What’s the point of homograph number?

[michmech]

(Submitted by David Lindemann)

Something strange from the Wikibase point of view is to have a “homograph number” at entry level, which in fact only informs you that there are homographs (if lemmata without homographs in the lemma list don’t have “1” but just no homograph number to make clear they are alone), but not how many, or which ones. I understand that this is something coming from digitized dictionaries. In Wikibase, one would instead of numbering homographs claim which ones are the homograph entries, and link them using a dedicated property, just like this is done on Wikidata.

[jmccrae]

I see David's point, but in practice homograph numbers of indicate the importance of each homograph for the definition, so it would have display implications

[michmech]

Agree with John. In DMLex, the homographNumber property of entry is like the listingOrder property we have on many other types, except that homographNumber is actually meant to be displayed to human dictionary users, while listingOrder is only meant to be used for putting things in an order but remains hidden from end-users.

Homograph numbers (thus defined) are common in human-oriented dictionaries, even in born-digital ones. It's certainly not just a legacy thing from retrodigitized dictionaries.

No further action is required, in my opinion. I suggest to close this issue.