Thread:User talk:CodeCat/Copying/Duplicating Pages/reply (3)

Exactly, this is why it's hard to define this. There are also many cases in various languages where the same word occurs in a different form, but both are equivalent. We call them "alternative forms". In this case there is also a choice between two equal forms, so our practice is to choose the one that is used less as the "alternative" and the other one becomes the main form with the lemma. We haven't done this for all words though, there are some English ones like color and colour where both have full entries. There has been a lot of discussion and arguing about this situation, but no solution so far that enough people agree on.

Of course, for aspects, it's not quite the same, because these forms actually do have different meanings. The problem is that this distinction is often lost when translating into English to make a definition. So they appear to have the same meaning, but in reality of course they don't. They can't be used interchangeably like alternative forms.