Gerard.Meijssen wrote:

LS, When I follow what has happened the last few days, I can not help but come to the conclusion that things are done with wikipedia in mind.

Not exactly. We generally have two things in mind: Wikipedia, and non-Wikimedia users.

Take for instance those lines that are "gratis" when you use headings. They make excellent sense when in Wikipedia but they look _horrible_ in wiktionary. Have a look at http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/Breton for instance. It does not look good.

You should be able to override this using [[MediaWiki:Monobook.css]]

Take a look at the restriction on the number of messages (5) per page. This is "reasonable" in wikipedia, but when you want to internationalise a page and use messages to indicate things that differ from language to language, like the gender of a word, you can have dozens words that are masculine and you get garbage as a result.

I've received a number of complaints about this from Wikipedians, and this is the first one I've had from someone from Wiktionary, so I fail to see how this indicates Wikipedia-centrism. It's a problem I intend to address during my reworking of template inclusion, over the next week or two.

When there are problems, they seem to be relatively quickly fixed for the wikipedia's but, for the wiktionaries the consistency is lacking.

When you have an environment like wiktionary/wikipedia they _need_ to be the same in order to be able to fix things and understand the behaviour of the software. The wiktionaries do not behave in a same way. You can create an article with a Chinese (characters) name in English but not on the nl:wiktionary (and others).

Wiktionaries were set up by copying the MediaWiki namespace and language files from the associated Wikipedias. You can't create an article with chinese characters in the title on the nl wikipedia either. English and German are exceptions to this rule because of special-case work done by the respective contributors.

We have just had a major disaster. What I expected in the aftermath was some consolidation. However, now the "Enhanced recent changes (not for all browsers)" in preferences is up the creek!!

What's wrong with it? It looks fine to me.

What concerns me is that for us "simple" users there is no idea what problems are being tacled. What the priorities are and if things still get tested prior to production.

*Is the idea that we have stabilized?? *Do we still have database problems? (anecdotal evidence says we do) *Is there a moratorium on minor stuff so that there is the peace and quiet to fix the major stuff?

I'm not going to announce everything I do in 10 different places. If you want to know what's going on in terms of software development and server administration, you should read wikitech-l.

Please understand that I'm not obliged to fix problems just because you want them fixed. You are not paying me. I try to make people happy, but you have no right to expect a minimum level of service.

I'm amazed at the poor quality of the English Wiktionary, it seems to miss so many important English words. Most new pages seem to be slang, jargon, and people adding a few dozen words from their native tongue. Plans to import a public domain dictionary were abandoned, and now there seems to be little organisation or direction. Perhaps Wiktionary can be revitalised with extra features, but I doubt stylesheet changes will be enough. It needs a different look and a whole raft of features. It needs methods for easily adding new words, and for categorisation and listing. But I'm neither excited by the project nor optimistic about its future. So most of all, it needs people who want to work on it.

-- Tim Starling