Talk:cartridge

Copyvio

Reverted copyright violation. Everything from "A cylindrical…" … to "…camera" was lifted verbatim from AHD. I am looking at AHD4 p. 287; anonymous editor 203.144.143.3 was obviously cribbing from one of the editions of AHD, whether 1, 2, 3, or 4. This one will need to be mostly rewritten from scratch. (The later entry about the type-foundry Boy is OK, not from AHD.) Lumbercutter 02:03, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Copyvio fixed

OK, I rewrote the bulk of the entry, and not a bad job of it, if I may say so myself. The "historical note" is indeed by yours truly, just in case anyone doubts that such a succinct little jewel is really my own! Ah, pat the back, there's a good ego. Lumbercutter 03:17, 30 August 2006 (UTC)

Re cleanup tag: Are these "problems" really "problems" at all?

The cleanup tag says that cleanup is needed because (a) the def contains subsenses, and (b) the "definitions and historical note are too verbose". My challenges to these reasons are: (a) Why are subsenses not allowed? Other dictionaries have subsenses, as well—because subsenses are logical for some words. Does Wiktionary bar them for some specific good reason? (If so, I'm happy to be educated on the subject, but please point out where to read about it.) (b) "too verbose" according to whom? If you look at AHD4's five types of "Note" elements (Synonym, Usage Note, Word History, Regional Note, and Our Living Language), you see that many of the Notes are equal in length to the note that is given here. As for the relative verbosity of the definitions, these are the best definitions of "cartridge" that I am aware of. They are already succinct given the amount of information that they convey, which is superior to what many other dictionaries give. I think my counterarguments can be summarized as: this cleanup is going to mean "reduce the entry's quality to force it to be arbitrarily short". I believe that that would be a degradation, not an improvement, of Wiktionary. Lumbercutter 02:37, 25 October 2006 (UTC)

Follow-up

Well, I looked around Wiktionary for any guidelines where the use of subsenses might be disparaged for some valid reason, but I did not find anything anywhere about this. In fact, when I search for "subsenses" or "subsense", this rfc tag is the only place in all of Wiktionary where those strings are found! So much for there being some kind of body of pre-existing discussion on not using subsenses! Regarding the relative verbosity, or no, of the definitions and historical note, upon later re-reading I still arrive at the same conclusion as before: They are already succinct given the amount of information that they convey, which is superior to what many other dictionaries give, and this "cleanup" would mean, in effect, "reduce the entry's quality in order to force it to be arbitrarily short". I believe that that would be a degradation, not an improvement, of Wiktionary. Therefore, I am removing the rfc tag. Lumbercutter 03:28, 8 November 2006 (UTC)

I think you jumped the gun on that tag removal. I've restored it mainly for the encyclopedic non-standard heading. The sub-senses have been pushed by a very small minority against reasonable complaints. My major complaint with sub-senses is the machine compatibility issues (but there are more, such as translation tables, synonym tables, etc.) There are additional copyvio issues that also surface, when the topic of sub-senses is raised. At any rate, I've started the trimming down that this entry needs, but the definitions are still too verbose.

If you really enjoy reading, a salient conversation can be found here. Note that User:Primetime was not banned for pushing his formatting POV, but rather for his prolific, mendacious copyright violations, subsequent sockpuppetting activities on WMF servers and his criminal activities outside of WMF to WMF contributors. Obviously, not everyone that pushes sub-senses is a criminal. But everyone that does push them, is breaking more interconnections than they realize. --Connel MacKenzie 19:07, 6 December 2006 (UTC)

Interesting. I didn't have time to read all of those threads, but I scanned over them enough to gather that the issue of subsenses is one that involves IT complications and translation complications, and has been hashed thoroughly by people who've mastered those details more than I have. So I will definitely just stick to the upshot of that process and avoid subsenses in future. Thanks for providing a link to help in finding this information.

I still believe that subsenses are very appropriate simply in terms of logic (ignoring for the moment the technical problems), and that a project like Wiktionary should eventually be made capable of employing them. However, the IT and linguistic complications are apparently currently a procrustean bed that forces us to avoid them. (An analogous process is how special non-ANSI characters can be very appropriate in filenaming, in terms of the logic itself, but you often have to avoid them because of technical limitations. Now that Unicode is gradually replacing more primitive character encodings, the IT landscape is evolving toward a day when filenames won't face those limitations. But that bigger picture is moot because in the meantime, life goes on each day.) So the upshot is that I will happily do what's best for now.

As for the quality, length, and content of the definitions and historical notes, I still think that what I supplied was best, but I am not worried about it enough to insist on it. And now I understand that there are good reasons why subsenses are deprecated. So I'll just leave it where it's at, with my two cents having been given, and I'm satisfied that we've all given it our best shot, and the upshot will be whatever it is.

Thanks for the guidance. Now I'll stop philosophizing and get back to the daily grind. :-) Lumbercutter 18:47, 14 January 2007 (UTC)

Update: I removed my historical note, as requested a while back. No one else cares, and now I find myself not caring whether anyone cares. Interesting info duly deleted. Lumbercutter 20:20, 15 November 2007 (UTC)