Hi Gerard, This might work for English, but not for all languages. I think that redirects should be possible. This would make sense for 1) verb conjugation. I would like to simply link most of the declination forms to the main verb entry, as long as no other language entry uses the same heading. Example: Low Saxon conjugation of "to be". "He was" => "he weer". I would simply redirect this to "wesen" (en: to be). I would not like to be forced to write a whole article stating that "he weer" is 3. person sing, simple present of "wesen". I would like to include the conjugation table only once. 2) dialect variations (of which we have a lot in Low Saxon): for "to be" we have "ween/wesen/sien" as regional dialects. I would redirect two of them to the "wesen". I would not like to be forced to write a whole article stating that "ween" is a variant of "wesen". 3) orthography variations. We also have several competing orthographies for Low Saxon. I would like to be able to just redirect to the main orthography that we use. In the end it might be nice to have all such explanations, but nds.wiktionary.org still has to be written, and it would simplify this writing a lot. This is a no-go for minor languages where "correct" spelling does not exist. Kind regards, Heiko Evermann

Gerard Meijssen wrote: The gap between my thinking and Gerard's thinking appears to be that Gerard considers redirects to be canonincal content; thus having a "wrong spelling" in a URL somehow implies that this is a "correct" spelling, which is therefore wrong and should be removed. To my mind however, redirects are not content. They are metacontent: compatibility tools used to provide corrections, by sending a visitor to the correct page if they're using an outdated link. In the case of a "misspelling" which has been moved to the correct spelling, this means a reference to the wrong spelling is automatically corrected when a visitor returns to that page. Not only is the visitor now brought to the correct location of the entry, but it's prominently labeled with the correct spelling at the top. They do not imply that a "wrong" spelling is correct, but rather do the exact opposite. Gerard's argument for deleting redirects thus, in my opinion, fails. More generally, it's completely irresponsible for a web-based resource to rearrange content pages without providing a redirect from the old URL. This is a basic principle which applies just as much to Wiktionary as to Wikipedia, just as much to Hewlett Packard's driver web pages as to Slashdot postings, just as much to a database of autogenerated earthquake reports or a collection of press releases as to an online academic journal. Wiktionary has no special dispensation: if we want people to believe this is a legitimate resource which can be used and referenced, maintaining URL compatibility is a non-negotioable requirement. This would be harmful to the project, as it would still break every such link that may exist offsite: * personal bookmarks * links from other sites * URLs published as references in papers or books * etc Some online links will eventually be noticed and corrected. Others never will be. Offline links (printed as references in papers, etc) will be broken forever unless someone notices and recreates the redirect. (Unless Gerard comes and deletes it again. ;) For a primarily web-based resource, it would be the height of unprofessional behavior to render something like 99% of our pages inaccessible from the URLs they've been at for years. Deleting redirects is bad for our users, it's bad for anyone who wants to rely on our resources as reference works, it's bad for anyone who wants to link to our site, it's just plain bad. -- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)

On 7/24/05, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: "Historical reasons" is surely not the only reason a Wiktionary uses first-character capitalisation, turning off first-character capitalisation is not the only way to achieve correctly spelled article titles, and having correctly spelled article titles has been denied as a reason for turning off first-character capitalisation by some. Don't forget that capitalisation of the first letter is only one issue as regards correct orthography in article titles. Another thing to watch out for is the three variations for making English compounds: two words with a space, two words with hyphenation, and one compound word. For any term, any one, two or three of these variants may be considered correct. Other test cases which have recently met strong resistence are Latin words correctly spelled in all capitals as was the only possible spelling while Latin was a living language, and using the correct non-ambiguous apostrophe character which has been widely available on home computers for 20 years. Other languages also have optional or compatibility spellings: In French it is officially correct to indicate accents on capital letters but there is a de facto rule to leave them out. German specifically allows ä, ö, and ü to be spelled as ae, oe, and ue. In Switzerland there is no letter ß, the correct spelling to be ss instead. This is also spefically considered correct in the other German-speaking countries. Latin and Old English often have macrons to show long vowels and rarely have breves to show short vowels. Old English and Middle English also had various fashions but no official spelling, with various exotic letters being used at different times and under various circumstances, resulting in varied spellings of many words. For example, ð and þ were mostly interchangeable. Ancient Greek and Modern Greek have different accent marks which look quite similar but have different names and different places in Unicode. But the Modern Greek accents are still much more commen in Ancient Greek on the Internet. Hebrew geresh is often represented by ASCII apostrophe, Hebrew gershayim is often represented by ASCII double quote, Hebrew maqaf is often represented by ASCII hyphen, Hawaiian okina is often represented by ASCII apostrophe, Turkish long vowels (actually more complicated than this) can be indicated by use of the circumflex accent according to the offical orthographical rules, Russian (and some other Cyrllic script languages) can optionally indicate where the stress is and in some contexts it is the norm. With Hebrew and most languages in Arabic script, all short vowels are optional as are a number of other "letters" such as dagesh, shada, sukun, and a host of more exotic ones. Hebrew also has accents which only occur in religious works plus there are plene and defective spellings and both have vowels etc as optional extras on top. In some Polynesian languages, it is macrons and glottal stops are optional, in others they are compulsory. Chinese, Japanese, and Korean have written variants of many characters which have the same meaning and sound with all being correct. They also have variants which exist only due to computer encodings and quirks in how various fonts were designed. For some languages different optional features of orthography can interact to from many combinations and permutations all of which are correct spellings. There are surly quite a few more examples I haven't even become aware of yet. Or they are moving due to rhetoric like this email rather than for any good reason. Remember that in print dictionaries the norm is to include different meanings and parts of speech, and even derivatives - regardless of capitalisation - into one article or at least on the one page. English Wiktionary still considers only first letter capitalisation and ASCII apostrophes and Russian without stress marks to be correct enough to be titles, in the last case even as redirects! (if this is the meaning of "lemma" you mean). What do other Wiktionaries do? Don't you mean that "not all words like Kinder and kinder are related"? This is almost the opposite meaning. Also many words are related. Even in German it is common for a noun and another part of speech to be intimately related and share an identical spelling apart from capitalisation. Please list out of the above points what is and what is not considered a correct spelling as Ultimate Wiktionary is concerned. Please then indicate whether every correct spelling is also suitable as a headword/ article title/lemma or whatever you wish to call it. Hippietrail. -- http://linguaphile.sf.net