Friday, November 18, 2005

Adopting changes in an included thesaurus/glossary

When authorative glossaries or thesauri are included in Ultimate Wiktionary, they have to choose how they want to make their content available. When they choose to be seperate, and have a restricted group of people work on their content, they will not benefit from the wiki-way. As the definitions and structures are seperate, they will find that alternative meanings and structures will arive. Meanings that are essentially the same.

It is therefore that a method needs to be found to merge glossary entries, thesaurus entries and wiktionary entries. This may seem like a simple thing and in many ways it is. The problems arise particularly in the thesaurus structures that are associated with a lemma.

When the community around a thesaurus decide to adopt a lemma, the version that is adopted is tagged as being part of the lemma. When the lemma is changed, the later version can be adopted as well. This allows for one way of quality control. Alternatively the changed lemma is flagged as "pending aproval" this in turn allows for a second method of quality assurance. The Wiki way would be to assume good faith and expect a change to be a change for the better.

When agreement can be reached on how a word is defined and how it is translated the relations may need to be tagged as belonging to a specific thesaurus or glossary. As agreement could be reached on the Meaning, the connections between the different thesauri is what brings the similarities in focus. This in turn may help bring more understanding.

Thanks,
GerardM

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