[Foundation-l] Wiktionary, general thoughts

Sun May 16 16:24:37 UTC 2004

Imran Ghory wrote:

> On Sun, 16 May 2004, Timwi wrote:
> 
>>Am I the only one who thinks this is unbelievably redundant?
> 
> I agree totally (but then again I thought that (the english) wiktionary
> should only define english words in English), but there's not much that
> can be done about it, becuase words in differnet langauges aren't
> reflective. That is just because A in language 1 means B in language 2, it
> doesn't mean B in language 2 means A in language 1. So it's not possible
> to have a single list that's shared by many languages.

Firstly, I think you're thinking on the wrong lines. If A is a possible 
translation for B, then B is always also a possible translation for A. 
(Two words are possible translations of each other if their meanings 
have a non-zero intersection; this property *is* reflexive.) Of course 
that doesn't mean that B is *always* translated as A, but at least it 
means that the graph represented by words and their translations is 
undirected.

Secondly, that's only one part of the redundancy. Even if the graph were 
directed, it would still mean that every Wiktionary would build that 
same graph, when building it once would really be sufficient.

Timwi