Hi Gerard,
I had an interesting conversation with Brion. We do
not agree on
everything. One of the things we do not agree on are redirects.
In my opinion, Wiktionary should not have redirects. A word is either
spelled correctly and it will have its lemma or it is not and there will
not be a lemma with the incorrect spelling.
In Brions opinion there are links to lemmas and as we need to ensure
that these links remain ok, we need redirects to make this possible.
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.
One crucial decision is that only correct spelling is
allowed.
This is a no-go for minor languages where "correct" spelling
does not exist.
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann