LGagnon,

I put an answer to your comment to Ortonmc. He is taking away links in the titles because I requested him to do so. It's the first item on his talk page. It would be nice if you could also start doing this. Many thanks.Polyglot 08:43, 20 Dec 2003 (UTC)


Hi L,

I see you are putting translations in non English entries. Did you consider how quickly this will become unmanageable if we start doing that for all the non English entries? I think it's best to concentrate the translations with the English entries and refer to those from the non English entries. This way there is only one list of translations to keep up to date. Polyglot 22:56, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

While that may be harder to keep up to date, it is still more convient to the reader to not have to go to another page to find the translation. Besides, some of the English terms contain multiple definitions with different terms for each of them. That would be a bit confusing for those who simply want the translation for the immediate definition, so I think we should still put translations on the non-English pages. -- LGagnon
It becomes next to impossible to keep up to date. Suppose you want to find the Cantonese translation for a Portuguese word and somebody has been so kind as to add it under the Kannada entry. Now you have to hunt down all the translations you can find to find your translation. Good luck. If it is known that all the translations can be found under the English entries, then it becomes immediately clear whether the translation is available or not. As for the problem of the multiple definitions and possible translations. Yes, it will take a bit more effort to find the correct translation, but assuming the definitions are good, it should be feasible to find the translation one is looking for.
There are exceptions where English is all but a good language to function as an intermediary language between two languages for certain words, for example if a certain concept doesn't have a word for it in English. In those cases it is acceptable to add the translations to the non English words. The other language Wiktionaries can have translations under their respective languages. This means that each Wiktionary would maintain one list of translations. That seems manageable to me. Trying to keep words in 30 or 50 languages or even only ten languages in sync for all the words that exist, seems like a disaster waiting to happen to me.
I have no idea when those other language Wiktionaries might arrive though. I once asked Brion on the wikipedia mailing list, when something like pt.wiktionary.org might be implemented and he said: but Wiktionary already is multilingual... So it doesn't seem to be planned for in the short term. And maybe we should just go ahead and implement it in another way, with the means we do have. (namespaces or something like that) Polyglot 23:31, 18 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Categories edit

Hi LGagnon,

Can I make a suggestion regarding your Categories? When subdividing categories (such as "Fruits") for different languages, I would recommend using the system Categories:Fruits:<language> rather than Categories:<language> fruits. This is the standard approach with other namespaces, such as Rhymes and Prefixes (eg, "Rhymes:English" as opposed to "English rhymes"). In this way, all of the "Fruits" subcategories are gathered together. — Paul G 08:35, 19 Jul 2004 (UTC)