Wiktionary:Information desk/2023/August

Translation problem at purfle
No definition similar to the gloss "special order in interrogative sentences" exists on the page purfle as far as I can tell, yet it titles the translation box, which was added 11 years ago. Hftf (talk) 07:13, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Since the Russian translation appears to mean "to trim with a border" I think they just copied the translation box code from somewhere else and forgot to change the header. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 08:22, 2 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Fixed. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 08:28, 2 August 2023 (UTC)

Value of pages in the Rhymes namespace vs. auto-generated categories
The template will auto-generate appropriate per-language categories, further broken down by the number of syllables if that information is provided to the template. It also generates a (red)link to a page that could be written with examples of words that rhyme. AFAICT, this page has to be hand-written, and would in theory contain the same words as in the auto-generated categories.

What is the value of creating such pages?

Thanks, Chernorizets (talk) 21:10, 4 August 2023 (UTC)


 * See Beer parlour/2021/August. rhymes didn't generate the categories until relatively recently and there was a proposal to get rid of the manual pages once it was implemented, but there were a few objections primarily relating to red links and qualifiers and it wasn't followed up on. —Al-Muqanna المقنع (talk) 21:16, 4 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @Al-Muqanna thanks for the context! Chernorizets (talk) 21:20, 4 August 2023 (UTC)

index:russian
When trying to reach the page en.wiktionary.org/wiki/index:russian, I am informed that this index has not been created. Since I have been using it for a few years, i don't understand what has happened or where the site disappeared to. Wrknight (talk) 14:19, 6 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Indexes were deleted two years ago after a vote: Votes/2021-07/Deleting the Index. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 19:35, 6 August 2023 (UTC)
 * See Category:Russian lemmas, which is the page that replaced the index. — Vorziblix (talk · contribs) 13:38, 8 August 2023 (UTC)

Want to add Yiddish entry request but citation is phonetic English

 * milchidik
 * https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/22/books/review/woody-allen-edward-sorel-mary-astors-purple-diary.html
 * https://www.haaretz.com/2014-08-12/ty-article/robin-williams-mensch/0000017f-e5d3-d62c-a1ff-fdfb8b7e0000
 * https://www.jta.org/2014/08/12/ny/robin-williams-honorary-jew
 * https://www.translationdirectory.com/dictionaries/dictionary004_m.htm
 * ....0mtwb9gd5wx (talk) 09:12, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @0mtwb9gd5wx: I added your request in . Anatoli T. (обсудить/вклад) 09:27, 9 August 2023 (UTC)


 * haaretz: "[...] Williams told the crowd in a Yiddish accent, "Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Temple Beth Prada. This evening's meal will be milchidik, fleishadik, and sushidik.""
 * jta: "[...] Williams said in a Yiddish accent, ‘Welcome to Temple Beth Prada. This evening’s meal will be milchidik, fleishadik and sushidik.’”"
 * : "[...] that the boy is neither milchidik nor flaishidik— neither dairy nor meat— but that's [...]"
 * : "[...] the dishes, knowing which set was for milchidik, which for fleishadik."
 * That's, prob. borrowed from Yiddish and related to . --15:49, 9 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Now I'm quite curious -- is sushidik a newer coinage referring to ? 😄 ‑‑ Eiríkr Útlendi │Tala við mig 21:07, 11 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Interesting, this looks like and  but with an added id. Maybe User:Insaneguy1083, who's been dealing with some Yiddish affixes lately, knows what the id is. - -sche (discuss) 04:51, 22 August 2023 (UTC)
 * If I had to guess, I'd say it's an informal construction formed with in mind that was further mixed with the  ending, where the -id actually just comes from the second syllable of, a Hebrew borrowing in its entirety. And if my memory serves me correctly, I've seen sushidik or something similar before, and sadly it does not pertain to . Insaneguy1083 (talk) 05:04, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

Visibility of new entries
I've made some new entries here but none of them appear in search results when searched by Google or any other search engine even when they appear here. Why so ? Is there any solution ? Polarbear678 (talk) 19:03, 10 August 2023 (UTC)


 * They just need time for the database to update. Give it a few hours or a day at most and they should start appearing. Vininn126 (talk) 19:08, 10 August 2023 (UTC)
 * New entries which I created that are over 1 month old too don't appear in google search result or any other search engine result . They just appear here. Is there any solution ? Polarbear678 (talk) 15:07, 11 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Which entries for example? Anyway, you'd need to contact Google (good luck!), since we aren't in control of their search engine. Equinox ◑ 16:38, 11 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Google in its early days may have been closer to us than they are today. They are now running an in-house dictionary script on all Android phones such that the user can merely press their thumb on any word visible on a page and see the definition.  While that doesn't make them hostile to Wiktionary, they no longer have an incentive to promote us in search results, and they may have decided to reduce the bot scrapings from several times a day to several times a month, and perhaps don't search our Special:NewPages anymore (assuming they once used to; it's pretty easily accessible to a webcrawler).  Even on iPhones, I believe a Google search for a single word in isolation will most often return a link to the Oxford Dictionary (not the OED, but presumably derived from it) above the link to    Wiktionary. — Soap — 17:07, 21 August 2023 (UTC)

Removing perfect tense from Ancient Greek conjugation template
How do you make t:grc-conj-έω not show the perfect and pluperfect tenses (i.e. those with a reduplicated stem)? I used that template at to show the imperfect, future, and aorist forms, but based on  no perfect form seems to actually be attested (and I don't know whether a hypothetical perfect stem would be ἠθῡ́μηκα, since the imperfect and aorist are formed by augmenting the initial ἀ- to ἠ-, or ἀτεθῡ́μηκα, as with  => ἐπιτεθῡ́μηκα), so the perfect forms probably shouldn't be displayed. - LaetusStudiis (talk) 03:16, 12 August 2023 (UTC)


 * It looks as though we need to add 1 and 1 to suppress them upon demand. I don't know what harmonisation with other Greek conjugation templates requires.  If this discussion gets involved, it should probably be moved to the template's discussion page rather than left here on an arbitrary discussion page. --RichardW57m (talk) 12:11, 18 August 2023 (UTC)

Character info for user-perceived characters
How do I create the equivalent of character info for a user-perceived character? I'm trying to create it for, and it's hard slog. I've already hit the potential issue that the glyphs I've created include white-space for marks above and below, but that's separate to this question. --RichardW57 (talk) RichardW57 (talk) 03:32, 22 August 2023 (UTC)

&c.
We have approximately 84 Latin-script entries and 116 non-Latin script entries in which the dated, stilted "&c." occurs instead of "etc." in wikivoice in definitions and the like. I am inclined to go through those entries and update "&c." to "etc." (manually, assisted by AWB, not via a bot, because there are still a few false positives in that list where it's in a quote). Support, objections? - -sche (discuss) 19:38, 22 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Seems wise. "&c." saves no time or space and runs a decent risk of being confusing. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 18:15, 23 August 2023 (UTC)

Ancient Greek - Inflection tables - Pres act imper 3rd per pl
Being new to Wiktionary editing and such, I posted my question/problem here:

https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Category_talk:Ancient_Greek_verb_inflection-table_templates&oldid=prev&diff=75770217

If applicable, please feel free to copy and paste it to a more appropriate place and delete it from there.

Basically it seems like the inflection tables have some problems with imperative 3rd person plural if I'm not mistaken (for present, using -όντων instead of -έτωσαν). But I don't have the knowledge of Wiktionary or Greek to help much with fixing it (if I'm even correct that problems currently exist).

Thanks in advance for any help.

NominativeCase (talk) 21:32, 23 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Possibly, but not the problem you seem to think. It is listed at Appendix:Ancient_Greek_dialectal_conjugation, and the page is listed at https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Appendix:Ancient_Greek_dialectal_conjugation#Imperative_thematic.  So I think the issue would be how to present the information so that you didn't feel there was a problem, without causing different problems.  --RichardW57m (talk) 14:32, 24 August 2023 (UTC)
 * @RichardW57m, Very interesting! It appears to be something like an Attic-to-Koine shift. Thanks for addressing my question. And I now see that the inflection tables have a link to that appendix as well. I suppose whether to change the presentation in the tables to include other forms (such as Koine) might depend on how often people would want that information as opposed to or in addition to regular Attic. I imagine this has been discussed here before. Cheers ~ NominativeCase (talk) 14:46, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Edit a declension template, make a new one, or put code on page?
Hello all, I've been busy trying to make a template for the Old Dutch declension of kint, but I've ran into a problem. This is because the template I would normally use (template:odt-decl-table) doesn't allow multiple links to exist in one cell. And it also doesn't include the vocative case. The latter also forms a problem because I can't find any sources that clearly state that Old Dutch even had vocative in the first place. Because of those reasons I made a new template special for kint, but I don't know wheter or not it'd be a good idea to publish it. I could also use the standard template, but then the links wouldn't work correctly. Or I could put the code of the template directly into kint, but that would create a mess in the code. Can anyone explain what would be the best to do now?

Thanks in advance. Preupellor (talk) 15:42, 24 August 2023 (UTC)


 * You can enter multiple links in one cell by doing something like . Stujul (talk) 09:18, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Potential slight change in definition of the word "Incel"
See here for more detail 205.189.94.8 19:09, 24 August 2023 (UTC)

Synonyms of if you find yourself in a hole...
They seem like vague rewordings of the lemma, so I'd like to clean them up. However, I'm unsure of the right way to do so. Should I turn the two linked pages into redirects and delete the Synonyms section from the lemma? Or do something else entirely? Ursus arctos californicus (talk) 02:56, 25 August 2023 (UTC)

Christianity terms labelled broadly "religion"
We have quite a few terms labelled or categorized as broadly "religious" which are in fact specifically Christian, e.g. Apostles' Creed (label), Christ on a cracker (category), and until my recent edits, action sermon and autosoterism. I have relabelled a few already and intend to continue unless anyone has objections... - -sche (discuss) 20:06, 26 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Makes tons of sense to me. —Justin ( koavf ) ❤T☮C☺M☯ 22:48, 26 August 2023 (UTC)
 * Go for it. Vininn126 (talk) 23:01, 26 August 2023 (UTC)

Arabic conjugation table for Uzbek Wiktionary
Hi! I have added كان entry to Uzbek wiktionary here: https://uz.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/كان. But I don’t know if Arabic conjugation table is available for Uzbek. Is it available for Uzbek wiktionary also? Yokubjon Juraev (talk) 10:06, 27 August 2023 (UTC)

Format of link to word/language
Never mind, after posting my question I realized that the second link also works. The link in the same page uses 'Spanish' but 'es' also works.

Hello I have a question, why the format of a link to a word in a language has this format:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ajedrez#Spanish

I think it would be better to use the language code in the last part, for example:

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/ajedrez#es

This way is easier to link to a specific word in a specific language.

I am writing a program to help me learn a language, I want to link words to wiktionary and I noticed this, but I think this format would be more useful in general.

Can someone share their thoughts on this topic?

Thanks Boris Blad77 (talk) 22:45, 27 August 2023 (UTC)


 * Your example page already has Spanish at the top, so there is no scrolling for the browser to do. It must be the language, not the language code, because it's a and must match the page section header, which is the language name. (Well, we could redesign it but that's probably not easy.) Equinox ◑ 22:53, 27 August 2023 (UTC)
 * A bot could replace each L2 heading like  by  . However, for ease of linking to specifically the Spanish term abominable (as in ), say, you can use template l or m, for example , which produces "".  --Lambiam 16:47, 29 August 2023 (UTC)

licensing question
I'm working on an app which uses Wiktionary data for an integrated dictionary, currently it just queries Wiktionary and then parses the wiki text. I'm happy to publish the parser under either of the two licenses (and indeed would be glad for people to use it), but I don't want my whole app to need to be copyleft. I'm not sure how "extensive" CC-BY-SA is, or if it allows for something akin to LGPL-like usage.

I also have the same question about the Lua code for templates, it's unclear if these are licensed under the same license as mediawiki (GPL2+) or the licenses for the actual text of Wiktionary. Hrschwartz (talk) 13:56, 29 August 2023 (UTC)


 * I'm confident CC-BY-SA won't be interpreted as extending to your original code, but only to Wiktionary content made available and possible transformed by it. You need to decide yourself under what licence you publish your own code. Pages hosted here with module code have the same footer text ("Definitions and other text are available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply.") as other pages, so it appears fair to interpret this as that they are covered by that licence. --Lambiam 16:36, 29 August 2023 (UTC)
 * So I'm using the Wiktionary content to auto-populate flashcards, which can then be modified by users, and are saved to the user's account for review etc. This feels enough like "transforming the data" that it would likely be subject to the share-alike restriction, but since it's integrated into the rest of the app it seems like that might apply to the entire app. Hrschwartz (talk) 17:10, 29 August 2023 (UTC)
 * IANAL, so don't take my word as definitive, but I don't see how the copyright status of the app itself would be affected. Is the user-transformed data redistributed (made available to other users)? If not, the terms of CC-BY-SA and the GFDL do not apply to the situation anyway. --Lambiam 12:17, 1 September 2023 (UTC)
 * sorry the thing I wrote was perhaps misleading, the user-modification is not the "transformation" in question, the wikitext > autopopulated flashcards functionality is. I'm also using wiktionary data directly to manage collocating inflected forms vs lemmas. If I was displaying wiktionary in an iframe or something I probably would never have written my original question, but it feels like "algorithmically transforming dictionary data to use for basic functionality" is at least likely to be subject to the share-alike clause.
 * it seems like both of us are kinda "hmm well maybe hm probably not it's probably fine"--is there a way to get a clearer answer without contacting a copyright lawyer myself? 45.164.150.50 18:41, 1 September 2023 (UTC)
 * (Sorry, previous post was indeed me). Anyway I've also sent an email to Creative Commons about this, but if you know who else I might contact that would be helpful. Hrschwartz (talk) 19:00, 1 September 2023 (UTC)