On Jan 6, 2004, at 7:48 PM, Timwi wrote:
- make one major change of policy/aim/goal. I think it is completely redundant and futile to try to define (explain the meaning of) all words of all languages *in* all languages. I think a word should only be defined in its own language, and if you want its meaning explained in another language, then you should really look up its translation
in that other language. There are just so many things on Wiktionary that are language-independent (e.g. the translations for each word, or pronunciation written in IPA) that duplicating it hundreds of times seems really dumb.
The trouble arises here when exact translations aren't available. If I want to know what 'guba' means in Hoobiflitz, I'd look up guba, translate to English (via inter-lang link), and read the definition. But 'guba' (let's say) doesn't have an exact English translation, so there's no appropriate English definition to link to. Here it's most effective to explain the definition of 'guba' in English. I think there may be a better way to set up inter-language links to allow for this. And if I had a good idea for it, I'd really have a point.
Peter
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