User talk:TonyLocke
nice edit
"Examples" box at "Adjective"[edit]
Hi, TonyLocke.
I just noticed your edit immediately after mine at "Adjective". Your edit summary is "I like the concise examples, but I've included a simple example to get the idea across quickly."
I'm having trouble understanding precisely what the advantage of adding your sentence is. (I'm not saying my example sentence is perfect, by the way.) Your sentence has three attributive adjectives ("quick", "brown", and "lazy")—and then we have another attributive adjective ("all") in the sentence that is shorter and contains three kinds (instead of just one) of adjective.
As I see it, we're back to the comparison: "All things green aren't red" has fewer words and three kinds of adjective; "The quick, brown fox jumps over the lazy dog" has more words and one kind of adjective. More words, three examples of the same thing, and just one kind of adjective: this strikes me as not only less simple and less quick, but also the first step to ending up with what we had before (five sentences containing nine examples of just one kind of adjective)—which, by the way, also came from one or more editors' replacing "All things green aren't red" with more and more examples of just one kind of adjective while eliminating examples of two other kinds. Why should we now have, including mine and yours, four examples of attributive adjectives? Why not twenty-four? Or four hundred? And why two sentences instead of one? How about five sentences, or ten or fifty? ("Oh! I, too, have an example!" seems to be a fairly common syndrome at Wikipedia. It's useful, but it must always be followed by selecting the better examples and weeding out the worse ones.)
If utter brevity were really the goal, we should just say "brown dog" or even "brown".
As I said, I'm just having trouble seeing what the advantage is. Is the "dog" sentence supposed to be easier to comprehend because it's commoner than the "things" sentence?
Cheers, sorry to go on so long, and thanks for watching out for vandalism at "Adjective".
President Lethe (talk) 02:06, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
- Hey President Lethe, I agree that the examples box has a bit of redundancy in it, but I think that this is a good thing. One of the reasons for having examples is so that the reader can compare them and see the common link, and this requires a number of examples of the same thing. In my opinion four examples of attributive adjectives is fine. TonyLocke (talk) 12:19, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
Hello, TonyLocke. It has been over six months since you last edited the Articles for Creation submission or draft page you started, User:TonyLocke/sandbox.
In accordance with our policy that Wikipedia is not for the indefinite hosting of material deemed unsuitable for the encyclopedia mainspace, the draft has been deleted. If you wish to retrieve it, you can request its undeletion by following the instructions at this link. An administrator will, in most cases, restore the submission so you can continue to work on it. — JJMC89 (T·C) 17:56, 1 March 2019 (UTC)