Canonical Lemmas and Review

Canonical lemmas are the shared vocabulary: available to every user, maintained by administrators, and not editable by the contributors who use them. Every other lemma is private to the person who made it.

This page describes the administrator's side. For submitting a lemma, see Lemmas.

Administrators only

The wrench in the header appears only for administrator accounts. It carries a red dot while requests are waiting.

Lemma administration

The wrench → Manage lemmas opens a dialog with two scopes.

Canonical lemmas

The full canonical list. Search by Lemma or by Sanskrit — the second is what you want when checking whether a word already exists under a different Gāndhārī form. The dropdown filters the list, and New lemma creates a canonical lemma directly, without anyone having to submit one.

Rows are annotated with what matched — Skt. evam · adv. — so a Sanskrit search shows you which Gāndhārī form you are looking at before you open it.

Selecting a lemma opens it for editing, with the same fields contributors see. Its Related lemmas list — the lemmas sharing a Sanskrit cognate with it — keeps deprecated relatives and tags them, so the whole family is visible before you change anything.

Deprecate retires a lemma without deleting it: existing tokens keep their link and it still displays, but it can no longer be chosen for new ones. Restore reverses this. Deprecating is the right move for a lemma that turned out to be a misanalysis — deleting it would strip the link from every token that used it.

Review queue

Pending submissions, filterable by status. Each row shows the lemma and who submitted it; selecting one shows the lemma's full fields, the submitter's note, and a box for your own note back.

Approve makes the lemma canonical. The confirmation names the submitter and warns that they will lose the ability to edit or delete it — worth reading, because it is not reversible from their side.

Reject returns it with your note. Give a reason: rejection is often "there is already a canonical lemma for this", which the submitter can act on, and the note is the only place they will see it.

Either way the submitter is notified.

What reviewers are checking

• Is it a real dictionary word rather than a one-off reading?
• Does a canonical lemma for it already exist, perhaps under another spelling? Search the Sanskrit.
• Are the part of speech, subpart, gender, and verbal class right? They determine which inflection fields every future token gets.
• Is the translation usable as a glossary gloss?
• Does it need a homograph order to keep it apart from an existing headword?