Muke Tever wrote:
Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
I agree.
As I have said ... probably many times now, 99% of Wiktionary
articles are stubs.
If you want stubs look at the Ido Wiktionary. 8-)
I hit special:randompage once on en: and io: and got:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Benignant
http://io.wiktionary.org/wiki/Seenessel
Not much difference there, except that en: has a part of
speech and io: has a language index category...
One big difference, the word is spelled binignant not Benignant
nl: doesn't fare much better, returning
http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/yei
which manages language, category, part of speech, and definition...
But the word is spelled entirely wrong (according to
[1] and en: it should probably be ေရ, though since Google
search ignores Burmese text [!!] I can't really confirm that)
If you were a part of the nl.community you would have changed it. As it
is, all these wiktionaries are islands, there is no cooperation. We
waste our time and effort.
(For my part, randompage on la: brought up
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thursday
which isn't all that hot either.)
Anyway, this reminds me of why I don't find duplication of effort
a problem in general. I don't trust any wiktionary for words
outside its native language, for one. Too many people import lists
of translations and don't do any fact-checking (I had to respell
several Kalaallisuut number words in en recently) or even reality-
checking (someone put in "cicňnnia" as the Sardinian for [[stork]]
some time ago--I had to hunt down and fix a lot of Sardinian
mojibake in several articles imported from the same source when I
ran across that one).
So you spend a lot of effort on the en.wiktionary. From my point of view
it does me no good. It does not help. You give excellent arguments why a
UW is what we need.
nl: I've found to be particularly bad about this, as it won't just
add the translation to the lists without checking, they'll actually
create full articles for them (like 'yei' above, or another word
under the [[nl:water]] list, Dagaare "koO", which appears to be
an ASCII rendering for koɔ...).
When a word is added as a translation, a "placeholder" will be created
in the UW, this is just a word with a language. If koO should be koɔ, it
is plain wrong and, this to spot this you need a big community of
people. This is exactly one argument why an UW would be beneficial as it
would increase the size of the community. On your authority I changed
koO to koɔ, something you would have done if you felt part of this
community.
The argument that there should not be a full lemma is wrong. The aim of
the wiktionary is to have all words in all languages.
Will the UW have any way to note that information was added by a
non-native speaker?
This is relatively trivial to do. I blogged about this feature; I would
tie it in with the "babel" functionality as I use it on my Meta and
nl.wikipedia userpage.
IMO the more effort put in (can't really say it was _duplicated_, as
outside of very specialized technical terms and the communalized SAE
semantics, just because something translates an English word doesn't
mean it's the best translation of the French, Greek, or Chinese word
that also translates the English..., and at the very least that has
to be checked), the more chances we have to find discrepancies and
make a better dictionary by checking them against each other.
Again, you give arguments why we need a community to do these kind of
things. It also means that we should share the work. Now everything done
in one project will need to be done in another. A huge waste of effort
because at this time we do not make a dictionary we make too many
wiktionaries.
Thanks,
GerardM