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

[Tom Chance]

> >> - 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.

I think that this is getting into overly complicated
realms. The whole purpose of the resource is to give
the user as much information as they need about an
article. We needn't say what units are used, because
they can find that out whilst reading the article and
then bring up the converter. We don't want to bombard
the user with every minutae detail of what an article
is like when they don't need to know. Keep it simple.
And we certainly don't need to know the units of an
article.


> >> - 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.

We can't start having different forms for different
countries. Not only would we then be discouraging
certain forms of expression from certain nations, but
it would get extremely complicated. I would have
thought that so long as we had translations of all the
pages (but not all articles yet) into as many
languages as possible, that would suffice, or am I
wrong?


> >> 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. 

But there is no set way to write an article about a
country. You could be writing about its economy now,
its political history, its geographical features.
There are endless articles on any given subject, so we
shouldn't narrow people's writing down. Articles may
be harder to compare, but we're likely to get a whole
lot more. Nobody wants to re-write their work to fit
somebody else's format, it is irritating and takes a
lot of time.


> 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)

Well for this we can only rely on the authors finding
similar articles and linking to them. Unless we give
moderators the power to link articles to articles they
deem to be similar. Just so long as people don't start
submitting lots of articles that link to their
previous articles that are irrelevant.


Tom Chance

=====
"True security is to be found in social solidarity rather than in isolated 
individual effort - Fyodor Dostoyevsky"

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