Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is not a dictionary/Archive 17

Exact definition of WINAD
In the early days of Wikipedia, WINAD was intended to mean Wikipedia can't simply have articles on all definable words without showing they can be expanded to actual articles rather than definitions. After a few years, however, it became common for Wikipedians to say that WINAD means anything about a non-noun word, regardless of its length, doesn't belong in Wikipedia. (Look at Talk:Di-. [That article is now a re-direct to Numeral prefix.]) Georgia guy (talk) 14:03, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
 * And...? Staszek Lem (talk) 20:52, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
 * P.S. Not exactly so: she, like, green vs. Hundescheisse, Kalauer, Prefijo... :-) Staszek Lem (talk) 20:52, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
 * The links in your comment I believe are German words. Georgia guy (talk) 21:02, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Right. These are German and Spanish nouns occasionally used in English language. Recently we deleted the article Zakazukha, a Russian noun, as an application of WINAD. The blue ones are the non-nouns, but we do have articles. So these we are kinda counter-examples for what you wrote. My text is as vague as yours 23:58, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

You comment seems to be a critique of another editor's comment on one particular prefix, and your observation / assertion that it's commonplace for other Wikipedians to categorically reject articles on non-noun words. Is there something specific that you would like here? North8000 (talk) 21:34, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
 * North8000, assuming your comment is aimed at me as opposed to Staszek, what I'm trying to do here is see if I can find good info on how much agreement there has been over the years on the exact meaning of WINAD. Georgia guy (talk) 21:38, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Do I understand you correctly that your question is related to history of Wikipedia's policies, rather than to improvement of the policy? (not that these issues cannot be related.) Staszek Lem (talk) 23:58, 27 September 2018 (UTC)
 * Yes. Georgia guy (talk) 23:59, 27 September 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, I have a specific proposal
WINAD. It's applied over broadly.

Example. I created (here) an article for the phrase "Boy howdy". It's a American idiom, not terribly current anymore, but apt to be found in literature by some non-zero number of readers, who might want to know what it means. The article was mainly a definition, and some examples, but I wanted to the space to be a little bit expansive on some of the nuances, demonstrating that and to what extent its a southern thing will a little more exposition than a terse "primarily U.S. South". There are also variations... a sentence about Boy Howdy the R. Crumb character... don't remember exactly. Quite a short article, mostly a definition and some examples of use.

And I am certain that some non-zero number of readers (probably the majority is my guess) that come across the phrase will turn here rather the (much less known) Wiktionary for explanation. And what will they find? Nothing, because the article was deleted. There wasn't anything wrong with the article. It was doing its tiny part to make the internet not suck. But it ran afoul of editors following what is IMO is a pretty expansive interpretation of WINAD.

And I was advised to re-write it at Wiktionary. But I didn't. So the months turn into years and we don't have any explanation, anywhere, for humanity of what "boy howdy" means. (And as I say, even if we did, some (most?) readers would come here, find nothing, and turn to Google (Oh OK, there does happen to be a disambiguation page with a Wiktionary pointer, in this particular case.)

But so here's the thing. A lot of WINAD is stuff like "Wikipedia is not a genealogical dictionary" (that's fine). "Articles on neologisms that have little or no usage in reliable sources are commonly deleted" (well of course). "Wikipedia is not in the business of saying how words, idioms, phrases etc. 'should' be used" (well of course). "We aren't teaching people how to talk like a hacker" (got it). I mean really a lot of this boils down to "We don't want your Urban Dictionary or leetspeak type stuff sourced to something you heard your sister say". There's a lot of stuff about article lengths and poorly written articles and so on.

But so then we have "Sometimes an article really is a mis-placed stub dictionary entry, that discusses the etymology, translations, usage, inflections, multiple distinct meanings, synonyms, antonyms, homophones, spelling, pronunciation, and so forth of a word or an idiomatic phrase". This is fine. An article that only or virtually only describes inflections, declensions, translations, etc. of a term is a pure dicdef. So assuming that pure dicdefs don't belong here (actually arguable, but let's assume), articles that are not pure dicdefs shouldn't be disallowed, and they are not. I mean, read the page.

But people are not getting this. They're not reading the page. They're reading the title. I get this... there's a lot of nuances in these rules, and we have day jobs. But let's make it easier for people with a simple clear statement. So yes, a concrete proposal would be to add something like this at the "Misplaced dictionary entries" section. Add to the opening as follows (written in draft-speak, don't worry about the exact phrasing; bolding just to show the addition):

(WINAD is carefully constructed (and that's fine), so you'd probably want to make some changes elsewhere so as not to contradict this. But you get the idea).

I may not get a lot of traction with the people who watch this page. Doesn't make me wrong, and doesn't mean this wouldn't be received well by the larger community. Herostratus (talk) 05:40, 28 September 2018 (UTC)


 * I generally agree with what Herostratus is saying. But adding more text isn't going to help much when the problem is that most editors don't read the page at all.  Consider the case of boy howdy (idiom).  The nominator of the AfD is now topic-banned from making any nominations for deletion because their record is so poor.  One of the delete !voters has now been blocked as a sock-puppet -- they used multiple accounts to ballot-stuff such discussions.  And the person who closed the discussion and deleted the page has quit after being overturned at DRV.  So, there's good scope to revisit the topic per WP:CCC.  I suggest starting by adding a section to howdy and then building on that.  Andrew D. (talk) 08:27, 28 September 2018 (UTC)
 * , the has got nothing to do with the topic, (which is being discussed) and your statement (that pushes in the case of retirement, out of no-where) is plainly disrespectful.  &#x222F; WBG converse 09:30, 1 October 2018 (UTC)
 * It's not plainly anything in my view. It's arguable. An editor's activity level is a public fact and it's legit to bring it up. I have, when revisiting old discussions been like "Yeah this was decided such-and-such way, but two-thirds of the people who decided are gone now, and to what extent do we want to be bound by the dead hand of the past, to the will of people that are no longer even here?" to which my answer is "not much."


 * Doubly so it the person was banned, for goodness' sake. I definitely do not want to be bound by the will of people who were banned. For the closer, if she had a history of DRV overturns, that also is germane. If not, not. But the main point is: not active. Herostratus (talk) 06:25, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

On the main point, this particular article doesn't matter. Non-notability was also cited. I don't have the article handy so I don't know if met the WP:GNG. If it didn't, that's different. I guess. Wiktionary requires three citations of use, we require two citations of discussion...

Looking at Wiktionary again, yeah that is really set up for really heavy language stuff. If I wanted to say "Boy howdy (IPA(key): /bɔɪ hɔwdɪ/; plural "Boy howdies", past tense "Boy howdied"; Italian, "Ragazzo ciao"; Middle English "Boye greetings"" and so on fine. There's nothing wrong with doing that stuff for a lot of words, or with Wiktionary.

Enh maybe its not a big deal. Maybe it's not much of a problem, or a problem at all. I mean I only ran into this that one time. And there's always marginal cases in everything. And there is a redirect to a section of another article... I've written a couple other articles on idioms... I say it's spinach for instance... no problem with these (to date).

I was just echoing the original poster's point, as it is something that has also been in my mind. Herostratus (talk) 06:25, 2 October 2018 (UTC)

glossaries
Did I misread the policy in considering glossary of slang terms a "dictionary"? I just AfD'd something then I noticed many glossaries for many things. Graywalls (talk) 01:51, 9 March 2019 (UTC)

WP:NEO
WP:NEO redirects here. The page is unclear on how many WP:RS should cover a term before it ceases to be one. Do we have to know their motivations? If they just copied on non-WP:RS websites (an editorial decision), does it cease to be one, or is it still is treated as one? Do we treat the depth of coverage? Or how many years until it no longer is "new"? Howard the Duck (talk) 15:34, 29 December 2020 (UTC)

BBC (sexual slang)
Please see: Talk:BBC (disambiguation) – apparently the entry to for the sexual term keeps getting censored off the disambiguation page, despite there being an ideal article section to point to. — SMcCandlish ☏ ¢ 😼  19:28, 14 April 2021 (UTC)