Sabine Cretella wrote:
I thought a long time about a mail where someone said that redirects should not be deleted. It is not logic to me that a wrong writing should redirect to a correct form of writing.
Let's take the German word for "German" – language and adjective.
adjective = deutsch
noun = Deutsch (language)
These two would have two different pages – so there's no re-direct possible – you can just add deutsch/Deutsch as related word on the page.
if you take the Italian word:
soprattutto
There's only one way to write it "soprattutto" with lower case "s". At this stage it would be "Soprattutto" that is going then to be redirected to "soprattutto". And the wrong writing should then remain as a redirect? This would confuse people – they could believe that the version with the capital "s" is correct.
Another thing: many people, in particular language students, write this very particular word wrong – they write "sopratutto". Since to easen search you would also allow redirects from wrong words to the right ones this one should then be added? No… this does not make sense.
The only way a wiktionary may be: with correct written words, with correct upper and lowercase. All the other, obviously wrong, stuff must be deleted – otherwise the credibility and the work of many people will become less credible and important.
I know, this is hard word, but the sooner you do it the better it is. All contributors to the English wiktionary should for some days/weeks (depending on the number of actively contributing people) concentrate on the conversion of upper to lowercase where necessary and the admins should concentrate on the deletion of the redirects. When someone sees that somebody still adds with uppercase instead of adding a word just go on his/her user page and tell him/her what to care about and to help with the conversion work. If everyone does this you'll not need longer than a month and than have a neat and correct wiktionary.
I generally agree with you. I've never supported useless redirects. There is a strong argument that can be made for having entries for common errors, but I don't believe that they should be redirects. In the case of "sopratutto", a text that says "common error for [[soprattutto]]" would be more useful since it brings the error immediately to the mistaken person's attention. The comment that a redirection has been made is too easily ignored.
There is an perpetual argument on Wiktionary about the prescriptive or descriptive nature of a dictionary. A significant segment of the participants believe that any word that is used in any context should be in a dictionary. They would support the inclusion of any outright error, of "leet" or "1337" words from internet chat lines, of invented words, and of words from invented languages such as Romanica and Espresso. They resent being told that there is a correct way to use words. Of course if too much of this kind of material is included the credibility problem is worse than what you perceive.
Voting on the change has taken place, and the vote in favour this time was very strong. At [[Wiktionary:Capitalization transition]] I made a few suggestions about how the change might proceed, including some procedures that should take place before the change is made. One of these tasks is to generate a list of articles containing links that should be corrected before the change. Unfortunately we curently have a shortage of technically savvy editors. Hippietrail, the one person who has experience with generating lists like this, is the one regular contributor who has taken a strong position against the proposed change in capitalization. If we have another person who could generate the desired list, the change could go ahead much more quickly.
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