Sabine Cretella sabine_cretella@yahoo.it wrote:
Yes, and this is why en.wiktionary is now being pushed into adding a see-also line to every such page, like the one at the top of http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nadir
Why don't you just insert the word in the "Related words"??? It is a related word - so a "see also" doesn't make any sense. (or maybe "variants")
Because they are not at all related. [[nadir]] is from an Arabic word naẓīr meaning 'counterpart', and [[Nadir]] is either from nazīr "rare" or naḍīr "auspicious". Outside of having a common source language they have nothing in common.
- In a paper dictionary you only find words in the proper
capitalisation.
Yes, and you will find them whether you are searching with the proper capitalization or not.
So what you are talking about is the search function, but not the article - this means that whenever you insert a word into the search field it should give back both results, with capital letter and without (it is sufficient thought to use google search).
Actually here I am talking about paper dictionaries, which don't have search functions. The Wiktionary search hasn't come up at all.
I don't think people are so stupid to search for an Englishword with a capital letter if it isn't normally capitalised -
It's rather the contrary really. People are used to case-insensitive search, and generally don't bother to capitalize anything when typing in search boxes, if my webserver's logs are any indication.
when studying English the first things you learn is that English usescapital letters only for months, days, countries, languages etc. andin titles and in some exceptional cases - so why should native speakerspretend capitalised entries in a dictionary?
Wiktionary page titles have no direct counterpart to anything in a paper dictionary.
http://frath.net/stuff/wikt-vs-paper.png
This is especially noticeable in languages which use optional pointing, such as Hebrew and Arabic, in which case the pointed form you would find in a paper dictionary is the in-page headword, and the page title is a normalized form *without* points--exactly the form the user normally searches for.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%D7%9E%D7%90%D7%93%D7%99%D7%9D
Cf. http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Categorie:Woorden_in_het_Hebreeuws which also uses normalized page titles. It is inconsistent to only normalize certain languages.
Yes, as I said earlier, it needn't be mediawiki #redirects, but there will have to be a reference of some kind. I am not talking about machine spell-check, but *human* use of the dictionary. There will be notes saying that people who have found [[its]] may be looking for [[it's]]. Such in fact already exist, e.g. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/its#Usage
Also this has to do with the search function - if I remember well, using google for the search it already works like this.
Not everyone uses Google for searching Wiktionary. In any case, Google suggests spellings when you give it a word that it doesnt recognize... both "its" and "it's" are English words; it won't suggest "it's" if you've searched for "its".
Consequently, as far as I am concerned redirects are of no use whatsoever in any Wiktionary.
Yes, IMHO #redirects are much less useful than most of en: thinks, though I do find them to have their use occasionally. On la: where words are to be disambiguated, it makes sense to redirect [[sulfur (en)]] and [[sulphur (en)]] together, because they are the same word.
No, they should be two single words, connected on the relative page under "Related words" or "Variants". Redirects do not have any sense even if there are some printed dictionaries that use this in order to save space - we don't have the space problem so why use it and not just create two separate pages connecting them under relations?
Because you will have duplicated information (viz., etymological information, pronunciations, derived and related terms, translation tables, definitions, etc.) that have to be synchronized--that, or you deal with the POV issue of labelling one spelling as "more correct" and worthy of hosting the information alone. This problem has been run across in several places on en.wikt, such as gray/grey, armor/armour... and in the source of several yet remains the injunction:
<!--If you edit this entry, please also edit the following entry to ensure these two entries remain in synchrony: grey-->
<!--If you edit this page, please also edit "armour" to ensure these pages remain in synch.-->
This is ridiculous, especially when the variation is not due to regional issues, as is the case with gray/grey--'gray' is, as the pages say, an American spelling, though this is slightly misleading, as it is not a color/colour-type pair: both 'gray' and 'grey' are common acceptable forms within this country (cf. gray vs lightgrey in HTML).
*Muke!