[Bug-gne]Re: Bug-gne digest, Vol 1 #52 - 1 msg

[Oliver Denzel]

Hi all!

> > - We should think about translating not only
> > alnguage but also units. 
> > This would could be done automatically. (Conversion
> > from miles to 
> > kilometers e.g.)
>
>
> How about we just provide a conversion utility? As
> opposed to trying to integrate this into all of the
> articles. Would be a good project for somebody to try
> in Perl or PHP or something...
A conversion utility would be a good thing. We also should have a 
database that stores which user can understand what units. We should 
think about which metadata we need about an article, because there are a 
few non - obvious. I think we need a link to the group of units that is 
used, some kind of rating (for beginners, experts, ...), a category 
(that we can have access to special metadata). It should also somehow 
link to articles on the same topic.

> > - What do we want to do about the country stuff? Not
> > every country is 
> > accepted by every other country. So how to adress
> > this in a translation? 
> > Or stuff that has to be changed very much because
> > the reader of the 
> > translation otherwise doesn't get the meaning?
>
>
> Well if a Chinese person translates an article which
> talks about Taiwan, then they can just talk about it
> as a state of China or something. They don't have to
> recognise it as a nation state, and any other country
> problems won't be too big a problem. Afterall, by not
> recognising Taiwan or Afghanistan as nations, authors
> are only offering opinions in the end, not a fact.

I thought more on the problem of user registration and metadata / links. 
You would have to have a different form for users from china and taiwan. 
But how to know this before they enter that? And if you want to link to 
some of the most important presidents of asian countries, you would have 
to have a version with and one without the taiwanese president.

> > It would also help the first
> > author to get a 
> > structure for his article.
>
>
> No two articles can be completely structures in the
> same way. Beyond having a title, synopsis and body,
> articles will always have different layouts (think of
> a political essay being structured in the same way as
> a review of a book or as an explanation of zero-point
> energy). So we can't really ask for a particular
> structure, only that articles are in some way
> structured.

I thought more on two or more articles on the same topic, e.g. on 
countries or molecules . For countries it would be possible to describe 
germany with three parts, G. in the past, present and future, the USA 
with geography, people, culture and military and hte UK by mentioning 
only the figures of statistics. In this way the reader can't compare to 
similar entries very well. It would also help us to get links between 
articles in the beginning, because we would know something about the 
subject of the article. (A dropdown with all countries for example if 
you write an article on a president or on states of countries or 
alliences of countries)

Ciao

Oli D.