On 25/07/05, Nikola Smolenski smolensk@eunet.yu wrote:
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.
Surely it would be better for the search function to try some other possibilities, such as removing glottal stops from the input and searching again.
Besides, didn't we forget the Unicode possibility of the same character entered in two ways? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canonical_equivalence
Actually, ideally every word would have a "search name" which is worked out based on the language. It would only contain the compulsory characters, with a certain decision on e.g. German ä ö ü (to transform them in one direction or the other). It could also decompose all precomposed characters into sets of characters. This is a little bit like how some databases store the soundex index.
I think this would handle most cases. I certainly agree that redirects are a necessary technical feature for the rarer cases.