On 29/07/05, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
Gerard Meijssen wrote:
Because it is important to know for a noun what its gender is.
Sorry if I've not been following UW discussions, but the gender of words can and have changed over time. How will UW address this? Can I, for example, indicate that a certain word had a male gender in the 17th, 18th, 19th century, but neuter in the 20th? And that in 1890-1920 the percentage of people who used male or neuter gradually shifted?
In a Wikipedia or Wiktionary article, these complex relations and exceptional cases can be described in plain text, as I did in the previous paragraph. But how do you express them in a relational database schema?
And what if you discover such complex relations as the project develops, what is the UW strategy for modifying the schema over time? Right now you seem to be designing an "ultimate" schema that will then be frozen and kept static for all time. The very name of the UW project suggests this kind of thinking, and to me that is about as foreign as marxism.
As was done with WM 1.4 to 1.5, some very complex queries - and a lot of processing time :) - would be needed to change the database design. Therefore it would be undertaken with care and, well, it can't really be planned for.