Wiktionary:Votes/2009-12/Proposed inclusion of words and abbreviations with meanings established by recognized international bodies and formally adopted by multiple national governments

Proposed CFI amendment to include words and abbreviations with meanings established by recognized international bodies and formally adopted by multiple national governments

 * Voting on: Proposed inclusion of words and abbreviations with meanings established by recognized international bodies and formally adopted by multiple national governments, by amending the attestation requirements of the CFI with the addition of:
 * [or] Establishment by recognized international bodies, and adoption by multiple national governments.


 * Vote starts: 00:00, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Vote ends: 24:00, 23 January 2010 (UTC)


 * Vote created: bd2412 T 20:50, 18 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Discussion:
 * [[Image:Wikt rei-artur3.svg|20px]] Beer parlour archive/2009/September
 * [[Image:Wikt rei-artur3.svg|20px]] Wiktionary talk:Votes/2009-12/Proposed CFI exception for SI Units

Support

 * 1) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support Yair rand 00:06, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * # [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support  AugPi 00:13, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support, this will permit addition of words to the dictionary, and allow us to fill coverage gaps in our swiss-cheese collection of SI units of measurement. bd2412 T 01:37, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 2) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support, but I would extend it to all terms with an official or legal status (see talk page for an example). Lmaltier 14:34, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 3) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support Neskaya contribs–talk? 18:58, 27 December 2009 (UTC) per BD2412, whose logic proves as sound as it always is in this matter. --Neskaya contribs–talk? 18:58, 27 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 4) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support Conrad.Irwin 22:42, 27 December 2009 (UTC) This needs more work, but the basic idea is sound.
 * 5) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support Pharamp 19:45, 1 January 2010 (UTC)
 * 6) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support —Internoob (Disc.•Cont.) 01:53, 4 January 2010 (UTC) I think it needs to be more specific, but, for the SI units at least, these are words that are usable and understandable simply by virtue of being established by a recognized international body, and therefore merit inclusion.
 * 7) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support especially for ==Translingual== entries. DAVilla 13:30, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
 * 8) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support \Mike 16:37, 17 January 2010 (UTC)
 * 9) [[Image:Symbol support vote.svg|20px]] Support. Adds value. -- Visviva 02:35, 19 January 2010 (UTC)

Oppose

 * 1) [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|20px]] Oppose Ivan Štambuk 00:46, 25 December 2009 (UTC) Per talkpage. --Ivan Štambuk 00:46, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 2) [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|20px]] Oppose, this sort of thing should be in appendices. "Official" doesn't have a set meaning, things are only "official" according to a certain source or sources. Mglovesfun (talk) 14:37, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 3) * "Official" appears nowhere in the proposal; what is required is establishment by recognized international bodies and (most importantly) formal adoption' by multiple national governments. bd2412 T 15:17, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 4) [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|20px]] Oppose Equinox ◑ 20:55, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 5) [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|20px]] Oppose  I think there are ways to convey this information w/o circumventing the current CFI. An appendix is a good start, but it isn't included in the default search. To deal with this, I think these terms should be listed in the =Derived terms= sections of the both the prefix and base unit entries (with a link to the Appendix). The CFI only governs the permissibility of entries, not the permissibility of links on existing entries, so this should be fine. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 05:42, 26 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 6) * That is actually a very reasonable alternative, and I wish it had been brought up in the talk page discussion of the topic. I have two questions, though. First, would the terms in mainspace then redirect to the appendix? Second, would we treat the abbreviations the same as the words? bd2412 T 15:49, 26 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I had originally thought that the links under =Derived terms= would link to the appendix (for those that don't currently meet CFI), but having redirects in the main namespace to the Appendix might be possible (maybe using ). I imagine the same could be done for the symbols. --Bequw → ¢ • τ 23:44, 26 December 2009 (UTC)
 * One particular concern that I have is that many of the abbreviated forms are also abbreviations for other things; thus, irrespective of whether we have petaampere, we will have PA. If we have the entry without that sense, then we are not actually conveying all the meanings of the abbreviation. A line on that page directing readers to an appendix for the SI Unit sense would be fine. bd2412 T 02:10, 27 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|20px]] Oppose  Wiktionary is a descriptive dictionary, not a prescriptive one. Let's talk about and agree to change our fundamental principals before just doing it hodge-podge.  Especially, let's not start by accepting governments as lexical authorities. —Michael Z. 2009-12-28 06:45 z 
 * 2) [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|20px]] uh, no we already have too many exceptions to CFI. The proposed exception does not seem to add any benefit, while creating another hole for lots of entries that are not used anywhere. -- Prince Kassad 23:24, 30 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 3) [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|20px]] Oppose: If the terms meet CFI on their own, let 'em be in here; if they don't, let 'em not and have 'em in an appendix.  L&#9786;g&#9786;maniac ☃ 23:34, 30 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 4) [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|20px]] Oppose Daniel. 02:53, 31 December 2009 (UTC) per Mglovesfun, Logomaniac and others. Such information is fine in appendices. --Daniel. 02:53, 31 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 5) [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|20px]] Oppose < class="latinx">Ƿidsiþ 18:21, 17 January 2010 (UTC) per Michael above.
 * 1) [[Image:Symbol oppose vote.svg|20px]] Oppose < class="latinx">Ƿidsiþ 18:21, 17 January 2010 (UTC) per Michael above.

Abstain

 * 1) [[Image:Symbol abstain vote.svg|20px]] Abstain   AugPi 00:57, 25 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 2) [[Image:Symbol abstain vote.svg|20px]] Abstain. I just don't know what-all would end up being covered by this. It seems like we'd be replacing a swiss-cheese approach based on attestation with a swiss-cheese approach based on which languages are official in multiple countries. —Ruakh TALK 13:24, 26 December 2009 (UTC)
 * I'm not sure why that would be a problem. Right now our swiss-cheese problem is that we have perhaps a fourth of the SI units, the remainder of which have either simply not been added (but could be with a diligent search for references) or could not be added because, despite their established meaning, they are passed upon in favor of more convenient units, for example measuring exertion of energy in hectojoules instead of toggling between hundreds of joules and tenths of kilojoules. So, for the English language at least, we have a grid with lots of holes in it, when we could have a smooth plane, as it were. There is no question than multiple English-speaking countries have adopted these measures, and the same for multiple countries where French is among the official languages. Probably the same for Spanish, and for other languages, either there will be multiple countries that have documented adoption in a particular language, or the words will not be attested as existing in that language by this method. bd2412 T 22:41, 27 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Nothing against English — thanks largely to RFV, more than half of my edits are for English — but establishing a "smooth plane" for English while leaving the Hebrew grid full of holes just doesn't do it for me. If we were only discussing the SI units, I might feel differently, but instead we have this subtler criterion that I don't have a good grasp on, besides seeing that it will clearly affect different languages in different ways, without any obvious justification for that. For example, if North and South Korea, say, or the PRC and the ROC were to agree on certain words, and then later they unified, would we have to go back and re-RFV all the words we'd added? —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 20:07, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
 * (BTW, the reason I'm O.K. with the SI units is that we know for sure what all of them would mean, even if we don't know that they do mean that. Even if tomorrow morning, everyone were to start using the word with some sort of metaphorical sense, we could still provide the unattested literal sense and know that we were "right". But the reason for this isn't that the meanings have been established by a recognized international body or that they've been formally adopted by national governments — such bodies and governments are frequently wrong — it's that the system is used in a consistent way by actual people, and the gaps are basically real words that just so happen not to have been used three times in durably archived media. It's like how we include full conjugations of Spanish verbs, even ones that are so rare that some individual forms might not actually meet the CFI.) —Ruakh <i >TALK</i > 20:15, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 1) First, I am unsure what this means by "inclusion" of the terms. Under what language would we put these, if we are relying on international bodies, not on citations that demonstrate the speakers of any particular language using them? As well, this is worded vaguely enough that it seems to imply that we will be including words in other dictionaries which happen to be official language regulators, like the RAE and the Turkish Language Association, even without sufficient citations. I'm not even sure that that is unintentional, because the intention of this proposal seems to be to throw out the normal attestation procedure entirely as long as an authority claims that a word exists, when that is something that Wiktionary as a project has explicitly rejected for years. Dominic·t 00:48, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
 * 2) [[Image:Symbol abstain vote.svg|20px]] I'm not sure I want to include every word established by the Dutch Language Union in its word list of the Dutch language and used a coupla times in two countries' government documents. &#x200b;— msh210 ℠ 18:44, 28 December 2009 (UTC)
 * Ruakh, above, expresses better than I can sentiments I agree with. &#x200b;— msh210 ℠ 20:28, 28 December 2009 (UTC)

Decision

 * Looks like no consensus (10-9-4). Perhaps this vote would have done better if it had been suggesting specific exceptions to CFI (such as SI units, ISO codes, and unicode characters). --Yair rand 07:19, 24 January 2010 (UTC)