Wiktionary:Information desk/2021/October

wgping
In the documentation of wgping, what does the following mean:
 * If you find find a template which was not properly substituted, use subst:wgping to fix it.

When I saw {{wping| ..., I naturally assumed it had not been substituted, let alone properly. However, it now appears that that is the normal output of the substitution! --RichardW57 (talk) 15:41, 3 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The positional group parameters are expanded in the substitution process, producing named parameters {{mono| |u1=A Fellow Editor|u2=Bemoeial|u3=Comfortably Paranoid|... }} . --Lambiam 15:44, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * {{re|Lambian}} How would one recognise a template that had not been properly substituted? --RichardW57 (talk) 09:49, 11 October 2021 (UTC)
 * By the absence of named parameters {{mono| |u1=...|u2=... }}.
 * By the warning issued when previewing a page with an unsubstituted wgping.
 * --Lambiam 05:45, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

lifeboat and life raft
Is there a difference between the two? 94.226.185.160 21:04, 5 October 2021 (UTC)
 * See over at the Wikipedia project.  --Lambiam 15:33, 10 October 2021 (UTC)

How to create a category in the User namespace

 * I need such categories for testing.
 * ShlomoKatzav (talk) 13:02, 7 October 2021 (UTC)


 * You can create a category without creating a page in the Category namespace. Just add to one or more pages. Category:SK-test will be a red link, but if you visit it you will see these pages listed. If you need a category page for your category in the Category namespace (I can’t think immediately of a reason why you might need it) you can create it yourself; then, when you are done testing and the category is empty, request its deletion by putting created purely for testing purposes, no longer needed. ~ at the top of the category page.  --Lambiam 15:30, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Hello, Lambiam
 * Thank you for your reply,
 * it was helpful.
 * Shlomo.
 * ShlomoKatzav (talk) 07:00, 16 October 2021 (UTC)

Ordre, please
Which phonological process produced the second r in < ? Was it assimilation, or is some other process at play here that can produce such sound change, even with no r present in the source word? --Lambiam 15:14, 10 October 2021 (UTC)
 * It isn't assimilation, as Walter Skeat gives additional examples without a preceding r:, ,, , . It's probably denasalization of /n/ to make a more preferred consonant cluster. Compare the Gaelic change of kn- to kr-. Spanish had this change as well in the further context of -mn- (mn > mr > mbr) as in hombre, hembra, nombre.--Urszag (talk) 03:29, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

Mixing inline and other references.
For example, has an inline reference to Childers for the gender and also a reference to the Pali Text Society dictionary for  knows what. How does one format the reference section to line them up neatly? At present we have
 * ===References===
 * / . Others use noncog or even cog, neither of which add categories. Whatever you choose, you should never use etyl: it's deprecated and people have spent a lot of time replacing it with other templates so it can be gotten rid of. Chuck Entz (talk) 05:43, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * This should be mentioned on Template:link/documentation. I did not realize m+ existed. 70.175.192.217 05:49, 13 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Perfect, exactly what I was looking for, thanks. I didn't realize it existed either. For others reading, there's also the parameter  which makes the language clickable:  :  --Fytcha (talk) 11:25, 13 October 2021 (UTC)

About the form 御拝でーびーる
Is the 御拝でーびーる with the びー long attested anywhere? I am by no means a native speaker of Shuri Okinawan so I cannot be sure, but 国立国語研究所『沖縄語辞典』第9刷, JLect and 沖縄方言辞典 all give the form with short び. Hsjoihs (talk) 13:35, 18 October 2021 (UTC)
 * —Suzukaze-c (talk) 06:46, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
 * 沖縄語の入門―たのしいウチナーグチ― by Satoshi Nishioka and Jō Nakahara only gives the form with short び. YukaSylvie (talk) 07:05, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you. Since all the references I could find gave it in short び, I believe the page should be moved/renamed, but I am not familiar with the correct way to do that. Hsjoihs (talk) 07:24, 1 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I moved the page. Hsjoihs (talk) 17:53, 11 November 2021 (UTC)

which way to the county seat?
I'm copping out by asking, but I'm exhausted after trying to figure out how to get an orphaned page deleted over a Wikipedia. (Hmm, I gave up there, basically, and am trying the w:WP:MFD route)

So I see the sentence
 * "Carteret County, of which Beaufort is the shiretown, extends from Bogue Sound on the south to the Neuse river on the north."

in wikisource:Page:Annual report of the superintendent of Negro Affairs in North Carolina, 1864.djvu/22.

I try 'shiretown' here and it gives me _nothing_. Amazed, I Google and Websters says "county seat" under "Definition of shire town". So I come back here and there's shire town.

So how does one 'cure' search not connecting 'shiretown' with shire town? I look around at redirects and get warned off, hearing mutterings about "soft redirects".

I saw the mention of second guess and second-guess at alternative spelling of. Does that mean you create a redirect article that *isn't* a &num;redirect (heaven forfend!), but an actual full entry whose only function is to point you the other entry? This is ... better? Shenme (talk) 05:53, 19 October 2021 (UTC)


 * It is the way it is. Possibly for no good reason other than 20 years of precedent. I don't like it and I wish these alternative spelling type entries had much less content and functioned more like disambiguation pages. DTLHS (talk) 06:02, 19 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Mm-kay, I've created shiretown. Now it has a redlink to shiretowns from the template used. Should I also create that? (as, unbelievably, it is a possibility) And, if there wasn't a plural, what would be better to use than en-noun to express only the singular? Shenme (talk) 19:37, 19 October 2021 (UTC)


 * Some editors routinely also create entries for the plurals of newly created count nouns, but many don’t (see e.g., and &thinsp;). For an uncountable noun, use -; see e.g. the entry .  --Lambiam 10:29, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Index pages removed: what other ways can I engage more organically with a specific language?
Feedback on my user experience, then a question:

I have begun studying Scottish Gaelic, and found Wiktionary to be a valuable addition to my other dictionary resources. I usually accessed the Scottish Gaelic word entries via the Scottish Gaelic index page. I'm perfectly aware I can just search for a specific word. Call me old-fashioned, but I liked the simple straightforward feel of the Index pages, both as my gateway and my path into the words. It felt to me more like the way I read paper dictionaries. I like to browse and search by hand, and observe related words and patterns as I go. Lists and alphabetic searches work well for how my brain works.

I was unaware of the history of the Index pages, and blissfully uninvolved in the wiki's management, so I was perplexed and a little shocked when the Index page vanished. No redirect, no explanation, it simply didn't exist. It took some determined digging for me to figure out that it was part of a purposeful, site-wide purge of a class of pages that were outdated and had become detrimental. That's all fine, but it would have been nice to be told why, and that newer, better structures had supplanted them. Maybe to the active contributors it was a welcome relief to have them disappear. To me as a user, it was a sudden unexplained loss of a useful resource. Never mind that it was flawed in ways I was unaware of – it was useful, and it disappeared almost without a trace.

With that off my chest, my question: What are the pages and features that have supplanted the Index page, and where can I find and learn about them?


 * I did not know we had such index pages, but perhaps Category:Scottish Gaelic lemmas will serve the intended purpose for you. --Lambiam 10:12, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, time machines do exist. You may want to bookmark this link. Also, the page may be a bit outdated (It is from Christmas eve eve last year). ॥ ☼ সূর্যমান ☽ ॥ 11:05, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks for the suggestion, but it was apparently outdated well before the snapshot. I'm not going to wed myself to a dead resource. To be clear, I was put out by the manner of its going, not by the fact that it left. Now that I understand the reasons I'm content to move on. Josepheh (talk) 18:07, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Thanks, I'll check that out. Josepheh (talk) 18:07, 20 October 2021 (UTC)


 * I see. The decision to get rid of the Index was taken at Votes/2021-07/Deleting the Index. Actually, it has not been deleted but moved to Appendix:Index/Scottish Gaelic. However, because the navigation bar template has been left unchanged, navigation does not work, making this kind of useless – although you can navigate by modifying the address in the address bar directly, such as by changing https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Index/Scottish_Gaelic  to   https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Index/Scottish_Gaelic /a.  --Lambiam 22:47, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

How are reconstructions made?
Rookie question: People make reconstructions for specific words to determine the origin of one known word. I have always wondered, how do they do that? Are they sourced from somewhere, or are they made by the people who made the article themselves?

In the latter case, *blushes* can I make those reconstructions myself? Is there some set method to do that? The thought of reconstructing dead(ish) languages excites me. ॥ ☼ সূর্যমান ☽ ॥ 11:49, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
 * I you have the understanding of what our notations stand for then you probably can do them yourself. I see you probably want Indo-Aryan or Indo-Iranian. Although this is somewhat unnecessary as there are published books on Indo-Aryan and Indo-Iranian reconstruction, still you sometimes have to decide whether you take this or that form as the page name, or how you understand the semantics, so the answer is often that editors use multiple sources and get their Wiktionary story by combination. Indo-European on the other hand you should avoid if you aren’t an absolute wisenheimer in the field, because if you don’t use enough sources you will make errors and if you cling to some sources you will also make errors. It really depends on how far away in the past the language you reconstruct is, or how many difficulties are involved in the family in general, and on whether you have good material access. Sometimes we are also explicit in our references or further readings sections that the sources given put it a bit differently. Fay Freak (talk) 12:27, 20 October 2021 (UTC)

Symbols for appendices
Hi. Where do I go to associate Commons images with the Unicode points in the Unicode appendices? E.g. at Appendix:Unicode/Miscellaneous Symbols and Arrows, a lot are blank, and a few of those have articles. Thanks. kwami (talk) 23:21, 20 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Subpages of Module:Unicode data. —Μετάknowledge discuss/deeds 00:15, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Could you be more specific? I don't see a subpage for images, and the subpages for the characters don't appear to contain this information. kwami (talk) 06:38, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
 * See (click “images” in the table). J3133 (talk) 06:41, 21 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Ah, I was off by a zero in the index. Thanks. kwami (talk) 06:45, 21 October 2021 (UTC)

How to reflect compound words (e.g., "treechanger", "tree-changer", "tree changer")
Reading a newspaper article today, I encountered the Australian expression "tree changer". Wiktionary gives me treechanger. I have just added the quotation but I may have done so incorrectly since the source uses "tree changer", not "treechanger". Should I have reflected that in some other way? --John Maynard Friedman (talk) 10:54, 24 October 2021 (UTC)
 * What you did was correct. The general practice is to put quotations for any form of a word in the entry for the main form. If an individual form of the word can be cited, an alternative form entry can be created for it, including quotes that specifically use that form. So if you found three independent uses of "tree changer" you could create an entry at and add the quote you found to that page, in addition to keeping it at . Andrew Sheedy (talk) 22:17, 24 October 2021 (UTC)

Help with new category Category:de:Swiss_politics
I have never before created a category so I'm sorry if I've caused a bit of a mess. I wanted to create Category:de:Swiss_politics analogously to Category:de:German_politics. For the purpose of that, I've made this edit which was just a copy-paste of the corresponding German part. Entries are added into the German category solely by virtue of the label which doesn't happen for  though: FDP

Can somebody help me with this category please? Fytcha (talk) 09:39, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
 * There's nothing wrong with the category, which you can always add manually. Labels are a completely different matter, governed by different modules. I've now copied the "German politics" item to make a new "Swiss politics" one . Chuck Entz (talk) 12:17, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you, the category is slowly filling up now. When exactly is that module triggered? No edits have been made to the article GPS since your changes but it is listed in the category nevertheless, unlike e.g. SVP. Fytcha (talk) 13:05, 26 October 2021 (UTC)
 * There is a job queue that automatically propagates the changes that are directly transcluded in the entries, but it does this for all transclusions for all the Wikimedia projects and it's anybody's guess as to how it prioritizes things. Otherwise it happens when an entry is edited. You can force the update by doing a null edit to the entry: click "Edit", then "Publish changes" without changing anything. In cases where a template transcludes another template, it's a good idea to do a null edit on the second template. I'm not entirely clear on the details in the latter case, but I've seen a number of cases where it was necessary. Chuck Entz (talk) 14:01, 26 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Thank you for your help, I understand it better now. Fytcha (talk) 14:47, 26 October 2021 (UTC)

sanaol / sana ol in Tagalog
What does this informal word/phrase actually mean? I get a lot of very different definitions online, so I can't discern a meaning. The only thing I know is it's something said in the context of romance? Can you create the entry? PseudoSkull (talk) 14:33, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
 * Well, to give you some background, it's a super new slang, I think it just started around 2018, and it's an exclamation said to react to someone who had something desirable happen to them. "Sanaol" or "sana all" literally means "wishing everyone (has that too)", something like that, but it's implying that you don't have that desirable thing, so by wishing everyone have it, you're implying something like "I wish I had that too". As for inclusion in Wiktionary, it's super new, and I'm not sure which spelling to use (though I'm inclined to use "sanaol" since it corresponds more to Tagalog orthography), so just not sure whether we can include it now. --Mar vin kaiser (talk) 14:43, 25 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The tiny bit of searching I just did indicates that unfortunately sanaol does not seem to fit the CFI attestation standards. But thanks for filling me in, anyway. Hopefully soon it will go into the discourse enough that a few books will mention it. PseudoSkull (talk) 14:50, 25 October 2021 (UTC)

Editing's problem
When I try to contribute on the English pages about Esperanto, ancient Greek or a proto-language, I receive a message "A brief description of the abuse rule which your action matched is: PdL-ja".

It's a big system error, because these pages don't concern the Japanese language. Could you all fix it please?

Thank you very much for your eventual reply. 2A01:CB05:8B96:E000:D4FC:CAD8:447A:3903 13:39, 28 October 2021 (UTC)

What are the Rhyme pages for?
There's both Rhymes:German/ax and Category:Rhymes:German/ax. The latter is generated automatically by templates in articles, so what is the use of the former? If there's no good reason for it, we should maybe get rid of it. Fytcha (talk) 21:28, 29 October 2021 (UTC)
 * The Rhymes: namespace is good because it allows commentary that the categories don't, such as "In accent X, words ending in {whatever} are also rhymes for the words on this page" or "This pronunciation is a rhyme only for certain pronunciations". Also, sometimes Wikipedia articles on surnames are added to the Rhymes: pages when there is no corresponding Wiktionary entry, which isn't possible with the categories. —Mahāgaja · talk 14:36, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
 * I guess it isn't possible to add a qualifier to an entry in a category, i.e. using something like such that this qualifier then appears in Category:Rhymes:German/ɪk, right?
 * As to the surnames, we could simply create these articles using a bot, no? Fytcha (talk) 16:09, 3 November 2021 (UTC)


 * To turn the question around, what exactly is the benefit of having the category when the Rhymes page exists and can include more information? Andrew Sheedy (talk) 18:45, 3 November 2021 (UTC)
 * Rhymes being able to include more information is a technical limitation on the part of categories, that I hope can be addressed. If we leave that aside, I'd argue that categories are both more logical as well as more maintainable:
 * The rhyming data of a word is information that is inherent to that word; as such, that data belongs inside that word's article, not on an unrelated site.
 * Adding new rhymes by adding from data that is already available in the article is much easier and less error prone than visiting a separate page, counting the syllables and adding it there.
 * In the late stages of rhyme-ification, Rhyme: pages would essentially contain a copy of every word of the language. This is a maintainability nightmare as pages are regularly moved, deleted etc. and the upkeep of Rhymes: pages would have to be heavily assisted by bots (which comes with a delay and a lot of additional traffic).
 * --Fytcha (talk) 20:52, 3 November 2021 (UTC)