edward molasses <molasses-one(a)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