Wikipedia:Articles for deletion/List of false friends (2nd nomination)


 * The following discussion is an archived debate of the proposed deletion of the article below. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review).  No further edits should be made to this page.

The result was   delete. Secret account 20:18, 20 December 2013 (UTC)

List of false friends
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A similar, but not identical, article under this title was deleted back in 2007. There are several problems with the article. One is its scope. With 6,000 languages on the planet, there are a huge number of possible false friends among them. Even narrowing this down to English versus other languages would produce a large and excessive article which would violate WP:NOT. A further problem is that the idea of which words are false friends often comes down to point of view. Is it really likely that in the right context an English speaker encountering a Spanish text wouldn't know that web refers to the internet rather than something made by a spider? The article itself doesn't cite any sources, leaving it a potential minefield for original research. Sources themselves usually don't agree on which words are false friends. That leaves us ultimately with an incomplete POV list, which due to its nature, can never be expanded into a suitable article. Valenciano (talk) 10:18, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Transwiki to wikt:Appendix:Spanish false cognates and false friends with English (and potentially wikt:Appendix:German false cognates and false friends with English, wikt:Appendix:Esperanto false cognates and false friends with English, wikt:Appendix:Norwegian false cognates and false friends with English,, wikt:Appendix:Swedish false cognates and false friends with English or similar, subject to Wiktionary's policies/guidelines - is anyone here fluent with the policies/guidelines there?), per WP:LISTN. -- Trevj (talk · contribs) 13:48, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Delete, reluctantly. It looks to be appropriating single sources' work in creating the lists, which is too close to copyvio to be comfortable.


 * There are some refs. For instance here is the ref given for the entire French section. But, the French section looks to include all the entries listed there. I'm pretty sure that that's a copyright violation, and even it technicaly not its piggybacking on someone else's work too much for my taste. It's a tough question because if the editor had just taken some of the entries, that'd be just his opinion (original research if you will). We have to walk the line between copyright vio and OR, and articles like this are hard to do right.


 * Lack of references is not as big a problem for this particular article. The point of refs is so that the reader can check our statements. For word definitions, that's fairly easy provided you have the right dictionary. When the article states that the Hungarian word "novella" means "short story", a person can look that up even if we don't provide a reference. That an English speaker might take "novella" to mean "novel" is sort of common sense; any ref would probably just be anecdotal anyway.


 * That fact that's incomplete doesn't bother me. In fact it's too long. Too long to manage, and many of the entries don't belong IMO for various reasons I won't go into. Some of it's not in English, for instance the note under "Billion" in the Hungarian section says "amerikai és modern brit angol", which leads me to believe that that was just copied from some source.


 * Somebody put a fair amount of work into this, even it was just reformatting existing material. It's not without value, although I'd prefer a different format and a much shorter article containing just those words that have been noted in more than one source, rather than just copied lists from a single source. You hate to throw this work away. But, for articles such as Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time we don't provide the list, because that would be misappropriation of Rolling Stone's intellectual work in making the list. Same deal here. Too close to a copyvio to even transwiki, maybe. Herostratus (talk) 15:37, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Any specifically identified copyright violations can be removed, e.g. phrases rather than simply one or two words which convey meaning. -- Trevj (talk · contribs) 16:17, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Lists-related deletion discussions. Evano1van(எவனோ ஓருவன்) 17:10, 11 December 2013 (UTC)
 * But it' not that kind of copyvio. The list itself is the copyvio.


 * Take an article like Rolling Stone's 500 Greatest Songs of All Time. The names of the songs aren't copywritable, or they are they're fair use, which is why can have an article such as List of songs by Katy Perry which lists song titles. We can do that because the Perry article is a purely mechanical list that requires no significant intellectual work, just a matter of looking up which songs she's recorded. But for the Rolling Stone article, some people at Rolling Stone had to do real intellectual work to come up with that list and decide what makes a "great song" and so forth. So our article just describes the Rolling Stone article (and massages the data on the in certain ways, which is our own work) and doesn't include the actual list. It'd be stealing their work, and copyright forbids that.


 * Same deal here, at least for the French section (and probably some or all of the others). The words themselves are not copyrighted of course, but the list itself is. Herostratus (talk) 16:45, 12 December 2013 (UTC)
 * In that case, shouldn't it have been tagged under CSD#G12? (Maybe not so simple now it's been expanded.) -- Trevj (talk · contribs) 06:12, 20 December 2013 (UTC)
 * Note: This debate has been included in the list of Language-related deletion discussions. • Gene93k (talk) 19:15, 12 December 2013 (UTC)


 * Delete - Not an encyclopedic topic. Carrite (talk) 04:06, 20 December 2013 (UTC)


 * The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the article's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.