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Wikipedia:Deletion policy/Lists of words

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Conclusion

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  • Most of these "list of words of <foo>" articles have brief prefaces that may be considered stubs.
  • Words of <foo> do exist, and hence an article about them as a phenomenon is a valid Wikipedia topic.
  • Therefore the proper solution would be to rename the article to "words of <foo>", and move the lists from these into wiktionary (but not delete the articles).

Attempted consensus

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Sometimes, a group of similar or related articles is nominated for deletion (or, in this case, transwikiing) over a short period of time. In cases like this, it seems prudent to have one centralized discussion about the entire group, rather than repeating arguments over each member thereof. This is an attempt to form consensus on one such groups of articles.

Description

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A large number of articles exist named "List of English words of <language> origin". Since these are lists of words, some people assert that these articles should be moved to Wiktionary instead, since they are said to be dictionaric in nature. Other people disagree, or state that the articles should be in both 'pedia and 'tionary. It would be a good idea to establish consensus on this.

Arguments for transwikiing

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  • It seems to me that these lists are tailor-made to be converted into or added to categories on Wiktionary, if they want them. (See, for example, wikt:Category:Greek derivations.) Especially for the large ones - I seem to recall that 40% of all English words are derived from Latin - the lists aren't of particular use here. —Korath (Talk) 12:08, Mar 4, 2005 (UTC)
  • Agreed, I think that the articles of this sort could find a good home in Wiktionary, and strengthen a dimension that most dictionaries overlook. Rather than duplicate material across the projects, it would be best to build the web and use each for its intended purpose (that is, put the encyclopedic material on culture mixing into Wikipedia, the definitions into Wiktionary). --iMb~Mw 09:00, 10 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • I agree with that. I've seen some people arguing to keep them here mainly on grounds that they allege that few people use wiktionary, but that seems not a particularly valid reason. Radiant! 09:24, Mar 10, 2005 (UTC)
  • I support the transwiki to wiktionary too. I think this information is useful, but it would fit better in a dictionary than an encylcopedia. DaveTheRed 05:09, 19 Mar 2005 (UTC)
  • Pretty much every word in the English language is going to have a source language. Cataloging the roots of every word in the language is one of the primary uses of a dictionary. If we're to have both Wikipedia and Wiktionary, then clearly these lists belong in Wiktionary, preferably assembled automatically from individual articles (as with categories). It's fine to leave behind an encyclopedia article talking about the phenomenon of borrowing from a specific language or in general; that would be less appropriate for the dictionary. -- Beland 02:17, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Arguments for keeping

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I'm under the impression that these would require case by case determination. There may be interesting cultural or other notes to be made for those languages or language groups that have contributed only a few words to English. On the other hand, an article on words of Germanic origin or words of French origin is going to contain a motley collection of unrelated words. -- Smerdis of Tlön 16:49, 17 Mar 2005 (UTC)

These articles are not simply definitions or lists of definitions. They are lists of linguistic information. There is no consensus that all lists of linguistic information should be moved to Wiktionary. There are many lists of exceptionally trivial minutiae on Wikipedia, and their continued existence on Wikipedia has been consistently held up in VfD. The existence of Wiktionary does not justify discrimination against lists whose contents happen to be linguistic in nature. Each article should be judged on its own merits. The potential scope for List of English words of Latin origin is too large to be useful; however, List of English words of Hindi origin has a perfectly reasonable scope. Nohat 07:53, 20 Mar 2005 (UTC)

They have not been consistently held up. I think what would be most useful is an article on English words of <foo> origin, and of course that article should contain a (relatively short) list of samples. For Hindi origin, that may well be all words, I'm not sure how many there are. For Latin origin, listing all words is absurdly impractical. Radiant_* 15:31, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)
They have been as consistently held up as anything on Wikipedia can be considered consistent. If we can have List of U.S. Presidents by height order we can have List of English words of Hindi origin. As for the suggestion that we discuss borrowed words without listing them, I don't really see how interesting or useful an article about words of foreign origin would be without a list that says what those words would be. Kind of an elephant in the room kind of thing--"we're going to tell you about these words, but we wouldn't deign to list them, because..." and it's the part that comes after the "because" that causes me problems because I don't see any good a priori reasons not to list the words. Nohat 02:48, 2 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I think these lists are useful, particularly for the English language. I refer to these lists and expect to find them in Wikipedia. --Henrygb 00:04, 28 Mar 2005 (UTC)

You should, however, expect to find them in Wiktionary instead. Radiant_* 15:31, Mar 30, 2005 (UTC)
Not really, you would expect to be able to find the origin of any particular word by looking for it in a dictionary, but you wouldn't consult a dictionary to find all words from a particular language--that's not how dictionaries work. I would expect to consult an encyclopedia, much like Henrygb would, for linguistic information that is not restricted to one particular word.Nohat
I find this (you wouldn't consult a dictionary to find all words..) a slightly strange statement. Perhaps I have misunderstood? I think that's exactly what people do with dictionaries. Scrabble people, for example, define "all the words" as meaning "all the words that are in the collins dictionary". I guess that a word list is more compact, but in the case of an electronic dictionary, like wiktionary, that can be bypassed. I guess that keeping redirects to a wiktionary summary page would achieve what you want? Mozzerati 13:52, 2005 Apr 9 (UTC)
Dictionaries are ordered alphabetically by spelling of word. If you want to find all words in a dictionary that have origin in some particular word, you would have to go through the entire dictionary, word by word, searching for words that had the name of the language in question in the etymology. I can't imagine there are many people who have that kind of patience. The benefit of putting all the words together on one page with their etymologies is so people don't have to go through the whole dictionary, word for word. What I meant by my comment is one wouldn't expect to open a dictionary and find indices of words sorted by various feature, such as language of origin. One expects a dictionary to have words in alphabetic order with definitions and other lexical information. If you are trying to find specialized categories of words, in general, you would look to some other kind of reference work. There isn't something inherently dictionary-like about making lists of words that something in common and it doesn't seem clear or obvious to me at all that this kind of linguistic information necessarily should be in Wiktionary and not Wikipedia. What does seem clear to me is that there is prejudice against linguistic information appearing in Wikipedia, and I think that prejudice has no support by either tradition or policy. Nohat 14:30, 9 Apr 2005 (UTC)

Arguments for putting in both Wiktionary and Wikipedia

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I agree with the points made by the Transwikiists above and by Mikkalai below. The passage of words and forms from one language into another is of the highest cultural importance, because it has such a fundamental role in creating language. I would say that articles on the nature, causes, and process of words being borrowed from language x by language y would be good things to create, unless doing so would duplicate existing linguistics info.

However, lists of loanwords, if completed, would in some cases contain hundreds of thousands of words, or thousands of roots, making those pages extremely difficult to use. I would say that the bare lists should go transwiki to Wiktionary. I think the volume would be far less of a pain for categorizing dicdefs than for categorizing encyclopedic knowledge. ```

Arguments for deletion

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I'd agree that these articles should be moved to Wiktionary. To me, a dictionary can be defined at the most basic level of being a list of words. --Woohookitty 21:29, 8 Mar 2005 (UTC)

Other

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  • The talk is slightly misdirected IMO. Most of these "list of words" articles have brief prefaces that may be considered stubs. See, e.g., List of words of Russian origin. Therefore IMO the proper solution would be:
  1. Rename the article (e.g., into Words of Russian origin).
  2. Remove the lists from these into wiktionary (but not delete the articles).
Reason: words of Russian origin do exist, and hence an article about them as a phenomenon is a valid wikipedia topic.
An excellent example of this approach is English words of Greek origin. Mikkalai 18:36, 4 Mar 2005 (UTC)
    • Good point. -Sean Curtin 03:08, Mar 5, 2005 (UTC)
      • I also concur with Mikkalai. vlad_mv 16:19, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
        • Great idea, Mikk.--ZayZayEM 01:51, 24 Mar 2005 (UTC)
          • Concur -- Glen Finney 21:04, 29 Mar 2005 (UTC)
            • Absolutely agree - such an article gives the reader a sense of what kinds of words have an unusual origin, and can easily refer to a wiktionary list of all the words. -- 8^D BD2412gab 00:19, 2005 Apr 9 (UTC)

From Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not

Lists of such definitions. There are, however, disambiguation pages consisting of pointers to other pages; these are used to clarify differing meanings of a word. Wikipedia also includes glossary pages for various specialized fields.

-- AllyUnion (talk) 06:24, 5 Mar 2005 (UTC)

AllyUnion, I think I missed your point. The note in Wikipedia:What Wikipedia is not is merely saying that lists of definitions are unencyclopedic. The point raised by Mikkalai is that the pages in question contain more information than a simple listing of dicdefs and are valid stubs, should we transwiki the lists and leave the rest. Could you please state more clearly whether you agree or not with this idea? vlad_mv 16:19, 18 Mar 2005 (UTC)
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