cookfire cookfire@softhome.net wrote:
Muke Tever wrote:
- Do they know whether the Hebrew definition is a translation of the French definition, vice versa, or written independently?
They don't have to. They read and compare the ones they do understand. If they find inconsistencies they can fix them.
Here I am mostly concerned for the users here, not the editors.
It would even be possible to mark the other definitions as 'dirty' orin need of being checked as well.
This is easily abused though. (Had to clean up [[you]] today because of this. It'd been like that for a month.)
- Do they have any way of knowing whether the French definition has any more or less information than the Hebrew one?
Only if they click through, I guess, but that's true now as well, except now they don't even know if the French definition even exists.
Gerard's interwiki bot has been working well on en: for quite some time now.
- Do they know whether they are perhaps for different senses of the same word? (Did the person who added the definition in Hebrew know enough French to mark it as a translation of a French one?)
The situation is worse with balkanized Wiktionaries. In the endeavour we're in, I am not sure perfection is possible, but things certainly can be improved. If a person adds a translation that doesn't fit in one Wiktionary, it doesn't get seen by many people and it will take a very long time before anybody notices the error.
[snip]
I'm not talking about the separate wiktionaries here, but the UW's feature of linking what is a translation of what... and I'm not talking about errors here either. I mean if, say, the French only defines "financial institution" and the Hebrew only "shore of a river" under "bank". Or if they both have "financial institution" but aren't marked as translations of one another. It's possible that I'm entirely missing the mark as to the features of this feature, but I havnt been introduced to any concrete examples here so all I have is speculation.
All the translations of the content will be found in the sameplace, instead of having to hunt across all the different languageWiktionaries.
Interwiki links do that already, and are flexible enough to handle information that isn't just a translation of prior information.
Take a look at bank in the English, the Dutch and the German dictionaries. The links are flexible, but the pages don't get updated.
Apparently because there aren't the editors to do it.
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.
This, frankly, seems impossible, except for words with very specific semantics. I would like to see how this is supposed to be done.
I'll try to give an example, but it'll take some time. Right now I need a way to include the contents of one page into another in the wiki interface. Anyway, please humour me and tell me what's wrong with the following:
- One word/term/expression has a series of meanings
- Each of these meanings has a list of synonyms and translations in
different languages.
- The translations can be given as a list with occasionally a comment
about usage, caveats, etc.
First off, when you say an added translation will be available to each and every user are you talking about a separate translation table for every word, where every French user can see the Hebrew translations of English "you", or a magic table that adheres to "you", "tu", "vous", "o senhor", "o senhora", "אתה", etc. simultaneously? Both seem impractical, for different reasons, but it was the latter I was thinking of.
Regardless: Second, attaching a translation table to every *sense* of a word will be rather excessive, especially when a word has many separate senses and the same word translates several or all of them. Hopefully there will be a kind of information-condensing mechanism?
Thirdly (and this a minor point) I would like to see example sentences accompanying translations. (This minor because eventually the translation's own entry will have an example sentence, hopefully.)
Last, what happens to a translation table when a valid definition that's accumulated translations is split or merged with another? (Like what happened with [[you]].) Presumably some kind of dirty marking would happen to the translations themselves, but if the translation table is attached to the senses themselves, is there some provision for moving it? (It's entirely possible that this is no problem at all, but again, there's no sense of what the interface looks like, though the impression I get from descriptions so far is that this won't be very transparent.)
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.
Or maybe [[You]]. :p
I'll have a look at it, but I wanted a spelling of a word that exists in more than one language.
[[I]] then ;) though that's a quite muddy case.
*Muke!