Talk:MediaWiki
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I asked Brion about the possibility of getting the new software earlier if I volunteered to manually move all the pages over. His response follows.
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- If we manually move pages over to the new system now, then it's going to make conversion more difficult overall: a list of renamed pages will need to be kept so that the page edit histories can be re-imported later. If I'm going to have to do that much work, I'd really rather just have the full conversion done and over with, and be rid of the old system for all languages at once. --Brion 01:14, 21 Aug 2003 (UTC)
Does anyone know what we would have to do to get the better software that the regular English Wiki uses? --Montrealais
- All we have to do is wait. :)
Brion is working on a conversion system to convert all of the languages on the old software to the Phase3/MediaWiki. Unless you can help with that, you can only wait.
Do we have a timescale for moving over to the new software? -- Tango
- Nothing definite but it partly depends on whether we want to wait for a fully automated conversion or do a lot of it manually. Angela
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- Do you mean moving pages, or do you mean technical stuff? If its just moving pages, i say do it as soon as possible, because there aren't too many pages at the moment, but it is increasing daily. -- Tango
Ok, don't quote me on this as I'm not sure this is accurate at all, but as far as I know, the stuff that would need to be done manually are
- renaming pages (removing or keeping captial letters as all currently have both letters captialised)
- removing links to talk pages
- put current talk pages in the talk namespace
- putting Wikipedia pages in the Wikipedia namespace (this would have to be done manually anyway)
- correcting links to newly titled pages
But even so, the conversion script isn't available yet, even if we do want to do it manually. Angela
- I think we could cope with doing that manually. So we just have to wait for the conversion script. *waits* -- Tango
Before the shift happens, there must be a dump of all the Simple English articles in the usemod XML-ized format. This is far more portable than the lousy MySQL dump format used by mediawiki.
A snapshot of the articles at that stage, or even right now, would be immensely useful for concordancing and experiments on organizing the data automatically. Prior XML dumps are of little use because there would be less than 300 articles in them, and later MySQL dumps are of little use because their format is so totally worthless to non-MySQL software, which is everything we care about in doing concordancing etc.
It also would be valuable to see if some XML formats could be developed that would be more suitable for presentation, client software, and the Simple English Editor, and working to a wikitext standard for more than just mediawiki sites. This will certainly have to have a parallel XML form anyway. See meta discussions on 'wikitext standard' and metaweb discussions on the same thing, listing the mediawiki sites innovating on this.
- I guess you're not going to be too impressed if I point you in the direction of the tech mailing list? Failing that, these things should be discussed at Meta rather than here, simply for the fact there are no developers here. Angela.
I turn my back for a minute, and when i come back you've moved over to the new software! Well done! :-) -- Tango 00:11, 23 Dec 2003 (UTC)
Simple English Words and Office Helps
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- Simple English is said in a circle as simple use of English. One common statement of Simple English is Basic English with the addition the 1000 Most Frequent words. This seems to be used by some companies for writing training books. Starting from Basic 1500, then only 320 words are needed to make the 1000 Most Frequent complete.
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- Basic English is a full language able to get the learner quickly into normal English use of words for living – for use as a complete language for international exchange and trade -- or for very quick (weeks, not years) getting into English-speaking life (immersion) with no unlearning needed. There are 850 root words, but word endings (suffixes) and complex words (compounds) give over 5000 letter groups (spellings).
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- Basic 1500 is the Basic English alphabetical wordlist + International 50 + Measures 50 + General (250 at 100 each, less those covered more than once) + Subsequent 350 words as a step to full English.
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- Most Frequent words, without "aah" and "ya'no", are able to put common words that are not truly needed to say full thoughts for basic living and work, but are common in everyday talk. Example -- the word "can" is not needed because "is able to" or "may" are Basic ways to say that thought. But "can" (taking in "tin can") is the 40th most used word in regular English. And can go into Simple English.
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- Basic teaches six derivatives (un- and suffixes -ed, -er, -ing, -ly, -s) (or 12 when you join them such as un+ wave +er +ing +ly). Which are let into Simple English? Addition of derivatives greatly increase the number of words (spellings) to learn and to be able to use.
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- Basic word lists are clear and up to now has Aids for Writing Simple English at the 850 words level. The Institute has suggestions for office helps that use Basic 1500 level plus the Most Frequent 320 that are not Basic words. The suggestions have the small number of derivatives of Basic and a small number taken from Basic -- -able, -est, -ive,(have), -th. See ReadSimple download and Simple English Project to join the discussion to help get marked out what is Simple English before any more work is done. Is this statement of Simple English over-much (Basic 850 or 1500 is better), or not enough (add VOA Special English with 500 more words), or completely wrong-headed, or what??
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- A suggestion is that writers make an attempt in Basic English (850 or 1500 ?) that everybody can read and that Simple English be a top limit ; any further and writing will not be clear.
- Once some agreement is made, then : writers can put stories with more certainty, or the Simple Wiki editor/review team can more easily fix stories that are put forward, or en.wiki stories can be transported -- in an simple, quick, complete, and fixed way for the readers.
