User talk:Anasofiapaixao

Welcome
--Daniel. 04:31, 21 April 2011 (UTC)

Conjugation table
Hello. Welcome to Wiktionary, and thank you for your interest in editing our Portuguese contents. I'd like to talk about your decision to change the design of the Portuguese conjugation tables, which is a staple of many entries in Portuguese. While editing it is certainly not inherently bad, and there are ways to improve it, I disagree with your change for various reasons.

When you edited the design of the Portuguese conjugation table, you removed the adverb "não", which I think was not a good idea because this adverb illustrates well the use of negative imperatives. As you can see on the entry hablar, the Spanish conjugation tables similarly show the word "no".

Relatedly, making conjugation tables of various languages look equal or similar may be in principle a good idea, but it is also a tricky task because there are many languages with different designs for tables. Finnish (example: akoittua), Armenian (example: ընթանալ) and Arabic (example: كتب) are instances of languages that employ different designs. One of the few things all languages usually have in common are the collapsible tables (the ones with buttons like "show" or" hide").

The Portuguese table has some things most of the others languages don't have, such as useful notes above and the ability to conjugate certain verbs with multiple words such as beijar de língua. Your last edit added a new column on the left, which I believe is also not a good idea, because the whole table of "beijar de língua" was pushed to the right as a result, and does not show up completely on my screen whose resolution is 1024x768. Other common resolutions may have different results, though.

Other advantages of the old design are the following visual clues: grammatical moods as titles, strategic use of italics and capital letters, borders and a variety of contrasts of colors. Your new design also uses colors as visual clues, and it may be a good idea to choose only light colors like you've done, but it neglects to differentiate present participles from infinitives this way as they have the same color, and they don't have borders anymore.

Please see the Portuguese verb parar, that currently uses your new design. English and Portuguese readers read from left to right, easily recognizing and using an unique leftmost side as the place to start reading each line, and stopping wherever it is the last word instead of going all the way to the rightmost side. The new design causes the reader to have to decide whether to ignore the leftmost side of the table because it often contains repetitive thus futile information, much like you most certainly aren't reading the leftmost side of this page right now because it only contains a list of links like "Main Page" and "Community portal" or a blank space. In addition, it makes it unclear where the line ends because there are many blank spaces. Your design conveys the false idea that both "parado" and "parando" are only first-person words due to the lack of borders, unless the reader already knows the other properties of these two words, thus making the table either erroneous or unnecessary. --Daniel. 04:31, 21 April 2011 (UTC)