--- Ray Saintonge <saintonge(a)telus.net> wrote:
Yann Forget
wrote:
Hi,
I think I found some errors in the Dutch Wiktionary
.......
This seems like an awfully difficult problem to
police. We are
basically at the mercy of the person who puts up
this kind of material.
A possible solution might be to forbid the inclusion
of translations unless
1. There is an active Wiktionary in that
language, or
2. A source has been cited for a particular
translation.
Are there any other fairly easy ways for us to
fact-check this kind of
information?
Well there is always the talk page for each word. One
of the benefits of a distributed project is that
everybody can have their say and wandering experts and
native speakers are always welcome.
The real problems are very different instead:
1) co-operation
2) time
3) computer / internet literacy
1) co-operation
Many people don't "think global and act local" - they just would like to
see their name at top and that's all - whenever they have to contribute
it is hard to motivate them. Out of approx. 1000 translators I tried to
interest only three would contribute and not even one of those three online.
There are many, many small wiktionaries and only a small group is now
interacting (and this is great :-)
2) time
Not everyone of us has enough time to do everything he/she would like to
do. Many would like to do more and many do a lot on single wiktionaries
- the same work done could be quite easily used for all wiktionaries -->
database solution
3) computer / internet literacy
Like I said above: the few people that write me and who would like to
contribute have one huge problem: most of them are not used to wikis -
they send me glossaries to be included (and these glossaries often
represent years of work for a translator) - on one hand they just don't
have the time to restart from the beginning uploading one word after the
other (we have one of approx. 7000 checked translations) and on the
other: they just don't know how to do this. Many of my colleagues use
the computer just like a typewriter. As soon as they have to work with
something else but Word they indeed have difficulties. So the language
experts are there, but they are not willing/not able/don't have time to
care about online work. I know from others I talked to on the phone that
they just don't offer their help as they belive not to be able to do
anything online or that their work (very valuable glossaries made by
specialists) are not of interest.
I have been thinking about these themes for some weeks now, discussed
with colleagues, discussed with my former business partner (who is
always full of ideas and checks my Italian writings for wiktionary) -
the only real solution would be: a human interface between many language
specialists and wiktionary, but not every single wiktionary - a global
one - so every contribution would have immediate effect and only the UI
would be different. Yes, I know, some don't like this idea, but
witktionary is very different to wikipedia, wikisource, wikibooks etc -
it uses data that is interchangeable if prepared wisely.
There are many potential contributors that could and would help with
their expertise, but they need an interface (a human one), someone to
talk to and we should find the way to include their expertise, the
linguist one.
I'll write a second mail that centers on a small project (that hopefully
will become very, very huge) we are trying to achieve and includes some
other basic questions. Even this one depends on proof reading, new
entries etc. I am just coping with the above difficulties within this
project and step by step it becomes very clear what we need.
Ciao,
Sabine