Word/quotation of the moment:

The Lunatic-in-Charge becomes the Lunatic-at-Large

Biden's last words to Trump: GET OFF MY LAWN !

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A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Buenaventura language. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 January 11#Buenaventura language until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 11:59, 11 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

From Most Phallic Building contest:

"Cabinet wrote that the Ypsilanti Water Tower, called "the brick dick" by locals, "is clearly the world's most phallic." [...] Located on the highest point in Ypsilanti, erection began in 1889 [...]" --Florian Blaschke (talk) 07:36, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Ha! Thanks, @Florian Blaschke: I used to live in Ypsi, actually, and the tower was only a couple minutes walk from my house. It was something of a joke, but we mostly took it for granite. — kwami (talk) 00:58, 15 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Dear Kwami, we've had this kind of discussion already some years ago: please, please do not make page moves out of the blue without any kind of preceding discussion. You moved Wolaytta language to Wolaitta language without giving any reason, probably having none, as Ethnologue, Glottolog and WALS all agree on calling it Wolaytta. This kind of move is not only pointless, but actually quite disruptive, as the title of the page now gives a different spelling than the first line, and Ethiopian language names are already confusing enough as they are. Most Wolaytta people can't even agree on how to spell their own given names, so why do we need to reinforce that when at least for the language name some kind of consensus has arisen, at least in the academic literature about the language? So, I kindly ask you to redo this move, or I will have to get myself into the trouble of finding out how to do this. Cheers, Landroving Linguist (talk) 08:18, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

(talk page stalker)@Landroving Linguist: If you cannot not move it back, I think you can place a technical request ("revert of a bold move"). But unexplained does not mean pointless: at least Ngram has almost even counts of "Wolaytta language" and "Wolaitta language"; without "language", "Wolaitta" is quite dominant over "Wolaytta". So a discussed move request might be more fruitful. –Austronesier (talk) 13:47, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Good point - I shouldn't come over so aggressive and should first assume that Kwami wouldn't do it without a good reason. So please take my apologies! In any case, I think Wikipedia should spell the language (the correct spelling is anyone's guess with the messy Wolaytta orthography) the same way as the other three large online repositories on languages, particularly as they all agree on one spelling. Landroving Linguist (talk) 15:02, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I don't care which spelling we use. The reason I moved it was that I created a link w the 'i' spelling, and it was red. That surprised me. I could've created a rd directly or by moving the page, and it was easier to move the page. But I certainly won't object if you move it back.

One point, though -- the 3 repositories you mention are not independent sources. Glottolog started off with Ethnologue's language inventory and then set out to correct, augment and purge it. If they leave an Ethn spelling, that can just mean that they don't care. (And they generally don't care about labels.) I believe WALS also uses ISO spellings. So they're really a single source, ISO, which is not a RS for which name is best. If Glotto and WALS go along with ISO, that may just mean that it's close enough to not bother with, not that it's the dominant spelling in the lit. (Which in this case AFAICT it's not.)

Personally, I don't think that we should use ISO, an industrial standard, to determine language-name preferences for linguistics. — kwami (talk) 22:05, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

All fair enough, which leaves me with the point that just short of deleting a page a move to a different page name is about the most impactful thing you can do to a Wikipedia page, particularly as it is not easily fixed. If you are really in the habit of moving pages because they don't happen to match the spelling of a link you create somewhere, you have something that you should seriously address in your life. And you should not do it without having a discussion first, or people here will hate your guts. Well, since the spelling in the case of this language really doesn't matter (the dictionaries I worked on often used three different spellings on the same page), and since the redirect still works from Wolaytta, and since I really don't know how to go about this, I will leave it at that. Landroving Linguist (talk) 22:21, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

I didn't move it because it didn't match the spelling of a link I made. I moved it because the most common spelling didn't exist and it needed to. I then had a choice of how to create the rd, and saw no reason not to do it by moving the article to the more common name. There are cases where I've moved an article half a dozen times to create half a dozen redirects. If anyone's ever objected, it was a trivial number compared to the thousands of page moves I've made and thousands of redirects I've created. And the choice is usually a trivial one anyway. Some of these languages, including some in Ethiopia, are so poorly covered in English that a single publication can change the dominant name or spelling in the literature. — kwami (talk) 22:33, 14 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi there, Kwamikagami: I notice that your recent edit at Pykobjê dialect has created a reference problem with ref name= "glotto" which doesn't exist - is this from a different article? Can you please help me correct it to a real reference format ? Thanks. 09:38, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Hi. That's referring to the glotto param in the info box. Someone must've disabled support. I noticed the glotto params don't generate refs any more. Must be part of that. When I get a chance I'll revert the changes to the info box. — kwami (talk) 00:44, 24 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

A discussion is taking place to address the redirect Chaungtha language. The discussion will occur at Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion/Log/2021 January 24#Chaungtha language until a consensus is reached, and anyone, including you, is welcome to contribute to the discussion. Shhhnotsoloud (talk) 13:03, 24 January 2021 (UTC)[reply]

Hi, you seem to prefer creating redirects using the unusual method of starting with one redirect and then moving it in sequence across all the titles for redirects to the same target. Please don't do that. It may save you a few milliseconds of your time, but it adds to the labour for anyone else who's going to deal with those redirects afterwards. If the first entry in a redirect's history is a move, then this will almost universally be an indication that the title was previously occupied by an article (it's articles that get moved, not redirects). On several occasions I've had to go from one move long entry to another, looking for that elusive article in the history that I may need to have histmerged, only to find in the end it's just redirects all the way down. Also, these redirects will end up having more than one edit in their history (because of the double-redirect fixing), which means that if the target article ever needs to be moved over one of them, this won't be possible without advanced permissions. – Uanfala (talk) 21:25, 2 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]