Talk:Vierzylinder-Benziner

RFD discussion: August–December 2016
SOP Chuck Entz (talk) 09:43, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Don't we usually consider compounds joined by a hyphen to be single words? Surely this is no more SOP than above-water, battery-powered, or bear-whelp. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 13:36, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * No, we don't. Those hyphenated entries that are there are either 1. idiomatic or 2. can stay because of COALMINE. -- Pedrianaplant (talk) 13:43, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * German spelling uses hyphens differently and can even make do without them. In any case, Vierzylinderbenziner and Vierzylinder-Benziner have as little right to entries as four-cylinder gasoline motor and four-cylinder gasoline car and as three-bedroom house, four-bedroom house... three-bedroom apartment... etc. --Espoo (talk) 13:53, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * If Vierzylinderbenziner is attestable, it unambiguously meets CFI (as compounds written together are always considered single words) and should be included, and if it's less common than the hyphenated version, then Vierzylinder-Benziner is also to be kept by COALMINE. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:46, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * P.S. I can find Vierzylinderbenziner without a hyphen in the online versions of several print newspapers. Presumably the print editions use the same spelling, making it attested in permanently archived sources. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 16:55, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Then we obviously need to change the CFI for German because otherwise we'd end up with many more German than English entries. In the CFI, we need to take into account that different languages have different writing systems. It's obvious that it makes no sense to include concepts in one language that are obviously excluded in others. I don't see anyone suggesting we start adding entries for four-cylinder motor and four-bedroom house. --Espoo (talk) 17:37, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * I see no problem in having many more German entries than English entries. We aren't paper. We are a dictionary of words, not of concepts, which is why we allow entries like schweigen but not be silent. If German has many more words than English, so be it. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 17:49, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * The whole point is that German obviously doesn't have many more words than English, so the current CFI's definition of what is a word is badly designed and too much based on English to be useful for a global dictionary. More specifically, it's obvious that a rule that would allow 8 or even more entries in any language for the expressions one-bedroom apartment, two-bedroom apartment, etc. would simply be a bad idea because it would cause completely unmanageable amounts of articles that need to be maintained.
 * These expressions and an almost unlimited number of similar groups exist in all languages irrespective of whether they are written with spaces or hyphens or nothing between the parts, and they all need to be banned.
 * I just checked and the German Wiktionary only has Ein- and Zweizimmerwohnung but not Dreizimmmerwohnung etc. The current CFI would produce an unmanageable and almost unimaginable flood of German words if anyone started to automate the creation of new lemmas. --Espoo (talk) 22:38, 17 August 2016 (UTC)
 * Note that Zimmer has a specific meaning in this context; it counts bedrooms and living rooms but not e. g. kitchens or bathrooms. That should be mentioned somewhere. -- Pedrianaplant (talk) 10:21, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
 * The number of entries our policies might permit simply isn't an issue. There is no maximum permissible number of German entries at Wiktionary. CFI won't allow one-bedroom apartment because it's not one word, it's either two (one-bedroom + apartment) or three (one + bedroom + apartment), but it will allow Zweizimmerwohnung because that's one word. (It is not immediately relevant to this discussion, but nevertheless interesting for an English speaker encountering German, to know that Zweizimmerwohnung means "one-bedroom apartment", not "two-bedroom apartment".) The only limit CFI puts on the German words is attestability: if we can't find three independent cites in durably archived sources for Neunzehnzimmerwohnung, we're not going to include it. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 10:54, 18 August 2016 (UTC)
 * The number of entries CFI permits is most definitely an issue because an unmanageable flood of entries would make it impossible to ensure the quality of Wiktionary. There would simply be too many terms at some point for the number of editors to ensure that large amounts of low-quality or incorrect information is not added and to make it possible to maintain the quality of such a large number of entries in case a similar change or improvement needs to be implemented in all of the variants of a term like zimmerwohnung.
 * So the problem is not Neunzimmerwohnung or other extremely rare variants but the large number of similar groups of multipart terms with "only" rare or trivial variants.
 * Just like "high school" and most other compound nouns in English, "one-bedroom apartment" is most definitely one word. It's simply a convention in English to write compound modifiers together or with a hyphen and to write compound nouns in parts separated by spaces. "High school" is a concept whereas "big school" is not. If it became a concept, it should obviously not be a CFI whether or not the name for this possible new school type is written "big school" or "big-school" or "bigschool". --Espoo (talk) 08:18, 19 August 2016 (UTC)


 * I think we're going about this backwards. We should first determine if an unhyphenated form meets CFI; if so, we should include it and include the hyphenated form if it also meets CFI. By using CFI-worthiness as a throttle, we can substantially limit the introduction of these terms. bd2412 T 19:40, 14 August 2016 (UTC)
 * There's actually no protection for single words in WT:CFI anyway, we just never delete them if they exist. Hyphen forms are generally a gray area but are I think rejected by most as always being single words. Faster-than-light for example, in my opinion, is not a 'single word' just several words linked by hyphens. It's one of the functions of a hyphen. Widsith always maintains that the OED considers all hyphen forms to be single words, but I've literally asked him about 20 times for supporting evidence and he's never produced any. Which makes me think he might have simply misremembered. He could have read whatever it was 30 years ago for all we know. Renard Migrant (talk) 11:20, 16 August 2016 (UTC)


 * Delete unless the unhyphenated version is attested, in which case we would need to compare their relative commonness to determine in COALMINE applied. - -sche (discuss) 19:03, 23 September 2016 (UTC)

Deleted. bd2412 T 00:36, 19 December 2016 (UTC)