Angela wrote:
On Thu, 10 Mar 2005 19:10:05 +0100, Anthere anthere9@yahoo.com wrote:
Wikidata is a new project... does the community supports this ?
Wikidata itself isn't really a project. It's more of a technical solution to some of the problems on existing projects.
The implementation of Wikidata will obviously need community support -- do Wiktionarians want to merge their projects into the "ultimate Wiktionary", for example -- but I don't think the feature itself should need consensus before its written, only before its implemented on Wikimedia in a way which would affect existing projects.
Gerard is full of technical solutions. Some of them may indeed be brilliant, but I don't have the technical expertise to judge. The real question lies in whether contributors whose primary interest is language will be driven away because the editing process is too complicated. One of the most important features of Wikipedia has been that anyone can learn how to edit with very little training. At one time their were passionate arguments over the use of html or wiki markup. Wiki markup was seen then as too complicated. We've gone a long way since then, but we still need to be aware that many of the contributors that we may seek are not computer geeks, but knowledgeable people in the subjects that are their passion.
I also see Gerard's proposal as directed toward the needs of translation. That's a commendable goal, but a dictionary is more than that. It is just as much a reference for people about their own language. And people writing about their own language need to feel free to do so easily without needing to be concerned about the potential effects on translations.
Also much of what Gerard says is theoretical, and very little of it gives real practical examples of how things will work Saying that a database structured on xml would be a big improvement does not mean much to those who are not intimately acquainted with xml.
As much as I've advocated for a unified Wikisource, I also advocate for separate Wiktionaries. Without getting too far into that debate now, I can at least point out that Wikisource deals with static texts that will not need to be repeatedly edited.
If Gerard wants to experiment with his ideas on some form of Wikidata project I won't stand in his way. If he wants to go from that into some kind of "Ultimate Wiktionary" he may come up with something that works. Maybe it will eventually be meaningful to migrate existing translation material there. But let's not go there until he has something practical established. The timetable for that may be considerably longer than the one which he so optimistically expresses.
Ec