Hi.
I meant to post this here a long time ago, but I didn't get around to it.
It is my understanding that the aim of the English Wiktionary has always been and still is to define all words of all languages, as well as provide translations of all words into all other languages. Is that right?
We would thus have hundreds of entries for, say, "five" in hundreds of languages, all of which say nothing else than "this means five" and the same list of translations into all other languages. Isn't this an incredible nightmare to keep in sync?
Now we have Wiktionaries in loads of languages, and all the redundancy above is multiplied /again/ by the number of languages. We would be collecting the translations for the word "five" n² times, where n is the number of languages. I don't know how many languages there are on this planet, but even if it was only 1000 languages, this means 1000000 (one million!) times the same list of words.
Am I the only one who thinks this is unbelievably redundant?
Timwi
On Sun, 16 May 2004, Timwi wrote:
Am I the only one who thinks this is unbelievably redundant?
I agree totally (but then again I thought that (the english) wiktionary should only define english words in English), but there's not much that can be done about it, becuase words in differnet langauges aren't reflective. That is just because A in language 1 means B in language 2, it doesn't mean B in language 2 means A in language 1. So it's not possible to have a single list that's shared by many languages.
Imran
Imran Ghory wrote:
On Sun, 16 May 2004, Timwi wrote:
Am I the only one who thinks this is unbelievably redundant?
I agree totally (but then again I thought that (the english) wiktionary should only define english words in English), but there's not much that can be done about it, becuase words in differnet langauges aren't reflective. That is just because A in language 1 means B in language 2, it doesn't mean B in language 2 means A in language 1. So it's not possible to have a single list that's shared by many languages.
Firstly, I think you're thinking on the wrong lines. If A is a possible translation for B, then B is always also a possible translation for A. (Two words are possible translations of each other if their meanings have a non-zero intersection; this property *is* reflexive.) Of course that doesn't mean that B is *always* translated as A, but at least it means that the graph represented by words and their translations is undirected.
Secondly, that's only one part of the redundancy. Even if the graph were directed, it would still mean that every Wiktionary would build that same graph, when building it once would really be sufficient.
Timwi
Foundation-l is for cross-project issues. Is there any reason this thread couldn't be on wiktionary-l? I expect it would be more likely to gain the attention of Wiktionarians there than it would here.
Please see http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l for details.
Angela.
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Timwi wrote in part:
Imran Ghory wrote:
there's not much that can be done about it, becuase words in differnet langauges aren't reflective.
(Two words are possible translations of each other if their meanings have a non-zero intersection; this property *is* reflexive.)
As a mathematician, I suppose that I should jump in here and say that the word that you want here is "symmetric", not "reflexive". ^_^
-- Toby
Toby Bartels wrote:
Timwi wrote in part:
(Two words are possible translations of each other if their meanings have a non-zero intersection; this property *is* reflexive.)
As a mathematician, I suppose that I should jump in here and say that the word that you want here is "symmetric", not "reflexive". ^_^
Yes, you're right. I always get them mixed up. Just today I did a past exam question, and this time I got them right. Lucky me :))
Timwi
Timwi wrote:
We would thus have hundreds of entries for, say, "five" in hundreds of languages, all of which say nothing else than "this means five" and the same list of translations into all other languages. Isn't this an incredible nightmare to keep in sync?
Now we have Wiktionaries in loads of languages, and all the redundancy above is multiplied /again/ by the number of languages.
No; for example in the Polish Wiktionary we have the following rule:
a Polish word -> translation into all languages a non-Polish word -> translation into Polish only
That's the only logical way of doing that.
Am I the only one who thinks this is unbelievably redundant?
You're not.
I understand that initially it wasn't clear whether Wiktionaries in other (than En) languages would be established at all. However, they are there now, so the redundant lists of translations should be moved from EN to the respective lng wiktionaries.
Tomasz Sienicki wrote:
No; for example in the Polish Wiktionary we have the following rule:
a Polish word -> translation into all languages a non-Polish word -> translation into Polish only
Ah, I see. Yes, that makes better sense. There's still some redundancy in it because the translations from a Polish word into all languages would include a translation into English which would also have to be added on the page about the Polish word in the English Wiktionary, but I'm happier with that.
I hope that convoluted sentence made sense.
Am I the only one who thinks this is unbelievably redundant?
You're not.
Oh, good :)
So, uhm ... I suppose people should really get together and agree that this policy should also be pursued on the English Wiktionary (and possibly all others too). Otherwise the incredible redundancy will even be complemented with outrageous inconsistency. :/
Greetings, Timwi
--- Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
... We would thus have hundreds of entries for, say, "five" in hundreds of languages, all of which say nothing else than "this means five" and the same list of translations into all other languages. Isn't this an incredible nightmare to keep in sync?
And every language Wikipedia should have an article about Europe too.
Now we have Wiktionaries in loads of languages, and all the redundancy above is multiplied /again/ by the number of languages. We would be collecting the translations for the word "five" n� times, where n is the number of languages. I don't know how many languages there are on this planet, but even if it was only 1000 languages, this means 1000000 (one million!) times the same list of words.
Yes - there would be a great deal of redundancy for the translation lists. Interwiki MediaWiki/Template pages would solve that. We have the same problem with interwiki links too - the same list minus one change has to be every language version of an article.
Am I the only one who thinks this is unbelievably redundant?
Only for the lists, not for the whole entries. I like the fact that Wiktionary is also a translating dictionary - it makes it much more useful.
--mav
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Daniel Mayer wrote:
--- Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote:
We would thus have hundreds of entries for, say, "five" in hundreds of
And every language Wikipedia should have an article about Europe too.
My impression is that the English Wiktionary will contain the articles
[[five]] - this means the number 5 [[fünf]] - this means five in German [[fem]] - this means five in Swedish [[cinq]] - this means five in French
and the German Wiktionary will contain the articles
[[fünf]] - dies bedeutet Number 5 [[five]] - dies bedeutet fünf auf Englisch [[cinq]] - dies bedeutet fünf auf Französisch [[fem]] - dies bedeutet fünf auf Schwedisch
and the Swedish Wiktionary will contain the articles
[[fem]] - detta betyder siffran 5 [[five]] - detta betyder fem på engelska [[fünf]] - detta betyder fem på tyska [[cinq]] - detta betyder fem på franska
etc. (none of these German or Swedish Wiktionary pages exist yet)
It gets even more complicated when words are ambiguous ("Sex" is both an English word, and the Swedish word for "six") and deflected (separate entries for go, went, gone). "Go" is a verb with so many meanings (go by bus, go for it, gone with the wind, ...) and should they all be explained and translated again on the went and gone pages? In "gone with the wind", gone means lost. But can this meaning also exist in another tense such as "went", "go" and "goes"? I think I'll go with the wind.
This Wiktionary concept spans a space so wide that filling it seems an endless task. I'm not yet convinced that it is meaningful even to try, which is why I don't. I might have misunderstood something, and those who are convinced should of course go ahead (not with the wind, though). There could, however, be more people like me, who need more information or motivation before they are convinced that this is how they should spend their evenings in the coming year.
There are already 38649 articles in the English Wiktionary. The German Wiktionary contains 971 pages, but only 39 qualify as articles. I don't know what is missing in the other 932 ones. The Swedish Wiktionary has similar proportions: only 117 articles out of 996 pages.
Already, the Swedish Wiktionary's entry on the German word "Wörterbuch" is rather impressive, http://sv.wiktionary.org/wiki/W%F6rterbuch and there is an interwiki link to the German Wiktionary. But I guess it will be long before more than a few languages will be linked to Swedish in this way. It seems far more likely that all languages will link to English.
There are some out-of-copyright Swedish dictionaries available at http://runeberg.org/saol/8/ (for spelling, printed 1923, 378 pages) and http://runeberg.org/svetym/ (for etymology, printed 1922, 1284 pages). They are scanned and OCRed, but still need some proofreading. Perhaps someone can find that useful.
Lars Aronsson wrote:
"Go" is a verb with so many meanings (go by bus, go for it, gone with the wind, ...) and should they all be explained and translated again on the went and gone pages?
Well, personally, I would like for "goes", "went" and "gone" to simply redirect to "go"...
The German Wiktionary contains 971 pages, but only 39 qualify as articles. I don't know what is missing in the other 932 ones.
I don't know that either, but I just went to have a look, and their Main Page explicitly says "PLEASE DO NOT CREATE ARTICLES YET." Apparently they want to think about the layout template and general organisation first. Quite obviously they are even more paranoid about consistency than I am, and I do acknowledge that consistency is an order of magnitude harder to accomplish in something like Wiktionary (which is mainly structured data) than in something like Wikipedia (which is mainly just free-form text).
Timwi
On Mon, May 17, 2004 at 02:42:00AM +0200, Lars Aronsson wrote:
Already, the Swedish Wiktionary's entry on the German word "Wörterbuch" is rather impressive, http://sv.wiktionary.org/wiki/W%F6rterbuch and there is an interwiki link to the German Wiktionary. But I guess it will be long before more than a few languages will be linked to Swedish in this way. It seems far more likely that all languages will link to English.
That's the 2: and 6: namespace, I think that a fresh mediawiki (CVS) has about 750 articles.
ciao, tom
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