Category talk:Talents

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[edit] Talents

Interesting precedent to examine here: In the books Talents are usually called by their verb form (a man Travels, someone is Healed, she learns Compulsion). Do we have a definitive source that lists them all at once in their 'natural format': maybe the RPG or the computer Game? For right now I've linked to Travel, Foretell, and Heal. nae'blis _(talk) 22:49, 24 Oct 2005 (UTC)

I feel like I am much more used to seeing them with the "ing" ending, except for Compulsion of course. Some stats:

$ for i in Heal Healing Foretell Foretelling Travel Traveling Compulsion Compulsing; do echo -n "$i "; grep -cE "$i(\.| |$)" wot1-9.txt; done
Heal 94
Healing 161
Foretell 5
Foretelling 26
Travel 20
Traveling 62    (33 if you subtract all occurrences of "Traveling People")
Compulsion 14
Compulsing 0

I don't know if this was the kind of examination you were looking for, but it's all that occured to me :) --Gherald 23:40, 24 Oct 2005 (UTC)

Wow, that's cool! Where did you find complete text for the books? nae'blis _(talk) 14:42, 25 Oct 2005 (UTC)

About a year ago I got the PDF through an http://isohunt.com search, converted it to HTML using some program in Gentoo's portage tree, and then coverted the HTML file to plain text somehow -- probably just "File -> Saved formatted document" in Links. I currently read the books using "etext reader"... here is a fullscreen shot: [1]

Okay, I'm a believer. After looking at the Wikipedia articles on running, swimming, and knitting, I think we should redirect Heal to a main article at Healing, etc. nae'blis _(talk) 13:33, 26 Oct 2005 (UTC)

I'm starting to reconsider this. While it's true that -ing is the most common, it is much easier to write "[[Travel]]ing" resulting in Traveling than it is to write "[[Traveling|Travel]]" for the inverse case. But I suppose it may be argued that having -ing in the main article name may "look" better... --Gherald 13:12, 17 Nov 2005 (UTC)

I don't think it should be a big deal if people are using the Travel redirect directly, rather than piping the link. When that's all we have left to worry about, we can go back and fix those. Just for kicks, I went and looked at WP's policy, and they support using the gerund form; Wikipedia:Naming conventions (verbs). nae'blis _(talk) 22:21, 18 Nov 2005 (UTC)