Tuesday, January 31, 2006

Rule number one: You are wrong !

There are those days when you must be wrong .. Today was one such day: because the vision that is behind WiktionaryZ "appears to be based on a simplistic and Eurocentric view of language". It must be true because that is what is being said .. If not, rule number one must be applicable ..

Today a nice standard called OLIF was pointed out to me. OLIF stands for Open Lexicon Interchange Format, it is an open standard for lexical/terminological data encoding. It is essentially a Free and Open standard, it has many illustrious and industrious backers. But it is a tad Eurocentric. It now has East Asian language support, but it is best at English, German, French, Spanish, Danish and Portuguese.

I would not want to dismiss a standard like OLIF when people are actively involved in a standard .. To be useful would be necessary to define how a standard is lacking, it might be that it is just a matter of some refining. It might be that the standard does consider things that I have not considered yet (and I do know that I do not consider everything all the time).

On Meta we are voting for a new Wikimedia project, this project is about standards .. Discussing standards but more importantly it is a conduit for working on those standards that do not fit the requirements that we have for standards in the Wikimedia Foundation's projects. Now there are two options: I am wrong or the standards will fit our needs like a glove.

Thanks,
GerardM

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