--- Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Yann Forget wrote:
Hi, I think I found some errors in the Dutch Wiktionary
.......
This seems like an awfully difficult problem to police. We are basically at the mercy of the person who puts up this kind of material.
A possible solution might be to forbid the inclusion of translations unless
- There is an active Wiktionary in that
language, or 2. A source has been cited for a particular translation. Are there any other fairly easy ways for us to fact-check this kind of information?
Well there is always the talk page for each word. One of the benefits of a distributed project is that everybody can have their say and wandering experts and native speakers are always welcome.
The real problems are very different instead: 1) co-operation 2) time 3) computer / internet literacy
1) co-operation Many people don't "think global and act local" - they just would like to see their name at top and that's all - whenever they have to contribute it is hard to motivate them. Out of approx. 1000 translators I tried to interest only three would contribute and not even one of those three online. There are many, many small wiktionaries and only a small group is now interacting (and this is great :-)
2) time Not everyone of us has enough time to do everything he/she would like to do. Many would like to do more and many do a lot on single wiktionaries - the same work done could be quite easily used for all wiktionaries --> database solution
3) computer / internet literacy Like I said above: the few people that write me and who would like to contribute have one huge problem: most of them are not used to wikis - they send me glossaries to be included (and these glossaries often represent years of work for a translator) - on one hand they just don't have the time to restart from the beginning uploading one word after the other (we have one of approx. 7000 checked translations) and on the other: they just don't know how to do this. Many of my colleagues use the computer just like a typewriter. As soon as they have to work with something else but Word they indeed have difficulties. So the language experts are there, but they are not willing/not able/don't have time to care about online work. I know from others I talked to on the phone that they just don't offer their help as they belive not to be able to do anything online or that their work (very valuable glossaries made by specialists) are not of interest.
I have been thinking about these themes for some weeks now, discussed with colleagues, discussed with my former business partner (who is always full of ideas and checks my Italian writings for wiktionary) - the only real solution would be: a human interface between many language specialists and wiktionary, but not every single wiktionary - a global one - so every contribution would have immediate effect and only the UI would be different. Yes, I know, some don't like this idea, but witktionary is very different to wikipedia, wikisource, wikibooks etc - it uses data that is interchangeable if prepared wisely.
There are many potential contributors that could and would help with their expertise, but they need an interface (a human one), someone to talk to and we should find the way to include their expertise, the linguist one.
I'll write a second mail that centers on a small project (that hopefully will become very, very huge) we are trying to achieve and includes some other basic questions. Even this one depends on proof reading, new entries etc. I am just coping with the above difficulties within this project and step by step it becomes very clear what we need.
Ciao,
Sabine