Hello everybody,
I'm a German student living in Paris for one year. I've learned Latin and Ancient Greek at school, so occasionally, I like to glance into a bilingual book. But sometimes it's impossible to find a bilingual version of a particular work, say, some books of Seneca; or they are extremely expensive or just badly translated. While I'm not good enough to translate an entire Latin book, it'd be great fun to translate some parts, and I'd think that many people who once learned ancient languages share this feeling. After all, this way you could actually USE what you've learned. Fans and Texts of ancient literature are hopelessly scattered through the Web, one text here and part of a translation there.
Could it be possible to set up a Wiki containing some Latin/Greek/Arabian/whatever philosophy (or other content) whose copyright has expired for a long time - be it by typing in old editions or by taking over some Gutenberg content - and displaying it one paragraph per page, giving the viewer the possibility to translate it into his native language? I guess some specific features would be helpful, such as allowing two translations in the same language to coexist (call them "English version, showing John's translations where possible" and the same thing for Jim), as there will never be "the one correct version". In addition, it would be nice to create a bilingual PDF for printing.
As I'm a student living in a small chamber with only two hours of Internet access from Monday till Friday, it is impossible for me to create such a thing. There will be lots of other ideas and feature requests; for me it doesn't matter if this will be a new project or integrated into Wikibooks or something completely different. I just wanted to present this idea; maybe someone "mightier than me" likes it, too: using your knowledge of humanism to actually exert humanism, translating some of the oldest and greatest works of mankind to be accessible free of charge by nowadays' mankind.
Have a nice day, Viktor.
Viktor Horvath wrote:
Could it be possible to set up a Wiki containing some Latin/Greek/Arabian/whatever philosophy (or other content) whose copyright has expired for a long time - be it by typing in old editions or by taking over some Gutenberg content - and displaying it one paragraph per page, giving the viewer the possibility to translate it into his native language? I guess some specific features would be helpful, such as allowing two translations in the same language to coexist (call them "English version, showing John's translations where possible" and the same thing for Jim), as there will never be "the one correct version". In addition, it would be nice to create a bilingual PDF for printing.
This sounds great to me. Would this be acceptable at wikisource without starting a fully new project? I know the original source texts would be, but are original translations okay, or is that project strictly for verbatim source texts?
A related project that's been mentioned on this list is support for annotations (a footnote-like system), which I think any translation project would need---there are often nuances and controversies in translation that can't be fully resolved in the text, but should be noted for those who are interested (and there are likely to be so many that they need to be noted as attachments to the text like footnotes, not scattered on the talk page).
-Mark
Le Thursday 14 October 2004 19:46, Delirium a écrit :
Viktor Horvath wrote:
Could it be possible to set up a Wiki containing some Latin/Greek/Arabian/whatever philosophy (or other content) whose copyright has expired for a long time - be it by typing in old editions or by taking over some Gutenberg content - and displaying it one paragraph per page, giving the viewer the possibility to translate it into his native language? I guess some specific features would be helpful, such as allowing two translations in the same language to coexist (call them "English version, showing John's translations where possible" and the same thing for Jim), as there will never be "the one correct version". In addition, it would be nice to create a bilingual PDF for printing.
Yes, that's a great idea.
This sounds great to me. Would this be acceptable at wikisource without starting a fully new project? I know the original source texts would be, but are original translations okay, or is that project strictly for verbatim source texts?
Of course translations are accepted.
A related project that's been mentioned on this list is support for annotations (a footnote-like system), which I think any translation project would need---there are often nuances and controversies in translation that can't be fully resolved in the text, but should be noted for those who are interested (and there are likely to be so many that they need to be noted as attachments to the text like footnotes, not scattered on the talk page).
There is no possibility to have footnotes now in MediaWiki like it exists in LaTeX. That would be a must for this kind of texts.
-Mark
Regards, Yann
On 14 Oct 2004, at 21:32, Yann Forget wrote:
Le Thursday 14 October 2004 19:46, Delirium a écrit :
A related project that's been mentioned on this list is support for annotations (a footnote-like system), which I think any translation project would need---there are often nuances and controversies in translation that can't be fully resolved in the text, but should be noted for those who are interested (and there are likely to be so many that they need to be noted as attachments to the text like footnotes, not scattered on the talk page).
There is no possibility to have footnotes now in MediaWiki like it exists in LaTeX. That would be a must for this kind of texts.
-Mark
Regards, Yann
While it's not on par with LaTeX footnotes, (and while few people are aware of this) the possibility to use footnotes in Wikipedia/MediaWiki does exist:
It works quite well, actually.
Here
is an example of heavy use of such annotation (admittedly, they're not proper ''foot''notes here).
-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]] www.ropersonline.com
Delirium wrote:
Viktor Horvath wrote:
Could it be possible to set up a Wiki containing some Latin/Greek/Arabian/whatever philosophy (or other content) whose copyright has expired for a long time - be it by typing in old editions or by taking over some Gutenberg content - and displaying it one paragraph per page, giving the viewer the possibility to translate it into his native language?
I would hope that one could have pages that are longer than one paragraph. My own preference would be to have the ability to have two or more versions that could be scrolled in synchrony beside each other.
I guess some specific features would be helpful, such as allowing two translations in the same language to coexist (call them "English version, showing John's translations where possible" and the same thing for Jim), as there will never be "the one correct version". In addition, it would be nice to create a bilingual PDF for printing.
This sounds great to me. Would this be acceptable at wikisource without starting a fully new project? I know the original source texts would be, but are original translations okay, or is that project strictly for verbatim source texts?
It fits in perfectly with my vision of Wikisource. In theory this is one way in which Wikisource could be superior to other e-text suppliers. There is bound to be some blurring of the line between Wikisource and Wikibooks.
A related project that's been mentioned on this list is support for annotations (a footnote-like system), which I think any translation project would need---there are often nuances and controversies in translation that can't be fully resolved in the text, but should be noted for those who are interested (and there are likely to be so many that they need to be noted as attachments to the text like footnotes, not scattered on the talk page).
Wikimedia does not do a good job with footnotes. Having to srcoll way down to the bottom of the page to see a footnote can be very inconvenient with a long text. It's often a good thing to be able to see both the referring text and the footnote at the same time. Again, this is something where having synchronized boxes would be very helpful.
Ec
On 15 Oct 2004, at 12:04, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Wikimedia does not do a good job with footnotes. Having to srcoll way down to the bottom of the page to see a footnote can be very inconvenient with a long text.
You don't have to scroll down, at least not manually. You just click on the superscript number. And hit backspace when finished reading the footnote. Cf.:
On Fri, 15 Oct 2004 12:25:30 +0200, Jens Ropers ropers@ropersonline.com wrote:
On 15 Oct 2004, at 12:04, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Wikimedia does not do a good job with footnotes. Having to srcoll way down to the bottom of the page to see a footnote can be very inconvenient with a long text.
You don't have to scroll down, at least not manually. You just click on the superscript number. And hit backspace when finished reading the footnote.
Or better yet, link the number at the start of the footnote to its position in the text. But MediaWiki doesn't support autonumbered or auto-positioned footnotes yet, at all... It would in general be useful to edit the footnote along with the relevant text.
< Cf.: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Footnotes
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Wikimedia does not do a good job with footnotes. Having to srcoll way down to the bottom of the page to see a footnote can be very inconvenient with a long text. It's often a good thing to be able to see both the referring text and the footnote at the same time. Again, this is something where having synchronized boxes would be very helpful.
I think we may also want to extend the concept of footnoes, given that we have the technology to do so. In print, a footnote follows the section it's footnoting, and what exactly preceding portion to refers to is not actually specified. This makes it difficult for densely-footnoted texts to figure out what is going on. Since this is the intarweb, we can annotate *regions* of text, even overlapping regions. This would be useful in Wikipedia proper as well, as you could annotate a particular section as "this is phrased this way because of the following issue" and be exactly clear what you're referring to.
I *seem* to recall someone already proposed something like this, and even had a page at meta about it, but I can't find it (I suppose I could be imagining things).
-Mark
Delirium-
we have the technology to do so. In print, a footnote follows the section it's footnoting, and what exactly preceding portion to refers to is not actually specified. This makes it difficult for densely-footnoted texts to figure out what is going on. Since this is the intarweb, we can annotate *regions* of text, even overlapping regions. This would be useful in Wikipedia proper as well, as you could annotate a particular section as "this is phrased this way because of the following issue" and be exactly clear what you're referring to.
I *seem* to recall someone already proposed something like this, and even had a page at meta about it, but I can't find it (I suppose I could be imagining things).
Nope, I have been suggesting this on the mailing lists a few times, and there's a WikiProject on en: which collects some ideas on the matter: http://en.wikipedia.org/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Fact_and_Reference_Check
My current plan is to specify a peer review markup language (PRML), which will of course be a subset of our wiki syntax, but which should be flexible enough to be used in other contexts as well. The primary function of the PRML would be to tag individual factual claims, and to highlight them if they presently lack a citation.
My current favored syntax for the basic fact mark-up / citation is
1) Claim without citation __The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci. ??
2) Claim with citation __The Mona Lisa was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci. [[Source:The Mona Lisa, 1984, p. 84]]
__ starts a factual claim
?? marks a factual claim as dubious
[[Source: Xyz]] or [http://www.xyz.com] generates an auto-numbered footnote or margin note (rendering could depend on user preferences or CSS)
Similar to red links, unsourced claims could be (faintly) highlighted in the rendered page, as an encouragement to add citations.
The reason I am not moving this forward more quickly is that I would like it to be properly integrated into the MediaWiki 2.0 framework. In particular, the [[Source:Xyz]] should really refer to a Wikidata structure, so we can start managing our collection of references properly, for the benefit of easy and consistent citation throughout Wikimedia. The PRML will also allow more complex statements, as not everything can be atomized like the above examples.
Regards,
Erik
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