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.
*Muke!