User talk:Xyzzyplugh/Articles about words

But we need one
I believe that actually having a policy or guideline on articles about words would be a good idea. However, various attempts at talking to others about this quickly revealed that everyone either has no opinion at all, finds this unimportant, or have opinions which are randomly scattered across every possible position imaginable on this topic, thereby making the chance of any policy being created at this time highly unlikely. --Xyzzyplugh 20:09, 25 March 2007 (UTC)


 * So your concern isn't with either of the two extremes (article is too short, it gets sent to Wiktionary; article obviously contains a fair bit of extra detail that Wiktionary doesn't want, we keep it here), which you seem to largely agree with. Your concern is with how the gray area in between is handled (article contains a small bit of extra information that would be lost if transwikied, do we keep it here and hope it will grow?), is that correct?
 * Anyway, the essay might be better received if it proposes possible solutions, rather than just worries about the fact that there's a problem. --Interiot 19:31, 28 March 2007 (UTC)
 * My purpose in writing the essay was to explain the problem, as very few editors are even aware of it. I don't have a specific solution in mind, as any solution ought to be formed by some consensus of the overall community, and with the community utterly unaware of or uninterested in this, such consensus will not be formed any time soon.
 * I can see two reasonable solutions to this. 1. allow articles on any words which have enough reliably sourced content to actually write an article about them which goes beyond a dictionary definition, including whatever etymologists have written about in various books and journals.  I'm assuming etymologists have probably written volumes of text about large numbers of words in various places which no normal human being ever reads.  2. Same as above, but leave out the etymologists' journals, and only look in magazines, newspapers, etc, in order to only get words which are the most notable.  Plenty has been written about Nigger, for example, in all sorts of places, but Thou probably gets deleted.
 * The other possible solutions, "allow articles on all words" and "allow articles on no words" are not ones anyone is likely to agree with. --Xyzzyplugh 14:22, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

The problem
I think toward the end you hit on exactly what the problem is. People are really, really, really, really, really reluctant to delete any article that has sources, a few sections and a few photos in it, even if that article's existance runs counter with existing policy. That isn't really hard to do with many words. But pad it out all you want, if all you can write about a word is etymology, usage and grammar then it is a just an exceedingly long dictionary entry (yes, I'm thinking of thou here). The only counter-examples I can think of are words that have some effect on society: womyn or nigger, for example. Those are actual encyclopedia articles and I don't (yet) see "Wikipedia is not an encyclopedia" at WP:NOT. Recury 19:40, 29 March 2007 (UTC)

Generalized to word phrases??
Any expansion of this discussion to include word phrases, such as Super Mario Bros. 2 (game name)?? Georgia guy 14:26, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
 * What is that? Recury 14:30, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
 * To clarify, this question is about a variant of this discussion that deals with articles about word phrases. Georgia guy 14:32, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
 * No, what is Super Mario Bros. 2 (game name)? Recury 15:50, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

See User:Georgia guy/Super Mario Bros. 2 (game name). Georgia guy 16:49, 30 March 2007 (UTC)
 * That isn't even an article, it's a basically a disambiguation page. It doesn't talk about any of the same things that articles on words talk about, so I don't see how it's relevant. But I guess there exist some articles on phrases that are similar like Oh My Gosh (expression). Recury 18:23, 30 March 2007 (UTC)

I added a link to my own essay at the bottom
This covers a very similar topic, and I didn't know about this essay when I wrote it.-h i s  s p a c e   r e s e a r c h 15:07, 14 August 2007 (UTC)

Good enough to ignore policy
I know this is just an essay, but I'm really concerned that the deciding argument is that if an article has good enough prose, it can be kept, no matter how obviously it violates a basic WP:NOT policy. Does this mean that we should apply "but it's good"-argument to instructions for building your own house or a really well-written piece of original research? I can't really see why not, since both would be a way of completely ignoring unambiguous policy. My experience from deletion discussions concerning articles on various words and phrases that are particularly lenghty, and usually richly illustrated, is that all debates follow the same basic pattern:


 * A sizeable minority supporting the nominator point out that information about usage, etymology, compounds, etc. are all the hallmarks of dictionary articles.
 * A sizeable majority objects to the deletion, claiming that it is well-written and useful and that it goes "beyond a dictionary definition". The very few instances when the latter claim is actually explained, the details of usage is exemplified.
 * The article is eventually kept on account of the number of supporters and the conclusion is that it's not a dicdef at all, but actually "about a word" or that it simply "goes beyond" a mere dicdef.

What has never once been clear to me, or as far as I know anyone else, is what the difference between "an article about a word" and a dicdef actually is. My own impression is that there are only two basic criteria in this context: that it happens to be on Wikipedia and that no one has attempted to transfer much, or even any, of the information to the corresponding Wiktionary article. Overall, it seems as if barely any of participants of those discussions ever edit Wiktionary articles and have no clue just how much information a dictionary article may contain and seem to believe that a transwiki would someone be a net loss for Wikipedia.

I agree only on one issue, and that is the usefulness of keeping words that have a truly major impact, and not just as a part of language. However, the current trend seems to be that any common word pseudo-dicdef is kept whether they be the minimal yes or the bloated football (word). There has got to be a better solution to keeping articles that really go beyond just usage notes, like thou, while deleting pure dicdefs like no.

Peter Isotalo 14:45, 17 September 2008 (UTC)


 * My essay was intended merely to describe the current situation (or at least, the situation at the time it was written, a year and a half ago. Things may have changed somewhat since then, I haven't been following deletion discussions much lately).  It wasn't intended to state how things should be done.  I think that the way we handle articles on words is not optimal, and that we should have some sort of reasonable policy as to what to do with articles on words.  "Delete short poorly written articles, keep long well written articles" is not a reasonable policy, but that's what we do.


 * Crafting a reasonable policy and getting widespread community agreement on it would take a large amount of effort, which hopefully someone will eventually put forth. I'm not too active on Wikipedia lately so it won't likely be me who puts this effort forth.  But if I had to come up with a quick opinion on what our policy would be, it would go something like -


 * We don't want to keep articles on all words, as we'd be pointlessly duplicating wiktionary. We don't want to have no articles on words, as there are clearly words which are notable and about which much has been written in mainstream sources.  So perhaps some notability guidelines could be agreed upon, so that notable words, whatever exactly those are, would be kept, and all others sent to wiktionary and deleted.   This would get rid of the pointless articles on words, while safeguarding the good ones from being deleted.  --Xyzzyplugh (talk) 08:46, 18 September 2008 (UTC)


 * My impression is that little has changed in this area. The example of yes as a separate pseudo-dicdef is a very good illustration that there is currently no consistency in applying WP:NOT. You have a point about trying to set some sort of notability critera to apply to the broad category of "articles about words", but this will require some fairly stringent specifications. Just about any common word is by most definitions notable, and one can always dig up tons of information on etymology, usage, and whathaveyou, but the result in most cases will still just be a wordy dicdef. There has been a discussion about this over at Wikipedia talk:What Wikipedia is not, and I've added my two cents to this. Maybe you could join the discussion so we could work towards a solution.
 * Peter Isotalo 13:32, 19 September 2008 (UTC)

AfD nomination of Bullshit
I nominated Bullshit for deletion because of WP:NOTDIC, I would appreciate your input, because you seem to want a clear policy about articles on words. ... Misty Willows   talk  23:19, 26 April 2009 (UTC)

Suggested change
The essay currently says "Giraffe is about the long-necked African mammal.". Would it be more accurate for it to say "The Giraffe article is about ..." or "The article titled "Giraffe" is about ..." (and similarly for the reference to "Thou") ? DexDor (talk) 20:35, 9 August 2013 (UTC)