User talk:Brooke Vibber

Note; I don't keep track of this page as often as on my Esperanto, English, or French user talk pages. Be sure to leave a note on one of them pointing at any important updates here.

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Hi Brion. Interested as I am in the page statistics for the International wikis, I couldn't help but notice that according to the Special:Statistics page the Chinese wiki is now by far the largest wiki in the world, with a whopping 18,446,744,073,709,551,615 valid pages! Too bad I can't read Chinese ;) -Scipius

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Hi Brion.

I have some suggestions to the Chinese wikipedia:

1. It is preferred to maintain a single version for Chinese language. Instead of a simplified version as well as a Formal Chinese version. There are possible to maintain a Formal Chinese version, but add the necessary translation module to the system which automatically translate the Formal Chinese version to the simplified version for Readers who do not understand the formal Chinese.

Such an facility could be built in sort time with the help of the unihan database (www.unicode.org).

There are some possible way to handle this:

1.a through user selection: add to user perference a selection for simplify display.

1.b through the browser/server content negoation (zh-tw, zh-hk, zh-mo to select Formal Chinese; zh-cn, zh-sg to select simplified Chinese)

1.c add an simplified link for display the simplified version.

1.d add an selection screen or seprated url for selection.

2. If the above is accepted, we still accept simplified Chinese writings. However, efforts can be done to convert them into formal Chinese later. A small tool can be used to assist this process.

3. The Search facility also need to handle the conversion: for searching, converting both the search expression and the text into simplified form will be perferred.

4. If I understand correctly, the current wikipedia software provide search on single characters for Chinese, it will be suficient for Wikipedia's usage. But I would like to point-out that the ranking algorithm would weight the consective matching a higher score, then it will be more close to the searcher's expectation.

I would be happy to write a small script to extract the simplified mapping table from the unihan database if you like.

Kent Sin kentsin@yahoo.com 2003.1.4

My impression is that converting traditional to simplified is relatively simpler (mostly many->one) than simplified to traditional (more one->many and many->many), but that it's still not going to be perfect. So, this should be doable, particularly if we can come up with a simple syntax for specifying conversion overrides. (Vaguely similarly, I'd like to see automatic furigana on the Japanese wiki, which again is going to be perfect, and would benefit from a simple override syntax.) --Brion VIBBER 2003年1月7日 09:22 (UTC)