[Gerard Meijssen ([Wiktionary-l] nds is now lowercase ..) writes:]

...

In your mail to the wikitech-l you said that you want to use redirects to indicate alternate spellings. It would be a better idea to treat them like we do with translations that is, have a proper description of the word and its origin (what orthography or origin) and refer for all the rest to a selected word.

[Pardon me butting in. I have just joined the list and this is my first posting.]

Apropos of alternative spellings, I am exploring the idea of moving my 100,000+ entry Japanese-English dictionary(*) into a wiki-like environment. One aspect of Japanese is that most words have at least two ways of writing them, and many have more. These are not lemmae; they are valid orthographical variants. I have stuck very solidly to the position that no entry can be restricted to a single headword. Multiple headwords are an intrinsic part of the present (XML) structure, and users need, and expect, to be able to go directly to the entry using any of the written forms.

If wiktionary were to end up importing this file (and there are many things to be considered first), I could not see it working if there were a separate entry for every orthographical variant. Since wiktionary seems to have no workable concept of multiple headwords, redirects *may* be a suitable path to take, especially if they could be generated automatically at upload time, or at the time of creating a new entry. Even that would be problematical, in that one of the accepted forms of a word is its representation in the (quasi-phonetical) hiragana script, and Japanese has a vast number of homophones. (For example, I have 19 entries with the pronunciation, and hence kana form, of koukou.[+])

My penny's worth.

Jim Breen

* See: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/j_jmdict.html http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/edict.html + See: http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jwb/wwwjdic?1MSJkoukou