On 5/30/05, Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
I see Gerard's vision as being based in the need
for technical solutions
for machine translations. In theory with his method one should be able
to look up a word in one's own language and immediately be able to find
a corresponding term in whatever other language one desires. I at least
agree with him that such an approach would require far more
sophisticated software than what we now employ. Much of what he
proposes appears to be very highly dependent on templates and technical
codification rather that plain language editing, and I'm afraid that
that would scare away many potential new contributors who don't feel
comfortable with the more technical approach.
I think its a safe assumption that it isn't for machine translation.
Plenty of crappy machine translators already :). The problem with
Wiktionary as it stands is that there's really one way to view it - as
a web page. If you want to query it (translations of the word 'mouse',
all Romanian nouns) you can't really. Its not 'machine readable'
(perhaps what you meant). Its not flexible, if there's desire to
change the formatting of the articles (entry formating is a much less
obvious and more complicated job then in Wikipedia) it would be a huge
undertaking. We'd have to see it to judge it obviously. It should be
decided that it is the way to go or that it is not... we shouldn't
ever have two competing Wiktionaries.
For my part translation is a secondary function of a
dictionary.
Documenting the history of a word, citing quotations that support uses
of the word, and commentary on the usages of a word are more interesting
and important. I recently did a little of this to raise awareness of
the divergence of [[gourmand]] in English and French. I find our
present software essentially adequate for the task.
Gerard has been talking about his Ultimate Wiktionary for a long time,
but so far I have not seen examples of what Gerard's Wiktionary will
look like, how it will work or how it will be editable. Perhaps if he
presented more concrete examples attitudes could change.
I guess "old-school" is probably a good term. I have very little
involvement on the technical side of things. I do find it a chore to
insert a picture or a table, but I figure it out when I have to. When
templates appear in an article that I am editing, I need to make extra
effort just to track where some of them come from or what they mean. If
I, as a person who has been here for over three years, am having trouble
with this, it must be worse for a non-technical person who just wants to
indulge his love of words.
Ec