Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)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!
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