Ziko van Dijk wrote: > Dear Aryeh, > > Your idea of "converting on the fly" would not work in many cases. Take for > example the ß in German WP. Swiss (registered) readers can decide via their > Preferences to see only ss and never ß, because the Swiss do not use ß. > That's ok. But vice versa, not every ss is to be converted to ß. > > The Germany-Germans write for example "Masse" (a mass, with a short "a") and > "Maße" (measures, with a long "a"). The Swiss write "Masse" and "Masse" for > both. Now, imagine that a Swiss editor writes "Masse", the conversion engine > would not know whether this should be converted to "Maße" or not. Only a > person who knows German is capable to decide.
There's no reason in principle why a computer can't be as good at making that decision as a human. Such ambiguities are what makes the field of computational linguistics interesting, they're not a reason to be dismissive. We need to find out what is possible with state-of-the-art research systems, and then negotiate, or develop software, to bring that technology to Wikipedia. -- Tim Starling _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l