Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I agree. As I have said ... probably many times now, 99% of Wiktionary articles are stubs.
If you want stubs look at the Ido Wiktionary. 8-)
I hit special:randompage once on en: and io: and got:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Benignant http://io.wiktionary.org/wiki/Seenessel
Not much difference there, except that en: has a part of speech and io: has a language index category...
nl: doesn't fare much better, returning http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/yei which manages language, category, part of speech, and definition... But the word is spelled entirely wrong (according to [1] and en: it should probably be ေရ, though since Google search ignores Burmese text [!!] I can't really confirm that)
(For my part, randompage on la: brought up http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thursday which isn't all that hot either.)
Anyway, this reminds me of why I don't find duplication of effort a problem in general. I don't trust any wiktionary for words outside its native language, for one. Too many people import lists of translations and don't do any fact-checking (I had to respell several Kalaallisuut number words in en recently) or even reality- checking (someone put in "cicňnnia" as the Sardinian for [[stork]] some time ago--I had to hunt down and fix a lot of Sardinian mojibake in several articles imported from the same source when I ran across that one).
nl: I've found to be particularly bad about this, as it won't just add the translation to the lists without checking, they'll actually create full articles for them (like 'yei' above, or another word under the [[nl:water]] list, Dagaare "koO", which appears to be an ASCII rendering for koɔ...).
Will the UW have any way to note that information was added by a non-native speaker?
IMO the more effort put in (can't really say it was _duplicated_, as outside of very specialized technical terms and the communalized SAE semantics, just because something translates an English word doesn't mean it's the best translation of the French, Greek, or Chinese word that also translates the English..., and at the very least that has to be checked), the more chances we have to find discrepancies and make a better dictionary by checking them against each other.
*Muke! [1] http://www.ayinepan.com/literature/search_word.php?word=w