[Wiktionary-l] Re: De-capitalisation-isation

Thu Jun 24 07:13:31 UTC 2004

Timwi wrote:

> Timwi wrote:
>
>> flip the switch (so [[blah]] and [[Blah]] become separate articles)
>
>
> Hi all.
>
> It seems that I have made a number of wrong assumptions when I started 
> all of this.
>
> Firstly, I assumed that just about everyone would agree to want to 
> have article titles lower-case if that is how the word is spelt. I am 
> indescribably surprised that this is not the case, but oh well, that's 
> wiki-democracy I guess.
>
> Secondly, I assumed that at least a majority, if not everyone, would 
> agree with me that engl. "kind" and German "Kind" are separate words 
> and should hence have separate articles. (I'm sorry for bringing the 
> same example over and over again, but I got used to it ;-).) Again, 
> I'm surprised that this does not seem to be the case. Apparently some 
> people actually *like* to have unrelated words on the same page, which 
> completely mystifies me.
>
> Thirdly, I assumed people would know what I'm talking about when I 
> said "case-sensitivity" and "[[kind]] and [[Kind]] should be separate 
> articles", etc. :-p
>
> Fourthly, I fell into a pitfall that I fell into numerous times in the 
> past (and, by implication, will probably fall into again numerous 
> times in the future :-p). What I'm talking about here is that people 
> emotionally attach to what they've got and what they're used to. There 
> is a strong opposition to any kind of change, and arguments cannot 
> change it. Just as long as the current way "somehow works", people 
> seem to look for only the negative things (the "arguments against") in 
> the proposal. The people who are in favour of the idea don't defend it 
> as vehemently as the others oppose it.
>
> Bottom line: It is futile for me to try to be of help with these kinds 
> of things. I'm only glad I never even started writing that script; it 
> would have been a waste of time.

Hi Timwi,

The voting page has been moved over to the English Wiktionary by 
Eclecticology. It will probably be a lot more visible there. Now we have 
a lot of no votes from people I don't see contributing all that much on 
Wiktionary. Eclecticology is in favor of your proposal as well, so don't 
give up yet. On the talk page I tried to give an example how 
[[Polish]]/[[polish]] would be treated in the new situtation and I also 
commented that we should be glad there (finally) is a developer who 
wants to care of this. I agree with you that if FullCasSensitivity or 
NoInitialCaps would not have been on since the beginning nobody would 
have made an issue of it. I still remember we requested it back then, 
but we were supposed to use the software as it was back then. We 
accepted that, adapted to it, started to work around it and got used to 
that.
It is not truly a problem that unrelated words are on the same page. The 
Dutch word [[kind]] (child) will still remain on the same page as the 
English word [[kind]]. They are separated by ----, which makes clear 
that they are words in different languages. Only the German [[Kind]] 
will move over. I guess that on the page for [[kind]] there could still 
be a German section referring people to [[Kind]]. That way it still 
remains visible that a word with almost the same spelling exists in 
another language. (Which is what we think of as interesting) (Even more 
interesting are words that are pronounced the same across different 
languages, but that's a totally different discussion...)

If you do write that script, I would like to check it out and comment on 
it before it gets run though. Maybe I have some suggestions to improve 
it, so less manual labor remains afterwards. What programming language 
do you use?

Polyglot