Community Wishlist Survey 2017/Wiktionary/Share conjugation (among other things) templates on www.wiktionary.org

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Share conjugation (among other things) templates on www.wiktionary.org

  • Problem: On Wiktionaries we share only interwikis. We often reinvent template or improve them separately, but we don’t mutualize this work. Some conjugations (like Russian ones) are really difficult to add on a wiki.
  • Who would benefit: All Wiktionaries editions.
  • Proposed solution: We could share data and templates/modules on [www.wiktionary.org] ([www.wikisource.org] is editable). www.wiktionary.org will be the world's biggest multilingual website about conjugation (at least it could be extended to other stuff). All Wiktionaries could choose to use it or not.
  • More comments:
  • Phabricator tickets:

Discussion[edit]

Hi ! Great idea and we could also share declension ! --Pom445 (talk) 18:36, 8 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

It's quite clear for wiktionarians, I am not sure for foreigners. Well, I want to raise some concern about this idea, to make clear how challenging it is. A conjugation is a table with forms and labels. Depending on languages, there is different ways to name those labels that cannot be translated easily. For example, preterit and passé simple do not cover the same functions. Plus, readers do not always know the way a language is describe in the language itself, i.e a French apprentice may not know what a plus-que-parfait is. Readers have habits of labels from school, and there is traditions in linguistics to describe other languages in a way or another, based on old analyses. So, at the end, labels in the table of conjugation are complexes and need to be adapted for each Wiktionary. Nevertheless, it is possible to share at least the inventory of forms. And, if possible, a prototypic table easy to reuse and adapt. And the better should be to have a magic table with a possibility to choose the name of every label on the fly. That could be a huge improvement for Wiktionaries and Wikidata developers do not plan to do that at all. Noé (talk) 19:29, 8 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Indeed, this is one of the Wikidata-style ideas that sounds good in theory, but is deeply problematic in practice. Different language Wiktionaries will want to display different forms in different orders with different orthographies and scripts, and making master databases to draw them from will be exceedingly difficult and subject to technical expertise. I doubt many larger Wiktionaries will want to give up their autonomy to those few who can handle and oversee the needfully complex databases that you propose. Metaknowledge (talk) 08:10, 12 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
I join @Noé: and @Metaknowledge: on their concerns. While I do wish to see a way to share more information between Wiktionaries, this can not be resolved in a framework that assume a single linguistitc theory. I provided the same feedback to Wikidata team which went with there Lexeme model, when it obviously doesn't offer enough expressiveness for presenting both varieties of lexicological theories and what they each claim about discourse segments. --Psychoslave (talk) 08:44, 12 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]
Well, We could try fore some similar languages. like romance ones. For exemple the two page fr:wikt:Annexe:Conjugaison en italien/amare en:wikt:Appendice:Coniugazioni/Italiano/amare share almost the same content… Otourly (talk) 16:33, 23 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Voting[edit]

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