Peter Gervai wrote:
On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 01:52:54AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
Peter Gervai wrote:
Although some of us would like to encourage other-language Wiktionaries, so far only the English version exists. If you have somebody who likes writing up dictionary articles in Hungarian, maybe you can convince him to start a Hungarian Wiktionary. :-)
Well, not that anyone would allocate time for that, but newbies usually create dictionary entries (in Hungarian), and would be useful to keep them instead of deleting. If a hu.wiktionary doesn't require much space or resources it would be nice, even if there would be only 46 articles a year...
All the wikis start small. :-) Once the opportunity is presented, some people will just naturally feel more comfortable working on a dictionary that on encyclopedia. 46 articles is a good start, but it should take a *lot* less than a year to get there. The transwiki concept would work just as well for moving an article from hu.wikipedia to hu.wiktionary as it does in English. The message to people changes. It is no longer, "Wikipedia is not a dictionary, so we're deleting your work." It becomes, "Wikipedia is not a dictionary, but we respect your effort and have a better place for your good work in Wiktionary."
That being said, if someone wants to write up English definitions for Hungarian words that would go on the English Wiktionary.
Sure. (To be honest, I don't really grasp the idea, since it's pretty time consuming to update a definition. For example there's a word for "Dog", and there are 23 pages describing dog in 23 other languages. Then I come, and want to share Hungarian Dog, so I have to edit *24* pages to insert Dog everywhere. I know, it's a wiki not a database, but still, prevents me from wanting to do anything serious there.)
The en:wiktionary currently show a translation for "dog" into 72 other languages. This is far more than for most words. It also gives an English meaning for the Dutch word "dog". There is a brief entry for "kutya" showing it as the Hungarian word for "dog". That entry also shows the translation of "kutya" into Dutch. I personally don't believe that the Dutch rendering should be on the "kutya" article, but it's not the sort of thing that I would spend a lot of time arguing about. Other Wiktionarians have been keen to develop an extensive system of cross-indexing, but have been less than diligent and focused on maintaining it.
I see three functions for the English Wiktionary: 1. Provide detailed definitions of English words in English for English speakers. 2. Provide translations of English words into an indefinite number of languages. 3. Provide entries for words in any foreign language for English speakers. Substitute the name of another language in that statement in all the places where "English" appears, and you have how, in a big picture, I would envision developments in other language Wiktionaries.
Wikimedia's volunteer environment is such that we will not cut your salary in half if you work on only 12 of 24 dog articles, and we won't triple it if you choose to work on 72 either. Effectively, you are limited in the number of meaningful contributions that you can make by the bumber of languages that you understand. Some people have a passion for providing dictionary definitions of a word in as many languages as they can, but they can't convince me that there is any depth to their understanding of any of those languages. Briefly, you are limited in what you can do by the time you have available, and there is never any obligation to do more than that. Providing the perfectionist's depth across a large breadth of languages is often simply impossible.
Ec