--- Timwi timwi@gmx.net wrote: > Timwi wrote:
last time we discussed this, I think there was consensus to switch the English Wiktionary to make it stop capitalising article titles, right?
Guys! Please keep this on the mailing list, and don't reply to me personally. Thanks!
Sorry I'm so used to mailing lists having the Reply-To set that I didn't notice.
Brion wrote:
This idea relies on the existence of the script for step (2). :)
The idea was that I would write it. (Where else would my involvement in this be? :-p)
Note that there may be an effect on usernames
I'll leave the usernames capitalised, I guess.
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Whatever process we choose will require some manual fix-up. The process that you suggest is as good as any.
My suggestion will require significantly less manual fix-up than moving 400,000 articles to lower-case versions manually.
How can we show capitalization when a linked word begins a sentence?
The same way as everywhere else, [[until|Until]].
Is there some way to integrate upper cased, lower cased and accented characters in generated lists?
I'm afraid I don't understand what you mean by this.
I think he means that there are times when case-folding is very handy. Though I'm not sure exactly his context and he's also talking about accent-folding - which is not possible without lots of messy hacking.
I don't remember it being a consensus at all. I seem to recall some being quite opposed to it.
Really? Can you provide links? I only remember people emphasising that they don't mind because they think the current work-around work perfectly for them.
I seem to remember Polyglot being opposed, probably in the Beer Parlour. Not all of us are subscribed to this list. I stayed off because I had no space in my email account for mailing lists until a few days ago (Thanks Yahoo!).
I seriously don't see how anyone can seriously be opposed to having a dictionary with correct spellings. :/
Now this statement is pure rhetoric. I'm in favour of correct spellings and I'm sure everybody is. But there's more than one way to solve a problem and I'd like everybody to think this through and consider all possible ways to fix it before jumping in and making major changes.
The choices: 1. Case fold first letter only to uppercase. (current) 2. Case fold nothing. (Timwi) 3. Case fold all letters to lowercase. (Hippietrail) 4. A new directive to supply a prominent "Headword". (Hippietrail)
Against 1: * Headwords are prominently displayed uppercase when most should be lowercase. * Words which differ only by the case of the first letter must share a page. (common nouns vs. proper nouns) * Words which differ only by case the case of subsequent letters must be on separate pages. (abbrevations & acronyms) Against 2: * People are going to add duplicates thinking their word is not in the dictionary. * Quite a large number of entries will have to be changed back to uppercase after the script is run. * Words which differ only by case of any letter must be on separate pages. (proper nouns vs. common nouns vs. abbrevations & acronyms) Against 3: * All headwords would be prominently displayed lowercase when some should be uppercase. * Quite a large number of entries will have to be changed back to uppercase after the script is run. * Words which differ only by the case of any letter must share a page.
4. Is special. It can be implemented with or without any of the others. It will solve one issue nicely but I feel there are really two issues.
Issue 1 Prominently displayed headwords are misleading because they are also the name of the article.
Because the name of the article is currently always uppercase, all the headings generated by the Wiki software are in uppercase - which is very unprofessional for a dictionary. (This is why Polyglot started doing manual headwords below the part-of-speech section)
Issue 2 What should and should not be on the same page.
Currently we case-fold the first letter which means "bob" and "Bob" are both on a page titled "Bob" but "us" and "US" are on separate pages titled "Us" and "US"
I've read some peoples' opinions that they would prefer one entry per page but this is never going to work because of homographs anyway. Another issue is other languages. In some languages, certain diacritics (accents) are optional. Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin spring to mind. Some languages have marks which dictionaries use to show stress, which are not used elsewhere. Japanese and Russian are examples.
If we rely on the article name to be the headword, these will never fit. Using Polyglot's system they fit in perfectly. Words which differ only in case, optional diacritics, or stress marks can all be on one page.
Conclusion: I am in favour of showing correct spelling, case, and diacritical marks for all entries.
I am in favour of words which differ only in minor ways sharing a single page.
If we can break the connection between the name of the page and the headword, we won't have to see "PH" in big embarassing letters at the top of the article on "pH".
Having a directive which allows us to set the title to "pH" is one way. Having Wiktionary simply not display the page title, and instead rely on "Polyglot-style" headwords alone is another. In fact this may even possible just by changing the stylesheet.
Let the discussion proceed...
Hippietrail.
Timwi
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