[WikiEN-l] www.wixpression.org?

Thu Jan 8 07:39:54 UTC 2004

Gutza wrote:

> Delirium wrote:
>
>> While this certainly seems useful, I'm not sure it can't be 
>> incorporated within Wiktionary itself instead of starting a new 
>> project.  Some paper dictionaries include some idiomatic phrases in 
>> them already, so this isn't completely unusual.  So I'd say just go 
>> ahead and add them to Wiktionary, though perhaps some sort of 
>> meta-markup on Wiktionary would be useful to categorize these sorts 
>> of things (perhaps the same sort of meta-markup being discussed for 
>> Wikipedia categories?).
>>
>> -Mark
>
>
> Well, Mark, I actually have a problem with markup in Wiktionary, hope 
> this doesn't get personal. :)
>
> I think Wiktionary is not a well-though project, I guess some guy 
> (gal) said "let's do this" at some point, and it was done. But it's 
> waaaay too English-centric, Wiktionary tends to become a good 
> English-to-anything dictionary if successful in the long run, but it's 
> a shame that it's nothing-to-English in return, due to lack of 
> formalized markup. I personally never followed (nor even found) any 
> discussion on the topic, but since there are a lot of intelligent, 
> knowledgeable people involved in all of Wikimedia's projects, I expect 
> I'm not raising a new issue here.
>
> What I'm trying to say is that Wiktionary will probably have to go 
> through some major (hopefully automated) markup changes in the 
> mid-ling run in order to support arbitrary language-to-language 
> dictionary searches, whereas "Wixpression" or whatever it would be 
> called, if accepted as a new project at all, is not suitable for such 
> treatment because expressions are generally not translatable 1:1, as 
> words tend to be. Also, while "red" in English is simply translated to 
> "rouge" in French, "bring it on" in English needs to be explained /in 
> English/ first, and only then, optionally, in French. Therefore I 
> think these should be two separate projects.

The last thing that Wiktionary needs is a listing of automated 
translation.  Of course the English Wiktionary is "English-centric". 
 What else did you expect?  It is first a dictionary, and only secondly 
a book of translations.  Still, to choose one example and say that there 
is a 1:1 correspondence between the words of two languages represnts a 
totally naïve view of language.

The idea of other language Wiktionary projects has come up repeatedly. 
 At this stage I find "Wixpression" completely useless, or at best 
premature.  There has always been an intent to have Wiktionaries in 
other languages,  and once they are functional it will be a lot easier 
to co-ordinate them with the English project and with each other.  But 
instead of seeing Wiktionaries in other languages, all I see is 
complaints.  If the whiners went ahead and started Wiktionaries in the 
language of their choice we would all be further ahead.

Ec