[Foundation-l] Re: Positive discrimination related to smaller communities and projects

[Ray Saintonge]

Brion Vibber wrote:

> Sites like Wiktionary or Wikinews are not really suitable for a wiki to
> begin with. I think it's unfortunate that people have so casually thrown
> "Wiki" on the front of the name and slapped up a new project wiki
> without any actual plan for making it work.
>
> Wikipedia is *very well* suited to a wiki model because an encyclopedia
> is largely unstructured prose text, with cross-references between
> articles and some light indexing. That's exactly what a wiki is, and our
> wiki software is strongly geared to that.
>
> Wiktionary requires structured data which is *completely* unlike what
> the wiki model provides. The project's been limping along with
> unstructured text for years and is going to have a hard time converting
> all that when the appropriate software is finally written for it (a
> project which is soon to get underway, I'm told, with a grant for
> development which Erik Moeller will be working on).

This really depends on the vision that one applies to a dictionary.  If 
the focus is on the host language of a particular Wiktionary the present 
software can be made to do, but I can see where it will not be adequate 
for Gerard's vision of a super-dictionary.  The super-dictionary has a 
much stronger focus on translation issues, and that can tolerate 
somewhat less semantic debate than might be the case in a particular 
language.  Once the super-dictionary has a working model it will 
probably be easier to co-ordinate between that and the various language 
specific projects.

Ec