[Wiktionary-l] Case - Sensitivity for Wiktionaries

Sat May 29 21:30:17 UTC 2004

Hi, 

A few months ago I asked a developer on the chat channel whether case 
sensitivity in the links would be possible to implement. He said it would be 
way to complicated to do so. Especially considering that a lot would be 
broken.
That's when I started fervently to add an ''example'' under the part of 
speech headers. This seemed redundant at first, but it was quickly accepted 
nonetheless. In fact, I think we are very happy with this solution and there 
is no reason why the German Wiktionary couldn't solve the problem in the 
same way. The English Wiktionary also describes German words and that's part 
of the reason this solution was adopted. The software was initially written 
for an encyclopedia and we got to use it as it was. I must say, I like the 
solution as it elegantly makes the pages self-contained.
So now, the story is, that it would be possible to make things 
case-sensitive. As I said, a few months ago, it was me asking the very same 
question as, obviously, case matters for a dictionary. Not only for a German 
version of it. If it does happen, I'm sure the English Wiktionary will be 
adapted pretty quickly (It's relatively easy to write a script to achieve 
it, exactly thanks to the solution we started using). Somebody needs to 
write it though, and I would rather write a script to copy entries from one 
Wiktionary to another, once I get the time to write it. (I'll start from the 
pyWikiBot scripts)
If this is a vote though, I tend to be against it, at this moment in time. 
What was a workaround for a problem we struggled with, has become an elegant 
solution. Behind the example there is room for the word gender, if 
appliccable, and then there is room for plurals and diminutives in the case 
of Nouns and comparatives and superlatives in the case of Adjectives. 
Conjugations of verbs and further flexion of words in languages like Polish, 
Russian etc. go under their own heading in table format. 

Polyglot 

Member of Linux MandrakeClub
http://www.mandrakeclub.com