Talk:Tariff/Archives/2018

Tariff: Customs Duty vs Price Schedule

Tariff in many other languages refers to price schedules, while in English it primarily refers to customs duty, and it appears that lot of non-English wikis are pointing to the English Tariff wikipedia page as a false cognate (i.e. they are interpreting the English tariff page as being about price schedules). The current situation is that the primary English page, tariff, is associated with wikidata entry Q736288 - tariff (price paid or charged for a service), but given its English meaning and current content, it seems more appropriate to associate tariff with Q52389 - customs duties. I'm not sure about the appropriate English wiki page to associate with Q736288 - tariff (price paid or charged for a service). There is a linked discussion at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Disambiguation and Talk:Tariff_(disambiguation) --Furicorn (talk) 23:47, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

I've stumbled across this page and taken the liberty to make a few changes:

1. Changed those wikidata entries so that the german, french and japanese lemmas and / or descriptions in Q736288 are about "fixed charges or prices", or "fixed contract conditions (incl. prices) offered by the seller", and in Q52389 about "customs duties", i.e. taxes levied on imported or exported goods. I've checked the english wiktionary entries on "tariff" and "Tarif" (the german cognate, to which the wikidata entry linked) and the german wiktionary on "Tarif"; also, Merriam-Webster on "tariff". However, I'm not sure how to document these changes directly on wikidata and notify authors who might have worked on the entries. Is there any good way to do this? I've barely ever seen talk page discussions on wikidata.
2. Rewrote the second sentence in the lead and clarified that this is not the meaning of the lemma in this article. Just before saving changes, I thought we might just delete it entirely, because this meaning is already mentioned in the disambiguation page and that page is in turn linked on the top (I was going to add the disambiguation link more prominently, but found no good template). Then I reconsidered, but forgot to change back my edit summary; thus another subsequent empty edit. If anyone with history editing privileges stumbles across this, feel free to merge the edits, if you like and policy allows.
3. I have not placed any english, german or french wikipedia links in Q736288. I've failed to find an article on this lemma on any of these wikis. The english disambiguation page only references pricing. Seems to me that no one found this topic important enough for its own article?

I'd be happy for any hints or improvements. :) Se'taan (talk) 11:55, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for following up on this work! With regards to documentation, when I've done things like this in the past I've just put it on the talk page with links to the other places where a change was made, that's the only tool I know about.

I think what you wrote works well.

For Q736288 - tariff (price paid or charged for a service), I'm a little confused about your comment about not adding German or French links. There are definitely already seemingly correct links to the German wikipedia article Tarif (although no French links). "Tarif" in WP:French redirects to Prix, but I don't read French so I'm not sure how relevant that is.

I think you are correct that no one has made a page in English about price schedules in general, and I would offer up that tariff essentially only has one meaning in English, which is customs duty. The secondary meaning equivalent to "Tarif" is extremely rare - in English I would say Tariff is only ever used that way as highly specialized legal or economic jargon. The commonly used terms for the pricing meaning are rate schedule, fee schedule, or price schedule. Maybe since we don't commonly use a single word for this concept in English, it's just not as clear a concept, which is why no one has written an article about it yet (although there is Telecommunications tariff, which is a specific regulatory concept in the US). Skimming WP:Spanish, I wonder if perhaps Tariff-as-price is a civil-code legal concept that isn't as generalized in common-law systems?

Furicorn (talk) 15:12, 22 January 2018 (UTC)

I did find some English sources that talk about the price schedule concept:

1. FCC: Tariffs
2. Wisegeek: What is a telecom tariff?
3. Does EIA publish electric utility rate, tariff, and demand charge data? - this link is interesting because it suggests that the preferred term in US English in the case of electricity is electricity rate, while recognizing that people looking for an answer there might use tariff instead.

My guess is that tariff may be more widely used in the Englishes of commonwealth countries. I feel like maybe it would be helpful if someone who spoke a non-US dialect (UK, Singapore, India, etc) could weight in on usages of Tariff in English, but I'm not sure how to get that feedback.

Maybe this suggests that a new article could be put together by cobbling bits from Electricity pricing and Telecommunications tariff. Furicorn (talk) 00:31, 23 January 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the answer! And sorry for not following up recently. Your guess about Commonwealth Englishes seems plausible to me, and there are matching entries in Oxford dictionaries:

• https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/tariff "(1.2) British A list of the fixed charges made by a business, especially for use of gas, electricity, or a mobile phone."
• https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/definition/english/tariff "(2) a list of fixed prices that are charged by a hotel or restaurant for rooms, meals, etc., or by a company for a particular service"

Interestingly enough, the Standard OED (first link) marks this usage as "British", in contrast to their Learner's edition and to Wiktionary. Of course, I have no clue where they take it from, but OED is an authority on British English.

Now, we could ask BE natives what they think of it (I'm no English native anyway but I could think of a place to go), and we could try to piece it all together verifiably... But, to be honest, I think we should leave such questions to Wiktionary. Editors there have the expertise and / or connections to fill in all the gaps, with satisfactory references, and that with a lot less hassle than we ever could. Maybe we can put up the question on Wiktionary, either with a crosswiki RFC (if there is such a thing) or just through the talk page. Whithin Wikipedia, this is not an article on a linguistics topic, so for me, it doesn't feel like the best place to resolve a linguistic question.

Until then, if ever the question comes up how to name an article on "price schedules", I suggest we simply use something as non-ambiguous as possible. :)

Se'taan (talk) 06:14, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

Also, I don't know what has gotten into me when I wrote, "no german ,,, wikipedia links in Q736288". You're cleary right, the given german link is just fine. The French "prix" article seems like an introduction to "pricing", but my French isn't good enough either, and I'd leave it to French wikidata editors.

Se'taan (talk) 06:29, 7 March 2018 (UTC)

@Se'taan:, seems like some good sourcing, maybe we should do something with it someday lol. I've gone ahead and made some changes to Q736288 and Q52389 which I think cover what we've discussed here. Furicorn (talk) 05:19, 8 March 2018 (UTC)