Wikipedia talk:Glossary

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should we add "barnstaritis" to the list 92.24.91.127 (talk) 09:20, 13 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

What is it? --DB1729^talk 11:22, 13 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

I imagine it's a "disease" (obsession) related to using

barnstars. Even better, there's a WP page for it. – The Grid (talk) 13:46, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply

]

Ah, thanks. I must have mistyped my search for it. --DB1729^talk 16:12, 14 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@The Grid, we should add the term to the list, I wanted to post this on the talk page so I wouldn't make edits and then get them reverted for vandalism, that is annoying, 88.110.61.147 (talk) 15:07, 28 June 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, Andrewa. You may not remember this edit adding "A base name is an undisambiguated article title", as it's been some years. I did a targeted advanced search, and couldn't find a lot of backing for that definition. In particular, I'm concerned about possible confusion with Magic word {{BASEPAGENAME}}.

I found one page that seems to support your definition, at Wikipedia:Cleaning up after a move where it is used in that sense, but there don't seem to be a lot of other cases like that one that I can see. Other pages seem to use it more as a shorthand for BASEPAGENAME, such as at Help:Page name and Wikipedia:Page name. Afaict, that seems to be the majority usage, but maybe the usage is just blurry, and either we should remove the glossary entry entirely, or call out the variability of usage, and provide some of these links.

The more I deal with the glossary, the more I think this kind of blurry variability of usage may be pretty common. See for example, my recent rewrite of the term

Could you look into base name a little more, and see how you'd like to handle it? Thanks, Mathglot (talk) 00:15, 18 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Dropped. Mathglot (talk) 07:11, 27 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@

Wikipedia:Base name from Wikipedia:Disambiguation § Redirecting to a primary topic, which includes a piped link to that redirect (in the context of base name being a synonym for unqualified title). That link seems to have been inserted in Special:Diff/905866534 - pinging Paine Ellsworth, who made that edit. Anecdotally speaking, I think of the term base name to mean an undisambiguated/unqualified article title (except in the special case of the magic word), though I can't remember exactly where I picked that up from. Best, ‍—‍a smart kitten_[meow] 21:21, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply

]

(I forgot to mention it in the above reply, but I also noticed that the term base name is referenced in a number of other glossary definitions, along with {{section link}}s that no longer work following the term's removal.) ‍—‍a smart kitten_[meow] 21:29, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]

(

Reference

is classic for this. I think that as long as we can provide multiple definitions that are actually in use and have support, such as with Reference, it's fine, and very helpful. If we have a word that seems a bit fuzzy (maybe only to me?) like base name, then either we have to improve it, or delete it. The last thing we want to do in a page labeled "Wikipedia:Glossary" is lead people astray, or provide idiosyncratic definitions that maybe come from a Talk page somewhere without really being adopted enough to determine a consistent meaning (or multiple consistent meanings).

A bit o/t, but while I'm here: this should be a Wikipedia Glossary, only; it is not an English dictionary. Words like

hagiography have no business being here. The very next term after that one, handwaving is not exclusive to Wikipedia, but is a jargony term used in a lot of debate or academic discussion contexts. Perhaps it is unfamiliar to a lot of people who might see it mentioned here, and to that extent, I'm not strongly opposed to retaining it, but since it is available in standard dictionaries (and has its own encyclopedic article here), I feel it's not necessary. I won't militate to remove it, but I don't think we should have too many like that here. We should stick to terms that match the title topic, as much as possible; any exceptions should have some clear benefit to a reader coming here. Mathglot (talk) 21:52, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply

]

Those should be fixed. Or maybe it's easier to just add it back, but then we need a authoritative definition. Mathglot (talk) 21:54, 18 January 2024 (UTC)[reply]