Closed opencooper closed 2 years ago
I'd be in favour of reviving the "rare" tag (six entries still have it, funnily enough) and using that instead of "obsc". It's impossible to confuse with "obs" and I prefer "rare" to "obscure" as an adjective for describing uncommon terms. It's also what Oxford uses.
Sounds good to me, though if we go by intuitive meanings of the words "rare" would obviously apply to a whole lot more words than "obscure" does. Not necessarily a bad thing, though.
I quite forget why "rare" was deprecated or fell into disuse. I'd hate to have to explain the precise difference as applied to entries. I think changing "obsc" to "rare" is not a bad thing. It's actually a relatively simple thing to do as the actual tag in the DB is numeric and the text/number pairs are in a table. I may as well go and change the existing 6 "rare" entries to "obsc" (pro tem) as preparation. There may be some other tag changes.
Now being handled in #68
Currently, the tag for an obsolete term is "obs", and for an obscure term, "obsc". I think the fact that "obs" could stand for either leads to unnecessary confusion.[0] A small change to lessen the potential for confusion would be to add an extra letter to "obs", e.g. "obsl".
[0]: A recent example, but I've also wondered in the past if an editor meant to apply the other tag.