Wiktionary talk:Translations/Whether non-English words should appear in English Wiktionary or not
- from Wiktionary talk:Translations#Whether non-English words should appear in English Wiktionary or not Rod (A. Smith) 21:46, 3 November 2007 (UTC)
<Henri de Solages 16:47, 3 Jun 2005 (UTC)> You really should decide whether English wiktionary is an English dictionary or an all-language dictionary in English.
- In the latter case, there will be many entries, which don't matter much, but also long articles because English uses many words of your "grandmother" tongues (German, French, Latin...). You should pay royalties for this. ;-)
- I support the idea 1 word: 1 entry, so I oppose
+ the (utopic) presence of the same Mongolian word in all Wiktionaries,
+ the presence of (many) homographs, from 1 or different languages, in the same article. How to search by category in this case ?
"1 word, 1 entry" is the best way to get accurate, up-to-date complete information about the word, because all users interested by the word would read the one whole centralised thing. Imagine I'm a linguist wanting to correct the etymology of a rare French word. I'd surely not take time to add or correct it in 100 wiktionaries. I may take time to modify it in one. Any non-specialist would read the false etymology in other dictionaries, and would not be able to take the decision to correct it (If ever they take time to look at others.). It'd take years before someone do it.
- A disadvantage of including foreign languages entry in English Wiktionary is that a French speaker hardly never goes and sees a French word in English Wiktionary, so even obvious mistakes will not be corrected. Below, someone said he added notes regarding the French adverb "plus". I went and see: grammar classification is severly deficient, making pronunciation rule confusing. I saw other French mistakes in English Wiktionary, though I didn't look many English articles (Today is my first day.).
- Why not to write in English and in the regarded language, in a one article of the word's language wictionary, things useful for foreigners: usage notes, description of the reality if it doesn't have exact equivalent in all the English speaking word ? For instance, the Mongolian "бурхан" (burkhan) may be translated in (future) Mongolian Wiktionary as "god, Buddha", with a note in English and Mongolian saying that the 1st known occurence of this word is in the 13th century, its etymology is unknown, and the word has been used for long in Mongolia in place of "Buddha", a word now in use because of the recent (re)arrival of Christians.</Henri de Solages>
Check out Wiktionary:Project - Ultimate Wiktionary which addresses this.--Richardb 14:17, 5 Jun 2005 (UTC)
- I completely agree, and I'd like to add my comments on why it's a crazy idea. The given example of the German word frei on the front page of the English Wikipedia is perfect. If someone wanted to look up the definition, why wouldn't they use the translation of the German word? If that definition isn't sufficient, extend it there! Otherwise people have two sources for the same information, and quite likely they're going to look for the word in the more complete source anyways.
- Yes, it would be cool to have a global search when the language isn't known, even more useful if conflating letters with diacritic marks in such a search, and cooler yet for pronunciations and approximations thereof, but that's acheivable with a search of all wiktionaries. The current approach seems to be entirely duplicative. If you attempt to create a wiktionary in every language of every word, then the number of language-specific dictionaries to be created is the square of the number of languages!
- To illustrate the absurdity, consider the simpler idea of have an enumerated list of all meanings rather than words. This would be akin to a category that is shared across all language wiktionaries. The result of simply linking to these pages, as done by more knowledgable translators, would create thesaurus-like entries in every language for words with the same meaning, plus the thesaurus entry of that meaning in all other languages! In that case there would be as many language-specific wiktionaries as languages and only one additional book of equivalent size. In addition, that book is a thesaurus. That's less work by an order of complexity with better results! Davilla 14:24, 24 July 2005 (UTC)