Hoi Erik did send this e-mail to the developers. I think however that you will be as interested in it as the developers. The relevance is that the Commons "tags" as Erik calls them use meanings defined in Ultimate Wiktionary. It is a preview that is really rough, but it shows the idea of using meaning and translations really well.
Thanks, GerardM
-------- Original Message -------- Subject: [Wikitech-l] A small Ultimate Wiktionary demo Date: Sun, 04 Sep 2005 21:57:47 +0200 From: Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de Reply-To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia developers wikitech-l@wikimedia.org
A while ago, Gerard posted this on Meta: http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_Ultimate_Wiktionary_for_Commons
It was a short explanation how UW could be used to internationalize categories on the Wikimedia Commons. I've now hacked together a small mock-up that demonstrates (hopefully) more clearly how this could work in practice:
http://epov.org/uwd/index.php?title=Tag:Dog&action=edit
(Further demos will be posted on http://epov.org/uwd/ in the coming weeks and months.)
It should work in Firefox and IE. The only active component are the radio buttons you can click.
Essentially, what this shows is:
1) A new tag for images of dogs is created. (In this demo, I call categories "tags", because I hope this will be what they are eventually called.)
2) The user can choose from the languages they speak to clarify which language this tag name is written in.
3) Based on the tag name and language, a lookup on UW is performed, which fetches all the associated meanings for this word.
4) The user selects one of these meanings.
5) Automagically, another lookup is performed to determine the available translations, if any. After saving the tag, it is then instantly available under these names in the other languages.
In the demo, the first two meanings have translations available, while the other two do not.
Why is this so powerful? Because, if UW itself is successful and contains many words, it almost instantly makes the entire media repository on Commons available to speakers of all languages. (Now, hopefully, you can see why we've been excited about getting millions of translations for free from the Logos project.) No need to create many different tags - just select the right meaning. Furthermore, it builds bridges from other projects to UW. The language work we are constantly doing will no longer be redundant, but focused on one place.
A 14-year-old Italian kid can then use the tag "cane" to look for photos of dogs, while a Maori girl from New Zealand can use "kurii". Moreover, the same category hierarchy can be used to browse in different languages (based on user perferences, a fallback hierarchy would be queried to determine the language that should be used should no translation be available).
We could also automatically make use of synonyms, plurals and inflections (though this requires further changes to the category code beyond internationalization). Given that we are mapping one of multiple meanings to a single tag, there will be tag collisions -- those will have to be dealt with through disambiguation. But this is not important: Try to see the tag name merely as a key to a meaning. What this key is called is secondary.
The key principle of selecting a meaning and then performing automatic translations can be used in many different contexts. For example, in Wikidata, one could use the same principle to internationalize field names such as "Country", "Flag" and "Population".
This application also shows that UW must contain everything from words to names to phrases. There is no limit to the scope of it. This makes it a potentially massively useful tool for both human and machine translation.
The category internationalization functionality will not be part of the first release of Ultimate Wiktionary, but we believe we can get funding to work on this later. I believe that UW, in combination with better tagging features in general, could make our tagging system the most advanced one available. Flickr, for example, has no localization, is unlikely to ever get semi-automatic localization, and apparently supports no synonyms either.
See the demo footnotes for further explanations. Feedback is welcome. (I'll be away until Wednesday.)
Best,
Erik _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikimedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l