On 9/10/09 10:06 AM, Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 9, 2009 at 6:50 PM, Tim Starling<[email protected]>  wrote:
>    
>> I don't know why you're writing this nonsense, you obviously haven't
>> looked at the code at all.
>>      
> This paragraph is unnecessary.
>    
Seriously! Please read things aloud before clicking send. You will 
hopefully then be able to better detect when it's time to take a break, 
eat some fruit and take it down a notch.
>> The language variant system that we have could easily convert between
>> US and UK English. In fact it already does convert between a language
>> pair with a far more complex relationship, that is Simplified and
>> Traditional Chinese.
>>
>> The language conversion system is very simple, it's just a table of
>> translated pairs, where the longest match takes precedence. The
>> translation table in one direction (e.g. UK ->  US) can be different to
>> the table in the other direction (US ->  UK). You would not list "ize
>> ->  ise", you would list every word in the dictionary with an -ize
>> ending that can be translated to -ise without controversy. The current
>> software could handle 50k pairs or so without serious performance
>> problems, and it could be extended and optimised to allow millions of
>> pairs if there was a need for that.
>>
>> It's possible to handle any pair of languages which are separated only
>> by vocabulary, and transliteration or spelling. It's only differences
>> in grammar, such as word order, that would give it trouble.
>>      
> Is there any reason nobody's tried adding such support for us/uk
> English?  It would resolve some long-standing tension on enwiki.
> Would anons have to be given one variant or the other, or would they
> get untransformed text or what?  Does the variant transformation apply
> to the edit page as well?
>
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>    
The variant system seems poorly understood by most people (including me) 
which often tends to cause something (like it for instance) to also be 
under-utilized...

Perhaps we need more information on what it intends to provide the user. 
All I find in Google on this topic are blurbs about configuration 
variables and lots of people confused as to what language variants even 
are...

Is there some awesome documentation somewhere I have yet to find?

- Trevor

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