Wikipedia:Miscellany for deletion/Template:User la

:{{pagelinks|Template:User la}}

Babel boxes serve an important function on the projects: they allow finding people who have understanding of a specific language (for communication, translation, etc).

A babel box claiming that its user is a native speaker of a dead language (that has no native speakers by definition) is either a joke or a mistake; in the former case the template has no business existing in project space (joke userboxen belong in user space), in the latter case the error should be corrected.

I propose that this template be deleted and extant transclusions be changed to {{tlx|User la-4}}, which is the probable meaning intended by those who used this one by mistake. — Coren ^(talk) 16:12, 13 December 2012 (UTC)

• I agree that this doesn't belong in wp: space. What about :Category:User la-N? And {{Commons cat|User la-N}} isn't here on enwp but on par. Dennis Brown - 2¢ © Join WER 16:45, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
• Well, I would have assumed the category is populated only from the template, which would mean it becomes deletable if that goes. As for the commons one, I don't know if their own rules also have a prohibition against non-project userboxen in template space? — Coren ^(talk) 17:41, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
• Ah, that is right. I am not a :cat expert, obviously. As for Commons, that place is like a whole different website, I've never really figured out all the rules there. Maybe a high profile big shot like yourself can ping someone there and raise the issue ;-) Dennis Brown - 2¢ © Join WER 17:50, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
• Delete A dead language has no native speakers. - Presidentman talk · contribs (Talkback) 22:06, 13 December 2012 (UTC)
• It is not inconceivable that two people who know Latin could decide to raise a child as a Latin speaker for their first language. Similar things have happened for dead languages, where two people neither of who is a native speaker have deliberately raised a child who will be one. It happened for Hebrew (see Language death#Language revitalization ) which a century or two ago had the same status as Latin. DGG ( talk ) 02:24, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
• Keep. Yes, it's rather unlikely that someone would speak Latin as a native language. However surely there are some number of people in the world who have spoken Latin with a degree of fluency from an early enough age that they might consider it one of their mother tongues. It's an almost entirely useless template that's part of a family of useful templates, but since it's not entirely useless, why separate it from the rest? Take {{tl|Gom}}, for instance - no one's going to have grounds to use it for four more years (and even then, only Jimbo and a handful of other editors will be entitled to it). As a rule it can never be used seriously, unless 2012-2001>16 all of a sudden. But we keep it because it's part of a family of other much more applicable templates. My point is, just because very very few people could ever use this template, that doesn't mean we should delete it. — Francophonie&Androphilie^{(Je vous invite à me parler)} 07:17, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
• There may well be people who speak Latin fluently, which is what {{tlx|User la-4}} is for. There aren't "very very few" people who speak Latin natively, there are exactly zero people who do. It's a dead language. There hasn't been a native speaker of Latin in well over a millenium. In other words, everyone currently using the template either used it in error or as a jest.— Coren ^(talk) 17:08, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

::*I disagree. I'm sure that out of one billion Catholics in the world, there's some couple among them who have been crazy enough to raise their kids speaking Latin, or Latin and another language - like DGG's above example with Hebrew. Someone did in fact post [http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20110711135528AAhoB7y this] to Yahoo! Answers, though they may have been trolling. But when you have a billion-strong sample size, pretty much anything's posssible. Even if you say the odds are rather low, as a rule they're higher than the odds that someone's been a Wikipedia editor for 16 years, to go back to the Gom example. — Francophonie&Androphilie^{(Je vous invite à me parler)} 17:23, 14 December 2012 (UTC)

• Comment - Seems like a lot of people are using the User la template.[http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:WhatLinksHere/Template:User_la&limit=500] It's been around since 2005. Not mentioned in the nom, there was Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/Not deleted/July 2005#Template:User la. However, Template:User uby -- Ubykh is an extinct language -- eventually was deleted and shows as redlinked at Wikipedia:Templates for deletion/Log/2007 September 4#Template:User uby. -- Uzma Gamal (talk) 16:24, 14 December 2012 (UTC)
• Contrary to the assertion of some sort of semantic divide between babelboxes and any other userboxes, editors are perfectly at liberty to assert that they are fluent native speakers of whatever languages they please just as they are free to assert that they are 80 years old, that cyborgs from the future are controlling our televisions, that bananas are inferior to apples or anything else within the loose boundaries of potential offence which are the only real rules for userboxes. The ~25 users of this infobox are not going to have their other userboxes deleted if it turns out that, say, they no longer use Google as a search engine or in fact have picked up something of a taste for Dr Pepper. We don't ask users to prove that they speak to whatever fluency they profess for other languages, making them just as likely to be false as claiming to natively speak a dead language. Chris Cunningham (user:thumperward) (talk) 14:35, 18 December 2012 (UTC)

:The above discussion is preserved as an archive of the debate. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page (such as the page's talk page or in a deletion review). No further edits should be made to this page.