Talk:Sister (disambiguation)

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[edit] Esperanto

Ugh, sister is fratino in Esperanto? More evidence that Esperanto is insane (and sexist). =P
I don't see how the developers could have rationally arrived at that word. It suggests that a sister is something akin to a little brother or female brother. Perhaps they were too ivory tower'd to understand gender. --[[User:Eequor|ηυωρ]] 05:04, 12 Sep 2004 (UTC)

Why does "understanding gender" call for male/female word pairs to be unrelated? They aren't necessarily so In Old English, "man" meant "person", and "woman" was "wif-man" = "wife person", a person of the wife variety. In Spanish, uncle is tío and aunt is tía. In French, a male cousin is a cousin and a female cousin is a cousine. So? --Largo Plazo 06:48, 1 January 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Siblings as main entry

Oops! I just noticed Commander Keane's objectionto making Siblings the main entry (in this edit summary but not on a talk page) -- but I've already done it. 99% of the links to Brother and Sister intend the meaning at Sibling. What's the argument for not making this change? Ewlyahoocom 01:33, 17 February 2006 (UTC)

Well, I'm here because I wanted info on religious sisters. As far as I'm concerned, I ended up in the wrong place. (And it's all about me, right? :) sibling may be the most commonly desired target, but I wonder how many of those links are kind of gratuitous; under what circumstance are most people going to be unsure enough about what a sister (sibling) is to have to follow a link to read an article about it? I mean, while in principle I suppose all nouns (and most other words) in wikipedia could be links (and I even think this would be kinda neat; in 1992, it's how I expected things would work...), current good practice seems to be to try to use links where meaning might be questionable, for further information and to elaborate on a subject; I'm not sure the authors who are linking to sister are doing it on that basis. Are many people really going to need background info for sister (sibling), or is it just the case that article authors thought linking the word was a nice idea? In most cases I advocate disambigs over defaults if a word has more than two or three possible interpretations; it conveys the information that alternative meanings exist. This would be especially important for the uneducated, which includes children and smart foreign people with poor English skills. As wikipedia fills in, more and more pages for common words are going to face this choice, and policy discussions seem likely. I was going to change the redir, but checked in here first to see if it had been discussed. I'll hold off, but we should find out if there's a policy position on this... my vote is for the disambig as the default. -- Akb4 03:46, 23 February 2007 (UTC)