Gerard.Meijssen wrote:
LS, When I follow what has happened the last few days,
I can not help
but come to the conclusion that things are done with wikipedia in
mind.
Not exactly. We generally have two things in mind: Wikipedia, and
non-Wikimedia users.
Take for instance those lines that are
"gratis" when you use
headings. They make excellent sense when in Wikipedia but they look
_horrible_ in wiktionary. Have a look at
http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Breton for instance. It does not look
good.
You should be able to override this using [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]]
Take a look at the restriction on the number of
messages (5) per
page. This is "reasonable" in wikipedia, but when you want to
internationalise a page and use messages to indicate things that
differ from language to language, like the gender of a word, you can
have dozens words that are masculine and you get garbage as a result.
I've received a number of complaints about this from Wikipedians, and
this is the first one I've had from someone from Wiktionary, so I fail
to see how this indicates Wikipedia-centrism. It's a problem I intend to
address during my reworking of template inclusion, over the next week or
two.
When there are problems, they seem to be relatively
quickly fixed for
the wikipedia's but, for the wiktionaries the consistency is
lacking.
When you have an environment like wiktionary/wikipedia they _need_ to
be the same in order to be able to fix things and understand the
behaviour of the software. The wiktionaries do not behave in a same
way. You can create an article with a Chinese (characters) name in
English but not on the nl:wiktionary (and others).
Wiktionaries were set up by copying the MediaWiki namespace and language
files from the associated Wikipedias. You can't create an article with
chinese characters in the title on the nl wikipedia either. English and
German are exceptions to this rule because of special-case work done by
the respective contributors.
We have just had a major disaster. What I expected in
the aftermath
was some consolidation. However, now the "Enhanced recent changes
(not for all browsers)" in preferences is up the creek!!
What's wrong with it? It looks fine to me.
What concerns me is that for us "simple"
users there is no idea what
problems are being tacled. What the priorities are and if things
still get tested prior to production.
*Is the idea that we have stabilized?? *Do we still have database
problems? (anecdotal evidence says we do) *Is there a moratorium on
minor stuff so that there is the peace and quiet to fix the major
stuff?
I'm not going to announce everything I do in 10 different places. If you
want to know what's going on in terms of software development and server
administration, you should read wikitech-l.
Please understand that I'm not obliged to fix problems just because you
want them fixed. You are not paying me. I try to make people happy, but
you have no right to expect a minimum level of service.
I'm amazed at the poor quality of the English Wiktionary, it seems to
miss so many important English words. Most new pages seem to be slang,
jargon, and people adding a few dozen words from their native tongue.
Plans to import a public domain dictionary were abandoned, and now there
seems to be little organisation or direction. Perhaps Wiktionary can be
revitalised with extra features, but I doubt stylesheet changes will be
enough. It needs a different look and a whole raft of features. It needs
methods for easily adding new words, and for categorisation and listing.
But I'm neither excited by the project nor optimistic about its future.
So most of all, it needs people who want to work on it.
-- Tim Starling