Wikipedia talk:Conlangs/Old straw poll

message: Hello. I think it is a little early for opening the vote right now: the discussion is still going on, and I was actually working on a draft proposal based on yours. Once the vote is open, it is pretty hard to change the options. Can we please close the vote for a while and first conclude our discussion? There's no need to remove this page, just put a huge DRAFT above it. --IJzeren Jan 06:54, 6 August 2005 (UTC)

message: Has a public corpus of at least 10,000 words: Firstly, is that comma separating thousands or decimals? Secondly, if the former, is this meant to be a lexicon, with 10 000 different words (in case my vote stands) or one or more texts consisting of in total 10 000 tokens, including duplicates? In that case, I need to change my vote. If the latter is the case, doesn't that mean that there is no lexicon-size criteria at all? I'd vote for that as a minor criteria. Same for the one with 100 or 100 000 words. Kaleissin 12:08:19, 2005-08-29 (UTC), who finds it fascinating how conlangs are judged harsher than natlangs
:The way I understand it, the question refers to the total number of words in all text written in the language, including translations. Every occurrence of a word counts of course separately; otherwise it would become extremely hard to count the words. All this has nothing to do with lexicon size; a separate question about that is formulated a little further down. 
:BTW, as I mentioned in the text, I find it pretty hard to work with absolutes here. A polysynthetic language consists of far fewer (but also much longer) words than an isolation language. --IJzeren Jan 12:26, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
replies: text:  If you look at the discussion on the other pages, it's clear that "corpus" means the total amount of text written in the language.  There is another criterion, "Has a sufficiently large vocabulary", which asks support voters to specify a minimum size for the lexicon, which numbers will be averaged if that criterion passes.  Although, as IJzeren Jan points out, comparing word counts in either the corpus or the lexicon for languages of different types (isolating, synthetic, polysynthetic) is problematic. --Jim Henry | Talk 14:40, 29 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Ambiguous phrasing of questions

message: Since we are having a time-out now and the votes already made will in all likeliness be discarded anyway, I have taken the liberty to come with an alternative questionnaire. That is, with a proposal largely based on the current one, with a few additions that were neglected earlier, and reorganised into something slightly more systematic. I wanted to do that earlier, but reasons of health and time withheld me from doing so. Anyway, here it is. Comments are sollicited on the talk page. --IJzeren Jan 10:06, 30 August 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Alternative proposal

message: Six days ago, the vote was opened. Two days later, the page was suddenly deleted and shortly after restored. We decided to mull over things a bit before reopening the vote, and not call it "vote" but "poll" instead. Since that moment, some people have abstained from voting anyway, others haven't. Things are getting a little messy, especially because it's not really made clear that the poll is stalled at the moment.
So, what are we going to do about it?
It doesn't look like anyone has much more to contribute to the discussion. In other words, before people forget about this little project, we might as well officially reopen the poll (or better, announce that it will be open from, say, 11 through 18 September. 
I still propose to use my alternative proposal as a basis for a new questionnaire. Like I said, I think it's a little more systematic and easier to use than the current one (all my reasons are explained on the same page). If y'all agree, I'll prepare a new voting form based on it.
The votes that have already been issued will probably have to be discarded. The best thing I can think of is that we invite anyone who participated to come and vote again.
Before we start a new vote/poll, we should make it very clear how the votes are counted (how consensus is reached). 
Comments? --IJzeren Jan 20:07, 3 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: I agree; you should make a new poll form based on your alternative proposal and the comments it's gotten from me and others, and specify how votes will be counted in the poll (based on the discussion here earlier); then announce the poll will be open starting a week or so from now. --Jim Henry | Talk 14:14, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Good to have you back! Okay, I'll get around to that tomorrow! Cheers, --IJzeren Jan 14:49, 6 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Alright, what are we going to do?