............ As much as I remember the switch over should have been done on April 1st (no, not a joke), but then, even if it was decided no-one really moved. I am already cleaning the links on it.wiktionary to en.wiktionary since someone (withour logging in) added manually some interwiki-links using capitalised words and besides that creating messed up pages using {{PAGENAME}} instead of re-writing the word in the title - so basically all double work. Should whoever added these pages read this message: please never use the pagename-template again like you did - if you don't know how to create a proper page, just contact me (also by e-mail is fine).. Ciao, Sabine ___________________________________ Yahoo! Mail: gratis 1GB per i messaggi e allegati da 10MB http://mail.yahoo.it

Maybe someone can think of a way to create automatic links to pages with titles differing just by the case of the first letter? E.g. it would be helpful to have link to "aa" from the article titled "Aa". I have had no success trying to accomplish something like that using the available means of mediawiki. That's by the way one of the reasons why not-yet-so-big Estonian wiktionary has not switched over to case-sensitivite first letters yet. There could be use for a magic word similar to PAGENAMEE which would return the page title with spaces substituted by '+' characters. Klaus

Klaus-Eduard Runnel wrote: Hoi, This would be a bad idea. It may help some wiktionaries but it would certainly break others. There is a big difference between the implementation of the English wiktionary who for whatever reason stayed overly long with capitalised articles and wiktionaries like the Dutch, the Italian and may others who changed the capitalisation at the first opportunity. The difference can be found in things like the English wiktionary seems to cherish the redirect pages while all redirect pages on the Dutch and Italian .. and others are always deleted. The reason for this is that like in a paper dictionaray we only want correct spellings and an incorrect spelling should result in a "not found" message. Ultimate Wiktionary is a project that intends to merge wiktionaries and its communities and build additional functionality and community. However, until individual wiktionaries start to merge into it, you cannot assume functionality and certainly automatic functionality is possible that is incompatible with other wiktionaries. It is possible to create the Ultimate Wiktionary because from a technical point of view, it makes a clean break with the existing wiktionaries. The result will be a single project and as a consequence it will be possible to change its functionality when the need arises. One thing you have to consider with regard to the implementation of case sensitivity is, that the longer you wait the more work there is to make the necessary changes. Thanks, GerardM

Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: In the US, and probably in other places where spelling is not phonetic, one of the most common uses for a dictionary (if not the most common) is to find what the correct spelling of a word is. If there is not "spell check" in the form of redirects or see-unders, then the Wiktionary is useless for this. *Muke! -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/

Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Capitalization is separate from spelling (though both are parts of orthography). Your sentence is spelled correctly, though capitalized unusually. In any case, free capitalization of words is quite common--it occur in titles of works ("Antique Lightbulbs of the Early 19th Century"), in advertising ("Save Today on Great Unbeatable Prices"), in any case where a word is given a special kind of emphasis ("it wasn't just a smell, it was a Smell"), is used as a title of address ("you're not listening to me, Mother"), is made into a proper noun ("he was a Zealot"), etc., and formerly also optionally of nouns in general. One of the most venerated documents in our country begins: We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquillity, provide for the common defence [sic], promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. The only words never take normal capitalization are those that are decreed to be so from technical context, such as "pH" or 'sinensis' in "Alligator sinensis." On these grounds first-letter case-folding should never have been turned off; but, since it has been so done, redirects from capitalized forms should ALWAYS exist, because all other words may be found either capitalized or not capitalized, and a user, seeing an unfamiliar capitalized word in a text, does not know whether it is properly capitalized or not (and here we come again to the problem of users going to the dictionary to ascertain a word's orthography, and the need for redirects to establish same). In other words I think the whole move was nonsense, but you already knew that. Then what do you suggest would replace it, so the dictionary can be useful? *Muke! -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/

Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen(a)gmail.com> wrote: Yes, that was why I thought breaking case-folding was silly. 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 Yes, and you will find them whether you are searching with the proper capitalization or not. 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 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) 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! -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/

Sabine Cretella &lt;sabine_cretella(a)yahoo.it&gt; wrote: Because they are not at all related. [[nadir]] is from an Arabic word naẓīr meaning 'counterpart', and [[Nadir]] is either from nazīr "rare" or naḍīr "auspicious". Outside of having a common source language they have nothing in common. Actually here I am talking about paper dictionaries, which don't have search functions. The Wiktionary search hasn't come up at all. It's rather the contrary really. People are used to case-insensitive search, and generally don't bother to capitalize anything when typing in search boxes, if my webserver's logs are any indication. Wiktionary page titles have no direct counterpart to anything in a paper dictionary. http://frath.net/stuff/wikt-vs-paper.png This is especially noticeable in languages which use optional pointing, such as Hebrew and Arabic, in which case the pointed form you would find in a paper dictionary is the in-page headword, and the page title is a normalized form *without* points--exactly the form the user normally searches for. http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/מאדים Cf. http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Categorie:Woorden_in_het_Hebreeuws which also uses normalized page titles. It is inconsistent to only normalize certain languages. Not everyone uses Google for searching Wiktionary. In any case, Google suggests spellings when you give it a word that it doesnt recognize... both "its" and "it's" are English words; it won't suggest "it's" if you've searched for "its". Because you will have duplicated information (viz., etymological information, pronunciations, derived and related terms, translation tables, definitions, etc.) that have to be synchronized--that, or you deal with the POV issue of labelling one spelling as "more correct" and worthy of hosting the information alone. This problem has been run across in several places on en.wikt, such as gray/grey, armor/armour... and in the source of several yet remains the injunction: <!--If you edit this entry, please also edit the following entry to ensure these two entries remain in synchrony: grey--> <!--If you edit this page, please also edit "armour" to ensure these pages remain in synch.--> This is ridiculous, especially when the variation is not due to regional issues, as is the case with gray/grey--'gray' is, as the pages say, an American spelling, though this is slightly misleading, as it is not a color/colour-type pair: both 'gray' and 'grey' are common acceptable forms within this country (cf. gray vs lightgrey in HTML). *Muke! -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/

Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: 'sic' is not an objection. It is the Latin word for 'so, thus' and is used to indicate that an unusual feature of a quoted text is present in the original--i.e. 'it was thus given'--and is not due to editorial oversight. The unusual feature of 'defence' is that it is the only noun in that preamble that is not capitalized--all the other ones are; the point being that the framers of the Constitution[1] were writing English where nouns are regularly capitalized. This is not a feature of emphasis, and was carried on through even mundane regions of subsequent text: Representatives and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several States which may be included within this Union, according to their respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths[sic] of all other Persons. http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/data/constitution/article01/ Current en.wiktionary practice _will_ require separate articles for [[number]] (modern practice) and [[Number]] (former practice), which I don't think is at all reasonable; redirecting from [[Number]] to [[number]] would be a thinkable alternative (and is what happens currently), but even the removal of these redirects has its advocates. If capitalization is as integral to spelling as the advocates of this recent move have been insisting, then to divorce [[number]] from [[Number]] is to rob us of our linguistic history. If the Bund für vereinfachte rechtschreibung [sic] were to have its way and la Germanophonie were to do away with the obligatory capitalization of nouns, what would de.wiktionary do with [[kind]] and [[Kind]]? This is not a hypothetical situation, as this has already happened in English and the Scandinavian languages, and is something Wiktionary _has to document_, as 'all words in all languages' implies 'in all ages' as well. *Muke! [1] The text quoted was not the Declaration of Independence, however topical it would have been to post it about now. -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/

Ray Saintonge &lt;saintonge(a)telus.net&gt; wrote: Neither is the use of any German word that is capitalized in standard texts changed in those texts that do not employ that language's unusual capitalization standards. It is decorative, an aid to reading, and little more. Yes, I have been using long ſ, whenever it occurs, in the texts I have been citing when giving quotations for la.wiktionary, e.g. under http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/Bisemutum -- it comes up so often that I memorized the keyboard shortcut for it some time ago (it is 'alt-0383'). But then, I often use ſ in handwriting, so perhaps I'm biased. *Muke! -- website: http://frath.net/ LiveJournal: http://kohath.livejournal.com/ deviantArt: http://kohath.deviantart.com/ FrathWiki, a conlang and conculture wiki: http://wiki.frath.net/

On 7/1/05, Muke Tever &lt;muke(a)frath.net&gt; wrote: Only as useless as a paper dictionary already is. Hippietrail. -- http://linguaphile.sf.net

Yes it would be very nice to have a proper "browse" function someday. Right now it's not really possible due to all languages sharing the article space and few users will be interested in having all languages sorted together. In the future with a more dictionary-aware wiki this would hopefully become possible. Hippietrail. On 7/4/05, Muke Tever &lt;muke(a)frath.net&gt; wrote: -- http://linguaphile.sf.net

cookfire wrote: That's pretty well my take on the situation. I wouldn't put too much blame on Tim for this. A self-administered slap on the knuckles with wet spaghetti should be adequate punishment. We'll believe him when he says the punishment has been carried out. ;-) One determined opponent had succeeded in grinding the process to a halt, and it didn't look as though it would go anywhere without bold action. The clean up will be bigger than I would want, but we'll cope. There are a few points where we may still need special help from the devs, and those will become clear over the next few days. Ec