[Wikipedia-l] An idea. What do you think about this?

talthen at wp.pl talthen at wp.pl
Tue Feb 10 18:29:14 UTC 2004


Hello,
Wikipedia's database is quite huge. But is not widening so fast. But it
would be changed when all the Wikipedians started creating common database.
The main problem is the difference of languages, but... I have an idea! :) I
know my idea will not be so easy to realize, but I would be very usefull.

The idea is to create new language, based on most popular languages from all
over the world. This language would not be a human language, but a language
to store information.

Today we have some language translating applications, but they are not
perfect, because two things:
1. Some languages differ too much
2. Some words have many meanings, and theprogram doesn't know which one
shoulb be chosen.
By creating new language we would solve first problem. (I think we do not
have to create entirely new language, maybe modifying Esperanto would be
just enough). The second problem could be chosen by listing all the meanings
of words. For example for english language we could create file like this:
word number    word    meaning
--------------------------------
1                       mind    intellect
2                       mind    thoughts
3                       mind    a head
4                       mind    to object to

The translating would look like this:
I have written a sentence: "The study of logic trains the mind". Application
scans my sentence and asks in which meaning I used word "mind". Then I
choose from all "mind" meanings word "intellect". After explaining allthe
meanings by the writer the application saves it in it's own language in a
structure like this:
116117 6322 987672 1 312312
Where the numbers means word numbers.

Decompression would look like this:
I have asked the program to display the message in Polish. The application
loads file "polish.txt" and is looking for words with these numbers.
As a fourth word it loads word from line one (because word "mind" with
meaning "intellect" is in line 1 in all the languages, not only in English).
It finds all the words and displays them.

I know that writing down all the meanings of words is not easy. But if all
Wikipedians write just a few we would finish it very fast.
The hardest thing is to make the language, that describes in which time is
the sencence, what the order of words should be after translating to
language X and what after diplaying in Y, etc.
But I think this is possible and would make for eg. building the database of
Wikipedia much easier.
And not only this. There will be many applications for it.

Hope you understood what I mean. I know I may have made some mistakes (both
gramatically and logically)...

So- how do you like my idea? Do you think it's worth realizing?

Regards,
            Talthen
      (talthen at wp.pl)




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