Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
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
Not in English. From a real dictionary: http://www.bartleby.com/61/96/B0189600.html
Cf. also Latin benignus.
If you're referring to the capitalization, the article states that it is 'benignant'. Capitalized 'Benignant' only appears in the title (as is customary capitalization for English).
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.
The time and effort is wasted adding things one doesn't know anything about, when the result is only going to be inaccurate.
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.
No, I don't put a lot of effort on en:, and havnt for some time really. "cicňnnia" was from when I was an en: regular, yeah. I ran across the errors in the Kalaallisuut when doing a reality check on stuff imported to la: from en:. The words had no google hits whatever outside of wiktionary (always a bad sign). So I went and found the right ones, fixed the la:, and the en: where I got them from, since it is a wiki after all.
I wouldn't have even been checking kl: words at all if I wasn't working to create a *new* source. If we only had one wiki, "arviniq" et al. would have sat there until 1) some kl-speaker came along to fix it or 2) some user wanted to make a good page for the kl word. (And if it was a nl-type user, they wouldn't have even checked the kl word before creating it, and both the bad translation and the bad article would stay until some kl-speaker came along to fix it.)
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.
As long as UW "placeholders" are just a word and a language, fine. But nl's "placeholders" are more than just a word with a language. Much of the time they also give a part of speech (which is usually the part of the speech of the Dutch word, regardless what it may be in the actual language -- hint: not always the same, especially for languages outside of Standard Average European) and a definition (which is also usually the same definition as the Dutch word, again regardless of how different it may be; in many cases they are broader).
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.
I prefer that no information be given than wrong information or information that has not been checked. All words in all languages does no good if they are not reliable.
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.
I would love to see a hundred independently-created dictionaries of Dagaare. A hundred and one, counting UW. :p I think it is a good thing that information be gathered separately by separate projects: it means people may use some discernment in what they add, and don't just copy things blindly; if one project fails on this, another may come through; if different projects disagree on data, we know there is a problem, which we don't know if all we get is one point of view. I'm not saying Ultimate Wiktionary shouldn't exist; I'm just saying that I don't agree with the idea that "duplication of effort" is without merit and something to be done away with entirely. Competition has its own merits.
*Muke!