Should Wiktionary have Czech reflexive verbs in page titles with the reflexive element?

This resource is a wikidebate, a collaborative effort to gather and organize all arguments on a given issue. It is a tool of argument analysis or pro-and-con analysis. This is not a place to defend your preferred points of view, but original arguments are allowed and welcome. See the Wikidebate guidelines for more.

Thus, should there be e.g. Wiktionary:en:dívat se as the main entry (as opposed to Wiktionary:en:dívat)? This question is asked in terms of Czech (since that allows for some arguments that differ e.g. from German), but much of the material is expected to apply to other languages, e.g. German. Examples of reflexive verbs: Czech dívat se, German sich beeilen, Dutch zich voelen and Russian издаваться.

Another example is obávat vs. obávat se, where the English and French Wiktionaries have the former, while the Czech, German and Polish Wiktionaries have the latter (as per Wikt:en:obávat, Wikt:fr:obávat, Wikt:cs:obávat se, Wikt:de:obávat se, Wikt:pl:obávat se).

Wiktionary should have Czech reflexive verbs in page titles with the reflexive element

Pro

• Pro That is how Internetová jazyková příručka (IJP, Internet Language Handbook) by Ústav pro jazyk český does it e.g. for dívat se. Inconclusive yet suggestive.
  • Objection On the other hand, IJP does not have mýt se, spálit se and učit se.
• Pro That is how Lingea's Slovník současné češtiny (Dictionary of Contemporary Czech) does it e.g. for dívat se. Inconclusive yet suggestive.
• Pro For Russian, the reflexive element is part of a single word anyway, so we cannot use the no-reflexive-in-page-title approach systematically across all languages.
  • Objection But we can use the principle for all languages with lexical separation, including Czech, Slovak and German. The result is uniform enough: centralize content on the base verb form without the reflexive element where possible.
• Pro One can note that addition of the reflexive se often creates a separate semantics and reflect how this bears some resemblance to English phrasal verbs. For English phrasal verbs, one does not centralize the content in base verb pages but rather has e.g. Wiktionary:en: loop up and Wiktionary:en: look after as separate pages.
  • Objection English phrasal verbs seem to be a phenomenon rather different from Czech reflexive verbs.
• Pro Expanding on the above, German separable verbs also have separate pages, e.g. Wiktionary:de:aufmachen.
  • Objection German separable verbs often produce non-separated form, e.g. aufmachen as contrasted to machen sie es auf. The case therefore seems rather dissimilar to Czech reflexive verbs.
• Pro Having a separate entry allows showing an inflection table with se.
  • Objection That inflection table is trivial and shows general grammar for reflexive verbs, arguably non-morphological grammar. Somewhat similarly, one does not want to have English verb tense grammar in the inflection table, featuring e.g. have done, has done, will have done, would have done, etc.; one wants only different forms, e.g. do, did, done, doing.
    • Objection Some Wiktionaries do show something like tense grammar for German verbs rather than showing only the single-word forms.
  • Objection Such an inflection table is actually misleading, showing a sequence, e.g. díval se, that is actually not fixed: the se can come before or after the base verb and there can be words between. The reader is better off to read the grammar of reflexive verbs as a subject in grammar, not vocabulary.
• Pro The reflexive form sometimes has a meaning radically different from the base form.
  • Objection That is no argument for having the meanings in separate entries. Entries generally feature multiple meanings. For some English verbs, the meaning list is extremely long, which is hardly ever the case for Czech verbs.

Con

• Con That is not how German dictionaries handle the matter for German reflexive verbs, including Duden and DWDS, e.g. for Wiktionary:de:beeilen vs. Wiktionary:de:sich beeilen.
  • Objection Czech content does not need to be modeled on German content.
    • Objection There is a benefit in having a unified approach across languages.
• Con Centralizing all content in e.g. Wiktionary:en:představit rather than having it distributed between představit, představit si and představit se arguably provides a better user experience: the user does not need to look at three pages to get the content in a glance.
• Con Centralizing content on one page is what e.g. PSJČ does for představit.
  • Objection PSJČ is an outdated dictionary, possibly making an outdated design choice.
    • Objection And the C programming language is a dated programming language (from 1972), yet it is still the king in its domain of application.
      • Objection The designers of modern programming languages, e.g. Go, try to learn from C's mistakes rather than trying to slavishly stick to all C's design decisions.
• Con Expanding on the above, centralizing content is what SSJČ and SSČ do e.g. for představit, much more modern dictionaries than PSJČ.
  • Objection SSJČ and SSČ are still more date than IJP.
    • Objection True, but IJP does not even seem to have entries for představit se and představit si (as per attempted search).
• Con The base verb, e.g. dívat, exists as a free morphological or syntactic word in a sentence, e.g. "Ráda se dívala na hvězdy", "Dívá se na fotbal" and "Už se konečně přestaň zabývat malichernostmi". It seems therefore strange to have no capture of the base verb form in the dictionary.
  • Objection The same is true of English phrasal verbs, e.g. look up.
    • Objection Not really. Since: for English phrasal verbs, the base form is always or nearly always used as a verb of its own, albeit often with a different meaning. That is not true of e.g. dívat se: there is no separate dívat and the same applies to many (not all) Czech reflexive verbs.
• Con Many Czech reflexive verbs show something like generic or sum-of-parts reflexivity: the operand of the base verb is really the self and the meaning is in no way suprising. Thus, there is mýt se (wash oneself), opravit se (correct oneself), obléci se (dress oneself), etc. For these verbs, separation into two pages seems particularly clumsy.
• Con It is the non-reflexive basis from which derivation takes place; the reflexive element gets ignored. Thus, there is bát se → bojácný, obávat se → obava, and dívat se → divák, divadlo. This seems to support the suppression of the reflexive element in the page title, even if weakly. (Moreover, this creates a clear contrast to English phrasal verbs, for which the separated element is reflected in the derivations, e.g. look up → look-up table).

Further reading

• Reflexive verb, wikipedia.org
• Wiktionary:en: Wiktionary:Beer_parlour_archive/May_06#reflexive_verbs
• Wiktionary:en: Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/2007/March#Reflexive_verbs
• Wiktionary:en: User talk:Dan Polansky/2007#Reflexive verbs