Jay Bowks wrote:
Greetings!
What's up with Wiktionary?
I've been reading the Talk pages and
there's an awful lot of complaining and
whining. First, about the Interlingua
entries. I need a large file type of list
that I can work from to add entries.
They are moving to the index section.
They can be deleted when I'm done
the bulk of entering the multilingual
info I have.
These bagan to appear in quantity. They were lists of interlingua
words followed by apparent translations into 5 or 6 languages.
Now, please don't misunderstand me...
I'm willing to follow protocols and
learn the wiki-ways. Plus whatever
conventions can be made clear I'll
willingly follow.
The conventions are being developed. Your opinions on these
developments are as welcome as those of all others.
Someone complained about my French,
ehem ehem, not my swearing mind you,
my use of French, in that it isn't proper
enough, and not accurate enough. Well
all I can say is that I'm not a native
French speaker, my French High School
teacher learned it in Algiers and it's been
years since I had a fluent conversation in
it for more than five minutes. I do what
I can. My German is rotten also, but
I do what I can. When I don't know
I either leave it blank or put in the English
as a marker for me to look up that word
later. Again, the index entries are there
to help me enter in new info into the main
Wiktionary... similarly with Wikipedia
articles. Two windows open, cut and
paste the look ups, edit here and there,
etc.
More often leaving things blank is better than putting in something that
is knowingly wrong. When you put erroneous material into the articles
it may stay that way for a long time. If large quantities of this stuff
appear, there simply aren't enough people available to clean up the
errors. I didn't really look at the German entries because I am not as
familiar with that language as French, but the French did leave me
suspicious about all the others. The mixed assortment of tenses in the
French verbs instead of the usual infinitive also made me uncertain
about what tense was being used to express the Interlingua verb. If, as
you say, the purpose of these articles is to have an index to help you
begin new entries and the index will be deleted later anyway, then put
manageable quantities on a Sandbox subpage of your user page. When you
have finished with one batch there it's easy to replace it with a new
batch. No regular participant ever disturbs what you put in a sandbox
because it is presumed that you are experimenting on something that is
often partial or incomplete.
Now I'm getting requests to "slow down"
how un-wiki is that???
Yes. Because you're rushing along in your own direction without regard
to what others are doing. Nobody regards your contributions as
malicious. It's more like you're functioning like a bull in a china shop.
Then about the use of HTML tags, well,
frankly, the "list" tags in the Wiktionary
are all HTML, my additions are usually
a mixture of both HTML and wiki-coding.
I find it more assuring to write <BR> than
to let the parser put a line where it thinks
it should. Same for <P> and for <HR>
the ---- is sometimes good sometimes
not clear enough for me. These are basic
HTML tags that shouldn't scare anyone.
If tables are a problem, I've only put these
in the Wikipedia Homepage for Interlingua
and Volapuk and in a couple of wikipedia
entries where everything needed a certain
layout, like the table of HTML and ASCII
codes in the Interlingua Wikipedia.
Not everyone is familiar with HTML, and as long as nobody feels the need
to edit the article they will remain untouched. It is much easier to
develop some kind of standard format for articles if we are all using
the same mark-ups. Using tables is an entirely negotiable matter,
Now my questions regarding the Wiktionary
are:
Is there a set way of entering the info?
It's under development in a co-operative manner.
Is there an entity that can decide this once
and for all?
Realistically: No.
Is it possible to have foreign language
appendixes on the English Wiktionary
What would such appendices do?
Or...
Is there a possibility that a namespace
will happen anytime soon for other languages?
(There's even complaints that "this is an English
dictionary, isn't it!!!" Well, maybe so but I thought
it was also a multilingual dictionary, and that's where
I'm interested in helping out).
Hopefully a sub-domain instead of a namespace for each language.
Consider the existing Wiktionary as a dictionary for English speakers
rather than simply a dictionary of English. It is multilingual in its
efforts to present an understanding of other languages for English
speakers. I expect that a parallel situation will exist when the
sub-domains are developed for other languages.
Eclecticology
