contributor thought they were unattestable OR
 * someone diligently searched all major corpora and authoritative references OR
 * as a result to some level of effort in between.
 * I think that, for English, we have very few plurals pages that have citations (either main page or citations subpage). We have relatively few pages for which diligent/exhaustive search has shown that the plural could not be attested. I am confident that we have a large number of templates that claim that plurals are unattested where no adequate search of corpora or authoritative references occurred.
 * Lastly, we probably have a great many lemmas that show plurals that, in fact, CANNOT be cited at present.
 * This Appendix may be woefully inadequate, but it is a marker of an addressed problem. Keep. DCDuring (talk) 15:24, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
 * It's probably worthwhile to distinguish the plurals we have tried to attest but have failed to, but a category (e.g. "English nouns whose plurals have failed verification") might be better suited to that than an appendix. --Tropylium (talk) 17:41, 8 May 2017 (UTC)
 * RFDO failed. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 01:08, 20 September 2017 (UTC)