User talk:Ken Hughes/MAVhelp

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[edit] MAV off-topic

My noisy know-it-alls spun off from Talk:modal auxiliary verb were chilled out, incorporated and cleaned a week ago due to Ruakh's suggestions and example. The off-topics swelled into anglocentricity, transwiki and my clear need to learn some policy for notions in the chatter below (now restated, with more concision). ยท ken(t) 16 August 2005.

? How long (i.e., "complete") should entries be
? Minimize anglo-centricity. or branch categorially
? [enWiktionary] before? or after? other country-codes
   
1. Copy wikisource.org --> {en fr ro es de pl}            - wikisource=86% of current WP,
2. Admin/bot does page DEL, MERGE per admin for {en fr ro es de pl} WPs & WKTNs,
-- etc.. Transwiki decisions reduce categorial cross-threads in the re-weaving, don't they?
    e.g., wikisource Moving_pages_to_language_domains)
I think articles should be as complete as possible, as long as they remain encyclopedic. If a given article becomes too long to be useful, then it should be broken up into subarticles. (TBH, I'm not sure that all my additions to Modal auxiliary verb were encyclopedic, but I thought it would be productive to supply a basic description of each verb's use, in the hopes that some of the contrasts will result in other users contributing more encylopedic details. If that doesn't happen, then some of my text should probably get either deleted or moved to Wiktionary.)
As regards Anglocentrism, I think the way to address that is to add non-English information to articles, and articles on non-English topics, rather than to curtail the discussion of English. (That said, it's a bit crappy if an article on a topic common to many languages is two-thirds about English and one-third about the other languages, even if the text on the other languages isn't missing anything obvious. The solution to that, I think, is to move the bulk of the content on English to a special "English foo" page.) In the case of modal auxiliary verb, I think it's a term applied specifically to English, which is why I added so much detail about the English. If I'm mistaken in that, and the term is applied in other languages as well, then I think the current content should be moved to English modal auxiliary verbs and modal auxiliary verb should be rewritten to discuss English and whatever other languages have them.
Finally, I'd recommend that you not get too caught up in planning for future changes in policy. When a policy changes, then make sure that any new edits you make conform to the new policy; and if there's a proposed policy that you like, then feel free to make edits that conform to it, provided these edits don't violate existing policies.
Ruakh 02:17, 5 August 2005 (UTC)
Good guidelines! I'm learning. -- Ken 16 August 2005