But think, what happens if user look for Russian "язык" or "месяц" etc. with new system? He will be forced to page that got Belorussian definitions. What if person looks for Spanish "justa"? User will get irrelevant Esperanto definition. Italian "cinta"? Ones again, not related page about Indonesian noun.
Hmm? No, that would be silly. The only language that should get that priority in any kind of disambiguation scheme is the language of the wiki.
What? There is no "disambiguation scheme" in this proposal. Look at example http://uk.wiktionary.org/wiki/November provided by Анатолій Гончаров in original post. First language that starts with A was shown. Lets stick to the point of discussion. *The core idea of this proposal is that we show user only one language after he searched for a word. Instead of showing all results.*
And my major objection - we better show relevant information after user hit "search" button, which is way more convenient, other then showing randomly selected alphabetical article. Not showing anything would be even worse.
If the language of the wiki doesn't have that word, but other
languages do, then one would get a disambiguation page, not whatever language happens to be first in alphabetical order. This is how the Latin Wiktionary has done it for years now. e.g.
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/greet (Not a Latin word, thus disambiguation)
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/formica (A Latin word; other languages linked from the bottom)
This is entirely different subject. I feel against creating millions of disambiguation page, but this is something for different discussion.
As Wiktionary grows,
there will be *fewer* like that.
How come? Have you ever paid attention how many words defined in English or French Wiktionary? Less then a million! And that is best Wiktionaries out there. In Russian language alone there are roughly one and a half million words. And there is absolutely nothing special about Russian language. Estimations for Ukrainian or Belorussian would be similar. With very low overlap - even alphabets are different. And there is thousands of languages out there. Even if Wiktionaries grow at a rate of one million new articles per year, in one century it would not be half of it supposed state in terms of words defined.
they are by definition not interested in anything else we feel like showing them.
I don't know who define what I'm interested in, as a user. And I'm a user indeed. And I rather have an easy access to information about word that interests me, other then have it hidden behind interface.
Vitaly aka TestPilot