On Thursday 01 September 2005 17:59, Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Heiko Evermann wrote:
The duplication of words that are spelled the same in different dialects or orthographies is inherent in the database design. This is essential if you want to have definitions and etymology in these dialects or orthographies. If you are willing to accept that definitions and etymology can be spelled in orthographies other than Sass there could be a solution but as the nds.wikipedia also has to standardise on Sass, I think this is a rather unlikely scenario.
Definition and etymology would be the same. Your approach would be a duplication of efforts. It would be sufficient to allow one entry to belong to several orthographis, as in 1:n instead of 1:1. So this is not inherent in the database design. It is the design bug that I complain about for some time. 1:n would allow us to enter the data the way we think appropriate. And it still leaves us the opportunity to add individual entries when other users really think that explanations must also be duplicated along the orthographies (which I really doubt). So they can, if they want to, but they are not forced.
I am interested in who your "we" is. I did recently discuss this design
Well, count me in, for the start.
What you call a design bug is in actual fact a design feature. One point that you are missing is that the meaning of a word spelled the same between dialects may be different. This is exactly one reason why this duplication is needed. The same is true for etymology; when a word
That is not reason for duplication at all. If a string of letters has different meanings in different dialects, each of these meanings should have a row in "word" table, with different wordID. Each of these wordIDs should be related to a SEPARATE spellingID, not the same one, even though it's still the same string of letters; for one, their languageIDs are different. Each of these spellingIDs, if valid, should of course be related to separate ValidSpellingID; and it should be possible that each of these ValidSpellingIDs is related to several spelling authorities. It is the norm, rather than exception, that different authorities recommend same spelling for same word.