[Wikipedia-l] Wiktionaries for all! - kinds of interlanguage links - utf-8

[SteffenB]

Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I've set up Wiktionaries for all 146 languages that have a Wikipedia.

Great work, I appreciate that! :-)
I hope, it is appropriate to answer in this list, even though it 
concerns mainly interwiktionary issues:

Tim Starling <ts4294967296 at hotmail.com> wrote:

> I've set up a few basic kinds of interwiki links, which may be expanded or
> modified in the future. The "w:" prefix should link to the Wikipedia in the
> same language. Language prefixes link to other language Wiktionaries. To
> link to a different language Wikipedia, use [[Wikipedia:xx:Page]].
>

> The "Wiktionary:" prefix still links to the English Wiktionary, but a
> new "wikt:" prefix has been introduced which links laterally to the
> MediaWiki allowing "diagonal" linking, with the help of redirects. A
> link reading [[wikt:fi:kukkala]] on the German Wikipedia will link to
> http://de.wiktionary.org/fi:Kukkala, which will redirect to
> http://fi.wiktionary.org/Kukkala .

When adopting the Wikipedia (WP) structures however there should be 
considered some significant differences in the needs for 
interlanguage-links in the case of the Wiktionary (WD)! From each WD 
entry have to be distinguished three different kinds of interlanguage 
destinations:

1. The from the WP well known interlanguage links, displayed at the page 
edge, does NOT link to translations, rather it links to the same 
Homonyms in other WDs!
( de:Bank --> en:Bank,  --> fr:Bank )

2. The "normal" link to translations has it's destination within the 
same WD.
( de:Bank --> de:bank, de:bench;  --> de:banque, de:banquette )

3. The actual (meaning-wise) interlanguage link would be one that leads 
to the translation in the respective "native" WD:
( de:Bank --> en:bank, en:bench;  --> fr:banque, fr:banquette )
Due to ambiguity this link can not be handled in the same way as in WP.
It can be constructed manually of course:
Translations:
*Englisch: bench ([[:en:bench|English]]) [1], bank 
([[:en:bank|English]]) [2, 3, 4, 5]
*Finnisch: something ([[:en:something|Suomi]]) [1,3], other 
([[:en:other|Suomi]]) [2,4,5]
But that won't work in practice, to enter each time the native writing 
of the respective Wiktionary language name, I suppose.

So it might be worth considering an interwiki-code for meaning-wise 
interlanguage links. Whether this link in the text should display as the 
  the native language name, or some other meaningful symbol, 
respectively, is a further consideration to be done then. E.g. it might 
be appropriate to introduce an "native-WD" symbol to indicate 
meaning-wise interlanguage links in the text.

== Different topic, probably more important: ==

Is there anything we can do for supporting a soon and smooth change of 
the character encoding from iso-8859-1 to utf-8, as long as the German 
Wiktionary is tiny? (I'm also willing to support the to utf-8 
transformation of the Wikipedia, off course. But there the constraints 
differ slightly, due to it's magnitude, and some days more or less to 
wait are off less influence on the effort.) Back to Wiktionary: I've 
saved a Lang.php to

  http://meta.wikipedia.org/wiki/LanguageWiktionaryDE.php

in order to allow checking and improvement, so that it hopefully will 
become suitable for usage, but probably it's not required any more as 
de.Wiktionary is operational already.


Greetings --SteffenB