[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia English English

[Rowan Collins]

On 22/09/05, Milos Rancic <millosh at mutualaid.org> wrote:
> I am sure that it is possible to make a software for conversion
> between British and American English, such Zhengzhu did for Chinese.
> All people would work on one Wikipedia and all people would use their
> own variant.

This is something that was indeed discussed when that software was
being developed. Apart from how to deal easily with exceptions, there
are problems with differences in meaning of the same word - to pull an
example out of the air, if a British user types "pants", it should be
converted to "underpants" when viewed by a US one; but if it was typed
by the US one, it should appear as "trousers" when viewed by the Brit.
I'm not 100% sure the Chinese orthography issue has these kinds of
double-mappings, but I can't remember. And what of words with two
meanings, such as "fall" for "autumn" - you wouldn't want text coming
out as "large trees sometimes autumn over"...

Plus, as I was recalling elsewhere, another problem is that there are
many more than two varieties of English, so if you gave every user a
choice of US or British, an Australian wouldn't know which to choose.
And if you created a version for every variety, you would have to
create and maintain lookup tables for converting between all those
different versions.

In the end, you'd be writing an entire machine translation system,
which isn't something generally considered all that easy. As I've
said, I'm not dead against such a system, but I'm increasingly
sceptical about its implementation.

--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]