Re: Ultimate Wiktionary and design decisions

James R. Johnson wrote:

>If there were an Ultimate Wiktionary, I'd like to have ang available in
>Latin and Runic sets.
>
>James
>
>-----Original Message-----
>From: [email protected]
>[mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Jim Breen
>Sent: Sunday, July 31, 2005 10:12 PM
>To: The Wiktionary (http://www.wiktionary.org) mailing list
>Subject: Re: [Wiktionary-l] Ultimate Wiktionary and design decisions
>
>[Gerard Meijssen ([Wiktionary-l] Ultimate Wiktionary and design decisions)
>writes:]
>  
>
>>>For the Ultimate Wiktionary I have documented some of the design
>>>criteria. It can be found here:
>>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_decisions_on_its_usage
>>>      
>>>
>
>  
>
>>>The Data design can be found here:
>>>http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Ultimate_Wiktionary_data_design
>>>      
>>>
>
>I have added some comments to the Discussion pages of those two.
>
>  
>
>>>One crucial decision is that only correct spelling is allowed.
>>>      
>>>
>
>Fine, as long as you are going to cater for multiple correct spellings.
>If you don't it's going to be difficult for some languages, e.g.,
>English, and impossible for others, e.g.. Japanese.
>  
>
Many languages have different accepted spellings for the same word. 
Japanese with the three character sets. German with umlauts and ae, oe 
and ue or ss instead of ß. Esperanto accepts cx and ch for ^c. Dutch had 
at one time a preferred and a progressive spelling and English has some 
variants depending on the locality it is spoken. I'm sure it doesn't end 
there and it is something a multilingual dictionary has to cater for. 
Adding common misspellings shouldn't be all that hard. They simply need 
a possibility to be marked as such. The misspellings don't exactly have 
to be shown either (except maybe on demand), but when somebody uses them 
to search the database, the entries they point to should be found.

Just my 2 cents,

Polyglot