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