Ec, your mails are little dissertations itself. :-)
On Wed, Nov 19, 2003 at 10:45:52AM -0800, Ray Saintonge wrote:
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
[...]
The basic question is whether it could be started now, because there are already entries, and that whether there is a planned solution for the language-crisscrossing.
Like, um, let me conjure some ideas,
An article: Dog: blah [[xl:en:Dog]] (xl = cross language template insert, en = use english word as index)
Would render on english: Dog: blah * German: Hound * Hungarian: kutya ...
Would render on hungarian: Dog: blah * Német: Hound * Magyar: kutya ...
where the page [[tpl:en:Dog]] would say: * [[de:Hound]] * [[hu:kutya]]
(and [[tpl:hu:kutya]] is just a redirect/symlink to [[tpl:en:Dog]]).
Just brainstorming.
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,
To me it looks logical to have redirect [[kutya]] to [[dog]], and [[dog]] informing us that "kutya" is the hungarian equivalent.
I see three functions for the LOCAL Wiktionary:
- Provide detailed definitions of LOCAL words in LOCAL lang for
LOCAL speakers. 2. Provide translations of LOCAL words into an indefinite number of languages.
(my template thingy above helps that.)
- Provide entries for words in any foreign language for LOCAL
speakers.
(redirects help that.)
I changed it to LOCAL, so, yes, basically that makes sense.
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.
Technical help may make it consume less labour. Maybe.
grin