Oldak Quill wrote:
One issue is the project works in a different way, it
is not possible
to simply transfer Wiktionary contents into it. To embrace omegawiki,
we'd have to phase out Wiktionary in its current state. I think
omegawiki as Wiktionary 2.0 is a controversial idea among many
Wiktionarians, though I can't give you any more details on that.
A unified multilingual project could make progress far more quickly.
That omegawiki is based on WikiData also makes it more flexible and
useful (as part of the semantic web, for researchers, for end-users,
for contributors, &c.) Also, because users from different languages
aggregate together, correctness of spelling and definition is more
likely.
A lot of this depends on your philosophy of dictionaries. Are they
descriptive or prescriptive? Translating dictionaries tend very heavily
toward the prescriptive, directed toward efficiently solving the very
real problem of rendering a text in one language into a readable text in
another language. But translations taken from translating dictionaries
will at best seem stillted, and often misleading unless you have fully
explored the subtleties of both languages. That is not particularly
efficient.
A top level single-language dictionary is built on descriptive
historical principles in that it is evidence based. And, as much as in
Wikipedia should be citing sources for usage. To the extent that a
dictionary describes words in its own language it should always strive
for a depth that is unachievable in a translation dictionary. A wise
literary translator must be aware of the subtleties, preferably of both
languages, but especially of the target language.
The problem for Wiktionary is how best to merge these conflicting
tendencies.
Ec