Wiktionary:Votes/pl-2015-10/Headword line

Voting on:

Proposal 1. Adding these rules to WT:NORM:

1. "Headword lines should always use templates, such as {{en-noun}} or {{head}}, not just wikitext, as in '''example'''."
2. "Entries should be categorized into POS categories (like Category:English nouns) using the headword-line templates, not using manual category links."

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Proposal 2. Editing WT:EL section WT:EL#A very simple example as follows:

• Removing this text:

  "the inflection word itself (using the correct Part of Speech template or the word in bold letters),"

• Replacing it with this text:

  "the word itself (using the correct headword template),"

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Proposal 3. Editing WT:EL section WT:EL#Headword line as follows:

• Removing the following paragraph:

  "We give a word’s inflections without indentation in the line below the “Part of speech” header. There is no separate header for this. For uninflected words it is enough to repeat the entry word in boldface. Further forms can be given in parentheses."

• Replacing it with one of the two following options:
  • Option 1 (just removing the mention about boldface and parentheses):

    "We give a word’s inflections without indentation in the line below the “Part of speech” header. There is no separate header for this."

  • Option 2 (full rewrite of the paragraph):

    "The headword line is the line directly below the part of speech header, in which the word is repeated, along with its inflections. Some languages also display other information here, such as genders and romanizations, when applicable. You can use either the generic template {{head}} or language-specific templates, such as {{en-noun}} for English nouns."

Schedule:

• Vote started: 00:00, 1 November 2015 (UTC)
• Vote ends: 23:59, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Vote created: --Daniel Carrero (talk) 15:20, 25 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion:

• Wiktionary:Beer parlour/2012/July#A suggestion
• Wiktionary talk:Normalization of entries#Always use templates for headword lines
• Wiktionary talk:Votes/pl-2015-10/Always use templates for headword lines

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1. Support --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:04, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
2. Support. This just codifies existing widespread practice, it's pretty much policy anyway. —CodeCat 02:12, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
3. Support. --WikiTiki89 05:53, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
4. Support profesjonalizm • reply 12:25, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
5. Support Matthias Buchmeier (talk) 22:39, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
6. Support Ƿidsiþ 08:38, 5 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
7. Support - -sche (discuss) 18:52, 5 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   Support  — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 06:06, 10 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

8. Support --Droigheann (talk) 02:13, 22 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
9. Support -- Jberkel (talk) 01:07, 26 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
10. Support  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:20, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
11. Support —JohnC5 23:32, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
12. Support --Dixtosa (talk) 18:08, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

1. Oppose This headword line is useless for analytic languages. Wyang (talk) 11:10, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   This proposal has nothing to do with whether we should use headword lines. It's only about how they should be formatted. --WikiTiki89 15:50, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   No one has directly addressed this issue since I raised it years ago. The headword line, which should not exist in the first place, has been hijacked to display information that should be shown elsewhere. This includes transliteration/pronunciation, conjugation/declension, etymology/word decomposition and usage note ({{tcx}}). Instead people just assumed no one questions the appropriateness of this line. So it ends up that for analytic languages there is an extra uninformative line of code in every entry. Wyang (talk) 00:49, 6 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   @Wyang: But how will opposing this particular proposal help your situation? All this does is say that the headword line (assuming there is one) should be formatted with a template rather than with raw text. --WikiTiki89 01:27, 6 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   @Wyang, Wikitiki89 To be fair, the proposed rule "Entries should be categorized into POS categories [...] using the headword-line templates," assumes that there is a headword-line in the first place. If a headword template is the only allowed way to categorize an entry into "X nouns", then a hypothetical entry without a headword-line would be unable to be categorized into "X nouns".

   That said, I created this vote under the assumption that all entries should have headword lines. I never heard of Wyang's proposal before. --Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:36, 10 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   Oh I see all the fuss was actually about the second line. Still, it doesn't say that the headword templates actually need to display anything. If we do allow entries without headword lines, the place where the headword line should have been is the ideal place for a POS categorization template. --WikiTiki89 23:10, 10 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   • I disagree, incidentally; I find that being able to put information like transliteration or what classifier to use on the headword line for analytic languages is pretty handy. They do use it less, but only a select set of languages really don't need it at all, and it's a minor redundancy for those. —Μετάknowledge^{discuss/deeds} 22:50, 27 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
2. Oppose strongly. Sometimes manual POS categories are helpful. For example, when a Hebrew verb form has the same spelling as its lemma form (the same binyan and root) btu different vowelization, the common practice is to include the verb form under the lemma form's headword as a sense line with {{he-wv}}. Categorization as a verb form would then have to be manual.​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:21, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   That practice has been deprecated by previous discussions, and is not common practice anyway. For example, Latin ablative singular forms of 1st declension nouns have the same written form as the lemma, but with an extra macron. We include these under separate verb form headers. That said, if the form is exactly identical with the lemma, I don't think the form needs to be mentioned at all. —CodeCat 22:43, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   Dunno about Latin, but AFAIK the practice I described in my example is still standard for Hebrew and has not been deprecated.​—msh210℠ (talk) 19:56, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

# Abstain Do I think entries should do this ideally? Yes, but I'm wary of implying that it's an error for new or occasional users who do not understand our templates and just want to add useful information. The principle of this site is that anyone can be an editor, it's for Admins to templatise later if necessary. The complexity of some of the coding here is already beyond all but a handful of users and I'm nervous of seeing this written into the rules. Ƿidsiþ 09:05, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

But these are not "rules" in the sense of being mandatory for editors, they're just mandatory for bots. WT:NORM says: "These norms are mandatory for bots only, so that any changes made by bots must conform to this policy. Editors other than bots can treat these norms as guidelines, while they are encouraged to use this format and correct pages which deviate from it." --Daniel Carrero (talk) 09:08, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, I see – thanks for clarifying. In that case I support. Ƿidsiþ 12:06, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Basically, what it comes down to is that you can do otherwise if you don't know any better, but when someone points out the correct way, you should adapt. —CodeCat 15:58, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

Two things:

1. @Widsith: You said "In that case I support." but you didn't place a vote in the support section yet. Could you do it so that your vote would be counted?
2. CodeCat said: "when someone points out the correct way, you should adapt"
   • I think that it would probably be true sometimes, but not always. Some rules make a higher difference in the appearance of the code (I'm thinking of whitespaces and line breaks) and others are less conspicuous so IMO it'd be fine even if many people forgot or ignored them (spacing after the asterisk, compare * example vs. *example).
   • In any event, no matter if people care to follow WT:NORM or not, bots could fix the entries in the end, so I'm not too worried about it.

--Daniel Carrero (talk) 19:54, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

It's hard for a bot to fix non-templated headword lines reliably. I fixed a sizable number of them, but there are still some. —CodeCat 20:23, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

So this vote does not make it mandatory for the untrained to use templates? I'm going to hold you to that. DAVilla 10:35, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

1. Abstain This is already standard practice; a vote on it is superfluous. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 19:59, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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1. Support --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:04, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
2. Support. The "inflection word" is just weird. —CodeCat 02:12, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
3. Support. --WikiTiki89 05:53, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
4. Support profesjonalizm • reply 12:25, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
5. SupportMatthias Buchmeier (talk) 22:39, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
6. Support Ƿidsiþ 12:06, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
7. Support - -sche (discuss) 18:52, 5 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
8. Support --Droigheann (talk) 02:18, 22 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
9. Support  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:20, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
10. Support —JohnC5 23:32, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

# Oppose per abstention above. Ƿidsiþ 09:07, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

1. Oppose per my comments on proposal 3, below.​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:21, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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1. Support --Daniel Carrero (talk) 02:04, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
2. Support, but I am open to amending the wording in the future. --WikiTiki89 05:54, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
3. Support profesjonalizm • reply 12:25, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
4. SupportMatthias Buchmeier (talk) 22:39, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
5. Support Ƿidsiþ 12:06, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
6. Support  — I.S.M.E.T.A. 21:20, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
7. Support —JohnC5 23:32, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
8. Support  — Saltmarsh^{συζήτηση-talk} 06:25, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

1. Oppose Both proposals give the impression that the headword line is the normal place to put inflections. But really, this is only done in the exceptional case that there are just a few forms that fit on the line. In the general case, an inflection table is called for. —CodeCat 02:12, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   Well you could have pitched in in the discussion on the talk page. --WikiTiki89 05:52, 1 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

2. Oppose per CodeCat. For English, inflections are being placed on the headwordline, but for multiple other languages, either none are placed there or just some picked cases of inflected forms are there to suggest the inflection pattern to the reader. Other than that, the new wording looks like an improvement, and if it were not for the problem, I would have supported option 2. --Dan Polansky (talk) 09:13, 7 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
3. Oppose. The proposed wordings are not accurate, per others. This, that and the other (talk) 02:16, 8 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
4. Oppose Per the others. The additional mention of genders and romanizations in Option 2 would be an improvement, but primarily it's about inflections, and both the current phrasing and that of the proposals do suggest that the proper place for all this information is the headword line. --Droigheann (talk) 02:18, 22 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
5. Oppose If we're going to rewrite what WT:EL says about headword lines, it should mention that for many languages, headword lines may differ from page names in showing diacritics (macrons in Latin and Old English, acute accents in Russian, pitch accent marks in Serbo-Croatian and Lithuanian, etc.). We should mention that romanization is automatic for some languages but needs to be added manually for others. Finally, rather than speaking of a word's "inflections" we should use the conventional term "principal parts" for the inflected forms that appear on the headword line. —Aɴɢʀ (talk) 20:08, 29 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]
6. Oppose both options per CodeCat, above. Plus, I oppose option 2 for the following reason: If someone doesn't know the right template to use, or if the standard templates don't adequately (or in a way he can figure out) display the correct formatting for the headword line, then he should be able to do it manually. While of course that's not an ideal situation, we shouldn't forbid it on ELE. (But this is not a reason to oppose proposal 1 item 1, above, since NORM is not binding policy on all edits.)​—msh210℠ (talk) 22:21, 30 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   Nonsense! From the Entry Layout page, where we are instructed to use "the correct headword template", the contributor can just intuitively scroll down to the section on the Headword Line, click on the last link for Headword Line Templates "for those who prefer this technique", jump down to the section on Headword-Line Templates since redirects don't work with sections (nevermind, I fixed it), go to the category for Headword-Line Templates by Language, find English Headword-Line Templates under E, and then click on the template name suspected to match the desired part of speech to hopefully read the intended purpose of that template and maybe even how to use it, presuming it's not something strange like -fucking- which requires use of {{head|en|infix}}. Shit, it's too late to vote, isn't it? DAVilla 10:31, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   @DAVilla: I'm afraid it is too late, yes. However, there would have needed to be four more voters supporting this proposal in order for it to have passed, so I don't think you need to worry that you missed the opportunity to change the outcome. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:31, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   Oh, uh, to be clear, I was being sarcastic, so actually opposing option 2. But there again, one vote would not have been enough, to your point. DAVilla 15:36, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

   @DAVilla: Ah, I see. Sorry. Underslept I think! — I.S.M.E.T.A. 15:42, 3 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

# Abstain Ƿidsiþ 09:07, 4 November 2015 (UTC)[reply]

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• Proposal 1 passes 12‒2‒1 (85⁵⁄₇% of non-abstainers in favour). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:29, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Proposal 2 passes 10‒1‒0 (90¹⁰⁄₁₁% of all voters in favour). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:29, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]
• Proposal 3 fails 8‒6‒0 (57⅐% of all voters in favour). — I.S.M.E.T.A. 01:29, 1 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@I.S.M.E.T.A. Would you please use decimals, such as 85.7? I find the fractions rather unusual and inconvenient; the decimal format allows easy comparison (>, <) and is typographically simpler. --Dan Polansky (talk) 11:21, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Dan Polansky: I'll just round up or down to integers henceforth. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 12:09, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@I.S.M.E.T.A. Rounding up to integers is not a good idea and is not our previous practice. I think 1 or 2 decimal points are in order. --Dan Polansky (talk) 12:31, 13 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Dan Polansky: Yes, I used to do that, but then my formatting of decimal points (· vs. . vs. ,) was objected to. The fractional numbers only have consequence when they're between the integers 66 and 67, anyway. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 09:16, 15 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@I.S.M.E.T.A. The most customary formatting is the decimal period, not ·. Sticking with the customary formatting seems best. --Dan Polansky (talk) 08:31, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Dan Polansky: Screw this. I just won't close votes in future. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 20:36, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

I found the whole idea of 57⅐% and middle decimal points weird initially, but I don't object to any of those as long as I understand the system being used. (That's probably selfish on my part, and I see the point of asking people to use the customary formatting as it is readily understood.)

Dan Polansky is right, though, in that the customary formatting is as he described. Also I don't like very much the idea of rounding up or down. A number with 1 or 2 decimal points is more accurate. Sometimes, people copy the results of a vote to make a point in discussions by saying like "54.7% of the voters prefer strawberry", so it's incorrect saying that "The fractional numbers only have consequence when they're between the integers 66 and 67, anyway." --Daniel Carrero (talk) 22:27, 19 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]

@Daniel Carrero: Thanks for chiming in and voicing your lack of objection. I'd just rather avoid the needless nitpicking. — I.S.M.E.T.A. 02:13, 20 December 2015 (UTC)[reply]