Thesaurus talk:person

Hyponyms

To decide which hyponyms to put to "person" is tricky. If all hyponyms of "person" are placed here, the page becomes large and unwieldy. In particular, terms for occupations should be mostly made hyponyms of "Wikisaurus:worker". And again, not all occupations should be listed as hyponyms of Wikisaurus:worker, but rather at Wikisaurus:physician, Wikisaurus:musician, etc. --Dan Polansky 07:37, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

On the depth of hyponymy, see also how Wikisaurus:animal is executed. --Dan Polansky 08:26, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

I may be wrong, but I've been thinking on the Wikisaurus as a project supposed to handle long lists of terms based on their semantic relations, particularly when they become unwieldy to place in the entries. That is, for instance, it is preferable to create a long list of relatives at WS:relative, rather than placing them at the entry relative where definitions, pronunciations and other information are placed too.

The placement of certain sets of hyponyms in lesser pages seems a good idea in principle: a person who is somehow interested in all (or most) hyponyms of "person" may search through WS:relative, WS:worker, WS:girl, etc. However, there is a serious issue: Various pages are named after glosses, not words. This fact restricts the organization and readability of Wikisaurus.

For example, the page WS:woman links to WS:mother in the Hyponyms section but to WS:beautiful woman in the See also section. Therefore, effectively "angel", "babe", "doll" or "fox" are not listed as hyponyms of woman. --Daniel. 09:21, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Wikisaurus should handle longer lists of hyponyms, but not arbitarily long. It makes no sense to list all nouns in Wikisaurus:entity as hyponyms. Wikisaurus:animal should not list all animals, and Wikisaurus:artifact should not list all artifacts. By contrast, Wikisaurus:physician can list physicians by all medical specialties, as there are not all that many, and the same applies to Wikisaurus:relative. The lowest nodes of the hyponymic hierarchy or directed acyclic graph ("physician", "musician", "relative") can be expanded fully, while the highest nodes ("entity", "artifact", "organism") and the middle nodes ("bird") cannot. --Dan Polansky 09:33, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

I see. Thanks for moving some links to the Hyponyms section of WS:woman; in my opinion, it looks better now. As the next issue to be resolved, since "ugly woman", "promiscuous woman" and "beautiful woman" are sum-of-parts, can them be shown as black text, instead of red links that are not supposed to be clicked? --Daniel. 10:25, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Meronyms

Body parts should IMHO be filed as meronyms of Wikisaurus:body, not as of "person". Person is an abstract entity, possibly understood as located somewhere in an individual animal of the species homo sapiens. Within this model, "person" is not a hyponym of "animal". This is a bit tricky. --Dan Polansky 07:46, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

The page Wikisaurus:body to list human body parts might work, despite it being prone to inexactness. It would probably contain "tail" and "paw" and much more examples non-human body parts eventually. Within your model, perhaps this page merits the meronyms mind and emotion.

Note that your meaning is currently not well defined in Wiktionary, since the most approximate definition from the entry person is "A human being; an individual.", which presents two links to entries that simply link back to person, while providing additional biological details such as bipedal and sentient. --Daniel. 08:34, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

Wikisaurus:body is a can of worms in that it is implied to be "human body", but could be extended to be "mammalian body" or "animal body". So far, I have treated Wikisaurus:body as human body.

The terms "human being" and "individual" are approximately as abstract as "person", it seems to me. So while my model is not perfectly clear from that definition, the model seems approximately consistent with it. I admit that this is open to discussion, and is a subtle subject. --Dan Polansky 08:49, 10 June 2010 (UTC)

I'm not very happy with that "ping pong" where person is defined as individual and comes back to person, but hopefully it will get better (especially since Wikipedia has more explanatory texts at Person that may eventually be converted into dictionary definitions).

On the subject of phrasebooks, WS:body may certainly mean celestial body, company, physical object, corpse and so on, so it is doomed to be not accurate if we rely solely on its title.

Since the WS:body is defined as "physical structure of a human or animal", I agree with the status quo that permits the addition of paw and tail as hyponyms of body, thus deprecating your treatment of that page as only containing human body parts.

As a wider project, we may probably have either (1) WS:human body, WS:dog body and WS:tiger body or (2) WS:hominid body, WS:canid body and WS:felid body; then, all of these would be hyponyms of WS:body in the "animal body" sense. --Daniel. 10:00, 10 June 2010 (UTC)