On Sat, 06 Nov 2004 08:04:32 +0100, Gerard Meijssen
<gerardm(a)myrealbox.com> wrote:
Hoi,
Yannf has added a category "language" to the categories that hold the
words in a language. This gives you one list with all lists of words in
a particular language.
What, like our Latin [[Category:Linguae]] ? ;)
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Linguae
(I realize I digress entirely with this next section here:)
A lot of Latin categories belong to other categories. It keeps them
all in order. For example you can start at the list of names of
animals in the family "Canidae":
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/Category:Canidae
and it is categorized under the order "Carnivora", which is
categorized under the class "Mammalia", which is under the phylum
"Chordata", etc., the whole tree under a taxonomy category. I think
it is a better system than other wiktionaries use. Instead of being
broad in domain but narrow in coverage (like en:'s "English mammals"
or fr:'s "Lexique en français des animaux") it goes for narrow in
domain but broad in coverage: entries are categorized by family, but
contain words in all languages, which I think is a more useful kind of
collection...
It does have the drawback of requiring many more categories, though:
currently with 682 words we have 213 categories, which is even more
categories than en: has! ;)
I do find the use of "English" as a category name to be useless. For me
the correct use of "English mammals" as a category name would refer to
mammals that are found in England. Even "English language" should be
limited to terms that are about the English language. A very broad
application that reduces it to any English word dilutes the value of the
term. Using another language name that way on the English Wiktionary is
slightly more justifiable, but the efficient use of "==Spanish==" should
work just as well to came up with a list of all Spanish words in the
Wiktionary, and a reliable Boolean search of "==Spanish== and
===Adjective===" should give us all Spanish adjectives.
I don't know whether using "Carnivora", "Canidae", etc. will do
much for
us. Shouldn't that be the responsibility of the new Wikispecies?
Ec