Sabine Cretella wrote:
That's what I dislike on the actual way of organising terms - you find every kind of writing in there - OK, on the English page there are the words beginning with other scripts. But how about the student studying German and going to the German wiktionary he finds "Anguille" - at a first glance if he/she knows french he/she could think that the french term is used in German as well - and this will happen - people are lazy - don't think about how we use the tools since we know them, but think about people who don't take much time - what then happens is that the student is being corrected the term and the end is: wiktionary is not a good ressource even if the fault is not wiktionary's fault, but the student's fault. He'll then talk with his friends etc. etc ... what comes out of this.
I don't think that we need to worry about all the stupid things that a user can do. If a word has 5 meanings one of them needs to be listed first. It's the user's duty to use common sense in making his choice. On Wikisource we had someone translate the Sherlock Holmes title "His Last Bow" into French as "Son dernier coup d'archet". It was the completely wrong meaning of "bow". Reasonable people do not hold a company responsible for the supidities of its users, except in the United States when they feel they can earn a fortune by startingf a lawsuit. :-)
So there are two possibilities: or foreign terms are identified as such by colour/symbol/language code in the listing or there are subsections for the single listings in different languages.
Each page is divided into separate sections for each language represented. Having the English and French for "sensible" on the same page helps in recognizing that they are false friends. I like to approach the problem from the perspective of the user who has a piece of text in front of him without being certain even of what is the language of the text. That is a fascinating challenge.
Hmmm ... I hope this is understandable - I was just thinking about my pupils at school (when I was still teaching) - using the dictionary even if you explain over and over again 80% of them just take the first translation they found as they don't like reading all the context. I'd like to avoid misunderstandings - that's all. For myself I have no problems with mixed up lists - working with languages every day it is normal, but we should think about those who potentially would have difficulties.
No vaccination exists that will prevent infectiously stupid behaviour. Are you familiar with the Scott Adams cartoon strip "Dilbert"? See the archives at http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/dilbert-20040809.html :-) Ec