Wiktionary:Improving entries for the most common English words

Project purpose
To improve the quality of the entries for the most commonly used English words.

Background and previous efforts
The recent Beer Parlor discussion: Beer_parlour/2023/August

Previous efforts and discussions

 * Project - Cleanup of basic English entries

Proposed word lists

 * User:DCDuring/GSL/GSL sortable - See and its official website.

Sample entries
User:-sche has working on several entries that might be good to focus on to determine what we mean by a good entry for these words. There may be issues to be resolved before we proceed on some classes of entries.
 * Examplars

Entries with a single principal PoS
NB: As used here high, go, know are not treated as "principal" PoSes.


 * Adjective
 * high

Nominations:
 * Noun


 * Verb
 * go
 * know

Nominations:
 * Determiner


 * Preposition/(Particle)*
 * at

Nominations:
 * Adverb

Nominations:
 * Conjunction

Entries with multiple principal PoSes

 * Pronoun/Determiner/conjunction
 * that


 * Noun/Verb
 * take


 * Adverb/Preposition/Conjunction
 * as

Nominations:
 * Preposition/Adverb/(Particle)*

Characteristics of Goodness

 * A set of good definitions that span attestable modern usage with minimal duplication
 * A full set of supporting sections and subsections
 * Formatting consistent with wiki-wide standards
 * Within entry consistency of formatting where wiki-wide formatting allows differences between entries.

Not subject to major requests
Important English PoS sections should not be open for cleanups, verification, or deletion. Minor matters (obsolete, rare, etc) can remain. Best would be to resolve them before starting on more global entry improvement, second best would be to keep the items open while undertaking global definition or attestation work, prioritizing the Etymology and PoS sections that have the request tags.
 * Next steps: attestation, definition, structuring

Definitions complete, structured

 * Comprehensive coverage of definitions
 * Clearly worded definitions

Definitions attested, exemplified

 * Add usexes and quotations to all senses that are missing them. This may lead to adjustment of definitions and structure.
 * Move quotations out of "quotations" sections and under corresponding definitions;
 * Logical grouping/ordering of senses, using sense-subsense structure, especially for PoS sections with many definitions.
 * Groups of common/basic definitions should appear before other groups
 * Within groups common/basic definitions should appear before others
 * Definitions, not synonym lists or single words only
 * Non-gloss definitions distinguished from gloss definitions

Other
Some of the following items may depend in whole or in part on the definitions. Work on the dependent tasks (marked defs), should probably not proceed until the definitions (and attestation?) are at least written and structured.

Etymology

 * Ancestry always
 * Collapsible display of cognates, speculative etymology, competing etymologies, long etymologies

Pronunciation

 * Depending on who's participating, make sure that pronunciation encompasses every major English-speaking country
 * Presence of at least American and British pronunciation
 * Audio files for at least American and British pronunciation

Usage notes

 * Usage notes for error-prone wordsdefs

Translation tables

 * Translation tables for every non-obsolete sense and subsense (because this can get unwieldy, could we perhaps consider indenting translation tables for subsenses as at quarantine?)defs

"Nyms"

 * Make sure that -nyms are displayed either together after all the definitions or listed under each one.defs
 * Special effort for synonymsdefs

Derived terms

 * Distinguished from Hyponymsdefs
 * Remove alternative forms differing only in punctuation, many as a result of Wonderfool's lazy DT dumping

Related terms

 * Same language cognates, etc, but distinguished from Derived terms

Formatting, consistency

 * Ensure consistent capitalization and punctuation at the beginning/end of all senses in an entry
 * Key terms wikified, common terms not wikified.defs
 * Grammatical labels
 * Verbs: transitive, intransitive, reflexive(?)defs
 * Nouns: countable, uncountable labels for departures from most common.defs
 * Usage examples for range of structures, eg, types of complements.defs

Supplemental material

 * Images, where applicabledefs
 * Examples, where applicabledefs

Other

 * Review of Etymology-PoS sections other than those for the most common English words for consistency, plausibility, absence of obvious flaws.

Perfection

 * When a few experienced users have reviewed an English section for the adequacy of each of these and found each of them good, we can declare the English section "Good".