Wiktionary talk:Criteria for inclusion

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This page is not making sense. It says that, "Simple English Wiktionary will have all words in the English language" and yet elsewhere it is said that there are only 15,000 words listed here because only simple words are to be listed. Why is "hyperbole" listed on en.wiktionary.org, but not on simple.wiktionary.org? Thanks, RB 66.217.118.170 (talk) 16:11, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Where does it say that only simple words should have entries? That's not true; we actually have definitions for complex and obscure words, such as inconclusible and hyperpolyglot. The only limitation is that they need to be defined in simple language. This wiki is a work in progress; we don't have nearly as many contributors as en.wiktionary has, so naturally we're not as comprehensive. We're expanding every day, though; and you're certainly welcome to help out if you wish. Tempodivalse [talk] 16:29, 10 November 2010 (UTC)

Should symbols be allowed?

Symbols are not in the inclusion list. But neither are they in the exclusion list. I added some astronomical symbols, and they were deleted. People who do not read English well need to be able to understand mathematical and scientific symbols just as much as people who do read English well. Symbols such as M_☉ (the mass of the Sun). If readers have difficulty with wikt.en, then it would be beneficial for them to have definitions here. Kwamikagami (talk) 02:48, 11 February 2022 (UTC)

I don't have severe objections about having them here and I'd gladly restore the deleted pages if others agree. Minorax (talk) 04:03, 12 February 2022 (UTC)

I am definitely in favor of symbols having entries here. At first I wasn't sure, but I looked it up on EN WT, and they're there; plus, symbols are extremely useful to our target audience. It's hard to claim that they're English, but if anything, they're a worthy exception! I would recommend the CFI be updated to reflect this change, in the Languages section, most likely. I also think that, since this is the only linguistic exception, we don't need to bother making any headers about it being not technically English like the language headers common on ENWT. Though if we were to decide to do something to distinguish them, I would vote that it only appear on the symbol pages, not the others. Another question, though: how do we decide what color a symbol should be, in cases where there's no standard color? Black and white? Does it matter? --Cromwellt|talk|contribs 02:48, 13 February 2022 (UTC)

They're used in English text, so in that sense they're English. They need to be marked as translingual on WT-en because they fit into many languages equally well, like the letters of the alphabet. But in an English-only context, they shouldn't need a language header. Print monolingual English dictionaries don't do anything like that. (They separate them because they can't be alphabetized.)

Emojis might be too much. But IMO mathematical, scientific and other technical symbols deserve a place in any good dictionary, because it may be impossible to understand a text without them.

I don't understand the question about color. Almost all technical symbols are the same color as the surrounding text. (Some of Dalton's chemical symbols were red, but even so most sources reproduce them in black, and in any case they're obsolete.) Here, I'd think they could take the same colors for highlighting and interwiki links as any other lemma. Kwamikagami (talk) 12:52, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

Good points. Yeah, emojis might be too much. I didn't know that about Dalton's symbols. I bring up color because (possibly due to me being on mobile), the symbols all have color for me. For example, the sun you put in earlier is yellow with orange rays. If you don't see those colors, must be my phone's OS deciding their appearance, treating them similar to emojis, I guess. I wonder if I can turn that off. --Cromwellt|talk|contribs 16:41, 14 February 2022 (UTC)

@Cromwellt: Ah, I see what you mean. Yes, some Unicode characters are optional emojis. Operating systems differ in whether they display them as emoji or as text by default. For example, the signs of the zodiac. You can override the OS preference and force one or the other with U+FE0E (VARIATION SELECTOR-15) for text and U+FE0F (VARIATION SELECTOR-16) for emoji. U+2649, for example, is text ♉︎ with VS15 and emoji ♉️ with VS16 (♉︎ and ♉️).

But the implementation isn't always perfect. I don't know which sun symbol you're talking about; none of the ones I used should have been emoji. I thought that U+1F31E should be text 🌞︎ (with VS15) and emoji 🌞️ (with VS16), but on my browser I'm seeing it as two different emojis. I believe that's because Unicode defines that character as an emoji, rather than it being an ambiguous character defined as text or emoji by the OS.[1] But emojis can at least be minimized by tacking U+FE0E onto the characters. Most characters have no emoji option, and indeed the Unicode specification for some is "not intended as emoji". Kwamikagami (talk) 07:39, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

WP-en has a template {{Emoji presentation|...|text}} to force the text variant. That may be easier to use than trying to remember the Unicode character code for VS15. Kwamikagami (talk) 21:48, 17 February 2022 (UTC)

@Cromwellt, Minorax: So, would it be worth restoring the entries for the planetary symbols? Kwamikagami (talk) 06:42, 22 February 2022 (UTC)

@Kwamikagami: Restored. Minorax (talk)

Thank you! Kwamikagami (talk) 02:11, 23 February 2022 (UTC)