Category talk:English terms with obsolete senses

RFM discussion: December 2012

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Category:English terms with obsolete senses

As per the discussion in the Beer Parlor, I suggest that this category be reserved only for words that are not fully obsolete (i.e., that contain at least one current sense), and that all words that have only obsolete senses (i.e., fully obsolete words) be moved back to Category:English obsolete terms. (I think it would be better to, as CodeCat suggested, simply leave non-fully obsolete words uncategorized, which would imply eventually deleeting Category:English terms with obsolete senses, but I'm OK with leaving it there for partially obsolete words if others want that.) --Pereru (talk) 08:33, 19 December 2012 (UTC)

Support —CodeCat 02:26, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

I'd like to support it, but not if there is no implementation scheduled. I would not be happy if this was our policy and two months from now most of the terms that were supposed to be in it were not. We need a dump run to identity the L2 sections that need the categorization. And maintaining it really should be part of an AF-type bot. I do hope that this is intended to be applied to all living languages. Are all obsolete tags not in English marked with lang= tags? DCDuring TALK 13:01, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

I would also support requiring lang=en for these tags, because people constantly forget those tags and put entries in the English categories. In fact the whole "English as default" thing doesn't work too well... I've lost count of how many instances of {{term}} without a language I've had to fix... —CodeCat 13:38, 21 December 2012 (UTC)

How can implementation be scheduled? How are such actions decided? (I've just created a {{obsolete term}} for fully obsolete terms, and I plan to slowly add it to all Latvian words for which it is appropriate, so as to slowly fill Category:Latvian obsolete terms; but how about English and all the other languages?) --Pereru (talk) 02:01, 22 December 2012 (UTC) I've just transfered abstrude and a few other similar terms to Category:English obsolete terms by changing the tag from {{obsolete}} to {{obsolete term}}. Is that part of what should be happening? --Pereru (talk) 02:04, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

Should {{obsolete}} be used for obsolete senses or obsolete terms? Using it for obsolete terms has one advantage: anyone can skim the list of obsolete terms and immediately spot a word they know is still in use. Trying to spot a completely-obsolete term among a list of terms with obsolete senses would be much harder. —CodeCat 02:20, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

On the other hand, people are more likely to use the shorter, generic name {{obsolete}} where it doesn't belong than to use the longer, explicit name {{obsolete term}} where it doesn't belong, so I think using {{obsolete}} only for obsolete terms and not for senses would be counter-intuitive and a bad idea. My preference would be to use {{obsolete}} for senses... but perhaps we should insist upon two explicitly named templates, {{obsolete term}} and {{obsolete sense}} (both with the display text "obsolete"?). Using two explicitly dedicated templates would make separate categorisation of entirely obsolete terms and of terms with obsolete senses practical, too. Btw, the "obsolete terms" category could be a subcategory of the "terms with obsolete senses" category, like "proper nouns" are a subcategory of "nouns". And we could keep {{obsolete}} (because new users and visitors from other projects may call it directly or in creative ways, like {{context|UK|obsolete|_|outside of|_|dialects}}), but treat its Whatlinkshere as a standing, self-updating cleanup list. - -sche (discuss) 04:39, 22 December 2012 (UTC)

I tend to agree with -sche above; {{obsolete sense}} would make, well, sense. But now there's one thing bugging me: shouldn't fully obsolete terms have the "obsolete" tag somewhere in their inflection line? Or else we'd have to add an {{obsolete term}} tag to every single sense, or else we imply that one of the obsolete senses is actually current... --Pereru (talk) 03:48, 23 December 2012 (UTC) By the way, in principle everything applies mutatis mutandis to the other Period labels (deprecated template usage) archaic and {{dated}}, right? --Pereru (talk) 03:50, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

So you are saying that obsoleteness of a term is not a context? I suppose that is true, but we don't have any system currently in place for indicating term-wide contexts. This has been a problem in the past too... for example {{cardinal}} or {{personal}} shouldn't really be usage labels either. —CodeCat 03:55, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

We indicate obsolescence on the sense line when only one of several senses is obsolete, so I think obsolescence should also be indicated on the sense line when all senses are obsolete: indicating obsolescence on each sense line in all cases adds clarity. Meanwhile, we indicate on the inflection/headline line when certain inflected forms are obsolete (or dialectal, etc; see [[learn]], [[work#verb]], etc): so indicating the obsolescence of senses on the inflection line, when the inflected forms are not any more obsolete (or {{dated}}!) than the word itself, would be confusing. I expect some people wouldn't notice the tag on the inflection line, and would thus think that no sense was obsolete (not what you want), or would notice the tag but think (logically) than it applied to the inflections and again that the senses were not obsolete (again, not what you want)... I think it's better to indicate the obsolescence of the senses on the sense line. (How many highly polysemous obsolete words are there, anyway?) - -sche (discuss) 05:09, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

We don't do this for any other register or dialect: We don't have separate categories for US-only terms and for those with US-only senses, nor separate categories for math-specific terms and for those with math-specific senses. Why should obsolete be different?​—msh210℠ (talk) 06:06, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

For one thing, it would give us a list of terms which a bot could use to identify terms that should probably not be used in definitions. The same would be true in varying degrees for {{archaic}}, {{dated}}, {{rare}}, and possibly others. DCDuring TALK 10:27, 23 December 2012 (UTC)