On Thursday 01 September 2005 17:59, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Heiko Evermann wrote:
The
duplication of words that are spelled the same in different dialects
or orthographies is inherent in the database design. This is essential
if you want to have definitions and etymology in these dialects or
orthographies. If you are willing to accept that definitions and
etymology can be spelled in orthographies other than Sass there could be
a solution but as the nds.wikipedia also has to standardise on Sass, I
think this is a rather unlikely scenario.
Definition and etymology would be the same. Your approach would be a
duplication of efforts. It would be sufficient to allow one entry to
belong to several orthographis, as in 1:n instead of 1:1. So this is not
inherent in the database design. It is the design bug that I complain
about for some time.
1:n would allow us to enter the data the way we think appropriate. And it
still leaves us the opportunity to add individual entries when other users
really think that explanations must also be duplicated along the
orthographies (which I really doubt). So they can, if they want to, but
they are not forced.
I am interested in who your "we" is. I did recently discuss this design
Well, count me in, for the start.
What you call a design bug is in actual fact a design
feature. One
point that you are missing is that the meaning of a word spelled the
same between dialects may be different. This is exactly one reason why
this duplication is needed. The same is true for etymology; when a word
That is not reason for duplication at all. If a string of letters has
different meanings in different dialects, each of these meanings should have
a row in "word" table, with different wordID. Each of these wordIDs should be
related to a SEPARATE spellingID, not the same one, even though it's still
the same string of letters; for one, their languageIDs are different. Each of
these spellingIDs, if valid, should of course be related to separate
ValidSpellingID; and it should be possible that each of these
ValidSpellingIDs is related to several spelling authorities. It is the norm,
rather than exception, that different authorities recommend same spelling for
same word.