[kde-edu]: [Parley-devel] common vocabulary lists

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Hi,
I'm currently away and totally out of the loop, so I thought, I'd just throw 
in how I think vocabulary should be collected:
I would like to see it happen as openly as possible, if we don't give people 
the possibility to work on it they won't... So I like the wiki approach. But I 
think wikis are way to unstructured. It is hard (Sabine had someone who did 
that, and it is overly complex) to get data out of wiktionary for example.

I do not like the idea of using the google applications for several reasons. I 
don't think the interface really fits the task - vocabulary is more complex 
that just two word mappings. I think it lacks any of the great advanced stuff 
that applications could make use of. And it lacks a way of easily structuring 
the data so that it can be split into lessons without major trouble. This is 
prone to breaking. Finally I don't like that it's proprietary software. But 
even if there was a free spreadsheet alternative that wouldn't make the cut 
for me.

In my opinion what is needed is a web app (maybe later accessible from within 
parley for example because I do not enjoy using web apps most of the time).
I think the data should be stored in a read database and there should be a 
specific front end that makes it possible to edit vocabulary in a meaningful 
way - including grammar things such as word type, conjugations etc.

One more note about books: it is sad, but experience shows that editorials 
that produce school books tend to insist on some silly copyrights for word 
lists because of their meaningful pedagogical arrangement... this seems to be 
a gray zone of copyrights... the individual translations are luckily not 
copyrightable (how insane would that be). I only looked into this a bit in 
Europe.

Cheers
Frederik


On Sunday 25 April 2010 20:00:53 Sabine Cretella wrote:
> Jürgen, please give me some days - I will try to answer you on that.
> There's just too much stuff around.
> 
> I want to see if Google spreadsheets can digest the big list - the small
> one for sure. So that is where you then can invite people to contribut
> with - Wikis are too prone to vandalism IMHO - you need people that won't
> mix up your data - the handful of people that will work on it should be
> sure that their time is invested well.
> 
> Of course you can go the Wiki-way, but please remember that there is always
> loads of admin work on a wiki to do and that takes away time from actually
> contributing. This is one of the reasons why I stopped to work on
> Wiktionary - it took me more time to clean vandalisms than I could in the
> end add in new terminology (which in any case cannot be extracted easily)
> 
> Maybe we have even a better way to do things, but I am myself waiting for
> information.
> 
> Btw. for English-Spanish:
> http://ambaradan.i-iter.org/voxhumanitatis/raw-file/b7fc8f4fa976/anaphraseu
> s/eng-spa/anaphraseusEnWikt-eng-spa.txt This is the English-Spanish
> wordlist in a tab delimited format from the English wiktionary. -
> eventually you will first have to set the encoding of your browser to
> utf-8 and than you can save the file properly
> 
> http://ambaradan.i-iter.org/voxhumanitatis/raw-file/b7fc8f4fa976/parley/eng
> -spa/VocTrainVH-eng-spa.kvtml file of VH data for Parley - eventually you
> will first have to set the encoding of your browser to utf-8 and than you
> can save the file properly
> 
> I have another two data sets here - one on environmental terminology and
> one general/specialised mixed, but don't have time to convert them right
> now ... this will take a bit.
> 
> cheers, Sabine
> 
> On Sun, Apr 25, 2010 at 7:41 PM, Juergen :-) 
<b4tasttd at auroville.org.in>wrote:
> > Hi everybody,
> > 
> > Sabine's mail about collective files brings up another aspect for me.
> > Presently there is no way to build vocabulary-lists together. That is a
> > pity because practically everybody has to start from scratch with on of
> > the present lists.
> > But if one user builds a list and uploads it some other user can
> > download it and use it and add to it but not upload it under the same
> > file. My suggestion to think about a solution.
> > I guess in whatever language there could be a template for a structure
> > like
> > 
> > at home
> > at work
> > in a restaurant
> > in the post office
> > etc
> > 
> > If Parley could have a kind of wiki-list where people simply could add
> > or edit words or grammar then this file could be used by all users of
> > the same language and if this file could work in reverse order like
> > EN-ES as well as ES-EN one could expect a faster grow of language files.
> > 
> > This will not take care of people who use a specific book and want to
> > follow the vocabularies of this book.
> > 
> > Be at peace and in harmony.
> > Juergen
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