Saturday, July 01, 2006

How to deal with conventions

There are conventions to indicate certain things. One such is the convention for the the name in Latin of a species; it is customary to capitalize the name of the genus an to have the whole in italics type. This would make it Homo sapiens.

What would we do in WiktionaryZ when we get data from another resource where these names are NOT treated according to the conventions. To me it would be obvious, if a convention is adopted, you do want to move data over in that direction.

Another convention that we are certain to adopt is about the spelling; an expression like MALARIA or Malaria is certainly to be replaced by malaria. In many scientific resources, the first two formats are the convention that is used for expressions. WiktionaryZ will want to maintain these forms in one way or another. One way of doing that is using the table that is currently called MisSpelling. I would not mind when the name of this table changes to become more politically correct.

Thanks,
GerardM

2 Comments:

Blogger SabineWanner said...

What bout simply "other spellings"?

10:58 am  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

"Other spellings" would indicate that they are valid spellings. I think we should make a difference between valid alternative spellings and misspellings.

2:13 pm  

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