Gerard Meijssen wrote:

There are several things "wrong".

*There is one diliberate line to distinguish the meaning of the word in two languages; Engels & Frans. This line does not serve its purpose *Because of the heading the word itself Engels & Frans are underlined _and_ they get a line from front to back.

It just does not look good.

This appears to be an aesthetic issue relating to the layout of the page. It is not for us who don't speak Dutch to get involved with this. Each Wiktionary will approach the matter in a manner suitable to its own users.

Ec

Tim Starling wrote:

Gerard.Meijssen wrote:

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Take a look at the restriction on the number of messages (5) per page. This is "reasonable" in wikipedia, but when you want to internationalise a page and use messages to indicate things that differ from language to language, like the gender of a word, you can have dozens words that are masculine and you get garbage as a result.

I've received a number of complaints about this from Wikipedians, and this is the first one I've had from someone from Wiktionary, so I fail to see how this indicates Wikipedia-centrism. It's a problem I intend to address during my reworking of template inclusion, over the next week or two.

My understanding must have missed something here. I've never encountered such a problem. Maybe I've just been around for too long. :-)

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When there are problems, they seem to be relatively quickly fixed for the wikipedia's but, for the wiktionaries the consistency is lacking.

While biting my tongue over the capitalization issue, I don't want to be too critical of the developers about this. They're doing what they can, and they need to priorize their limited times. We need more technically competent people to deal with software issues, but they also need to be able to keep some distance between themselves and the frequent bickering that takes place. Tim and Brion have handled that well.

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When you have an environment like wiktionary/wikipedia they _need_ to be the same in order to be able to fix things and understand the behaviour of the software. The wiktionaries do not behave in a same way. You can create an article with a Chinese (characters) name in English but not on the nl:wiktionary (and others).

Wiktionaries were set up by copying the MediaWiki namespace and language files from the associated Wikipedias. You can't create an article with chinese characters in the title on the nl wikipedia either. English and German are exceptions to this rule because of special-case work done by the respective contributors.

That's unfortunate about the Chinese titles; I guess that I have been under the mistaken impression that Unicode implied that CJK would be be broadly available. Maybe I've been spoiled by having this feature available in English.

I don't think that it's a necessity that everything on a Wikipedia and its corresponding Wiktionary needs to function exactly the same way. The capitalization issue is a good example. Current policy has worked well in Wikipedia, with only a limited number of difficulties. For Wiktionary this has created awkward difficulties.

Please understand that I'm not obliged to fix problems just because you want them fixed. You are not paying me. I try to make people happy, but you have no right to expect a minimum level of service.

Agreed. What positive contribution has our critic offered?

I'm amazed at the poor quality of the English Wiktionary, it seems to miss so many important English words. Most new pages seem to be slang, jargon, and people adding a few dozen words from their native tongue. Plans to import a public domain dictionary were abandoned, and now there seems to be little organisation or direction. Perhaps Wiktionary can be revitalised with extra features, but I doubt stylesheet changes will be enough. It needs a different look and a whole raft of features. It needs methods for easily adding new words, and for categorisation and listing. But I'm neither excited by the project nor optimistic about its future. So most of all, it needs people who want to work on it.

I want to take this personally in the most positive sense. I essentially agree, and need to accept my share of the responsibility. One of our earliest debates was over whether we should be a primarily English dictionary or a translating dictionary. A lot more people seem concerned with translations, and are satisfied with translations that show significant naïveté toward concepts of translation. Slang and jargon need to be addressed, but should not become dominant. The project to import a public domain dictionary has not been abandoned, only ignored.

I too really would like to see more organization and direction. That may require people to accept certain tasks and carry them through to completion. I accept that my inability to herd cats as one of my own flaws.

New features, stylesheets, looks, etc. are not what will save Wiktionary. They are not a substitute for hard disciplined work. I don't see any difficulty in adding new words. New ones are being added regularly, even if they are foreign or jargon. Categorization and listing is a problem, and we did discuss the matter of pseudonamespaces some months ago. Of course, I've also been around long enough to know that without practical support from other Wiktionarians I would have been alone in this enterprise, and Wiktionary would not have been helped by a further fragmentary effort.

Most of all I agree that we need people wo want to work, not just dilettantes. At this stage content is still more important than obsessing about format. I still believe that the concept is sound, and that it has a tremendous capacity for becoming a unique resource. It is unfortunate that all the projects have frequent visitors with fantastic visionary ideas, but little appreciation for the work needed to bring these ideas into reality.

Ec