Wikipedia:Featured list removal candidates/List of Merriam–Webster's Words of the Year/archive1

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The following is an archived discussion of a featured list removal nomination. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the article's talk page or in Wikipedia talk:Featured list candidates. No further edits should be made to this page.

The list was removed by Sephiroth BCR 23:12, 10 February 2009 [1].

List of Merriam–Webster's Words of the Year[edit]

Notified: Dem393, WP COMEDY, WP LITERATURE.
  • Delist, and merge to Word of the year. First off, this has no reason at all to exist as a separate article, as it is simply one variant on the same theme, none of the rest of which have their own articles. Secondly...
  • Featured List Criteria:
    • Prose: Fail. Wanders from nonsensical to misleading to unparseable.
    • Lead: Pass, thoroughly.
    • Comprehensiveness: Pass, thoroughly.
    • Structure: Neutral: The structure is not confusing, but it is excessively overstructured for such a simple topic. The entire piece, stripped of its OR can be reduced to a subsection in a broader article that is presently rather lacking due to the content being mis-located in this overblown list article.
    • Style: Fail. Serious deficiencies (not in formatting and italics-here or double-quotation-marks-there, but in basic Wikipedia article formation and standards generally).
    • Visual appeal: Neutral. Not particularly relevant to material this textual in nature. If tables were needed, they have been handled properly, but they are emphatically unnecessary when the OR material is removed.
    • Stability: Neutral. Long dormant for the most part, but with few major editors before the WP:FL process started, so a moot point.
  • Broader Featured Article Criteria that also necessarily apply to featured lists, as a subset of featured articles:
    • Factually accurate: Dismal fail. In particular, the definitions provided cannot possibly match the intent of the authors of the material the article covers.
    • Neutral: Dismal fail: Definitions provided are in many cases highly biased and selective.
    • Consistent citations: Neutral. The citations are consistent in format, to an extent, but are not consistent in the broader meaning of the term. They are principally citations to definitions preferred by, convenient to or simply first identified by various editors of the article, but not consistent with the often clear intent of the article subject's creators' intentions with regard to the words in question.
    • Length: Fail-ish. Overly-long for the subject matter in question, due to extensive quotation of extraneous, irrelevant, even counter-productive definitions (cf. the proposed merge target, Word of the year, for a lean, clear counter-example).
  • Issues, in detail:*
    • Doesn't any of this strike anyone else but me as kind of veering between polemical, snide, pseudo-intellectual, off-kilter, nonsensical and occasionally possibly accidentally correct? Some of these definitions are so of-base it astounds me.
      • "terrorism: (noun) Use of violence or threats to intimidate or coerce a person, especially for political purposes." Um, well, just, uh, NO. The entire concept of terrorism is that it is against a supra-individual entity, such a country, government, nation, ethnicity, etc. The presence of the word "person" in that definition suggests that it was written by a child, or to be understood only by a child.
      • "google: (verb) Using the Google search engine to look up information about a person." Or an object, a question, a company, a product, a chemical, a term, a... Why "a person"?!?
      • "apathetic: (adjective) No feeling or passion, indifferent." That's not even grammatical. Proof: "I'm apathetic today". Case 1: I'm indifferent today." PASS. Case 2: I'm no feeling or passion today." FAIL: DOES NOT PARSE AS ENGLISH.
    • I could give a dozen more examples like that before even touching the more the subtle matters like the highly politically-charged, even jingoistic definitions of some of these terms, and the blindingly-obvious misinterpretations.
    • I insist that we have a serious issue here. The questions are: a) Are the definitions given in the article those given by the M–W WotY selection committee itself, or are they definitions culled by WP editors from random sources, of differing levels of reliability, of variable amounts of specificity and applicability, and (probably notably) of different ages; and b) if they are not from the M–W WotY committee, are they actually applicable to the intentions of the committee in the sense(s) in which these words were nominated, and if allegedly so, what is the proof that these are not simply original research suppositions, or worse yet impositions of biased personal opinion in various cases? Given the almost certain answers to these questions, I'm frankly completely shocked that this piece has a Featured List designation. I'm so blown over by this that I can't even read it any further.
    • From what I can determine before dying of shock and excessively verbose melodrama (yes, I am making fun of myself), most if not all of these definitions appear to have been culled, often verbatim (cf. WP:COPYVIO) from the first-to-third search results at Dictionary.Reference.com.
    • I.e., this entire page is [2] [3] [4], other than the bare word-list itself.
    • I've been here for 5 years or so, I think (maybe longer by now, this being 2009 and all) and I've never seen such a candidate for WP:FLRC scrutiny. Yes, this ticks me off. No, I do not have anything at all against its editors (I did not even look at the page history, other than to ascertain that its present state was not the result of elaborate vandalism [addendum: and later to find major contributors to notify of this FLRC]). Yes, I am not being overly charitable toward this list article. I do not believe that it deserves such charity, especially given the extremes of sourcing effort, writing clarity, encyclopedic focus and other gauntlets that other lists have had to run in order to achieve FL status. It should be flensed to its bare bones and reborn (as a subsection elsewhere, as noted).
    • Finally, the decorative but space-consumptive table layout of this page can be easily condensed by conversion to simple prose after removal of all the OR blather here, and the entire article will make a neat, lean sub-section of the proposed merge target, Word of the year.
  • * Note: My example criticisms of a few of the definitions, as applied to the contexts that our readers will be expecting, are criticisms of the dictionary sources cited, not of the good-faith editor of the WP article in question, who (per WP:RS, etc.) is not in a position to make up new definitions or cite even less reliable sources than major dictionaries. The problem is that many major dictionaries, if not all of them, are collaboratively written by a tiny handful of people compared to WP's editorship, often betray biases that escape editors-in-chief, and are perpetually behind actual usage, sometimes by decades or even generations, as well as limited in the contextually-applicable definitional scope.
  • — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 18:39, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]


  • Comment Now THAT's a nomination, it puts my three sentence ones to shame. Make sure you notify the user that originally nominated the list as well as all of the relevant wikiprojects. -- Scorpion0422 20:04, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reply/Question: Notified the (only!) principal editor of the page, and (for what near-zero it is worth the one anon that made substantive edits). I'm a bit at a loss what projects to notify. Suggestions? — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 20:38, 13 January 2009 (UTC) Aside from the 2 on the talk page I mean. They're already in my edit windows. Anyone else? I'm not trying to railroad anything. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 20:40, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment First, the merging issue should not be discussed here at all since this is FLRC. Secondly, whether this list fulfills the Wikipedia:Featured article criteria is completely irrelevant because this is a featured list not featured article. So, please keep this nomination on topic. Thanks—Chris! ct 20:19, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Reply: Firstly, then, sorry, but I don't treat WP administrative bailiwiks as rigidly as some. I have zero problem discussing the potential of a merge in the middle of a WP:AFD debate, or discussing the WP:RM and WP:NC article-naming ramifications of a series of articles when a WP:CFD nomination raises issues with the name of the category that they are in, or discussing the Featured Article/List/Whatever consequences of an article in the middle of a merge discussion. These things do not exist in vacuums, but often interrelate. What I expect here is a clear delisting as a FL, and some interest generated, at Talk:Word of the year at the merge thread already started there, from parties to this discussion who might otherwise never have even noticed. I think such breadth would be helpful, in a two-way manner. Second, I have to disagree with your interpretation of the relationship between FAs and FLs. FLs are a subset. The sourcing/accuracy requirements of FAs apply to FLs as well (I mean, let's be real about this – WP:V is policy, across the board. Lists are not magically exempt from policy!). Thirdly, that nitpick seems a bit off-point, anyway, as substantial FL-only issues have been raised. Do you have any objections to those? If you are picking a WP:PROCESS bone with me, I think we must be talking past each other. I have a years-long reputation as one of the staunchest WP:PROCESS people on the system. If that's not your point, I may be missing something, and if so please restate. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 20:38, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Chris, when SM says "Broader Featured Article Criteria that also necessarily apply to featured lists", he is correct. Note the preamble of the FL criteria, which states that the article must meet FL criteria "In addition to meeting the requirements for all Wikipedia content—in particular, naming conventions, neutrality, no original research, verifiability, citations, reliable sources (taking particular care with living persons), non-free content and what Wikipedia is not". Dabomb87 (talk) 21:22, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Fair enough. All I want is to keep this discussion on topic.—Chris! ct 23:34, 13 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
Keen by me. — SMcCandlish [talk] [cont] ‹(-¿-)› 03:31, 14 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Um, as an FYI, tone down the rhetoric. I realize that you apparently hate the "jingoistic" nature of this list, but let's keep it to an objective level, shall we? How shocked, abashed, overblown, appalled, disgusted, or stunned you are (to illustrate how many times you expressed your discontent with this list) is not really going to change how I close this nomination or opinions here, and frankly is plain silly after a certain point. Anyhow, on the topic of the definitions, if the Merriam-Webster definitions were the ones utilized for all items, then it would be an improvement. You can't really claim that they're OR at that point, and whether we want to include definitions or not here is up to the consensus here (seemed to be consensus for their inclusion in the FLC for whatever it's worth). As for the merge suggestion, FLRC isn't the place for it unless you already have a preexisting consensus to do so. — sephiroth bcr (converse) 10:45, 14 January 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Weak Delist. Would using Mirriam-webster's definitions be ok for copyright? If so, they should be used, and the list as it is delisted until/unless it is fully sourced including the definitions. The use of many different sources makes this seem very strange - doesn't MW give the deifnitions when they announce the winners?. Aren't the definitions they give only one meaning?, not all meanings of the word or homonyms. Overall i don't think it is as far of FL as the nominator insists, but i also don't think it would pass now. Yobmod (talk) 17:10, 5 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
  • Delist, but Neutral on move. I'm no English major, but I can clearly tell that some of these definitions are not correct, and there are serious prose issues to boot. However, I believe this can exist as a stand-alone list; it is self-contained, and on a definite, verifiable subject. That said, it needs major work to get it to featured list status, and should be removed unless serious improvements are made.-RunningOnBrains 23:05, 7 February 2009 (UTC)[reply]
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. No further edits should be made to this page.
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