Talk:Bookcase

Request for Additional Information
I believe the discussion on the bay arrangement could either be rewritten to make it easier picture or even better, a photo provided. I don't believe as many people are familiar with that arrangement compared to the other two arrangements so a photo could help. It took me a second to deduce what it would look like. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.125.100.62 (talk) 00:39, 1 February 2008 (UTC)

Spare image
This gould go back in the article if it gets longer; no more pictures are needed at present.--Felix Folio Secundus (talk) 12:13, 31 May 2011 (UTC)

"Furniture" vs. "piece of furniture"
Hi,

the short description of this article (and others) seems to use the term "furniture" as a singular noun. Wouldn't it be appropriate to replace it with "piece of furniture" or "item of furniture"? 79.41.80.69 (talk) 15:25, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Short descriptions are, by definition, short. renders as
 * Bookcase – Furniture used to store books
 * which is perfectly understandable, and useful without needing extra words. Just plain Bill (talk) 15:49, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
 * Second Law of Michelson: Something short doesn't become long when you add "piece of" to it :-). Seriously, I was wondering if the sentence wasn't just ungrammatical. 79.41.80.69 (talk) 17:21, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
 * It is not a sentence, but more like a caption or a subtitle, as short descriptions are meant to be. In context as it now stands, it is not confusing. For the kind of technical writing seen in Wikipedia articles, I hew to Strunk's maxim, "Omit needless words." Just plain Bill (talk) 17:46, 12 March 2023 (UTC)
 * I did look at WP:SDESC and it says a short description isn't required to be a definition. But, I hope, it must still be a description. And, given a description Descr for an entity E, I'd expect a sentence like An E is a Descr (or a very similar one) to be correct. Whereas you can't say "a bookcase is a furniture". It seems like, if you omit "piece of", it becomes more of a hint than a description. It's like, for instance, "pop music" would be in the short description of a song. But "pop music" doesn't describe the song. At most it describes its category, or one of its categories. 79.50.205.100 (talk) 07:58, 13 March 2023 (UTC)
 * You can certainly say "a bookcase is furniture".
 * Short descriptions serve three purposes:
 * very brief indication of the field covered by the article
 * short descriptive annotation
 * disambiguation in searches
 * "Describing its category" is central to the first and third items above. The only place many readers will see a short description is in annotated "see also" sections, where brevity reduces clutter. Just plain Bill (talk) 17:45, 14 March 2023 (UTC)