Thread:User talk:Rua/Cognate adding IP/reply (4)

Indeed, and I feel it was an appropriate measure. I was making the edits as I came across new words and found connections between them; I think temp-banning me was a good way to bring my attention to the issue and prevent me from messing anything else up until I addressed it.

I'm learning Dutch for the first time, and being a native English speaker who has also studied a bit of German, I am positively delighted with the amount of clear and comprehensible Germanic cognates found in Dutch. I, like many folks who work with Wiktionary, speak a number of languages to varying degrees, and I'm the kind of person who finds etymological connections to make language learning much, much easier. Hence the decision to start adding German and English cognates or otherwise related words to Dutch entries. After all, many entries for German and English words that I had already seen contain explicit lists of cognates that are hyperlinked in the Etymology and easily accessible, but I saw very little of that in any entries for Dutch words. An example of this would be, ,. lists cognates from 8 languages, lists 9, and  lists 0. I found this to be a strange asymmetry. When I saw it, I guessed that perhaps this was the case because, well, perhaps simply Dutch entries were "less attended to", or seen as "secondary" in some way. I don't think that's exactly accurate - of course there are many hardworking folks who put together Dutch entries with just as much care as any other language - but that's why I started to make the edits I did, thinking I was doing a service.

I now understand that the Etymology section should be a bit more strict than that, and so I will cease making such edits... I trust the judgement of more experienced people, like you. Nonetheless, I can't help but feel that Dutch entries could be "better connected" in some way. Perhaps there is some sort of template that I could link instead, which could direct an interested reader to a "directory" of cognates using the pre-existing Proto-Germanic architecture? I wouldn't know, I'm quite new to actually editing and contributing to Wiktionary. But I'd like to know if there's something I could do to achieve my goals in a more rule-abiding fashion.

Thanks again!