[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
--
Jim Breen
http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/
Clayton School of Information Technology, Tel: +61 3 9905 9554
Monash University, VIC 3800, Australia Fax: +61 3 9905 5146
(Monash Provider No. 00008C) ジム・ブリーン@モナシュ大学