Hoi,
I had an interesting conversation with Brion. We do not agree on
everything. One of the things we do not agree on are redirects.
In my opinion, Wiktionary should not have redirects. A word is either
spelled correctly and it will have its lemma or it is not and there will
not be a lemma with the incorrect spelling.
In Brions opinion there are links to lemmas and as we need to ensure
that these links remain ok, we need redirects to make this possible.
In a Wikipedia context I am 100% with Brion. In a Wiktionary context it
is a different matter. As only correctly spelled words should be in a
Wiktionary, errors should be deleted. Some of our Wiktionaries for
historical reasons are capitalising their articles. In essence this
means that from a spelling point of view the name of the lemmas are
irrelevant. However, many people assume that the name of the article
indicates that a word is spelled correctly. To remedy this, more and
more wiktionaries are moving away from first character capitalisation
and make it possible to have correctly spelled words as a lemma.
When a wiktionary has made this move away from first character
capitalisation, the interwiki and interproject links within the
Wikimedia projects need to be fixed. After this, the redirects can in my
opinion be removed. I think this is appropriate because users expect
that an application behaves in certain ways. When new content is added
to a non-capitalised Wiktionary, the word foo will not have a redirect
in Foo and consequently it behaves differently from the content
predating the move to non-capitalisation. Also words like Kinder and
kinder are not related at all. The redirect at Kinder will be replaced
at some stage breaking the existing redirect and consequently not
providing the continuance that Brion holds dear.
For the Ultimate Wiktionary I have documented some of the design
criteria. It can be found here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_decisions_on_its_usage
The Data design can be found here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_data_design
One crucial decision is that only correct spelling is allowed. This
means that all incorrect spelling will be amended or deleted. As
Ultimate Wiktionary is a database, it does not cater for things like
redirects. I urge you to have a look at both the design criteria and the
design itself because this is the time when it is relatively easy to
make changes. Once Erik starts coding the UW database, having finished
Wikidata and the GEMET implementation, the moment has passed us by.
Thanks,
GerardM