User:Quiddity/sandbox

Words

Background, aka Why this page was made.

Then (late 2001), and still now, this page's purpose was to prevent people making goodfaith stubs that were purely a dictionary definition. In late 2002, Wiktionary was created, partially because people were still making dicdef stubs here (a need/desire was shown).

E.g. Nobody wants this dicdef on Wikipedia. It is exactly what Wiktionary is for.

Requirements

An article/list on Wikipedia needs to satisfy WP:GNG. This basically means, enough ReliableSources are available, to write an article/list on the topic.

WP:NOTDIC should further refine this, by stating that the ReliableSources cannot just be a handful of dictionary-entries. (iirc, it used to say this explicitly?)

Practically-speaking, this means enough RSs exist that the topic can reach Featured status (eventually[ism]). - Note: This doesn't imply length; the FA criteria just says "comprehensive coverage". The shortest current FAs are very short (eg Tropical Depression Ten (2005), and Miss Meyers).

Wiktionary

They don't want encyclopedic content.

Compare wikt:thou with Thou. Compare wikt:gay with Gay.

Longterm misunderstanding

Back in 2004, it was pointed out that editors were misunderstanding the point of WP:NOTDIC.

Here in 2012, there are still regularly AFDs for articles about notable topics, simply because the topic is "a word" (e.g.), or even suspected of being about a word (e.g.).

Not all though! Most NOTDIC-afds are both goodfaith, and correctly deleted. (See Wikipedia:WikiProject Deletion sorting/Language/archive). However, the very small number of words (very low hundreds) that are notable enough to have been written about extensively, in non-dictionary format, should be kept, and this policy ought to reflect that description of practice/reality better than it does.

Suggested fix

We need to re-examine the development of this policy's wording, especially some of the aggressive changes by wolfkeeper from 2008-2010 (WT:NOTDIC talkpage archives #5 to #12 are mostly wolfkeeper arguing with everyone else. A lot of his changes are still in this policy's wording, mostly because we got sick of arguing and edit-warring with him. Eg. the confusingly written nutshell was added by him.).