Rather than having a developer suddenly go ahead now and toggle some switch, our next step should be to consider haw we can implement this in a project that already contains nearly 60,000 articles in its principle namespace with minimized disruption.

OK - this would mean some organisation - how many active editors are there? Do you have the possibility to mail all people who inserted their e-mail address?

Otherwise you need to use the message that is shown on every page until work is over (this will maybe need some more time, but it works as well).

You need to create a wordlist with all words in it.

You need to create a page with "words to be checked" and one with "words to be devided" (for people who ave difficulties in this).

The page with "all words" may not be a category or simply the all words list - it must be a page where you can insert and delete the single words (it should be possible to be able to create the list froma dump).

Who contributes simply takes the words he is "moving" (working on) off the list - the admins have enough work with deleting all the re-directs (or is there a way to do this automatically) maybe modifying the page and writing "to be deleted" instead of the re-direct?

Anyone should be asked to do at least 10 words a day - if 2000 editors help: this is an effort of three days with 60000 words.

Ciao, Sabine

Muke Tever wrote:

Sabine Cretella sabine_cretella@yahoo.it wrote:

...

Who contributes simply takes the words he is "moving" (working on) off the list - the admins have enough work with deleting all the re-directs (or is there a way to do this automatically) maybe modifying the page and writing "to be deleted" instead of the re-direct?

Why delete the redirects? You'll break all the old pages on the web that link to Wiktionary articles.

You'll have to think of other wikimedia sites too. For example en.wikipedia's "link to Wiktionary" template currently just uses {{PAGENAME}}, which will always be capitalized, because Wikipedia capitalizes all topics it treats.

*Muke!

Hoi, You delete the redirects because they are plain wrong. A word that has has both a capitalised version and a non capitalised version will be split into two versions. The usage of wikipedia's link to Wiktionary currently does indeed use PAGENAME, how do you know that it still refers to the correct version of the word ?? You do not ! So it needs to be changed as PAGENAME is not good enough.

It is feasible to change the PAGENAME to something else for instance a genuine parameter that is either capitalised or not. I think it would be feasible to have a bot check the occrurence of the old template and change it for a capitalised or an uncapitalised REAL parameter. So practically all the instances of the current template need to be changed anyway.

The decision of the capitalisation on en:wiktionary has been made, now it is necessary to plan a good conversion plan. It will hurt and it will be a lot of work. Extra painfull is the fact that the en:wiktionary did not agree to change the first time round because MANY new words have been added in the mean time. I think it is better to suffer a bit and do a good job than to do an incomplete job and not remove the pain.

One other reason why you want to change the current wiktionary content is because you will not add redirects for all the new words that will be added in the future.

Thanks, GerardM

Ray Saintonge wrote:

Jo wrote:

...

I organized a new vote on the subject of first letter capitaliztion on en.wiktionary.org:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/First_letter_capitaliz...

after the previous one went awry:

http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Beer_parlour/case-sensitivity_vote

What went wrong in the first vote is that it wasn't clear what was being voted for. We got a lot of people we hardly saw making contributions to Wiktionary voting against, back then. This time all the major current and longtime contributors to the project are in favour of switching off First letter capitalization.

What is the next step? Should we ask a developer? Is it enough to ask on this mailing list?

Many thanks for your advice,

Polyglot

Thank you for your efforts in dealing with this. It has been a month since the vote was started. The 13-2 current vote in favour is seems to be a mandate to take this to the next step.

The confusion in the earlier vote on this topic was partly because questions involving the use of bots and the functionality of the search engine were mixed in. By contrast, this time the question was kept to its simplest form.

Rather than having a developer suddenly go ahead now and toggle some switch, our next step should be to consider haw we can implement this in a project that already contains nearly 60,000 articles in its principle namespace with minimized disruption.

Hi Eclecticology,

What do you propose and wouldn't that discussion risk muddying the waters again? If a developer toggles the switch, at first there would be no difference. Then people will start converting entries and there will be disruption for several months, maybe even more than a year. I don't think this can be avoided. I think all the contributors will simply take it in their stride and simply convert entries as they go. In the mean time all the existing content gets revised, which isn't a bad thing. There will probably be a slowdown in the addition of new entries, but I think it's a good opportunity to broaden the scope of the existing content.

Kind regards,

Polyglot