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Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Archive/Adapt visual editor to wiktionaries

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Adapt visual editor to wiktionaries

NoN Outside the scope of Community Tech

  • Problem: The visual editor is the same as Wikipedia, but wiktionary pages are structured in a totally different way
  • Who would benefit: Anyone who wants to create or edit wiktionary pages
  • Proposed solution: Install a visual editor which understands the structure of wiktionary pages and proposes tools that handle the wiktionary templates. This will help editors a lot, especially the beginners. The most obvious features are:
  1. Handle multiple languages in the same page
  2. Standard sections that are present in all pages (e.g. the French wiktionary always has 1. Etymology 2. Form and pronunciation 3. Definitions and example sentences 4. translations)
  3. Definitions start with one or more templates
  4. Optional sections have a predefined order
  5. Configurable character sets are needed to build pronunciations
  6. A tool to build sources from one of the existing models, to put at the end of example sentences
  7. A tool to add links and lists of links to a section, many sections contain structured and ordered lists of links to other pages (words)
  8. Links to Wikipedia and other sister projects

Discussion

  • The solution for this problem may also imply some UX, to frame a branch of VisualEditor that fit with the specific needs of Wiktionarians. Also, in French Wiktionary we have a gadget to use a form for the creation of new entries, it could be a good indication of our needs in this kind of contribution, it's CreerNouveauMot. A related proposal, Visual entry form suggests to also use more preload in order to help begginers to have the template of the page. It may also be through a dynamic questionnaire asking questions such as "Is it for English?" Yes/No "Is it for a noun, verb, adverb, etc.?" "Is it still in use?" (if not, add "old" in the beginning of a definition), etc. Noé (talk) 10:00, 9 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @Romainbehar: I am sorry for contacting you last minute... voting starts tomorrow! I believe there may be a problem with this proposal. As you say, each Wiktionary uses a different format so it will be very difficult if not impossible to make a tool that works for all of them. Additionally, VisualEditor in particular is a behemoth of software, and customizing it for Wiktionary is probably outside our scope. However, we could make a gadget that allows for easy addition/modification of Wiktionary entries, but this would have to be specifically for your wiki. Would you like to reword the proposal to be solely for French Wiktionary? MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 03:17, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
  • @MusikAnimal: Thanks for answering my request. I understand that VisualEditor is a large piece of software and doesn't fit in your current scope, but creating a gadget is far from my inital idea: using VisualEditor in the French Wiktionary is almost useless as it just allows modifying text (sometimes it's more difficult than expected), and doesn't help much with Wiktionary specific templates and structures. The French Wiktionary already has gadgets, such as the one named CreerNouveauMot widely used to ease the creation of new pages. I'll create another entry to improve that gadget. Out of curiosity, could you give me links to the VisualEditor community and code? Romainbehar (talk) 08:05, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
    Understood. In that case I'm going to archive this proposal as out of scope, because even if we did work on VisualEditor, it'd need to be adapted to suit all the Wiktionaries. This is not really possible unless there is some sort of structured data. I have been made aware of Dbnary which does offer structured data, but I don't think this would help us if we're talking about editing. We'd still need some configuration for each wiki, when VisualEditor is supposed to be wiki-agnostic. I'm not sure what you mean by the VE "community", but technical details can be found at mw:Extension:VisualEditor. Thanks for your participation in the survey! MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 17:03, 20 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]
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