Nikola Smolenski wrote:
On Monday 25 July 2005 09:02, Andrew Dunbar wrote:
On 7/24/05, Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote: accent according to the offical orthographical rules, Russian (and some other Cyrllic script languages) can optionally indicate where the stress is and in some contexts it is the norm. With Hebrew and most
Yes, and one of the places where it is the norm is in a dictionary ;)
Regardless of how is this resolved in the end, it would make sense to built in at least some ability of determining such things automatically. You don't want to duplicate entire Russian corpus (with inflections, it could easily rise to ten million words), so that you could have each one of them with and without diacritics. It makes sense to have only canonical spellings in the dictionary, and a bit of code to offer nearest match when someone tries to retrieve a word spelled in a different way.
As a matter a fact I do want all inflections even if they are ten million words. Now I do not expect to have all these inflections to start off with but as far as I am concerned I want them all. I already have 222.930 Dutch words and they do include many inflections. I asked Brion about this at one stage and he saw no problem with a big database. from a discspace pov it does indeed not amount to that much .. :)
As we explicitly want to use the UW as a repository of correct spellings, a repository that can be used by Open and Free software projects, we explicitly want the physical records. When we have technology to generate inflection well and good but we will still want all the correctly spelled words.
One crucial decision is that only correct spelling is allowed. This means that all incorrect spelling will be amended or deleted. As Ultimate Wiktionary is a database, it does not cater for things like redirects. I urge you to have a look at both the design criteria and the design itself because this is the time when it is relatively easy to make changes. Once Erik starts coding the UW database, having finished Wikidata and the GEMET implementation, the moment has passed us by.
Please list out of the above points what is and what is not considered a correct spelling as Ultimate Wiktionary is concerned. Please then indicate whether every correct spelling is also suitable as a headword/ article title/lemma or whatever you wish to call it.
The way I see it, this decision is a political and not a technical one. Each word could have several spellings, each of which is related to a spelling authority. If you want common misspellings in the dictionary, simply have "Common misspelling" as a spelling authority. Similarly, nothing prevents you from having several different spellings of a same word attributed to a single spelling authority, which solves all the problems you mentioned above.
I have for one compelling reason added a table Misspelling. This is where the absolutely wrong spellings may go. Its function? to prevent people to add wrong spellings time and again. So this table is to grow organically. Now there is this massive file on en.wikipedia and en.wiktionary, this file contains typos. This table is not really there for the typos but for the words that are spelled wrong for the "right" reason. Meaning can relate to several almost identical Words (and by implication Spelling). This may mean that several orthographies are implied. These orthographies are to be named and indentified. Common misspelling is not an orthography is anything it is the antithesis of orthography.
From a database point of view a Word has one Spelling. That is given the ERD very much technical and non negotialbe. It is the Spelling that is validated by a Spelling Authority.
Thanks, GerardM