On 25/07/05, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk(a)eunet.yu>
wrote:
The way I see it, this decision is a political and
not a technical one. Each
word could have several spellings, each of which is related to a spelling
authority. If you want common misspellings in the dictionary, simply have
"Common misspelling" as a spelling authority. Similarly, nothing prevents you
from having several different spellings of a same word attributed to a single
spelling authority, which solves all the problems you mentioned above.
Surely it would be better for the search function to try some other
possibilities, such as removing glottal stops from the input and
searching again.
Besides, didn't we forget the Unicode possibility of the same
character entered in two ways?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_equivalence
Actually, ideally every word would have a "search name" which is
worked out based on the language. It would only contain the compulsory
characters, with a certain decision on e.g. German ä ö ü (to transform
them in one direction or the other). It could also decompose all
precomposed characters into sets of characters. This is a little bit
like how some databases store the soundex index.
I think this would handle most cases. I certainly agree that redirects
are a necessary technical feature for the rarer cases.
Hoi,
Redirects will not exist in the UW. There is no need for them. Either
they are correct spelling or they are not. If we MUST have a situation
where links into UW need to be maintained, the words will go into
Misspelling. Consequently the information will be utterly different from
what it had before and consequently it cannot be maintained that the
exterior party will have the URL point to the same information. Because
in stead of a word with a meanin and all the other stuff it will now
give a "You are wrong". This will be handled either at the Spelling
level or at the Misspelling level.
Then again, a user may want to see only a limited number of languages,
and consequently what is shown will also not be the same for everyone.
The word "dei" and "die" or both common typos, they are but for
different languages. So what are we going to show when someone asks for
dei of die ??
Thanks,
GerardM