Muke Tever wrote:
Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
I agree. As I have said ... probably many times now, 99% of Wiktionary articles are stubs.
If you want stubs look at the Ido Wiktionary. 8-)
I hit special:randompage once on en: and io: and got:
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Benignant http://io.wiktionary.org/wiki/Seenessel
Not much difference there, except that en: has a part of speech and io: has a language index category...
One big difference, the word is spelled binignant not Benignant
nl: doesn't fare much better, returning http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/yei which manages language, category, part of speech, and definition... But the word is spelled entirely wrong (according to [1] and en: it should probably be ေရ, though since Google search ignores Burmese text [!!] I can't really confirm that)
If you were a part of the nl.community you would have changed it. As it is, all these wiktionaries are islands, there is no cooperation. We waste our time and effort.
(For my part, randompage on la: brought up http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/Thursday which isn't all that hot either.)
Anyway, this reminds me of why I don't find duplication of effort a problem in general. I don't trust any wiktionary for words outside its native language, for one. Too many people import lists of translations and don't do any fact-checking (I had to respell several Kalaallisuut number words in en recently) or even reality- checking (someone put in "cicňnnia" as the Sardinian for [[stork]] some time ago--I had to hunt down and fix a lot of Sardinian mojibake in several articles imported from the same source when I ran across that one).
So you spend a lot of effort on the en.wiktionary. From my point of view it does me no good. It does not help. You give excellent arguments why a UW is what we need.
nl: I've found to be particularly bad about this, as it won't just add the translation to the lists without checking, they'll actually create full articles for them (like 'yei' above, or another word under the [[nl:water]] list, Dagaare "koO", which appears to be an ASCII rendering for koɔ...).
When a word is added as a translation, a "placeholder" will be created in the UW, this is just a word with a language. If koO should be koɔ, it is plain wrong and, this to spot this you need a big community of people. This is exactly one argument why an UW would be beneficial as it would increase the size of the community. On your authority I changed koO to koɔ, something you would have done if you felt part of this community.
The argument that there should not be a full lemma is wrong. The aim of the wiktionary is to have all words in all languages.
Will the UW have any way to note that information was added by a non-native speaker?
This is relatively trivial to do. I blogged about this feature; I would tie it in with the "babel" functionality as I use it on my Meta and nl.wikipedia userpage.
IMO the more effort put in (can't really say it was _duplicated_, as outside of very specialized technical terms and the communalized SAE semantics, just because something translates an English word doesn't mean it's the best translation of the French, Greek, or Chinese word that also translates the English..., and at the very least that has to be checked), the more chances we have to find discrepancies and make a better dictionary by checking them against each other.
Again, you give arguments why we need a community to do these kind of things. It also means that we should share the work. Now everything done in one project will need to be done in another. A huge waste of effort because at this time we do not make a dictionary we make too many wiktionaries.
Thanks, GerardM
*Muke!
[1] http://www.ayinepan.com/literature/search_word.php?word=w