Yesterday Brion made an executive decision. He decided that ALL wiktionaries will have lower case articles from now on. He changed the database so that lower case articles are allowed and ran a program that changed all entries from uppercase to lowercase.
The result was predictable, some wiktionaries like the Norwegian is really happy. They were anticipating this change of their database. They were ready for it and the major problems were done in a few hours. Not so with some of the other wiktionaries, there this was completely unanticipated and a lot of feathers were ruffled. When you do not have a plan, when it is against what you wish it does not make for an effective change.
The other thing that was not really pleasant, is that the bot used to create the interwiki links is broken. It is broken yet again. It does work after a fashion but it does not do all the work that it is supposed to do.
This month is probably set another record for the RobotGMwikt bot. As so many wiktionary entries have changed, it has to be changed on ALL projects. This month may be good for some 500.000 edits.. It is indeed great that we have interwiki links but the technology is not efficient.
Thanks,
GerardM
3 comments:
I think it was the right decision to put all wiktionaries on lowercase. Sooner or later it had to be done. Sometimes it's necessary to be forceful. :-)
Sorry to hear about the bot... but is it really necessary to fix and run it, now that WiktionaryZ is on its way?
There are several reasons why it is good to have good interwiki information. First of all people ARE working on the wiktionaries and they deserve the best service that can be had. Having links to other wiktionaries eases cooperation. Cooperation will be key in WiktionaryZ and when I can help by running the bot I will.
Thanks,
GerardM
Having all words in lowercase might be a good thing for many reasons. But you need to notice, that some languages may change the meaning while migrating to lowercase in the first Letter.
Look at my example Automobil on ontoworld. While the word "Automobil" describes a thing (ie. a Car), the word "automobil" describes how something is.
Another Example where the first Letter is significant is "pH-Value".
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