[Foundation-l] Frustration with the conversion engines issue

Thu Apr 2 09:45:44 UTC 2009

On Wed, Apr 1, 2009 at 5:32 PM, Ziko van Dijk <zvandijk at googlemail.com> wrote:
> - a split of the Wikipedias into two; this is most likely when there are
> other linguistic differences e.g. in dictionary.

Dictionary is not a problem. This is the option for Ekavian-Iyekavian
conversion engine for Serbian. I made an algorithm with exponential
complexity (I am not a programmer :) ), but Robert Stojnic (maintainer
of the Serbian conversion engine) said that it is possible to avoid
it.

> - one variety has so much support in the linguistic community that the
> minority is small and discouraged to create a Wikipedia of their own. In
> that case automatic conversion is a nice conveniency, but as editors the
> minority users more or less have to adapt to the majority.

If we don't start to deal with those issues, we won't be able to have
a better product. If we start it, our chances will become much better
:) So, simpler cases may be solved faster, more complex cases may be
solved not so fast. But, if we have something which may be able to
solve simpler cases, we would be able to go further.