What, clicking = good, scrolling = bad? No! We all use both ways to navigate web pages and Wiktionary. It is not about being bad/good thing. It is about removing/keeping choice... And you can use either way at present.
But think, what happens if user look for Russian "язык" or "месяц" etc. with new system? He will be forced to page that got Belorussian definitions. What if person looks for Spanish "justa"? User will get irrelevant Esperanto definition. Italian "cinta"? Ones again, not related page about Indonesian noun. While with interface as it is, I don't even have to click/scroll - information is shown directly on my screen after search of above-words . There dozens(if not hundreds) of thousands articles like that. And as Wiktionary grow, there would be even more.
You say that there is few articles with too huge Contents menu. Legitimate point. But why than we don't fix the real problem - menu itself. For example by adding option to collapse all but top level entrees (e.g. languages). Just the way we got "Hide" option right now. But adding an extra menu to the top of each and every article plus aggressively changing page layout do not sound to me like a right solution for that.
My main point - current system more versatile and more convenient. In a different ways. And contrary to what you say, I do believe, that the chances of article to be edited/corrected related to how many time it was shown/visited/looked into.
Vitally, aka TestPilot
Vitaly V. dr.vitall@gmail.com wrote:
But think, what happens if user look for Russian "язык" or "месяц" etc. with new system? He will be forced to page that got Belorussian definitions. What if person looks for Spanish "justa"? User will get irrelevant Esperanto definition. Italian "cinta"? Ones again, not related page about Indonesian noun.
Hmm? No, that would be silly. The only language that should get that priority in any kind of disambiguation scheme is the language of the wiki. If the language of the wiki doesn't have that word, but other languages do, then one would get a disambiguation page, not whatever language happens to be first in alphabetical order. This is how the Latin Wiktionary has done it for years now. e.g.
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/greet (Not a Latin word, thus disambiguation)
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/formica (A Latin word; other languages linked from the bottom)
While with interface as it is, I don't even have to click/scroll - information is shown directly on my screen after search of above-words . There dozens(if not hundreds) of thousands articles like that. And as Wiktionary grow, there would be even more.
Again, if you get all the information at once, it is because there is not much information there: you're looking at stubs. As Wiktionary grows, there will be *fewer* like that.
And contrary to what you say, I do believe, that the chances of article to be edited/corrected related to how many time it was shown/visited/looked into.
Fair enough; but either the user is a casual browser, or someone looking for a specific piece of information. In the former case, they are exactly as likely to run across [[язык (ru)]] as [[язык (bg)]], and in the latter case, they are by definition not interested in anything else we feel like showing them.
Again, there are better ways of getting people to look at information than relying on other headwords happening to be spelled the same way as what the user is actually looking for. Heck, just showing five articles from the main namespace at *random* in addition to the main entry would be more useful for that purpose than just showing homographs, if exposure is the goal you're aiming at.
*Muke!
But think, what happens if user look for Russian "язык" or "месяц" etc. with new system? He will be forced to page that got Belorussian definitions. What if person looks for Spanish "justa"? User will get irrelevant Esperanto definition. Italian "cinta"? Ones again, not related page about Indonesian noun.
Hmm? No, that would be silly. The only language that should get that priority in any kind of disambiguation scheme is the language of the wiki.
What? There is no "disambiguation scheme" in this proposal. Look at example http://uk.wiktionary.org/wiki/November provided by Анатолій Гончаров in original post. First language that starts with A was shown. Lets stick to the point of discussion. *The core idea of this proposal is that we show user only one language after he searched for a word. Instead of showing all results.*
And my major objection - we better show relevant information after user hit "search" button, which is way more convenient, other then showing randomly selected alphabetical article. Not showing anything would be even worse.
If the language of the wiki doesn't have that word, but other
languages do, then one would get a disambiguation page, not whatever language happens to be first in alphabetical order. This is how the Latin Wiktionary has done it for years now. e.g.
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/greet (Not a Latin word, thus disambiguation)
http://la.wiktionary.org/wiki/formica (A Latin word; other languages linked from the bottom)
This is entirely different subject. I feel against creating millions of disambiguation page, but this is something for different discussion.
As Wiktionary grows,
there will be *fewer* like that.
How come? Have you ever paid attention how many words defined in English or French Wiktionary? Less then a million! And that is best Wiktionaries out there. In Russian language alone there are roughly one and a half million words. And there is absolutely nothing special about Russian language. Estimations for Ukrainian or Belorussian would be similar. With very low overlap - even alphabets are different. And there is thousands of languages out there. Even if Wiktionaries grow at a rate of one million new articles per year, in one century it would not be half of it supposed state in terms of words defined.
they are by definition not interested in anything else we feel like showing them.
I don't know who define what I'm interested in, as a user. And I'm a user indeed. And I rather have an easy access to information about word that interests me, other then have it hidden behind interface.
Vitaly aka TestPilot
Vitaly V. dr.vitall@gmail.com wrote:
Hmm? No, that would be silly. The only language that should get that priority in any kind of disambiguation scheme is the language of the wiki.
What? There is no "disambiguation scheme" in this proposal. Look at example http://uk.wiktionary.org/wiki/November provided by Анатолій Гончаров in original post.
...which is a page which apparently (for whatever reason) considers the English article primary, and has perfectly ordinary disambiguation links to [[November/la]] and [[November/de]]--no different than what you might find at the top of a wikipedia page--only displayed in a fancy simplified format instead of with the usual text which would be along the lines of "This page is about the English word 'November'. For the Latin word, see [[November/la]]. For the German word, see [[November/de]]."
This is entirely different subject. I feel against creating millions of disambiguation page, but this is something for different discussion.
Against millions of disambiguation pages when there are millions of things to disambiguate against? Could you sell that viewpoint on any wiki? Why this one?
As Wiktionary grows, there will be *fewer* like that.
How come? Have you ever paid attention how many words defined in English or French Wiktionary? Less then a million! And that is best Wiktionaries out there. In Russian language alone there are roughly one and a half million words. And there is absolutely nothing special about Russian language. Estimations for Ukrainian or Belorussian would be similar. With very low overlap - even alphabets are different. And there is thousands of languages out there.
Overlap between languages doesn't matter for the particular point that remark was about. There will be millions of articles, certainly. But the remark was about seeing all the information at once after searching for the word, which is irrelevant to the number of languages on it: as Wiktionary grows, most pages will need to have all their separate sections for homographs, pronunciations, alternative spellings, etymologies, parts of speech, declension or conjugation tables, associated terms of various kinds, derived terms, etc., depending on the format of the wiktionary. As I mentioned with the examples, some of those had *tables of contents* more than a screen high even with only one or two languages on the page, and this is supposed to be normal: when the pages are no longer stubs, you will not have the situation where "information is shown directly on [your] screen after search".
they are by definition not interested in anything else we feel like showing them.
I don't know who define what I'm interested in, as a user. And I'm a user indeed. And I rather have an easy access to information about word that interests me, other then have it hidden behind interface.
Exactly the point. If the user wants easy access to the word of interest to them, that pretty much excludes having several other words *not* of interest to them presented at the same time just because by some historical accident they happen to be spelled with the same letters. The irrelevant data, namely the words the user is not interested in, should not be part of the interface hiding the word that does interest them, but so long as the words are all on the same page, that is the state of affairs.
And if a user happens to be interested in words that have the same spelling, they can click through to find them just as people click through to reach words with the same rhyme scheme in pronunciation sections, or as they click through to reach words with the same meaning in translation sections, or as they click through to reach words with the same root in etymology or derivation sections. Is there a particular reason why words with the same spelling should be accorded special preference?
*Muke!
Vitaly V. wrote:
What, clicking = good, scrolling = bad? No! We all use both ways to navigate web pages and Wiktionary.
This sounds like my favorite line from the movie "The Bluesbrothers". The band (playing blues) comes to a small place in the countryside and asks what kind of music is usually played there. "We have *both* kinds: Country *and* Western."
When the choice is between scrolling and clicking, perhaps we need to move on to something entirely new in interface design.
Wiktionary is limited by the Mediawiki software, which is great for collaboratively writing an encyclopedia, but its innovation is the "edit" button, not its browsing user interface. What kind of user interfaces do commercial dictionary software (without the edit button and revision history) use? Dynamic mind-maps?
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