[Muke Tever (Re: [Wiktionary-l] Ultimate Wiktionary and design decisions) writes:]
Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
> One crucial decision is that only correct spelling is allowed.
JB> Fine, as long as you are going to cater for multiple correct spellings. JB> If you don't it's going to be difficult for some languages, e.g., JB> English, and impossible for others, e.g.. Japanese.
Many languages have different accepted spellings for the same word. Japanese with the three character sets. German with umlauts and ae, oe and ue or ss instead of ß. Esperanto accepts cx and ch for ^c. Dutch had at one time a preferred and a progressive spelling and English has some variants depending on the locality it is spoken. I'm sure it doesn't end there and it is something a multilingual dictionary has to cater for. Adding common misspellings shouldn't be all that hard. They simply need a possibility to be marked as such. The misspellings don't exactly have to be shown either (except maybe on demand), but when somebody uses them to search the database, the entries they point to should be found.
Have a look at the latest design it caters for having some Miss Pellings. http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_decisions_on_its_usage#On...
Yes, it mention "incorrect spelling", but is silent on the matter of valid spelling varinats.
What about languages that do not have "correct spelling" standards?
Indeed.
If you look at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Ultimate_Wiktionary_decisions_on_its_usa... you'll see Gerard and I have been, er, discussing this matter.
Cheers
Jim
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