Wiktionary:Information desk/2018/August

word order in English
Why do we say "traditional Chinese medicine" and not "Chinese traditional medicine"? What is the grammatical rule that dictates this order? What is it called and how does it work? ---&#62; Tooironic (talk) 05:45, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Adjectives are grouped semantically and placed in an order that is set for each language, with varying degrees of flexibility. Here is the order for English. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 06:15, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Thank you, that's very helpful. ---&#62; Tooironic (talk) 07:42, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
 * I was wondering just the other day, when I expanded w:Adjective, whether Wiktionary should include some of that info in English adjectives. What do you think? - -sche (discuss) 06:25, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Sure, why not? It would be useful. ---&#62; Tooironic (talk) 06:32, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * "Chinese traditional medicine" doesn't sound outright wrong, though, does it? It would just be treating "traditional medicine" more as a set type of thing, and considering the Chinese version. Equinox ◑ 20:38, 2 August 2018 (UTC)
 * That's also my sense, FWIW. - -sche (discuss) 06:25, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Well it's not outright wrong, but I've never heard TCM referred to that way in English. I note the few hits for "Chinese traditional medicine" on Wikipedia are from non-native-speaker sources. ---&#62; Tooironic (talk) 06:32, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

What steps are currently being taken to find all the words?
Do we have people with bots looking at other collections of words and looking to see if any are not represented here? Is it generally known that certain fields are not well-represented here in terms of jargon? JustOneMore (talk) 21:49, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
 * I run scripts to look for missing words in various news sources for English and Spanish. For most languages the answer to the question of which words are missing is "most of them", and doing these types of searches is somewhat pointless (although interesting). DTLHS (talk) 21:52, 3 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the reply. I'm thinking about running scripts as well through other word lists, but wanted to know if there was already something like that, perhaps even a list of lists that have already been searched for words not currently on WT. JustOneMore (talk) 03:13, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Some examples: User:Visviva/Tracking (a lot of the pages have been completed and deleted), Special:PrefixIndex/User:DTLHS/tracking. DTLHS (talk) 03:24, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * [edit conflict] Equinox and other users have assembled various lists of words that we are missing (I have a shortish list on my userpage as well). I know that the industry I worked in for a while (window coverings) is pretty underrepresented, for instance, as are some technical usages of certain (often common) words in Roman Catholicism. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 03:29, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * Thanks, this is just the type of stuff I was looking for. Now that I see how others generally do this sort of stuff I will copy them. I'm also going to start linking userpages like those on my userpage, just so I have a place to keep track of other people tracking this sort of stuff. JustOneMore (talk) 04:04, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * User:DTLHS, which I compile by recursively trawling Google Books (find one word -> look it up, write down all the words we don't have entries for in the results, repeat). DTLHS (talk) 04:08, 4 August 2018 (UTC)
 * User:SemperBlotto/sandbox and its subpages contains lots of pages that we are missing. I also scan technical websites for missing words, but generate the wordlists offline. (currently working through articles within . SemperBlotto (talk) 04:41, 4 August 2018 (UTC)


 * Redlink dumps is where all or most "lists of missing words" are (or should be) listed. - -sche (discuss) 06:29, 4 August 2018 (UTC)


 * You may also like Wanted_entries/en and Requested_entries_(English)/Wordlist. I have further lists of my own that I dip into (not on Wiktionary, sometimes for copyright reasons). Equinox ◑ 17:20, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

"so am I" vs. "so I am"
It amuses me that these don't mean the same thing. Per utramque cavernam 17:48, 4 August 2018 (UTC)


 * "I am so" is something else again (childish reassertion of something denied: "You're not even ____..." "I am so! / I am too!"). Equinox ◑ 18:28, 4 August 2018 (UTC)

Live Updates on Watchlist
What should the incon in the "Live updates" box show if "Live updates" is selected, the empty square or the solid right-pointing triangle? Is this some kind of standard user-interface design feature? Is there a more intuitive, obvious way of communicating the current status of the selection? DCDuring (talk) 15:51, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
 * It's like the icons on the buttons of a cassette player (and so on): right-facing triangle for play, square for stop. — Eru·tuon 19:22, 8 August 2018 (UTC)


 * A check box would make more sense to me, or even one of those trendy new two-way toggle switches that seem to have replaced check boxes (and are harder to understand the selected state of). Equinox ◑ 23:48, 8 August 2018 (UTC)
 * A check box makes more sense to me too. With the streaming-player controls you get feedback from seeing or hearing within seconds. I have no trouble with commons video and audio. With watchlists, which are, after all, just text, the feedback might take many minutes. Also, the background-foreground color reversal on the existing control confuses simple souls like me. DCDuring (talk) 06:43, 9 August 2018 (UTC)

What happened to the new editing interface?
What happened to the new editing interface? We had for some time, then it was gone. I never saw any discussions. Is it available in preferences? There were positive and negative things about it. Perhaps it could be improved. --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 23:42, 8 August 2018 (UTC)

Obscure Chinese character ⿰坐瓜
This page from an 1896 book uses a character ⿰坐瓜, which I can't seem to find online. The following page gives a definition and the pronunciation pǎi, and mentions that the character is "not noted in the dictionaries". Is this character in Unicode? Does anyone know where I can find more information about it (in English or in Chinese)? —Granger (talk · contribs) 13:15, 12 August 2018 (UTC)
 * No luck yet either. A good tool to use for this is 教育部異體字字典, which offers component or pinyin lookup, however this char seems to be missing from their database. Also the composition seems strange- maybe it's actually ⿰坐爪 similar to 爬沠 etc. Wyang (talk) 08:59, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

RussianGram - Chrome plugin to insert stresses and letter "ё" on a Russian web page
If anyone is interested, there is lightweight RussianGram Chrome plugin, which inserts word stresses and letter "ё" on a Russian web page. I have tested and it looks very promising. It doesn't insert stresses for words it doesn't know, such as foreign names or rare words. Where there are multiple stresses possible (depends on the context or if there are variants), the variant words are separated by a pipe: са́мого|самого́, по́зднее|поздне́е.

It's very helpful for learners of Russian, IMO, since one of the most difficult part is knowing the correct stress in a running text and knowing where "е" should be read as "ё". --Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 05:16, 13 August 2018 (UTC)

Chat up as used in Time of August 27, 2018
In an article about the candidates to represent Arizona, a photo is captioned Ward chats up voters ... — this does fall under the definition currently given for chat up, but I was surprised, since to me it almost always has connotations of flirtation or similar, as in both examples given there and, under See also, hit on and pick up. Could there be a difference between usage in the US, the UK and other regions? PJTraill (talk) 14:13, 23 August 2018 (UTC)
 * As an American, I would think "chat up" would probably refer to hitting on or flirting but I can easily see it being "having small talk with..." —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:29, 24 August 2018 (UTC)

most definition lines
Forgive me if we've already had this converation (in fact, I know we have but I can't find it, despite great effort)... Do we have a list of the entries with the most separate definitions? I recently made palomilla, which has 19, and is probably my own personal WT record. set has 85 definition lines on WT, but is probably not the record for the most. --XY3999 (talk) 18:37, 25 August 2018 (UTC)


 * I don't think there's been any systematic attempt to track them, but I track 'em when I see 'em, at User:-sche/exceptional, but the numbers are evidently out of date. - -sche (discuss) 20:41, 25 August 2018 (UTC)

Adding new parts of speech for existing words
I have repeatedly attempted to add words that are ignored in current Wiktionary pages, namely different parts of speech, such as adjectives that are ignored when only past participles are listed, as well as both nouns and adjectives which are ignored when only present participles are listed. My attempts have run afoul of the fact that I don't know how to do so without apparently destroying the current part of speech, namely a verb, that is the only meaning recorded on Wiktionary's page. How can I add a new meaning without replacing the old one?
 * You can look at your contributions and note the edits that follow correcting your mistakes. DTLHS (talk) 16:18, 28 August 2018 (UTC)