Category talk:Basic words by language

RFM discussion: September 2016
We have a number of categories with names like "Category:1000 basic Italian words" (which, as Jberkel notes at RFDO, hilariously contains only "pizza", "pasta", "amore", "grazie", "ciao", and three other words). For close to a decade, these categories have suffered from two problems: they never contain the titular number of entries (often, as with Italian, they contain comically fewer, or more), and any fixed number is arbitrary anyway: if there are already 999 entries in a category, how would you decide whether "hello" or "goodbye" is more basic, for example? One solution would be to delete the categories, but there has not been support for that, so as long as (/iff) we're going to have them, Andrew Sheedy made the IMO-excellent suggestion at WT:RFDO of removing the numbers from the name. I would like to rename them all to drop the number, and to have a consistent order of "LANGUAGE basic terms" (vs "Basic LANGUAGE terms"), and to use "terms" like that rather than "words", to match Category:English archaic terms, Category:English dated terms, and all the other comparable categories. - -sche (discuss) 22:51, 1 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Support. But any of them that are essentially jokes (like Italian) should be depopulated and deleted, anyone who wants to put in the effort of adding it to all the appropriate pages can recreate it. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 04:58, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Support. I'm also volunteering to help expand the Italian category to prevent it from getting deleted. – Jberkel (talk) 09:06, 2 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Support (shocking, I know). The French category at least contains the most basic French words. I'll hopefully get around to populating it sometime later. I might also get one started for Tagalog, as I've been creating a number of entries for it lately. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 00:19, 3 September 2016 (UTC)


 * Moved. - -sche (discuss) 07:12, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Great. Now I'd like to help filling these categories but I can't get the hotcat gadget to work. It's enabled in my preferences but I don't see the links. Maybe a conflict with something else? Does it work for you? – Jberkel (talk) 19:06, 19 September 2016 (UTC)
 * Looks like hotcat does not work when tabbed languages are enabled. Shame. – Jberkel (talk) 19:16, 19 September 2016 (UTC)

=== 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 === (above are links so that aWa will put links on those pages to the central place this discussion will be archived)

RFD discussion: February–December 2020
Nominating the categories and all subcategories (except Esperanto). The idea of what counts as "basic" is thoroughly subjective if not following a standard somewhere and not useful to readers in its current state, nor worth the effort to make it "complete" (whatever that means). —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 03:09, 16 February 2020 (UTC)


 * Delete per nom, IMO. (These used to be called "1000 basic English words" and the like, and have random numbers of entries in them, from 7 to 1200+.) - -sche (discuss) 03:58, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete This is fine for what is inevitably arbitrary like the phrasebooks or some appendix namespace lists but I expect something more objective and hierarchical for categories. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 10:04, 16 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete. Ultimateria (talk) 00:15, 17 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Sad to seem them go, but delete. I was going to mention that some language courses have "official" list of basic words, but these are sometimes copyrighted (as witnessed on the German Wiktionary – Duden does mention if a word is a basic word on the entry page). – Jberkel 13:38, 19 February 2020 (UTC)
 * Delete. PUC – 11:08, 19 August 2020 (UTC)
 * , this is a bot job for sure. Would you be interested in executing the consensus on this? —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 20:16, 30 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Done. I left Esperanto and also Korean, which seems also to be an official list. Benwing2 (talk) 21:32, 5 December 2020 (UTC)
 * OK, I realize now that there are a ton of pages that link to e.g. Category:English basic words; same presumably for the other-language basic words. Presumably these categories should be removed by bot from the pages that link to them? Benwing2 (talk) 23:34, 6 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Yes, since the category is deleted. (I was just coming here to ask about this because I noticed job was still categorized, while i was going through and removing the "Appalachian English" category from entries with no senses that were labelled as or seemed to be restricted to Appalachian English.) - -sche (discuss) 00:17, 7 December 2020 (UTC)


 * Deleted (not by me) Kilo Lima Mike (talk) 20:49, 23 December 2020 (UTC)