[Foundation-l] Wiktionary, general thoughts

Mon May 17 00:42:00 UTC 2004

Daniel Mayer wrote:
> --- Timwi <timwi at gmx.net> wrote:
> > We would thus have hundreds of entries for, say, "five" in hundreds of
>
> And every language Wikipedia should have an article about Europe too.

My impression is that the English Wiktionary will contain the articles

 [[five]] - this means the number 5
 [[fünf]] - this means five in German
 [[fem]]  - this means five in Swedish
 [[cinq]] - this means five in French

and the German Wiktionary will contain the articles

 [[fünf]] - dies bedeutet Number 5
 [[five]] - dies bedeutet fünf auf Englisch
 [[cinq]] - dies bedeutet fünf auf Französisch
 [[fem]]  - dies bedeutet fünf auf Schwedisch

and the Swedish Wiktionary will contain the articles

 [[fem]]  - detta betyder siffran 5
 [[five]] - detta betyder fem på engelska
 [[fünf]] - detta betyder fem på tyska
 [[cinq]] - detta betyder fem på franska

etc. (none of these German or Swedish Wiktionary pages exist yet)

It gets even more complicated when words are ambiguous ("Sex" is both
an English word, and the Swedish word for "six") and deflected
(separate entries for go, went, gone).  "Go" is a verb with so many
meanings (go by bus, go for it, gone with the wind, ...) and should
they all be explained and translated again on the went and gone pages?
In "gone with the wind", gone means lost.  But can this meaning also
exist in another tense such as "went", "go" and "goes"?  I think I'll
go with the wind.

This Wiktionary concept spans a space so wide that filling it seems an
endless task.  I'm not yet convinced that it is meaningful even to
try, which is why I don't.  I might have misunderstood something, and
those who are convinced should of course go ahead (not with the wind,
though).  There could, however, be more people like me, who need more
information or motivation before they are convinced that this is how
they should spend their evenings in the coming year.

There are already 38649 articles in the English Wiktionary.  The
German Wiktionary contains 971 pages, but only 39 qualify as articles.
I don't know what is missing in the other 932 ones.  The Swedish
Wiktionary has similar proportions: only 117 articles out of 996
pages.

Already, the Swedish Wiktionary's entry on the German word
"Wörterbuch"  is rather impressive,
http://sv.wiktionary.org/wiki/W%F6rterbuch and there is an interwiki
link to the German Wiktionary.  But I guess it will be long before
more than a few languages will be linked to Swedish in this way.  It
seems far more likely that all languages will link to English.

There are some out-of-copyright Swedish dictionaries available at
http://runeberg.org/saol/8/ (for spelling, printed 1923, 378 pages)
and http://runeberg.org/svetym/ (for etymology, printed 1922, 1284
pages). They are scanned and OCRed, but still need some proofreading.
Perhaps someone can find that useful.

-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se/