Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia is not a dictionary

What about disambig pages?

Do disambig pages also have to follow "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" policy ? For example, see Bunk which a disambig page with wikilinks to various dictionary meanings of bunk. Jay 09:52, 11 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Well, good that this discussion was not archived even after about 5 years! We now do have a Disambiguation page is not a dictionary policy - WP:DAB#Dictionary definitions. Jay (talk) 07:50, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Ongoing problems with this policy

It is becoming clear to me that an article entitled Octopus (word) would likely be kept at AfD if it included enough etymology, historical usage, and popular culture references. Since this policy specifically states that an article about the word "Octopus" (as opposed to an article about the eight-armed mollusk) belongs in Wiktionary, such a "keep" result would be in direct contravention of this policy. Yet I could see it happening given recent and current results of other AfDs.

Something needs to give here.

I suggest that perhaps part of the problem is the focus this policy places on "dictionary definitions". The majority of commentators at most AfDs clearly view "dictionary definition" as something short and limited: "Any of several marine molluscs/mollusks, of the family Octopodidae, having no internal or external protective shell or bone (unlike the nautilus, squid or cuttlefish) and eight arms each covered with suckers." Anything more than that is, in their eyes, not a dictionary definition and therefore not subject to this policy, even if that additional content involves usage notes, etymology, and examples, all of which are necessary parts of useful dictionary entries.

Nearly any attempt to have lengthy articles about words deleted is met with "Keep, notable term" despite notability not being at issue.

Perhaps we should change the focus of the policy; rather than saying "don't include dictionary definitions," perhaps we should say "don't include articles about words except in certain very limited cases." Either that, or change the policy to say "dictionary entries are fine, including definitions, etymology, and usage notes, so long as it's a popular word or an entertaining article," which seems to be the actual consensus around AfD.

Why else would we have separate articles on Flatulance and Fart?

-- Powers ^T 13:29, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

• Please see the section Change to Guideline status above which makes much the same points. Colonel Warden (talk) 14:03, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
  • I did, but that discussion stalled a few months ago and I wanted a fresh start. Powers ^T 14:32, 7 July 2008 (UTC)

• AFD is unreliable due to the small numbers of editors participating and their uncertain level of knowledge. A possible alternative is to merge the many duplicate articles with synonymous titles. For example, Nucular might be merged with Nuclear. Colonel Warden (talk) 18:57, 7 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Unfortunately, merge proposals get even less attention than AfDs. Powers ^T 13:32, 8 July 2008 (UTC)

• It may help to keep a list of AFD discussions in which there seems to be a lack of comprehension of the difference between a topic and the particular word/phrase used to describe it. A fresh example is: Nuked the fridge. Colonel Warden (talk) 11:48, 9 July 2008 (UTC)
  • Yes, I've been thinking about proposing a "articles about words" list at Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting. Powers ^T 13:08, 9 July 2008 (UTC)

• We have another counter-example to this policy with the article about the word Meh which seems likely to be kept at its latest AFD. Colonel Warden (talk) 09:27, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

No, IMO that's not a counterexample. Look, all articles define at least one word or phrase- the title(!) Meh seems to be acceptable, since it doesn't have multiple meanings. Having multiple meanings would make it clearly non encyclopedic.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 16:06, 6 December 2008 (UTC)

Please read the article which starts, Meh is an interjection, an expression of apathy, indifference, boredom. It can also be an adjective, meaning mediocre or boring.. This provides multiple meanings and grammatical usages. It is as dictionary-like as it can be. Colonel Warden (talk) 07:40, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

No, they're entirely synonymous.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 17:02, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Articles about words

Someone has added a section without discussion here:

Sometimes a word itself can be the basis for an encyclopedia article, if the word has been the subject of extensive discussion in reliable sources, other than dictionaries and usage guides. Some words (often ethnic slurs, profanity, and slang) have recognized cultural significance, such that an article can be written that is much more extensive than a dictionary entry. See Truthiness, a featured article, for an example of an article about a word that is not simply a dictionary entry. But note that a mere definition, etymology, and list of usages in popular culture is not enough to constitute an encyclopedia article.

I am reverting this addition since I see no direct discussion here and the addition would make the policy contradictory, complex and confusing. It seems apparent that the policy, as written currently, does not have consensus support and so should be deprecated rather than extended. Colonel Warden (talk) 07:46, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Note that that the guideline text which now appears in the box at the article's head talks of commonsense and the "occasional exception". This seems adequate explanation as to why the guideline is not always followed. Colonel Warden (talk) 07:51, 9 December 2008 (UTC)

Change from guideline to policy again

I just noticed that this had been changed by a single editor without changing all the things that refer to it. He also did not have any recent discussion on the talk page, and so it's extremely far from clear that this is consensus position. I'm therefore reverting it pending further community input.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 17:14, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

Examples of Wikipedia articles on words

There is a point of discussion regarding the policy that Wikipedia is not a dictionary. Looking at the AfD that Colonel Warden mentions above, I noticed that it mentioned this essay which mentioned the article Thou - a featured article (or dictionary definition, depending on your viewpoint). Curious, I looked for some more dictionary definitions, and found Humbug, Costermonger, Milord, Fête, American (word), No (word), Man (word), A and an, and stopped looking for individual words, and looked instead for categories - Category:English words, Category:Interjections, Category:Words, etc. There are hundreds here: Category:Words and phrases by language - such as Akata, Isibongo, Idle, etc.

The articles I have referenced vary in quality, and not all would survive an AfD - but some would, and they would survive for varying reasons which would challenge the standing policy that we must not have dictionary definitions. It appears that the community would like dictionary definitions on certain words and phrases, including slang words (Ratfucking, Banhammer, Fuck), and that the community will take such dictionary definitions up to featured article status. This appears to be such a widespread disregard of the "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" policy that it has gone beyond IAR into community consensus.

I feel that Colonel Warden may be right in his observation, and that this policy, misunderstood, ignored and unwanted as it is, would be better presented as a community guideline than a standing rule. I would support marking it as a guideline. SilkTork *^YES! 01:10, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I think the problem lies in how this part:

Wikipedia articles should begin with a good definition and description of one topic, however, they should provide other types of information about that topic as well.

is interpreted. My rule of thumb is that if the "other types of information" are compliant with our content rules (i.e., not OR or somesuch) and they fall outside the scope of Wiktionary (i.e., they would not be copied over during a transwiki), then you plainly have something more than a dicdef.

One also has to consider the reasons why we don't want dicdefs, usage guides, and the like on Wikipedia. In my view, the most important reason relates to WP:NOR: "how this word should be used" is advice, aka opinion, aka OR. "How this word has been used" by public figures, cultural works, scholars, or otherwise is not OR. I suspect that WINAD came into being, in the early days of Wikipedia, because the "dicdefs" of those days were actual dictionary entries: definition, usage examples, maybe some etymological info, and nothing supported by sources. (Sourcing only really came into vogue from about 2004 onward.) Being pure OR, those dicdefs plainly did not belong on Wikipedia.

But nowadays, with our emphasis on sources, even if our article about a word has, say, nothing more than a definition, some notes about its historical or contemporary usage, and maybe some etymological info -- as long as that information is sourced and is presented in encyclopedic format, then one can plausibly say that our encyclopedia article about a word is an encyclopedia article about a word, and not a dictionary entry. It doesn't violate any principle of what we're trying to achieve on Wikipedia, and in fact, it serves our goals. So, more often than not, such articles get kept.

Taking a narrow view of Wikipedia, and of WINAD's purpose -- to the extent that "encyclopedic information about words" is thrown out during the transwiki process -- has limited support on Wikipedia, and to my eyes, even less sense. We can have true dicdefs on Wikitionary and highly detailed, well-written, and sourced... shall we say "pseudo-dicdefs" on Wikipedia -- and for any given term we're better for having both a dicdef on Wiktionary and a pseudo-dicdef on Wikipedia that goes beyond what Wiktionary can do.

IMO.--Father Goose (talk) 07:09, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

No, it's never correct to have an encyclopedia article that is centered on a word. That's what dictionaries do, and do it better than the encyclopedia can or would want to. Encyclopedias are always centered on a topic, that could, in the most borderline cases be circumstances surrounding a word being coined for example, but the word itself is not an encyclopedic topic in itself. Or it could be on a single meaning of a word; that's fine, it's centered on one meaning.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 15:45, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

We have few absolutes on Wikipedia because we tend to find that absolutism can lead to narrow, blinkered thinking. "Never" is an unattractive absolute that suggests a lack of willingness to look for consensus. SilkTork *^YES! 18:41, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

This policy is absolutely central to the wikipedia. We cannot remove it without dissolving the wikipedia into the wiktionary. If that's what you're trying to do, then fine, but you need to state that clearly.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 15:49, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

It is not a core policy. And, as evidenced above, it has been ignored for years to rather positive effect. SilkTork *^YES! 18:41, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Actually this is a subarticle of WP:Is not which very definitely is core policy, and the very first content part there says that wikipedia is not a dictionary, and refers to this policy.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 19:01, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

There are articles that survive AFD that never should have done, where the arguments and policies were not correctly applied. To try to work that backwards and remove policies based on incompetent AFDs is a very, very, very, very bad idea. No policy will ever withstand that.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 15:49, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

It's worth reflecting on how policies and guidelines come about. We do stuff and talk about the best way of doing it, we make a page / essay of our discussions, we do more stuff and we refer to the page we made earlier of previous discussions to see if the page is helpful. The pages we find the most useful we call a guideline, the guidelines we use the most and agree on most we call policy. Apart from the core policies, every guideline and policy has emerged from doing and discussing. We didn't set up the rules first. The development of this page into policy is a good example: - start - August 2001, a year later August 2002, 2 years later August 2003, 3 years later August 2004, is put in policy category - January 2005, hmmm, "Usage Guide" has recently been added August 2006, differences table first appears, becomes a guideline, back to policy. SilkTork *^YES! 18:41, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Just for the record, it was never a guideline. Just because one single user acting alone, with a deceptive edit summary vandalised the policy to make it look like it was a guideline to make a point, doesn't make it not a policy.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 18:54, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

If you want to make a change as fundamental to the wikipedia you would need to raise an RFC on that. Trying to change it by hacking it to say something different based on a few people's comments on a talk page isn't even in the same ballpark as what you would need to do.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 15:51, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

This is often how change occurs. Somebody raises a query. Sometimes the query grows into a movement, sometimes it doesn't. I have taken part in changes to various core guidelines, and it varies. Sometimes somebody just edits the page and nobody reverts it. Other times it takes months of discussion. It depends on the circumstances. SilkTork *^YES! 18:41, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't think there's a welk in a supernova's chance of this change being made now. You would have to rewrite all the other policies as well; it would be a horrible mess. If you'd have tried this back in 2001 then there might have been a chance, but now? Nah.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 18:54, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I agree, for a couple of divergent reasons.

Now, I'm not very familiar with Wiktionary (have made a few dozen edits, scanned a few help pages, read a few hundred pages over the years (via right-click-search in my browser)), so I took some time to peruse the site again, to refresh myself, and see what has changed.

The main problem I had, and still have, is a lack of examples of what a "featured" Wiktionary equivalent is. (They have a "Word of the day", but it selects based on exotic-ness, not article quality (though that is presumably a factor)) I've now read through more than a dozen help/community pages, and I cannot find any pointers to how an ideal/finished/complete article looks. They don't seem to have an article grading system at all. I would guess that the 5 dictdefs linked on their main page (etymology, wiki, free, English, and dictionnaire) could be considered well-polished.

Their main policies/guidelines, for what they think belongs here, seem to be Wiktionary:What Wiktionary is not and Wiktionary:CFI#Wiktionary is not an encyclopedia. "Care should be taken so that entries do not become encyclopedic in nature; if this happens, such content should be moved to Wikipedia, but the dictionary entry itself should be kept."

Secondly. As Silktork suggests above, we have to take into account the original reasons behind this policy/guideline, in order to fully understand its intent (the spirit in which to interpret it). I would suggest that this policy was originally created to prevent the mass-creation of stub-definition entries at Wikipedia. -- In the good old days, when the links were red and sheep were scared (rambot says "baaa", and creates 30,000 geostubs), there were well-meaning editors who sought to populate those red links with some minimal information - when this was simply etymology and PartofSpeech information, the info was often moved to Wiktionary, and became a softredirect or a redlink again. Othertimes, the info grew into a full encyclopedic article. We must be careful to discern these two types, and treat them correctly and without haste.

Therefore. Any article that is more comprehensive or voluminous or encyclopedic than those Wiktionary pages (or any other example you can find), belong at Wikipedia. The examples and categories listed above are mostly good examples of that. The examples above (and elsewhere here) that are not encyclopedic in nature/size, should be moved to Wiktionary per standard procedure. (Similarly, large quantities of quotations centered on a specific word, are moved from Wiktionary to Wikiquote.)

This policy page tiptoes around that all that (in its current state), but it could be made clearer. I think we need linked examples of what should be kept and what should be moved. That might be sufficient to clear up the lingering confusion? If not, marking it as a guideline would be sensible. (Sorry if any of this explanation is muddled. I wrote half last night, and half just now). -- Quiddity (talk) 19:22, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

I don't agree that that is currently what this policy says. The policy says that you are essentially only really allowed to talk about one concept and any very closely allied/overlapping concepts (synonymous concepts) in an article, and you have to define what overall concept you're talking about. The 2001 definition more or less did try to simply imply that dictionaries are short and encyclopedias are long, but I certainly think though that Diderot certainly didn't consider that an encyclopedia article is simply a dictionary article that is made longer. I mean check out this image of Diderot's division of knowledge:[1]; you can see that diderot was trying to divide things up conceptually, not just in terms of words. That the wikipedia is an encyclopedia is not something that you can really change, and we need policy to state what we believe an encyclopedia is or at least how it differs from dictionaries.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 20:27, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Just to give you an idea what you are toying with here. Consider an article like flight. It's about things that go through the air/space. However, flight can also be about running away or the feathers on an arrow. These are not covered in that article! If this was a dictionary, then we would be able to do that. This dispersion of things called flight into different articles is very, very fundamental to how an encyclopedia works.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 20:31, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Again, I think we need specific examples in order to clarify where the confusion is.

• The Wikipedia articles thou and dude and fuck could not be moved to Wiktionary - they would simply be moved straight back. The Wiktionary articles wikt:thou and wikt:dude and wikt:fuck are what should exist there.
• Wiktionary has the page wikt:flight, whereas we have flight and flight (military unit) and flight (disambiguation) and the rest (many of which are stubs, but have the potential for development into full encyclopedia articles). We could not simply merge all the content from the wikipedia "flight" stubs to the single Wiktionary "flight" page - they would simply delete it or move it back.

You [hint at] seem to be coming to this discussion with some specific AfDs in your recent past, that you think went wrong. What are the articles that you believe should be moved to Wiktionary? Have you tried copying their content to Wiktionary to see if it fits/lasts? (Wiktionary's smaller userbase makes this more confusing, because it could take months for anyone to notice and object to the new content... however, it's all worth thinking about.)

Coming from the other direction, is anyone in this thread actually a regular Wiktionary contributor? And/Or is this just a Wikipedia-centric eventualism vs immediatism vs inclusionism etc issue? -- Quiddity (talk) 22:26, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Now you seem to be trying to argue that dictionary==wiktionary and that any article will either go in the wiktionary or the wikipedia. The world is not either-or. There are articles that should very probably go in neither place, but simply were popular when AFDd, and kept.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 22:44, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

This policy is 'wikipedia is not a dictionary', not 'wikipedia is not the wiktionary'. The wiktionary is used just as an example of a dictionary.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 22:44, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

FWIW I think thou and dude are perfectly legitimate encyclopedia articles. Fuck is probably not, because it is used in multiple completely distinct ways, but good luck with trying to explain that to people in an AFD(!) I guess fuck is what IAR was intended for ;-)- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 23:05, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

(But you could break up fuck into its different meanings and merge it with other articles as appropriate, and that would be fine.)- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 23:07, 17 February 2009 (UTC)

Quiddity's observations are very perceptive. Yes, some clarity and guidance in how to interpret when an article is suitable for Wikipedia via linked examples would be very helpful. Provided the page gives appropriate advice and follows existing consensus the whole question of this page being called a policy or a guideline becomes a mere technicality. I would rather the page were designed to be more useful and kept as a policy than it be downgraded to a guideline because the interpretation is not clear. Clearly the Thou article is an obvious example of what we want on Wikipedia. The question is, how do we word the article so that we give guidance on when to keep Thou and when to reject Textversation. We might need to consider rewriting the The differences between encyclopedia and dictionary articles section. We are now no longer considering the differences between encyclopedia and dictionary articles, we are looking at why certain articles are not acceptable on Wikipedia, and why others are acceptable. I'd like to open up this discussion a bit more via the Centralized discussion template, though I feel we need a clearer description of the aims first. People tend to balk at change, especially to policies, and a common reaction is to say "keep things as they are" if the issues are not clearly explained. What would be useful is if we could have two or three short bullet point reasons why this page needs to be changed, and at least one sensible consideration of why the change would be unhelpful. SilkTork *^YES! 10:15, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

• The article thou is not about the word, qua word, since it discusses the matter more widely. It is essentially the same topic as T-V distinction and the article could be just as well called T-V distinction in English or Informal pronoun usage, etc. This seems a good practical test: does the article still make sense if given a different, synonymous title? Thou passes this test but Dude does not. Colonel Warden (talk) 15:37, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

It seems to me your test is incorrectly assuming that every concept has two names. That's really not the case; although it may commonly be. A test that only works mostly is of little use. We need a very good test indeed, not just one that works mostly. Is not a dude a concept that just happens to be referred to by the name 'dude'?- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 17:47, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

No, dude represents three concepts - man, dandy and greenhorn. The current content wouldn't work under these other titles because it is the particular word which brings these different topics together in the same article. Colonel Warden (talk) 18:40, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I think the concept of dude is somewhere between the three really.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 19:01, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

And my central point is that it's acceptable to have multiple overlapping definitions for an article name, clearly there are overlaps between man and dandy and dandy and greenhorn and greenhorn and man; so even if you use different definitions it doesn't matter that much because they overlap. It's when they don't overlap that the argument that there is dicdef going on seriously starts to kick in.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 19:01, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

What ought to happen in this case is that the page would serve to disambiguate as between the topics of dandy, man and greenhorn/dude ranch. The main reason this hasn't happened is that some editors want to fill the article with fluff about "doood", Bill and Ted, etc which are just examples of usage and pronunciation, i.e. dictionary material. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Colonel Warden (talk • contribs) 19:12, 18 February 2009

I agree that you could separate them and disambiguate them, and it might be better if you did, but that you don't strictly have to, because they overlap. If there was a definition of a gear wheel as a dude- that shouldn't go there, that would be in another article and would require disambiguation. It's because then it wouldn't be largely synonymous. In encyclopedias synonymous material gets pushed together, in dictionaries they're pushed apart. That's the primary difference.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 19:49, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

And it's really crucial, because pushing similar things together make them much, much easier to understand and learn, and it gives a place to add more material in. The whole point of encyclopedias is to cover things, and commonality between things is a very powerful form of understanding; perhaps the only form.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 19:49, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Dictionaries are OK for looking up words, but inappropriate for learning stuff. Right? And this is mostly why.- (User) Wolfkeeper (Talk) 19:49, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

I have just come upon Category:Etymologies. I think it would be interesting to do as Quiddity suggests above and examine what it is we do and don't want from a Wikipedia article, and how "Wikipedia is not a dictionary" is currently addressing that. Looking back at the talk page it reveals that people have been questioning this "policy" for some time. That indicates, at least, that the policy is not clear, especially when we have a good number of entries that exist apparently in violation of this policy. SilkTork *^YES! 18:13, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Not just exist, but are kept at AFD in violation of this policy. How else to explain why we have an article on Fart separate from the article on Flatulence? The problem is that people see a long entry and say "oh, that's more than a dicdef". (Another part of the problem is that dictionaries contain more than definitions, so the "dicdef" thing is extremely misleading.) Powers ^T 13:09, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

My god, everybody keeps violating consensus! We'll have to remind the community that what they think takes a back seat to policy.--Father Goose (talk) 18:44, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Sarcasm doesn't do anyone any good here. If you're just here to write pithy commentary on others' comments, we could do without that. Anyway, I certainly didn't mean to imply that mere words can irrevocably overrule consensus (although there are certainly policies that are inviolable). The point is that there is a clear dichotomy between what this policy says and what people at AfD will keep. That needs to be fixed. Whether that dichotomy arises because of a genuine desire to disregard this policy, or because of a misunderstanding of this policy, or simply because this policy is out of sync with the current consensus on its topic, I don't know. But it must be resolved, because the plain language of this policy is not being applied right now. Powers ^T 22:39, 26 March 2009 (UTC)

Whenever a policy gets broadly ignored, that to me is an indication that the policy is wrong (i.e., not expressing a consensual position). I tried to make small changes to the policy about a month ago ([2]) to better sync up with the current practices, but that got rejected by a certain editor who shall remain nameless.

I apologize for the sarcasm. I guess I'm just frustrated, like you, by the failure of this policy to match reality. I think that is primarily due to a certain group of editors wanting reality to match the policy -- which has so far made it impossible to fix it.--Father Goose (talk) 01:47, 27 March 2009 (UTC)