[Wiktionary-l] GNU-FDL and Ultimate Wiktionary

Mon May 30 07:18:01 UTC 2005

On 5/30/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge at telus.net> wrote:
> 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.

I think its a safe assumption that it isn't for machine translation.
Plenty of crappy machine translators already :). The problem with
Wiktionary as it stands is that there's really one way to view it - as
a web page. If you want to query it (translations of the word 'mouse',
all Romanian nouns) you can't really. Its not 'machine readable'
(perhaps what you meant). Its not flexible, if there's desire to
change the formatting of the articles (entry formating is a much less
obvious and more complicated job then in Wikipedia) it would be a huge
undertaking. We'd have to see it to judge it obviously. It should be
decided that it is the way to go or that it is not... we shouldn't
ever have two competing Wiktionaries.

> 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
>