[Wikipedia-l] Re: [Wikitech-l] Hyperlink convention

[Rowan Collins]

On Wed, 06 Oct 2004 01:14:26 -0700, David Friedland <david at nohat.net> wrote:
> I don't think there was anything about my proposal that indicated that
> editors will be expected to know all the regional differences and be
> required to put variant words in curly brackets. The beauty of the wiki
> system, you see, is that when someone comes along who DOES know the word
> is a regionalism, they can add the brackets, thus increasing the
> article's accessibility.

This isn't an argument against your {{foo}} proposal, more an
additional design consideration, but there is a problem with how you
know, while reading, whether an article is using translations or not -
by design, you only see one version of the text. So people will only
come across places to put these braces (or whatever other markup, for
that matter) if they are already editing the article. Or, I suppose,
if the word they see is not the one that matches their choice of
dialect.

----

On the "milliard" front, can I just point out that this isn't actually
normal British usage anyway - "thousand million", ugly though it is,
is what British people would have called 1000,000,000 until recently.
Some probably still do, and when "billion" is used in casual usage,
let alone "trillion", it tends to be worth checking the context to see
if it is a traditional/European (10^12) billion or a US/modern (10^9)
billion.

If you standardise on "-{en-us billion en-uk thousand million}-",
you're going to get into trouble with "-{en-us trillion": the obvious
choice of "en-uk billion}-" is not a good idea, because many official
British institutions now use the US definition of "billion" anyway.
Maybe this just means we shouldn't bother translating this one at all,
or maybe it goes to show how complex this problem really is; I'm not
sure which.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]