Wiktionary:Information desk/2020/November

Wiktionary is virtually useless for Japanese
Wiktionary is virtually useless for Japanese. Most of the words I have tried to look up just give the katakana or hiragana spelling inxtead of the latin spelling, and perhaps point to some synonyms (also in Japanese). No English definition is provided in most cases. JRSpriggs (talk) 05:53, 4 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Hmm. I just looked at 相撲 (as an example) and saw a reasonable translation into English. SemperBlotto (talk) 05:56, 4 November 2020 (UTC)


 * Examples often help. I think the problem is with transliterated Japanese as a language variant.  If one looks up, one gets referenced to the kana, which then one clicks again to get the hanji and then clicks the hanji to get the translation.  I see two issues one here.--RichardW57 (talk) 16:13, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
 * There is a lot of hostility to, or perhaps just contempt for, those who are using a language in other than its native script. Perhaps the preferred answer is to use the search box at the top right of the pages rather than to access words by URL.  However, for several languages, such as Japanese, a more sympathetic approach has been allowed to poke through.
 * The second problem is that maintaining complete entries for different ways of writing a word is difficult, given the way information is stored on Wiktionary. The solution adopted is to have a primary entry, which holds details such as etymology, multiple meanings and attestations.  (Sometimes bits are so large that they are stored in appendices.).  This is why you have to take an indirect route.
 * There are several ways to ameliorate the second issue. You may notice that the conversion is done by invoking the template .  What I have taken to with Pali entries is to use the parameter t to add the basic meaning of the word, to serve as a memory jogger.  That parameter is used for many templates, including this one.  There may be a straightforward way to elegantly add the kanji, so that it is only one extra click to get to the full entry for the word.
 * Now, who's going to add this extra information. Well, 'anyone can edit', so I suggest you do, on the principle of leaving a public utility as you would wish to find it.  If you have a tendency to forget Japanese words, and look the same word up several times, you will even be helping yourself.  One could expand the current entry from
 * to
 * ; see for details
 * Others may suggest better formatting. --RichardW57 (talk) 16:13, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Others may suggest better formatting. --RichardW57 (talk) 16:13, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Sidebar being printed
The entire left sidebar in the French Wiktionary is being printed, along with the information. This didn't used to happen, and doesn't happen in my other languages. Is this an error and is there anything I can do to prevent this. Thanks
 * I think it is better to ask the people at Wiktionnaire:Questions techniques, because this has to be due to how they recently reconfigured something on their site. I think they may forgive you if you ask this in English. --Lambiam 23:31, 7 November 2020 (UTC)

Edit to a Page
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E0%B6%9E Should note that the character has a slight resemblance to an among us character. The character in question is this: "ඞ"


 * Nah, that's not relevant in a dictionary. Equinox ◑ 22:01, 10 November 2020 (UTC)

SVG file is displayed in the wrong proportions
I was unsatisfied with the low resolution of the main image in this page, so I replaced the image with a. I reload the page and it's now being displayed in the wrong aspect ratio or wrong proportions. As you can see, the image is stretched out vertically to fit the table. How do I solve this issue?
 * Daman semibreve.svg don’t know why the displayed aspect ratio is as it is, but perhaps you can use the image shown to the right, which IMO also looks better. --Lambiam 12:07, 11 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Check it now. See this edit. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 00:40, 12 November 2020 (UTC)

unable to include audio file in template?
I'm trying, which usually works for other files I've uploaded. But for some reason, for that file only, I get. Am I doing something wrong? = paul2520 💬 00:45, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * ...I also uploaded a .wav version (Commons:File:En-us-plat.wav), which strangely has the same issue. = paul2520 💬 00:47, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Just now I tried searching in the search box, and only the .wav version showed up (at commons, both do). Entering the .wav file seems to work now. I'm guessing that this is some kind of problem with indexing or communication between servers. By the way: it sounds like it's cut off too abruptly at the end, so it's easy to mistake the final consonant for a "k". Chuck Entz (talk) 07:04, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * No, this should work. I tried including it on Wikipedia, same problem. – Jberkel 01:53, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * Thank you both., I was unable to reproduce/hear the issue with the cut off... can you give it a listen again (below)? Maybe it was also related to processing? = paul2520 💬 14:41, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * It sounds good to me. I find that Wikimedia audio files sometimes get cut short for some reason, but when you replay them they're fine, so maybe that's what happened for Chuck. Andrew Sheedy (talk) 20:32, 12 November 2020 (UTC)
 * In most cases where I get a cut-off, it is on replay and I have to reload the page. The phenomenon is quite erratic, though. --Lambiam 15:05, 13 November 2020 (UTC)
 * In most cases where I get a cut-off, it is on replay and I have to reload the page. The phenomenon is quite erratic, though. --Lambiam 15:05, 13 November 2020 (UTC)

Palawalla - word submitted today
Dear editor(s), I am writing you to provide more anecdotal evidence supporting the existence and use of the word 'palowalla' in Guyana by Guyanese as described in my initial submission. Within the past few hours, additional Guyanese members of my Facebook Group have added comments that the term was used only by Guyanese to describe 'islanders" and "migrants from St. Lucia" (or other French-Caribbean islands) who spoke a distinct brand of French-Creole, the cadence of which they (English-speaking Guyanese) informally translated onomatopoetically as "palowalla" thus birthing the word. Hence, the word definitely exists in the lexicon of most Guyanese, especially Baby-boomers. Please feel free to contact a random sample of Guyanese in this demographic for additional confirmation. Regards, James G. Paul Sr.

language levels
the description of the language levels doesn't match in some languages... for example ru-2 is intermediate in the English description but in the Russian one it says "хорошо" (good/well) LICA98 (talk) 18:44, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

Lemma Consolidation and Copyright
I've been consolidating Pali lemmas by moving information from inflected forms to the lemma entry, and marking the entries as inflected forms. It now occurs to me that some of those entries of what are now presented as inflected forms (chiefly nominative singulars) may have acquired copyright 'protection' from re-use at creation, except as permitted by the CC BY-SA licence. Is there a recommended procedure to provide attribution for these entries that have been moved from one page to another? Wikipedia has a recommended procedure associated with w:Template:copied, but I see that a template copied has been deleted from Wiktionary. (I can find no record of what it was or why it was deleted.) Is there a recommended manner for complying with the CC BY-SA licence when performing such consolidation? --RichardW57 (talk) 19:48, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
 * An edit comment or a note on the talk page should be sufficient. If the other page gets deleted, that could be a problem, though. The edit history needs to be viewable somewhere and there has to be some way to get to it from the new location. Chuck Entz (talk) 19:55, 22 November 2020 (UTC)
 * The Wikipedia template w:Template:copied is supposed to address that issue, but my guess is that it was rejected at Wiktionary. I suppose it could have been deleted for lack of use.  If we can credit all editors of the source entry in the destination's change history, we don't actually need to be able to access the change history. --RichardW57 (talk) 23:28, 22 November 2020 (UTC)

anticòs
Wrongly categorised as an English word derived from German and an English word calqued from German. Tharthan (talk) 05:34, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
 * ✅ by someone. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 05:40, 23 November 2020 (UTC)
 * It was just ca copied from antibody without changing the "en" to "ca". It's taken longer to explain it than it did to fix it.Chuck Entz (talk) 05:48, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

How is clusivity usually handled when addressing mixed or unknown people?
E.g. / or /. When addressing a mixed crowd consisting both "us'es" and "not-us'es", or when talking through an asynchronous medium to an unknown audience, which "we" is used? I assume that's language-specific? But, choosing a few examples from the table on WP and looking them up here, none of the entries seem to specify.__Gamren (talk) 23:32, 23 November 2020 (UTC)

Template:ux
I'd like to make the Template:ux available for Malayalam Wiktionary. What is the procedure? --991joseph (talk) 10:56, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
 * I don't think there is a "procedure". You'll need to copy Module:usex to the ഘടകം namespace on the Malayalam Wiktionary, and Template:ux to the ഫലകം namespace, while acknowledging their sources in the edit summaries to conform to the attribution requirement of the CC BY-SA 3.0 license. If you want documentation in Malayalam, you need to translate and install Template:ux/documentation; otherwise, you can remove or comment out  from the template code (although it does not hurt the functionality of the template itself).  --Lambiam 16:30, 28 November 2020 (UTC)
 * OK, thanks.--991joseph (talk) 10:00, 29 November 2020 (UTC)

Definitions and literal meanings of proverbs
Can I add literal meanings to a proverb? On this entry alah bisa, tegal biasa, only the definition “Practice makes perfect” is given, but it lacks the literal meaning. I think adding the literal meaning would allow users to better understand that proverb. Should I just add “lit. [literal meaning]” in basic text there, or is there any special template for it?

Thank you! -Colathewikian (talk) 05:26, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
 * You could add an etymology section that contains the literal meaning. SemperBlotto (talk) 05:54, 29 November 2020 (UTC)
 * @SemperBlotto, Thanks for the suggestion! -Colathewikian (talk) 16:10, 7 December 2020 (UTC)