I have been talking about this since quite a while (although without any concrete proposal)... using Wikipedia's popularity to benefit Wiktionary. Jimbo Wales showed up in IRC and I took the opportunity to talk with him about it. I had already discussed it on the IRC channel. Here's a transcript of the chat <pre> <Hemanshu> hello <jwales> Hello! <Hemanshu> I was wondering if Wikipedia should incorporate links to Wiktionary in articles? <Hemanshu> Wiktionary is really lacking interest <jwales> It sounds like a reasonable concept to me. <Hemanshu> we need to use Wikipedia's popularity to make Wiktionary more popular <jwales> I agree with that. <Hemanshu> good <jwales> I can think of two ways... <jwales> First, encourage more interwiki linking with wiktionary, somehow. <jwales> Possibly even go so far as to have a bit of new markup. <Hemanshu> yes <Hemanshu> maybe we can have a small icon link next to words <jwales> Second, we could put a link on every page of wikipedia, "Look for a definition of 'Article Title' in Wiktionary". <Hemanshu> yeah <jwales> That second one might generate resistance, though, because many many times the article title is not really a word that needs defining, per se. <jwales> Take a look at this: <jwales> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_Japan <jwales> just an example for us to brainstorm about. <jwales> Now, that article has interlanguage links for 'fr' and 'ja' versions of the same topic. <jwales> Perhaps a simple extension of the interlanguage syntax, but for definitions, would be sensible. <Hemanshu> yeah I see <Hemanshu> yes <jwales> Here's a better brainstorm: <Hemanshu> that would make it possible to link to definitions of article titles <jwales> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics <Hemanshu> and that could be implemented really easily <jwales> There are 4 interlanguage links there. <jwales> We could have a new one, like: <Hemanshu> being able to provide quicklinks to definitions of word used in the article could be more difficult <jwales> [[definiton:paraphyletic]] could be the simple new markup. <Hemanshu> yeah <jwales> And that magically makes a a link, in the text at that point, to wiktionary. <jwales> I would support something along those lines. <jwales> Will you run this by wikipedia-l and wikitech-l? <jwales> I'll make noises of joy. <Hemanshu> :) <jwales> Maybe it will excite someone and then it might happen. <Hemanshu> I haven't joined the mailing list <Hemanshu> I just have to send an email to? <Hemanshu> wikipedia-1@? <Hemanshu> can I post this conversation on the wiki? <jwales> Yeah <Hemanshu> ok <jwales> Anyhow, talk to you later I'm going to have to go. <Hemanshu> ok <Hemanshu> nice talking </pre>
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Wikimedia PR wrote:
I have been talking about this since quite a while (although without any concrete proposal)... using Wikipedia's popularity to benefit Wiktionary. Jimbo Wales showed up in IRC and I took the opportunity to talk with him about it. I had already discussed it on the IRC channel.
[chat snipped]
I would support something along the line of interwiki links in the header, but to wiktionary, for article titles that are also words with definitions. I don't think we should liberally spread through links to Wiktionary in running text though. In the worst case that would result in every single word in Wikipedia being hyperlinked to its definition, which would be a bit strange. Even if only "unusual" words were hyperlinked, it'd have a negative stylistic effect in highlighting the "big words". It'd also have a subtle hint of "this is a word you might not know", and given the wide variation in vocabularies it'd be hard to come up with some reasonable set of such words---much better is to assume everyone knows all words, and let them use a dictionary (such as Wiktionary, or some other online dictionary, or one of their desk) on their own if they don't.
-Mark
I would support something along the line of interwiki links in the header, but to wiktionary, for article titles that are also words with definitions. I don't think we should liberally spread through links to Wiktionary in running text though. In the worst case that would result in every single word in Wikipedia being hyperlinked to its definition, which would be a bit strange. Even if only "unusual" words were hyperlinked, it'd have a negative stylistic effect in highlighting the "big words". It'd also have a subtle hint of "this is a word you might not know", and given the wide variation in vocabularies it'd be hard to come up with some reasonable set of such words---much better is to assume everyone knows all words, and let them use a dictionary (such as Wiktionary, or some other online dictionary, or one of their desk) on their own if they don't.
I agree. Wikipedia is not everything2, and I'd prefer to keep wikilinking analogous to the use of small caps in print encyclopedias (that is, as a pointer to an article of interest in the same topic).
I like being able to look up words conveniently, but that's a feature I'd rather have in my desktop environment. (In my case, this means highlighting a word and hitting command-=) Cluttering a page up with hyperlinks would be confusing at best and counterproductive at worst, even if Wiktionary links are stylistically differentiated (with a different color, perhaps).
-Mark
Delirium wrote:
Wikimedia PR wrote:
I have been talking about this since quite a while (although without any concrete proposal)... using Wikipedia's popularity to benefit Wiktionary. Jimbo Wales showed up in IRC and I took the opportunity to talk with him about it. I had already discussed it on the IRC channel.
[chat snipped]
I would support something along the line of interwiki links in the header, but to wiktionary, for article titles that are also words with definitions. I don't think we should liberally spread through links to Wiktionary in running text though. In the worst case that would result in every single word in Wikipedia being hyperlinked to its definition, which would be a bit strange. Even if only "unusual" words were hyperlinked, it'd have a negative stylistic effect in highlighting the "big words". It'd also have a subtle hint of "this is a word you might not know", and given the wide variation in vocabularies it'd be hard to come up with some reasonable set of such words---much better is to assume everyone knows all words, and let them use a dictionary (such as Wiktionary, or some other online dictionary, or one of their desk) on their own if they don't.
I agree that it would be futile to try to guess what words the reader does not know, (not to mention somewhat paternalistic). A person who is not a native speaker of English would want to seek the meanings of more words than a native speaker.
Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you want to look up in Wiktionary". Clicking would open a question mark cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.
Wiktionary is not yet full enough to adequately deal with this, but perhaps in another year it could be a nice feature. By that time it may become feasible to ensure that every word in the other sister projects has a definition in Wiktionary.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you want to look up in Wiktionary". Clicking would open a question mark cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.
That sounds like a great idea to me, if there's a reasonable way to implement something like that (Javascript?).
-Mark
On Fri, 21 May 2004 17:49:49 -0700, Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you want to look up in Wiktionary". Clicking would open a question mark cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.
That sounds like a great idea to me, if there's a reasonable way to implement something like that (Javascript?).
That specific implementation sounds iffy. If I were to go about doing this (in any web page) I think the following procedure would be needed: * have the link set some sort of Java-script variable (wiktClick=true) and perhaps adjust the stylesheet so the cursor would become a Help cursor * set the word in its own private <span> or something with an onMouseClick event which calls a function with its self as an argument which would load up the relevant page if clicked when wiktClick was on.
The problem would be that, from what I know of JavaScript in HTML, you would need an event handler for EVERY SINGLE WORD. This could easily quadruple the size of the HTML pages. So I don' t think this implementation would work per se.
What might be better is some sort of new syntax. Perhaps something like: <<fancyword>> Then you could have a link which could toggle hilighting for these words and a JavaScript handler for sending people to Wiktionary when it was toggled.
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you want to look up in Wiktionary". Clicking would open a question mark cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.
That sounds like a great idea to me, if there's a reasonable way to implement something like that (Javascript?).
That sounds cute, but how would it deal with the fact the inline word might be "examples" when the word you'd want to look up in wiktionary would be "example", etc.
If you really want to encourage wikipedians to use wiktionary, how about simply adding a wiktionary search box next to/under the wikipedia one?
Fabi.
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fabiform wrote:
--- Delirium delirium@hackish.org wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you want to look up in Wiktionary". Clicking would open a question mark cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.
That sounds like a great idea to me, if there's a reasonable way to implement something like that (Javascript?).
That sounds cute, but how would it deal with the fact the inline word might be "examples" when the word you'd want to look up in wiktionary would be "example", etc.
If you wanted something to link to an example rather than the word "example" you might need some kind of special treatment. I think, though, that words like that are a very small subset of the overall vocabulary.
If you really want to encourage wikipedians to use wiktionary, how about simply adding a wiktionary search box next to/under the wikipedia one?
That too would be a welcome alternative. However, it does depend on our own search engine being functional again. I really miss it. :'(
Ec
Kaixo!
On Thu, May 06, 2004 at 01:33:55PM -0700, Wikimedia PR wrote:
<Hemanshu> I was wondering if Wikipedia should incorporate links to Wiktionary in articles?
We use something like that in the Walloon wikipedia; we have a pseudo-namespace "Motî:" for dictionnary entries; and whenever we use a word in an article that may not be very known (Walloon is a small language with no official support, in fact there didn't existed any language-wide dictionary until now, so putting definitions is more needed than with other languages, like English or French, where anybody is supposed to have a good dictionnary on his shelf).
So it goes like this (from [[wa:Clå d' esté]]):
« On clå d' esté, c' est on [[Motî:sonnant|sonnant]] [[clå (del pea)|clå]] »
"sonnant" means "bleeding", and doesn't deserve an encyclopedic entry; but as some people may not understand it first time, a dictionnary entry link is usefull.
Note we don't use wictionnary but a pseudo-namespace on wikipedia; first because we started with it previous to the start of the wictionnnary project; and also for easyness; if a simple inline link can't be done (like in the example above), then it is useless. Now, if http://wa.wiktionary.org/wiki/sonnant could be made linkable as [[Motî:sonnant]] from wa.wikipedia.org; then it would be nice and we could ask to migrate the dictionnary section (note however that wiktionary would be more useful case sensitive, eg: http://wa.wiktionary.org/wiki/M%C3%A5tche and http://wa.wiktionary.org/wiki/m%C3%A5tche are not the same).
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