Tim Starling wrote:
Gerard.Meijssen wrote:
Take a look at the restriction on the number of
messages (5) per
page. This is "reasonable" in wikipedia, but when you want to
internationalise a page and use messages to indicate things that
differ from language to language, like the gender of a word, you can
have dozens words that are masculine and you get garbage as a result.
I've received a number of complaints about this from Wikipedians, and
this is the first one I've had from someone from Wiktionary, so I fail
to see how this indicates Wikipedia-centrism. It's a problem I intend to
address during my reworking of template inclusion, over the next week or
two.
My understanding must have missed something here. I've never
encountered such a problem. Maybe I've just been around for too long. :-)
> When there are problems, they seem to be
relatively quickly fixed for
> the wikipedia's but, for the wiktionaries the consistency is
> lacking.
While biting my tongue over the capitalization issue, I don't want to
be too critical of the developers about this. They're doing what they
can, and they need to priorize their limited times. We need more
technically competent people to deal with software issues, but they also
need to be able to keep some distance between themselves and the
frequent bickering that takes place. Tim and Brion have handled that well.
When you have
an environment like wiktionary/wikipedia they _need_ to
be the same in order to be able to fix things and understand the
behaviour of the software. The wiktionaries do not behave in a same
way. You can create an article with a Chinese (characters) name in
English but not on the nl:wiktionary (and others).
Wiktionaries were set up by copying the MediaWiki namespace and language
files from the associated Wikipedias. You can't create an article with
chinese characters in the title on the nl wikipedia either. English and
German are exceptions to this rule because of special-case work done by
the respective contributors.
That's unfortunate about the Chinese titles; I guess that I have been
under the mistaken impression that Unicode implied that CJK would be be
broadly available. Maybe I've been spoiled by having this feature
available in English.
I don't think that it's a necessity that everything on a Wikipedia and
its corresponding Wiktionary needs to function exactly the same way.
The capitalization issue is a good example. Current policy has worked
well in Wikipedia, with only a limited number of difficulties. For
Wiktionary this has created awkward difficulties.
Please understand that I'm not obliged to fix
problems just because you
want them fixed. You are not paying me. I try to make people happy, but
you have no right to expect a minimum level of service.
Agreed. What positive contribution has our critic offered?
I'm amazed at the poor quality of the English
Wiktionary, it seems to
miss so many important English words. Most new pages seem to be slang,
jargon, and people adding a few dozen words from their native tongue.
Plans to import a public domain dictionary were abandoned, and now there
seems to be little organisation or direction. Perhaps Wiktionary can be
revitalised with extra features, but I doubt stylesheet changes will be
enough. It needs a different look and a whole raft of features. It needs
methods for easily adding new words, and for categorisation and listing.
But I'm neither excited by the project nor optimistic about its future.
So most of all, it needs people who want to work on it.
I want to take this personally in the most positive sense. I
essentially agree, and need to accept my share of the responsibility.
One of our earliest debates was over whether we should be a primarily
English dictionary or a translating dictionary. A lot more people seem
concerned with translations, and are satisfied with translations that
show significant naïveté toward concepts of translation. Slang and
jargon need to be addressed, but should not become dominant. The
project to import a public domain dictionary has not been abandoned,
only ignored.
I too really would like to see more organization and direction. That
may require people to accept certain tasks and carry them through to
completion. I accept that my inability to herd cats as one of my own flaws.
New features, stylesheets, looks, etc. are not what will save
Wiktionary. They are not a substitute for hard disciplined work. I
don't see any difficulty in adding new words. New ones are being added
regularly, even if they are foreign or jargon. Categorization and
listing is a problem, and we did discuss the matter of pseudonamespaces
some months ago. Of course, I've also been around long enough to know
that without practical support from other Wiktionarians I would have
been alone in this enterprise, and Wiktionary would not have been helped
by a further fragmentary effort.
Most of all I agree that we need people wo want to work, not just
dilettantes. At this stage content is still more important than
obsessing about format. I still believe that the concept is sound, and
that it has a tremendous capacity for becoming a unique resource. It is
unfortunate that all the projects have frequent visitors with fantastic
visionary ideas, but little appreciation for the work needed to bring
these ideas into reality.
Ec