Muke Tever wrote:
Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
The following is what he says there
Using this imperfect system of templates has taught us that 80% of the lexicological content can be expressed using templates.What evidence is there of this? Sure, we can get closer to that when translations are viewed as mechanical acts and we can ignore all subtleties of language. In reality such an attitude only goves a lot of pap.
The evidence can be found in the practice of the it: or nl: and other wiktionaries. Please explain "goves a lot of pap".
it:, nl:, and the other wiktionaries are 99% stubs. Certainly it's conceivable that the language-independent content *now* is 80%. But in the future, when there is actually enough content to make wiktionary worth using, both in real definitions and auxiliary information such as etymological analysis (not just "{{xx}} X, from {{yy}} Y, ..."), discussion of pronunciation and grammatical usage in everyday vs. formal or standardized use, citations and translations of same into the user's native language, a real and useful thesaurus of each language (I mean more than a simple list of synonyms), etc., then the numbers will surely be quite different.
This is why I don't see anything particularly "ultimate" about UW. If all you really want to build is a "translationary," I don't doubt UW will be reasonable and sufficient. Outside of that, from what I understand, it looks like the vast amounts of real content will be provincialized, stuck in the language of the user who added it. It will be just like Wikipedia in that way, where it is little or no effort to carry over an infobox template, say, from en.wikipedia to la.wikipedia, but the real meat is not the standardized template but the actual article about what is being discussed... and UW only seems to concern itself with the equivalent of the infobox.
An entry will have the 'real content' available in many languages at the same time. It will be presented to you in the language of the interface that you used if available in that language. There will also be icons to show in what other languages this etymology or comment is available as well. And a button to translate it to a new language that wasn't available yet. Nothing gets provincialized. All the translations of the content will be found in the same place, instead of having to hunt across all the different language Wiktionaries. It's not just about translations. Although, they too, will benefit of only having to be put in once and become available for each and every person using the Wiktionary.
Ultimate Wiktionary is just a name. Rather fitting, if I may say so, but just a name all the same. It had to be called something.
I'm going to try and make an example of a common word and what it might look like in UW.
Bank seems like a good candidate to do this with. It is defined in en, de, nl, sv and volapük in the English Wiktionary. The Swedish Wiktionary doesn't have an entry for it yet. The Dutch and German Wiktionaries and they both have an extra definition in Indonesian, which is lacking in the English Wiktionary. Oddly the German Wiktionary is not defining the German word, so the entry probably wasn't added by a German speaker. With the UW there would already have been a beginning of an entry since it had been added by somebody working through the English language interface. The same goes for the Swedish definition. What's most important though is that Indonesian wouldn't have been lost to the English Wiktionary community. It may not have come with a definition written in English, but a definition in another language would have been available, ready to be translated. It would have been in view and not hidden from sight in the Dutch and German Wiktionaries waiting to be discovered by somebody who happens to enjoy jumping from one language Wiktionary to another.
Indicating what more exists will be taken care of by the software. It won't have to be added manually.
Have to run now.
Polyglot