Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Muke Tever wrote:
Redirects are not an appropriate tool for spell checks.
Then what do you suggest would replace it, so the dictionary can be useful?
There are several reasons why redirects will not work.
- At this moment in time, there are some 76.000 words. When you have
some 760.000 words, you will have a need to add a redirect for every added word. I do not think that this is reasonable to ask from the contributors to Wiktionary.
Yes, that was why I thought breaking case-folding was silly.
- When a word exists both as a capitalised word and as a noncapitalised
word, you will not be directed from one to the other word. This works both ways.
Yes, and this is why en.wiktionary is now being pushed into adding a see-also line to every such page, like the one at the top of http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nadir
- In a paper dictionary you only find words in the proper capitalisation.
Yes, and you will find them whether you are searching with the proper capitalization or not.
- When the content of the Ultimate Wiktionary is to be used for spell
checking, there will be software that will perform this functionality. The functionality that will allow for uppercase that is typically not correct will be in the software not in the content of the UW. Even so, certain words are only correct in a certain context, otherwise words like their and there can be used without it being recoginised. This is to say that there is more to spellchecking than what can be indicated by redirects in any Wiktionary.
Yes, as I said earlier, it needn't be mediawiki #redirects, but there will have to be a reference of some kind. I am not talking about machine spell-check, but *human* use of the dictionary. There will be notes saying that people who have found [[its]] may be looking for [[it's]]. Such in fact already exist, e.g. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/its#Usage
Consequently, as far as I am concerned redirects are of no use whatsoever in any Wiktionary.
Yes, IMHO #redirects are much less useful than most of en: thinks, though I do find them to have their use occasionally. On la: where words are to be disambiguated, it makes sense to redirect [[sulfur (en)]] and [[sulphur (en)]] together, because they are the same word.
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/Sulphur_(en)
Your arguments against having words in the proper case do not convinceme, but you already knew that.
No, I'm not against having words in their normal case; I just don't think that the URL is a useful place to communicate such information. (And as I have mentioned before, it is improper for a title to be in lower case.)
*Muke!