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Community Wishlist/Wishes/Insert attestation using Wikisource as a corpus

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Insert attestation using Wikisource and Wikiquote as corpora Submitted

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Description

Wiktionaries definitions relies on attestations, sentences from corpora illustrating the usages and meanings of words.

Wikisource is an excellent corpus for Wiktionaries, especially for classic uses, but it is actually tedious to search into the texts for a specific word, with a lot of false positive. Then, the reference of the sentence had to be copy/paste and edited in detail. It is a long and boring way to contribute, the result being very few quotation in Wiktionaries come from Wikisources (less than 3 % for French Wiktionary).

Wikiquote is another potential source of attestations, with beautiful sentences and a large diversity of voices.

Sadly, it is quite painful to dig into Wikisource and Wikiquote. A tool maybe help to facilitate this task.

This idea is inspired by the feature Insert media but targeting Wikisource and Wikiquote instead of Wikimedia Commons.

So, instead of an snippet search offering pictures, Insert attestation may display a list of sentences from a targeted Wikisource or Wikiquote (with a language selector) that include the targeted sequence of characters.

There is no meaning requirement nor proximity, the need is for exact results only to keep it simple.

In the displayed snippet of results, an editor would just grab a sentence with a single click and it will be added with the adequate sources picked from Wikidata associated with the Wikisource page, or in the related template for Wikiquote.

This function would copy the sentence. It is not a transclusion. Also copy the source of the sentence (adding the information for the number of the page in the original manuscript optimally, i.e. "chapter 5, page 35.").

This feature may need a specific parser to identify limits of sentences and to bold the targeted sequence of characters. This last part is similar as Luthor by Asaf Bartov.

Assigned focus area

Unassigned.

Type of wish

Feature request

Wiktionary, Wikisource, Wikiquote

Affected users

Readers of Wiktionaries would find more examples of usages and a way to access the whole source directly in Wikisource. Editors of Wiktionaries would have a fancy and enjoyable way to add attestations similarly as Insert media tool that dig into Wikimedia Commons, and the community may grow with new people that like to add sentences from their readings. Editors of Wikisource would have a new way to shed light on their sisyphean work of copy-editing books. Editors of Wikiquote would also have a place where their work is displayed. Each projects visibility would increase in search engines with more links between them. The audience of each projects may increase with more connectivity. Also, other projects may benefit from this feature, such as Wikipedia to add quotations in authors' pages. 

Phabricator tasks

T139152, T157802

Other details

  • Created: 09:44, 1 August 2024 (UTC)
  • Last updated: 19:56, 9 February 2025 (UTC)
  • Author: Noé (talk)