Jimmy Wales wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
Not really, since the existing wiktionaries would continue as they have all along.
I am not agreeing or disagreeing or taking any position on this at all. Please consider my questions about this to be merely data gathering. :-)
Why should we have such a formal break? Why shouldn't we instead transition from one to the other in a seamless way? I worry a lot about duplication of effort, etc.
Are there objections from old-school wiktionarians to the ultimate wiktionary plans? Is it possible that we could address these objections through code?
I'm very sorry that I don't already know all of this, but I'm sure you can all get me up to speed quite quickly.
The following are my further comments that I have added in the Wiktionary Beer Parlour, for those who don't haunt that place. Perhaps, before we get into copyright licensing issues, we should make sure that we are not pursuing a chimera.
In all fairness Gerard's proposal for his Ultimate Wiktionary has been around for some time. According to the timetable Prototype III is now available, but I have been unable to find a link to it. A version that is fully integrated with Mediawiki 1.6 is due by the middle of June. There is all manner of talk about how all the Wiktionaries can be integrated into one big Ultimate Wiktionary but there is precious little practical progress.
At some point Gerard expressed that when the Ultimate Wiktionary was operational we would not be forced to migrate, but predicted that we would all see this new project as the best thing in on-line dictionaries ever created. He further predicted that we would all find it so marvellous that we would be inspired to move everything there without any difficulty whatsoever. I accepted that at face value, and was prepared to wait until there was something in place before wasting any more time debating it. That explains my opinionated silence on the matter. A recent comment by Jimbo on the mailing list suggested to me that he has been led to believe that there is more to this project than can be supported by facts. That made it necessary to comment.
It's wonderful that Gerard has been able to talk €5,000 from a Dutch company to fund his proposal, but let's get real. Gerard's Ultimate Wiktionary is currently at the level of a techies pipedream, and we can only wonder what's in the pipe. Adapting to software that does not exist showes that UW really stands for "Ultimate Wheelspinning". We don't know how Mediawiki 1.6 will handle this by mid-June; Mediawiki 1.5 is only now in development and has not yet been released. Let's not become dependent on software that has yet to be written.
While I'm at it I should remark how effective these proposals have been at propelling the Ido Wiktionary to become the 7th largest Wiktionary with some 9,000 entries. Ido is a minor dialect of Esperanto. Of course most of the entries don't have a definition, and only show a translation of the word into one other language. I sometimes wonder if some of these people understand what a dictionary is all about. <small><small> I hope nobody is reading this on the Klingon homeworld. </small></small>
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