That's the thing with the ambiguity. That's the reason I'm suggesting
articles be stored in Traditional and converted into Simplified
on-the-run.
Traditional-to-Simplified conversions will have a much much much
smaller number with ambiguous conversions than
Simplified-to-Traditional. If a Simplified user writes additional
content in Simplified, but parts of it are converted incorrectly
before being added to the database, then a special process will take
effect:
Since the wrong character and the right character in Traditional are
the same character in Simplified, it won't have any effect on
Simplified users who will continue browsing it as it is. However, the
error *will* show up to Traditional users, who will then correct it.
This correction will have no effect on the apperance of the text to a
Simplified user, but it will make it so it uses the correct character
for a Traditional user.
This eliminates the need for special semantic markup.
--Jin Junshu/Mark
On Wed, 15 Sep 2004 13:51:54 +0100, Rowan Collins
<rowan.collins(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, 14 Sep 2004 20:31:11 -0700, Mark Williamson <node.ue(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> <snip>
> > I propose to store all text in Traditional but convert it to
> > Simplified (perhaps with some sort of caching so articles do not have
> > to be re-generated each time) because TC>SC conversion is less
> > ambiguous than SC>TC conversion. If somebody adds text to an article
> > but they are typing in SC, it will be converted to TC when it adds it
> > to the database. In the edit window even though, text will appear as
> > whichever domain you are at. Titles of articles should be converted
> > too. If a mistake is made in conversion when a Simplified text is
> > added to the database, eventually somebody browsing at
> > http://zh-tw.wikipedia.org/ will notice this error and hopefully fix
> > it. In the mean time this error won't cause any problems on zh-cn
> > because it will convert back the same way.
>
> This is more or less the concept I was mulling over as a very general
> solution, but I realised that it does have a big disadvantage: naive
> users 'correcting' the translation may simply shift the error into the
> opposite version. Or, more specifically, there is no way of
> distinguishing a translational correction from a factual one. For
> example:
>
> Say you have a database in English, but with automated conversion to a
> dialect, we'll call it Blinglish. The English database contains the
> text "...while eating an apple...", and this is viewed by a Blinglish
> user. They replace the word 'apple' (in the Blinglish version) with
> 'orange'. The software now has no way of knowing whether the use is
> saying that 'orange' is the Blinglish word for 'apple', or whether the
> Blinglish user is correcting a fact, and the English version should be
> updated to say 'orange'.
>
> Obviously, the translation corrections *should* be labelled using
> special markup, but the majority of users find special markup very
> hard to learn, and huge numbers of users pass through who have no idea
> how to use such things. In order to encourage them to return and
> contribute more, we need to not only make the system work *despite*
> them, but to actively fit them into it.
>
> If, to continue my example, we translate 'orange' back to English,
> when it is in fact supposed to be an idiomatic translation, another
> user may come along on the English site and correct it back to
> 'apple'. The Blinglish version will then be in its original state, and
> the cycle will continue until a more experienced user spots the
> ambiguity and marks it up appropriately. A waste of everyone's time,
> and a definite turn-off for the casual users whose changes keep
> disappearing.
>
> If we can rely on a majority of the users understanding more than one
> of the languages involved, we could more-or-less avoid this by
> providing some obvious mechanism for saying "this change is because of
> a translation issue", that even technophobes can use. But anyone that
> only understands one version will not know themselves whether it is a
> translation issue - only that it is, within the version they are
> looking at, a mistake...
>
> --
> Rowan Collins BSc
> [IMSoP]
>
I'd like to be responsible for the creation of a wikipediaversion in
gothic.
Full name: gothic
Language code: got
Number of speakers: 0
Number of people which has knowledge about gothic: at least 400, probably
much more.
_________________________________________________________________
Auktioner: Tjäna en hacka på gamla prylar http://tradera.msn.se
Scríobh Mark Williamson:
>Apparently you have not been reading a single word I have said,
>because I have said already that there are already kids being raised
>in Gothic, yet to the best of my knowledge one couple claimed to be
>raising their child(ren?) in Klingon but it turned out they weren't or
>something.
For the parents teaching their kids Klingon, the attempt failed, because
Klingon doesn't (or didn't, at that point) have enough words to describe
everyday objects like "table". The children didn't take to it, and the
experiment was abandoned. However, I do remember reading a news story
awhile ago about Child Protection officers raiding some caravan in the deep
South, where they found, in addition to a lot of squalor, that the father of
three children only addressed them in Klingon. So, I guess that they could
be termed first-language speakers of the language.
As for Latin, anyone who went to a Catholic school can probably recount
horrible experiences of learning that. There are lots of people with decent
Latin out there, even if nobody much speaks it as a first language. I think
there's a place for a Latin-language wiki though.
- Craig Franklin
-------------------
Craig Franklin
PO Box 764
Ashgrove, Q, 4060
Australia
http://www.halo-17.net - Australia's Favourite Source of Indie Music, Art,
and Culture.
Tired as I am of receiving emails about Gothic (it seems to me that I have
more emails about the language than there are speakers), I want to suggest a
compromise.
Rather than create a Gothic Wikipedia, we start with a Gothic Wiktionary.
This has potential to be a valuable resource for researchers. It could be
multilingual, translating Gothic words into English, French, German, Spanish, and any
other languages. Then, if the Gothic Wiktionary takes off (say 10,000 words
and phrases), we can revisit the question of creating a Gothic Wikipedia.
Danny
I have a question - when my mouse hovers over the "log in, my watchlist, my
contributions" at the top right, it jumps to the left of the page, behind
the wikipedia logo. Anyone know why?
James
WikiSpecies in currently in the process of being launched as an official
wikimedia project with an initial interface and basic functions at
www.wikispecies.org/
A big thank you to everybody who contributed to the project so far, from the
constructive discussion to the technical support. I hope that the interest
in wikispecies will remain as high as it seems to be right now.
In order to allow an efficient communication between all those who are
interested in wikispecies, a mainling list was created. To register at this
mailing list, please go to:
http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikispecies-l
I hope many of you register and want to become part of an evolving
wikispecies! Best,
Benedikt
--
NEU: GMX ProMail mit bestem Virenschutz http://www.gmx.net/de/go/mail
+++ Empfehlung der Redaktion +++ Internet Professionell 10/04 +++
I made on Meta page [[South Slavic NPOV page]] for (primary) NPOV
coordination for South Slavic Wikipedias (Bosnian, Bulgarian,
Croatian, Rusyn [they live in South Slavic region even it is East
Slavic language; also, they don't have Wikipedia, but they would
have], Serbian and Slovenian).
Official lanugages are South Slavic (+Rusyn), but if you don't know
any other, you can participate using English language.
I read this story on Newsforge, the imminence of this (expected THIS
fall) makes it really something. The material is of such a quality, the
breath of their data, the pictures alone, this is really big news ! As
the article says, openining up this content to the public, will make the
British culture much more important.
The license they will use will be the Creative Commons license.
http://trends.newsforge.com/trends/04/09/14/0715249.shtml
Thanks,
GerardM