Hi Gerard,
I had an interesting conversation with Brion. We do not agree on everything. One of the things we do not agree on are redirects.
In my opinion, Wiktionary should not have redirects. A word is either spelled correctly and it will have its lemma or it is not and there will not be a lemma with the incorrect spelling. In Brions opinion there are links to lemmas and as we need to ensure that these links remain ok, we need redirects to make this possible.
This might work for English, but not for all languages. I think that redirects should be possible. This would make sense for 1) verb conjugation. I would like to simply link most of the declination forms to the main verb entry, as long as no other language entry uses the same heading. Example: Low Saxon conjugation of "to be". "He was" => "he weer". I would simply redirect this to "wesen" (en: to be). I would not like to be forced to write a whole article stating that "he weer" is 3. person sing, simple present of "wesen". I would like to include the conjugation table only once. 2) dialect variations (of which we have a lot in Low Saxon): for "to be" we have "ween/wesen/sien" as regional dialects. I would redirect two of them to the "wesen". I would not like to be forced to write a whole article stating that "ween" is a variant of "wesen". 3) orthography variations. We also have several competing orthographies for Low Saxon. I would like to be able to just redirect to the main orthography that we use.
In the end it might be nice to have all such explanations, but nds.wiktionary.org still has to be written, and it would simplify this writing a lot.
One crucial decision is that only correct spelling is allowed.
This is a no-go for minor languages where "correct" spelling does not exist.
Kind regards,
Heiko Evermann