Muke Tever wrote:
edward molasses molasses-one@shaw.ca wrote:
On Friday 08 July 2005 2:46 pm, Muke Tever wrote:
The purpose of interlanguage links is to link to an article on the *same* topic in another language. For the purpose of a dictionary, this means the same word. Thus an article that treats the English word 'house' must use interwiki links for other languages with articles also treating the English word 'house'.
Some wiktionaries have been using an inline link in the translation table for the kind of link you appear to be looking for, i.e., a link from en:house to it:casa... this generally appears next to the translation as a small symbol such as ^, °, ☞, or ↺, depending on the wiktionary.
When the Wiktionaries are better written, http://it.wiktionary.org/wiki/house will have an actual definition of the word as well.
Thank you for the help Muke! I'm not sure I understand completely, is it that traditionally editors of wiktionary word pages will add the interwiki link using the english translation of the word as the page name because they don't know what the translated word would be, and the wiki of the other language's site will have the intermediate page named with the english translation to make it easier for the english wiki to link to it without knowing the translation of the word?
No.
The purpose of the interlanguage links is to link to the *same topic* treated in *another language*. For wikipedia, this means [[en:house]] would have a link to [[it:casa]], because wikipedia writes articles about people, places, things, and ideas, but for wiktionary this means [[en:house]] links to [[it:house]] -- this is because the subject matter of wiktionary is *words*.
It may help if you consider the page title to be in full "the word 'house'". The corresponding Italian page has to be "la parola 'house'", which is why [[en:house]] links to [[it:house]].
Remember, each wiktionary aims to cover all words in all languages. The page that links to [[it:casa]] is http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/casa.
I think that Muke's explanation is accurate. The aim of all words in all languages for all languages is a very ambitious one. When the project is successful it will be like no other. We've had some interesting but difficult challenges on the way, and none of us believes that we have seen the end of challenges.
If you look at each Wiktionary from the perspective that it is written primarily (but not exclusively) with native speakers of that language in mind. In theory every Wiktionary should have an entry under "house" and under "casa". In every case it will include a reference to every language in which the words occur, but all the explanations will be in the host language. It will also take into account that "casa" is not just in Italian, but it can also be in Latin where it only applies to some kinds of houses, and in Spanish where it can also be an inflection of "casar" (meaning "to marry"), and whatever we might discover in other languages.
Thus "house" on the English Wiktionary will have a translation list which should link to the translated form on the English Wiktionary, and that in turn will have interwiki links to all the relevant languages.
Ec