[Foundation-l] Wiktionary, general thoughts

Sun May 16 21:03:25 UTC 2004

--- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> ...
> We would thus have hundreds of entries for, say, "five" in hundreds of 
> languages, all of which say nothing else than "this means five" and the 
> same list of translations into all other languages. Isn't this an 
> incredible nightmare to keep in sync?

And every language Wikipedia should have an article about Europe too. 

> Now we have Wiktionaries in loads of languages, and all the redundancy 
> above is multiplied /again/ by the number of languages. We would be 
> collecting the translations for the word "five" n² times, where n is the 
> number of languages. I don't know how many languages there are on this 
> planet, but even if it was only 1000 languages, this means 1000000 (one 
> million!) times the same list of words.

Yes - there would be a great deal of redundancy for the translation lists.
Interwiki MediaWiki/Template pages would solve that. We have the same problem
with interwiki links too - the same list minus one change has to be every
language version of an article. 

> Am I the only one who thinks this is unbelievably redundant?

Only for the lists, not for the whole entries. I like the fact that Wiktionary
is also a translating dictionary - it makes it much more useful. 

--mav

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