[Wikipedia-l] zh.wikipedia.org - having a single unified portal

Wed Jun 23 05:24:10 UTC 2004

----- Original Message -----
From: "Roozbeh Pournader" <roozbeh at gmail.com>
To: <wikipedia-l at wikimedia.org>
Sent: Tuesday, June 22, 2004 10:50 PM
Subject: Re: [Wikipedia-l] zh.wikipedia.org - having a single unified portal

> I don't want to get into the debate, but just FYI, such a convertor is
> considered impossible by many experts. By impossible, I mean
> impossible in the level of a perfect German to English to German
> machine translation software. Refer to Unicode mailing list and its
> archives for more details.
>
> roozbeh

There are some unsolvable problems if one wish to automatically convert an
unknown text from simplified to full forms, because there are some
exceptions (simplified form of F1 and F2 could be the same S, for instance),
but it is surely not as far as English to German "conversion". I guess that
in the case of Wikipedia, such exceptions could be handled by special
markups inside the text. If a simplified sentence is S1 S2 S3 S4 S5 and S3
conversion is not obvious, one could write something like S1 S2 S3
 S4 S5, what would help the conversion tool. As most of the
simplification is "bijective" (one and only one S <-> one and only one F),
this markup would not be that annoying to add, and robots could look for the
relatively few problematic characters and display a list of articles to be
checked.

(gbog)