User talk:Anachronist

Sourcing

By submitting material without citing the source, you are guilty of plagiarism, and violating the spirit of the GFDL. [1] vs. [2]. --Connel MacKenzie 05:58, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

The source for all my edits today is Nomenclature of Ships by Charles Snelling, 10/20/1981. It's issued by the US Navy to civilian employees. I simply paraphrased it. The uscgboating.org web site very likely used the same source — and note that they didn't cite it either. It is not plagiarism, simply paraphrasing. The original source says: Today a phrase meaning that a person is an expert, it originally meant exactly the reverse. In early days, when "he knows the ropes" was written on a seaman's discharge, it meant that he was only a novice, knowing just names and uses of the principal ropes.

I am unfamiliar with how sources should be cited here. An example would help. -Anachronist 06:14, 1 October 2006 (UTC)

I see you're starting to add citations. If that book is in the public domain, then, although it may violate the spirit of the GFDL as Connel said, I can't see that it violates any rule not to cite. I, for one, don't know whether that book is in the public domain; see w:Copyright status of work by the U.S. government.—msh210℠ 22:24, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

This has got to be the longest and slowest conversation, averaging two comments per year!

Anyway, the reason I can't cite it properly is that it's a stapled booklet I got 15 years ago, and I can no longer locate it. I had recorded the title, author, and date in another communication, but I didn't record the government publication number. I'm no longer working for the US Naval Sea Systems Command, who issued it to me. I will contact a former colleague to see if I can get a full citation, or a new copy. For now, the discussions linked on Talk:learn the ropes will have to do. Anachronist 22:49, 20 January 2009 (UTC)

urban Indian

Yuo have the right idea in providing supporting citations, but unfortunately the citation you provided isn't supportive. If you look at the link you gave, the combination "urban Inidan" has only the second word capitalized, which is a red flag that this may not be a use of a fixed phrase. Secondly, the combination only appears as "urban Indian community", which suggests that what we have is actually a noun (community) modified by two adjectives. Finally, on the same page you can see "Bay Area Indian community". Just as "Bay Area Indian" or "California Indian" would be [place] + "Indian", and thus not deserve an entry as a separate word, so "urban" + "Indian" seems to fall into the same category based on the citation you supplied.

Not every combination of words that regularly occurs together is considered to merit a dictionary entry. I find 609 b.g.c. hits for "big yellow bus" [3], but that doesn't mean it deserves a dictionary entry. We need evidence in this case that the combination is not sum-of-parts. By that, we mean that you can't get the complete sense of what the word means from looking up the individual parts. A "big yellow bus" can be understood by looking up (deprecated template usage) big, (deprecated template usage) yellow, and (deprecated template usage) bus. The same seems to be true of "urban Indian" from the evidence I've seen so far, meaning that an "urban Indian" is merely an Indian who is urban, but convincing evidence otherwise could still be out there.

As you can see, verifying an entry is not as simple as merely doing a quick internet search. The potential returns have to be examined for merit to determine whether they support the entry. --EncycloPetey 03:31, 21 January 2009 (UTC)

loli

The English Wiktionary does not use redirects to join alternative forms or misspellings or between upper and lower-case forms of words. This is because we exist to document the language, and thus the spelling should be included as an entry in its own right. {{alternative spelling of}} and {{misspelling of}} exist to facilitate the creation of entries for such spellings. To learn more about editing Wiktionary please read Help:How to edit a page or nose around in the community portal. Thank you. Conrad.Irwin 22:22, 18 February 2009 (UTC)

Thanks. I see a lot of entries that don't make sense here. I was going to make changes similar to yours to the entries for loli, lolita, and Lolita, but I decided to disturb them as little as possible. Your changes make more sense. ~Anachronist (talk) 20:14, 20 February 2009 (UTC)