[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wiktionary-l] Article on LISA

[Sabine Cretella]

James R. Johnson wrote:

>I'm also a bit wary about merging all the wiktionaries into one
>mega-wiktionary.  
>
You won't see too many differences - the data is there, but you choose 
from which language you start - so let's say I start from Italian with 
my search I will see things similar to it.wiktionary.org - of course the 
"visual aspect" is not really defined now - so the presentation of the 
data might be different, but the contents will be the same you see now 
on a wiki page.

>The idea about the user-interface appearing in one's
>preferred language is interesting though.  There are different wiktionaries
>for the same reason there are different wikipedias.  As Mark and others have
>been telling for the past several months that I've contributed to wikis, we
>have these multitudinous
>wikipedias/wiktionaries/wikibooks/wikiquote/wiki-... sites to encourage each
>language, and the thesauri become more useful and more accessible to people
>through the community involvement of the users on each wiki.  The German
>wiktionary grows through the efforts of those who contribute to it, as do
>the English, Russian, etc.  Let the individual wiktionaries apply the GEMET
>if they so choose, using the terminology they choose.  Individuals can make
>a better choice than some centralized monolith can, and often faster, and
>better.  And as far as I have seen, it's the individual with conviction that
>improves the wikis and spreads the concept to new languages, people, and
>articles.  Some of the things you want in this Ultimate Wiktionary can be
>done in the individual wiktionaries, if the users want it.
>  
>
The thing is: many wiktionaries do not have a structure that is easy to 
convert to UW - this would mean to do things twice and that does not 
make sense to me. UW was created out of the fact that we do things more 
than just once. For example: I know five languages, so I could 
contribute to at least five wiktionaries adding German translations ... 
but this does not make sense - I would add five times the same words and 
need five times those two minutes to go there and add. On UW I insert 
this word just once and so the other four times can be used for other 
words, write a definition (in my mothertognue), classify words etc. This 
means that we are going to be more productive.

>And " and thus resulting in increased trade opportunities for the EC." -
>Wikis are about more than simply Europe.  There's more to the world than
>Europe, and the wiktionaries are not simply there to benefit Europe and its
>trade opportunities.  Sounds like the kind of cultural imperialism the US
>gets accused of.
>  
>
The use of EC terminology has nothing to to with imperialism the US gets 
accused of. We just received data from the EC and they are interested in 
UW - that's all. Of course, knowing a terminology of a certain 
economical area allows also for better business in that area ... so this 
should be some kind of stimuli for the US government to contribute ;-)

The contents of UW depends from the contributors just like any other 
project around. So whoever contributes valuable data is welcome.

Ciao, Sabine

		
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