Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Language/2019 December 30

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December 30

What does cfr. mean?

I just saw it at here. What does it mean and why would you put [[Inuit|Inui]]<nowiki/>t) anyway? CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 22:44, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

It stands for Latin confer, meaning "compare". The normal abbreviation is "cf." The coding appears to remove the "t" from the link so that the blue portion would appear as "Inui". No idea why. Jmar67 (talk) 23:32, 30 December 2019 (UTC)

Thanks. If it had been cf. I would have figured it out. The extra r threw me. On the page it looked like this; Inuit. CambridgeBayWeather, Uqaqtuq (talk), Sunasuttuq 00:03, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

@CambridgeBayWeather and Jmar67: The strange wikilink formatting comes from this edit Special:Diff/933024649 by Baldodelia (who made just two edits so far, both in the Kelly Fraser article). I have seen such formatting a few times recently. Now I did some testing and found it may result from a lack of attention with Visual Editing.

The original link was [[Inuit|Inuk]]. When you want to change Inuk to Inuit, you need to delete ‘k’ and insert ‘it’. If you accidentally press a right-arrow button between the letters: i→t the cursor apparently doesn't move, but the focus moves outside a wikilink. Then the ‘t’ is inserted just outside the wikilink, and an empty (self-closed) ‘nowiki’ tag is inserted to prevent the ‘t’ from extending the link (like in [[profession]]al). Possibly there are other scenarios, involving other key press sequences or some mouse clicks, which would lead the editor to append letters just after a wikilink instead of inserting them into the link contents. Alas I can't think of any method to avoid them. --CiaPan (talk) 09:01, 31 December 2019 (UTC)

It may as well be noted here that in the Inuktitut language, "Inuit" is the plural of "Inuk". But to English-speakers far from the Arctic it doesn't look like a plural, so we often use "Inuit" for both plural and singular and would tend to describe Kelly Fraser as "an Inuit singer"... as the article did before the series of edits in question. Currently it describes her as "an Inuk singer". To me that reads something like describing Maurice Chevalier in English as "a français singer", but I can imagine that some people see it as preferred usage. Anyway, that's got to be the issue that the edits were about. --142.112.159.101 (talk) 20:47, 31 December 2019 (UTC)