Over the past few days there's been a buzz of discussion concerning the Etymology namespace, on SCM's talk page, Discord, the Staff Noticeboard, and in the history of the Etymology project page itself of course (which is now locked to editing lmao). I thought it best to put all the proposals floating around in one place so we can lay these issues to rest. Here are the proposals in question:
- Abacos has argued, eg at User talk:Some Color Mage and Project:Staff Noticeboard, that the namespace must be renamed. The claim here is that the term "etymology" is misleading. I will not try to reproduce their arguments as they are clearly laid out there.
- Technobliterator has argued that the namespace should be scrapped, alternatively because it's entirely off-topic or because transclusion is overdone and adds to page bloat.
- Techno, possibly among others, wants to merge Project:Etymology into the Manual of Style, possibly making a technical documentation page explaining how the Etymology namespace works, so as to reduce policy bloat.
- Techno, Keltainentoukokuu, Some Color Mage and I, possibly among others, think that such pages as Etymology:Fire which are "obvious" should be scrapped because they frankly look ridiculous and don't add anything to the wiki. Instead perhaps we should have more discussion in Etymology namespace about how real-world concepts inspired Final Fantasy.
Perhaps the authors of the above proposals could write here to argue more strongly for them. Let me just give my opinions on each of the above proposals in turn before turning over discussion to the peanut gallery:
- I don't quite buy Abacos' argument here. The assertion is that "etymologies are not definitions", and we are not using them as definitions. Take Etymology:Bahamut. A definition of "Bahamut", for us, would be something like "the recurring summon who appears as a metallic dragon who attacks with the nonelemental laser-breath attack Megaflare", which is not the content of Etymology:Bahamut. Rather, the historical development and origin are that it was taken from D&D, which in turn took it from Persian mythic cosmology; this is exactly the content of Etymology:Bahamut. Anyways, there is still the issue that the name "Etymology" is a little confusing even though I still hold that it's not wrong. But renaming it doesn't seem entirely worth it (seriously, how easy is it to rename a namespace? It can't be that easy, given how tightly Fandom seems to govern namespaces...)
- We don't need to transclude Etymologies on every page, eg Bahamut (Final Fantasy XIV) doesn't need a transclude. But it still makes sense to have a transcludable namespace. This is because there are pages without an obvious "root", instead they just have a disambig, and the whole point of disambigs is to not have any content on them. So we would want to be able to transclude Etymologies onto each of the pages linked to by the disambig.
- Makes sense, we have a lot of policy pages and personally speaking I tend to get them mixed up a lot...
- Yes please. At the request of Hyrule57 I made Etymology:List of etymologies by origin, which they filled out. Maybe we should look into having more resources like this in Etymology space so it isn't just a transclusion fiesta. That would be a better use of the space than recalling well-known words in the English language. Cat (meow ∙ hunt) 00:08, 13 March 2022 (UTC)