Talk:Glossary of contract bridge terms

(This marks a four-year break in discussion)

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Treatment

The revised entry limits treatments to bids, a subset of calls. It limits conventions in the same way, but the entry Conventions is more general.

ACBL "Alert" regulations" seem to include a useful definition for Convention and a useless one for Treatment. --P64 (talk) 23:10, 13 April 2011 (UTC)

Removed "conventional call"

I have removed the entry for "conventional call" for several reasons. The most cogent one is that the entry was a comment on diction rather than the definition of a technical term. Less important but still cogent is that the author appears to have ignored the pertinent definition of the word "convention," which is "an agreement or pact," per the Random House Unabridged. Granted, that's the fifth definition, but it's the one meant by its usage in contract bridge. Finally, a convention is not of itself necessarily nonstandard, unusual or special. The takeout double is a convention. TurnerHodges (talk) 15:28, 15 September 2011 (UTC)

Section wikilinks problem?

Folks, A robot has corrected some section wikilinks, most recently in this revision. A few corrections are to lowercase capitalized anchor names.

[[#Shortclub => [[#shortclub

Several are not that, but I cannot discern them in the report. (I see no difference between the highlighted selections. Do you?) So I don't know whether they do indicate a true problem in our practices here. --P64 (talk) 14:36, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

I too have tried to discern what is going on with some of these elusive changes and the best I have ever been able to come up with is (a) an obscure change in punctuation (adding a comma, deleting a comma, replacing a comma with something else, etc.) and (b) reduction of two consecutive spaces to one. I have given up trying to figure these out on the premise that if the bot was doing something really stupid, better people than I can deal with it - too much else to do. BTW your stamina on updating competitions is outstanding - atta boy (or girl)! Newwhist (talk) 19:40, 5 October 2011 (UTC)

To Editor "John plaut"

I would have placed this on your own page but you have apparently not registered on Wikipedia.

Your enthusiasm for, and energy expended on, the edits you have been making to the contract bridge glossary are appreciated. However, there are frequent problems with the writing style you employ, as well as the completeness of the information. For example:

You have supplied a definition titled "0-4, or Blackwood," defining it as "A way to express a player is using plain Blackwood anwers to a Gerber or Blackwood ace asking bid." I believe that you mean to say that there is a term, "0-4," that one might use in response to the question "What responses to Blackwood are you and your partner using?" However, I can find no source to confirm that this is any sort of standard term. The matter of "standard" or traditional responses to the Blackwood convention is covered in its own article.

You state that 1430 is the "amount of points won in a major suit slam made." You omit the information that it is the score for a small slam, and that the slam must be bid as well as made. (That bit of information is marginally relevant, but just barely so, to a glossary definition of the term "1430.") Similarly, the CRASH entry is incomplete without mentioning its inherent ambiguity, which leads to pass-or-correct situations, that the type of suits is indicated by steps, and that many CRASH users also employ it over a 1NT opening bid. All of this is relevant to a definition of CRASH, and yet it is too much information for a glossary entry -- which is the reason that we decided to skip it in the first place.

You insert a glossary entry for "Chinese finesse." Years ago, when this glossary was in its initial construction, Duja and I (using a different handle) briefly discussed the propriety of employing that term in the glossary. We decided that it is inappropriate to do so. Today's sensibilities regarding ethnic attributions are more enlightened than they were in the middle 1900s, when the term was more popular. The play is more properly termed a "pseudo finesse" and is discussed in the separate article on finesses; furthermore, the fact that the play is also termed a "Chinese" finesse is noted there. But there is no good and compelling reason to include it as such in the glossary.

The tone of the entries is inappropriate for a glossary in an encyclopedia. Phrases such as "on the other hand" (from your two-way checkback entry) are more chatty than informative and can usually be omitted.

You have provided useful edits, of course, in particular noting that there was an error in the definition of the Cavendish variation of Chicago -- an error that can be traced back to a similar error in the 1976 edition of the Official Encyclopedia.

Normally, one of the regular contributors to the glossary would have made the necessary corrections, edits or deletions of your contributions on a piecemeal basis. But there has been such a flood of contributions from you during the past month that it will take considerable time to complete that task. Hence this note on the Discussion page.

Again, your time, effort and enthusiasm for the project is appreciated. But I ask you to take more time and care with your edits. Several of us have spent uncounted hours designing and constructing this glossary and we hope that an equal degree of care be brought to the edits. TurnerHodges (talk) 18:01, 27 October 2011 (UTC)

Template {gcb}

I have moved a glossary-link template from my User space to Template:Gcb. Let me quote the documentation:

quote
Commonly the template is placed in-line where the running text uses a term in the glossary. In the simplest cases, the code ''{{gcb|id='' and ''}}'' surrounds the glossary term just as code ''[['' and '']]'' surrounds the article title for the simplest link to a Wikipedia article.

For example suppose "On the next deal ..." appears in the running text.

On the next {{gcb|id=deal}} ...

displays

On the next deal ...

which includes a link to 'Deal' in the Glossary.
unquote

--P64 (talk) 21:14, 1 November 2011 (UTC)

IMPROVED {{gcb}} 2011-11-03. After today's revision,

• in the simplest case, the code {{gcb| and }} surrounds the glossary term
• the glossary term is the value of both parameters.

This works as-presumably-intended if the term does appear in the glossary and serves as its own id there. For example,

{{gcb|deal}}

displays

deal

which is linked to the glossary entry 'Deal'. --P64 (talk) 14:51, 3 November 2011 (UTC)