[Foundation-l] 1.6 Billion USD to spare? How about liberation of some pictures

[Gregory Maxwell]

On Jan 23, 2008 11:10 AM, Gerard Meijssen <gerard.meijssen at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hoi,
> A language without a grammar does not express. You cannot express anything
> by using OmegaWiki and consequently it is not a language.

6511

(Amusingly, the word I would have preferred to use  to reply to you in
English has a defined meaning which did not match my intended use,
OmegaWiki would have mis-translated, and I could find no equal in OW)

[snip]
> When you are talking about "diminished returns", how do you explain this to
> the communities of all the WMF projects that you just excluded? Do you
> really want to tell them that they do not matter? How do you rationalise
> yourself out of that corner?

If a group wants to be included they are free to add their words. They
should not expect others to do the work for them.

> How are you going to deal with homonyms, how are you going to deal with
> false friends?

Egads. We need a tagging system, not a translation system. Homonyms
can be handled by simply avoiding them since they are ambiguous, and
leaving links in so that search can suggest disambiguating words. For
the tags we simple use another word. Let humans edit the metadata.

Search does not need to be perfect.

Perfect isn't possible. OmegaWiki's great failure is that it treats
languages as something far more tidy and well defined than they
actually are.

> You approach does not work and is the only the best solution indeed when a
> "worse solution is better"

You can assert this all you want, but you can't prove it.

On the other hand it is easy to demonstrate that your approach
requires a large amount of complexity.