I thought a long time about a mail where someone said that redirects should not be deleted. It is not logic to me that a wrong writing should redirect to a correct form of writing.
Let's take the German word for "German" – language and adjective.
adjective = deutsch
noun = Deutsch (language)
These two would have two different pages – so there's no re-direct possible – you can just add deutsch/Deutsch as related word on the page.
if you take the Italian word:
soprattutto
There's only one way to write it "soprattutto" with lower case "s". At this stage it would be "Soprattutto" that is going then to be redirected to "soprattutto". And the wrong writing should then remain as a redirect? This would confuse people – they could believe that the version with the capital "s" is correct.
Another thing: many people, in particular language students, write this very particular word wrong – they write "sopratutto". Since to easen search you would also allow redirects from wrong words to the right ones this one should then be added? No… this does not make sense.
The only way a wiktionary may be: with correct written words, with correct upper and lowercase. All the other, obviously wrong, stuff must be deleted – otherwise the credibility and the work of many people will become less credible and important.
I know, this is hard word, but the sooner you do it the better it is. All contributors to the English wiktionary should for some days/weeks (depending on the number of actively contributing people) concentrate on the conversion of upper to lowercase where necessary and the admins should concentrate on the deletion of the redirects. When someone sees that somebody still adds with uppercase instead of adding a word just go on his/her user page and tell him/her what to care about and to help with the conversion work. If everyone does this you'll not need longer than a month and than have a neat and correct wiktionary.
Ciao, Sabine
Sabine Cretella wrote:
I thought a long time about a mail where someone said that redirects should not be deleted. It is not logic to me that a wrong writing should redirect to a correct form of writing.
Let's take the German word for "German" – language and adjective.
adjective = deutsch
noun = Deutsch (language)
These two would have two different pages – so there's no re-direct possible – you can just add deutsch/Deutsch as related word on the page.
if you take the Italian word:
soprattutto
There's only one way to write it "soprattutto" with lower case "s". At this stage it would be "Soprattutto" that is going then to be redirected to "soprattutto". And the wrong writing should then remain as a redirect? This would confuse people – they could believe that the version with the capital "s" is correct.
Another thing: many people, in particular language students, write this very particular word wrong – they write "sopratutto". Since to easen search you would also allow redirects from wrong words to the right ones this one should then be added? No… this does not make sense.
The only way a wiktionary may be: with correct written words, with correct upper and lowercase. All the other, obviously wrong, stuff must be deleted – otherwise the credibility and the work of many people will become less credible and important.
I know, this is hard word, but the sooner you do it the better it is. All contributors to the English wiktionary should for some days/weeks (depending on the number of actively contributing people) concentrate on the conversion of upper to lowercase where necessary and the admins should concentrate on the deletion of the redirects. When someone sees that somebody still adds with uppercase instead of adding a word just go on his/her user page and tell him/her what to care about and to help with the conversion work. If everyone does this you'll not need longer than a month and than have a neat and correct wiktionary.
Ciao, Sabine
Hi Sabine,
There is already a policy on the English Wiktionary to redirect words that are very often misspelled to their correctly spelled counterparts. If somebody asks for such a page, it will say 'redirected from ...' at the top. This will teach people who thought the wrong spelling was correct, how to properly write those words. I'm not in favour or against deleting the redirects, but there was somebody who said that there were probably a lot of sites (en.wikipedia comes to mind but it certainly isn't the only one) linking to the capitalised versions of the words. It would be a very bad idea to break all those links. I think it is wise not to take out those redirects right away.
Polyglot
cookfire wrote:
There is already a policy on the English Wiktionary to redirect words that are very often misspelled to their correctly spelled counterparts. If somebody asks for such a page, it will say 'redirected from ...' at the top. This will teach people who thought the wrong spelling was correct, how to properly write those words. I'm not in favour or against deleting the redirects, but there was somebody who said that there were probably a lot of sites (en.wikipedia comes to mind but it certainly isn't the only one) linking to the capitalised versions of the words. It would be a very bad idea to break all those links. I think it is wise not to take out those redirects right away.
Polyglot
As I said in my direct response to Sabine I believe that a statement like "common error for [[...]]" is more meaningful than a redirect, because it makes them pause to see that they have made an error.
As a person who would prefer to minimize the number of redirects, I agree that there is no rush to do this.
The question of inter-project links is an interesting one. I believe that each project should be free to develop its own capitalization policies. This understandably leads to problems when inter-project links are desirable. The fact that the English Wikipedia does not yet use Unicode also implies an entire range of problems. When one project makes a link to another project the link should follow the rules of the target project rather than its own rules. To this end there have been no problems in creating inter-Wikipedia links between languages for personal names. Some projects use middle names, but others don't. The Esperanto Wikipedia puts surnames in all capitals, and that does not appear to carry any problems. My suggestion for links, when there is no ambiguity, would be for a link from Wikipedia to default to whatever form exists on Wiktionary. The ambiguous cases may need further consideration.
Ec
Ray Saintonge wrote:
cookfire wrote:
There is already a policy on the English Wiktionary to redirect words that are very often misspelled to their correctly spelled counterparts. If somebody asks for such a page, it will say 'redirected from ...' at the top. This will teach people who thought the wrong spelling was correct, how to properly write those words. I'm not in favour or against deleting the redirects, but there was somebody who said that there were probably a lot of sites (en.wikipedia comes to mind but it certainly isn't the only one) linking to the capitalised versions of the words. It would be a very bad idea to break all those links. I think it is wise not to take out those redirects right away.
Polyglot
As I said in my direct response to Sabine I believe that a statement like "common error for [[...]]" is more meaningful than a redirect, because it makes them pause to see that they have made an error.
As a person who would prefer to minimize the number of redirects, I agree that there is no rush to do this.
The question of inter-project links is an interesting one. I believe that each project should be free to develop its own capitalization policies. This understandably leads to problems when inter-project links are desirable. The fact that the English Wikipedia does not yet use Unicode also implies an entire range of problems. When one project makes a link to another project the link should follow the rules of the target project rather than its own rules. To this end there have been no problems in creating inter-Wikipedia links between languages for personal names. Some projects use middle names, but others don't. The Esperanto Wikipedia puts surnames in all capitals, and that does not appear to carry any problems. My suggestion for links, when there is no ambiguity, would be for a link from Wikipedia to default to whatever form exists on Wiktionary. The ambiguous cases may need further consideration.
Ec
Hoi, With the ultimate wiktionary, the question of interlanguage links will be solved. There will be no interlanguage links. Also, there will be no redirects. There will be no records for common errors. Only words spelled correctly will have a place.
The links to another project will use a parameter; you have to specify the name of the article you want to link to and spell it correctly. This is not ambiguous at all, it does not need explaining.
I reply to this threat, because it makes sense to consider the implications of what we decide for the eventual conversion to the ultimate wiktionary. Personally I stopped adding words that are not Dutch to the nl:wiktionary. The translations of the Dutch words will be there implicitly when the Dutch words are converted into the ultimate wiktionary. I also am spending much time on adding pronunciations. These will be available when you look at a Dutch word nevermind what language you start from.
The most important words when implementing the ultimate wiktionary will be the ones for the values that will be used in the interface. They will be the names of languages, the names of wordtypes. These are the same values that are currently used in the templates as used in many wiktionaries like nl: fr: hi: it: etc.
Thanks, GerardM
Sabine Cretella wrote:
I thought a long time about a mail where someone said that redirects should not be deleted. It is not logic to me that a wrong writing should redirect to a correct form of writing.
Let's take the German word for "German" – language and adjective.
adjective = deutsch
noun = Deutsch (language)
These two would have two different pages – so there's no re-direct possible – you can just add deutsch/Deutsch as related word on the page.
if you take the Italian word:
soprattutto
There's only one way to write it "soprattutto" with lower case "s". At this stage it would be "Soprattutto" that is going then to be redirected to "soprattutto". And the wrong writing should then remain as a redirect? This would confuse people – they could believe that the version with the capital "s" is correct.
Another thing: many people, in particular language students, write this very particular word wrong – they write "sopratutto". Since to easen search you would also allow redirects from wrong words to the right ones this one should then be added? No… this does not make sense.
The only way a wiktionary may be: with correct written words, with correct upper and lowercase. All the other, obviously wrong, stuff must be deleted – otherwise the credibility and the work of many people will become less credible and important.
I know, this is hard word, but the sooner you do it the better it is. All contributors to the English wiktionary should for some days/weeks (depending on the number of actively contributing people) concentrate on the conversion of upper to lowercase where necessary and the admins should concentrate on the deletion of the redirects. When someone sees that somebody still adds with uppercase instead of adding a word just go on his/her user page and tell him/her what to care about and to help with the conversion work. If everyone does this you'll not need longer than a month and than have a neat and correct wiktionary.
I generally agree with you. I've never supported useless redirects. There is a strong argument that can be made for having entries for common errors, but I don't believe that they should be redirects. In the case of "sopratutto", a text that says "common error for [[soprattutto]]" would be more useful since it brings the error immediately to the mistaken person's attention. The comment that a redirection has been made is too easily ignored.
There is an perpetual argument on Wiktionary about the prescriptive or descriptive nature of a dictionary. A significant segment of the participants believe that any word that is used in any context should be in a dictionary. They would support the inclusion of any outright error, of "leet" or "1337" words from internet chat lines, of invented words, and of words from invented languages such as Romanica and Espresso. They resent being told that there is a correct way to use words. Of course if too much of this kind of material is included the credibility problem is worse than what you perceive.
Voting on the change has taken place, and the vote in favour this time was very strong. At [[Wiktionary:Capitalization transition]] I made a few suggestions about how the change might proceed, including some procedures that should take place before the change is made. One of these tasks is to generate a list of articles containing links that should be corrected before the change. Unfortunately we curently have a shortage of technically savvy editors. Hippietrail, the one person who has experience with generating lists like this, is the one regular contributor who has taken a strong position against the proposed change in capitalization. If we have another person who could generate the desired list, the change could go ahead much more quickly.
Ec
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