New subject: [Fwd: [Wikitech-l] A small Ultimate Wiktionary demo]

4 Sep 2005

Hoi
Erik did send this e-mail to the developers. I think however that you 
will be as interested in it as the developers. The relevance is that the 
Commons "tags" as Erik calls them use meanings defined in Ultimate 
Wiktionary. It is a preview that is really rough, but it shows the idea 
of using meaning and translations really well.

Thanks,
    GerardM

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	[Wikitech-l] A small Ultimate Wiktionary demo
Date: 	Sun, 04 Sep 2005 21:57:47 +0200
From: 	Erik Moeller &lt;erik_moeller(a)gmx.de&gt;
Reply-To: 	Wikimedia developers &lt;wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org&gt;
To: 	Wikimedia developers &lt;wikitech-l(a)wikimedia.org&gt;

A while ago, Gerard posted this on Meta:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Using_Ultimate_Wiktionary_for_Commons

It was a short explanation how UW could be used to internationalize 
categories on the Wikimedia Commons. I've now hacked together a small 
mock-up that demonstrates (hopefully) more clearly how this could work 
in practice:

http://epov.org/uwd/index.php?title=Tag:Dog&action=edit

(Further demos will be posted on http://epov.org/uwd/ in the coming 
weeks and months.)

It should work in Firefox and IE. The only active component are the 
radio buttons you can click.

Essentially, what this shows is:

1) A new tag for images of dogs is created. (In this demo, I call 
categories "tags", because I hope this will be what they are eventually 
called.)

2) The user can choose from the languages they speak to clarify which 
language this tag name is written in.

3) Based on the tag name and language, a lookup on UW is performed, 
which fetches all the associated meanings for this word.

4) The user selects one of these meanings.

5) Automagically, another lookup is performed to determine the available 
translations, if any. After saving the tag, it is then instantly 
available under these names in the other languages.

In the demo, the first two meanings have translations available, while 
the other two do not.

Why is this so powerful? Because, if UW itself is successful and 
contains many words, it almost instantly makes the entire media 
repository on Commons available to speakers of all languages. (Now, 
hopefully, you can see why we've been excited about getting millions of 
translations for free from the Logos project.) No need to create many 
different tags - just select the right meaning. Furthermore, it builds 
bridges from other projects to UW. The language work we are constantly 
doing will no longer be redundant, but focused on one place.

A 14-year-old Italian kid can then use the tag "cane" to look for photos 
of dogs, while a Maori girl from New Zealand can use "kurii". Moreover, 
the same category hierarchy can be used to browse in different languages 
(based on user perferences, a fallback hierarchy would be queried to 
determine the language that should be used should no translation be 
available).

We could also automatically make use of synonyms, plurals and 
inflections (though this requires further changes to the category code 
beyond internationalization). Given that we are mapping one of multiple 
meanings to a single tag, there will be tag collisions -- those will 
have to be dealt with through disambiguation. But this is not important: 
Try to see the tag name merely as a key to a meaning. What this key is 
called is secondary.

The key principle of selecting a meaning and then performing automatic 
translations can be used in many different contexts. For example, in 
Wikidata, one could use the same principle to internationalize field 
names such as "Country", "Flag" and "Population".

This application also shows that UW must contain everything from words 
to names to phrases. There is no limit to the scope of it. This makes it 
a potentially massively useful tool for both human and machine translation.

The category internationalization functionality will not be part of the 
first release of Ultimate Wiktionary, but we believe we can get funding 
to work on this later. I believe that UW, in combination with better 
tagging features in general, could make our tagging system the most 
advanced one available. Flickr, for example, has no localization, is 
unlikely to ever get semi-automatic localization, and apparently 
supports no synonyms either.

See the demo footnotes for further explanations. Feedback is welcome. 
(I'll be away until Wednesday.)

Best,

Erik
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