[Wiktionary-l] GNU-FDL and Ultimate Wiktionary

Mon May 30 06:45:16 UTC 2005

Jimmy Wales wrote:

>Ray Saintonge wrote:
>  
>
>>Not really, since the existing wiktionaries would continue as they have
>>all along.
>>    
>>
>
>I am not agreeing or disagreeing or taking any position on this at all.
> Please consider my questions about this to be merely data gathering. :-)
>
>Why should we have such a formal break?  Why shouldn't we instead
>transition from one to the other in a seamless way?  I worry a lot about
>duplication of effort, etc.
>
>Are there objections from old-school wiktionarians to the ultimate
>wiktionary plans?  Is it possible that we could address these objections
>through code?
>
>I'm very sorry that I don't already know all of this, but I'm sure you
>can all get me up to speed quite quickly.
>  
>
To a large extent I see the fundamental difference between Gerard and me 
as rooted in different visions about the role and nature of 
dictionaries.  I'll try not to misrepresent his point of view.

I see Gerard's vision as being based in the need for technical solutions 
for machine translations.  In theory with his method one should be able 
to look up a word in one's own language and immediately be able to find 
a corresponding term in whatever other language one desires.  I at least 
agree with him that such an approach would require far more 
sophisticated software than what we now employ.  Much of what he 
proposes appears to be very highly dependent on templates and technical 
codification rather that plain language editing, and I'm afraid that 
that would scare away many potential new contributors who don't feel 
comfortable with the more technical approach.

For my part translation is a secondary function of a dictionary.  
Documenting the history of a word, citing quotations that support uses 
of the word, and commentary on the usages of a word are more interesting 
and important.  I recently did a little of this to raise awareness of 
the divergence of  [[gourmand]]  in English and French.  I find our 
present software essentially adequate for the task.

Gerard has been talking about his Ultimate Wiktionary for a long time, 
but so far I have not seen examples of what Gerard's Wiktionary will 
look like, how it will work or how it will be editable.  Perhaps if he 
presented more concrete examples attitudes could change.  

I guess "old-school" is probably a good term.  I have very little 
involvement on the technical side of things.  I do find it a chore to 
insert a picture or a table, but I figure it out when I have to.  When 
templates appear in an article that I am editing, I need to make extra 
effort just to track where some of them come from or what they mean.  If 
I, as a person who has been here for over three years, am having trouble 
with this, it must be worse for a non-technical person who just wants to 
indulge his love of words.

Ec