Thursday, June 30, 2005

The capitalisation of the English language Wiktionary

With some 76.000 articles, the English language Wiktionary is the biggest Wiktionary. Until yesterday all the articlenames were capitalised. Some months ago there was a vote to change it so that articles would be as the word is spelled. This decision was not implemented, a lot of words were spilled on this issue and now many months later, out of the blue it was changed.

The English wiktionary now has a problem and, it has an opportunity. The problem is that many entries are wrong. The problem is that the interproject links to Wiktionary from Wikipedia are wrong. The opportunity is that there are many other things wrong as well and it is therefore an unsought opportunity to revisit the content to improve the content.

Many people will feel frustrated because of all the huha. Many people will feel angry because the timing was not great; it stopped the migration of Wikipedia to release 1.5 temporarily among other things. But as the opportunity is there. It is also the time to step to the plate and do the best that can be done.

I am speaking to Andre Engels and I hope that he will come up with a bot that will find the capitalised words and move them back to capitalisation. This bot should also be able to list the words where a word can be found in both upper- and lowercase. After this the interwiki.py bot can be run again.. There is also a need for a bot that checks the en.wikipedia content for links to wiktionary and checks if the article is there and if not fixes it to undercase..

Yes, there was a need to prepare this change but it is also understandable that given that the decision was reached so long ago it could go wrong as it did. So now we have to do without preparation and just do the work ..

Thanks,
GerardM

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