“They took our houses, they took our women, but they can never take our memories”

NGO workers often struggle to befriend the Yezidis they minister to in Kurdistan.  But one key to developing the relationship is for project workers to take a real interest in the villages people have come from.

If we talk about education and current affairs, these folk will likely feel belittled about all they don’t know; if we lower ourselves to ask them about their villages, they will maybe realise they actually were quite expert in the history, geography and economy of their village.

The first step is adding to Wikipedia a full list of the villages of Sinjar.  English Wikipedia lists the main settlements, but ku.wikipedia.org is the site where a full alphabetic listing of villages is being kept.  Ask a Sinjari friend the name of their village or hamlet, and if it’s not on the list, you can add it! Wikipedia is a great way to help disempowered people and put their village on the map.  They can be empowered in a small but significant way by being the geographers and historians of their own village.

I have opened a webpage called Sinjar Stories.  Anyone can click the edit icon and add their notes.  Just remember this short URL tinyURL.com/sinjarstories and start recording any interesting info.  This is a source that can be cited when a Wikipedia page is written for a village.

I have also just discovered the excellent multi-layered mapping at Wikimapia.  Click on Categories and you can choose to view villages, schools or ‘interesting places’ for example: another great way to while away the hours profitably while drinking tea with Shingalis.

 

 

Training Course for Wiktionarians?

Related to the previous post is this question: how can I provide training for my staff that will make them more effective lexicographers?

For example, we are doing a feasibility study on launching a Sorani-dialect Wiktionary that would be a cousin site to the ku.wiktionary.org site.

The two dialects are quite similar, but you cannot lump them together and just have one monolingual Kurdish dictionary.  Either you define a giraffe in Kurmanji or you define it in Sorani.  The answer is having two separate wiktionaries.  (In fact, a stub already exists for Sorani: ckb.wiktionary.org, but noone seems to have added data to it yet)

But much of the data would be shared.  Only slight changes to the page below would be needed, and Bob’s Your Uncle you have a Sorani dictionary entry for the word giraffe.

But how exactly does one acquire the skills to do that sort of data export-import?

And we’d like to be able to adapt and improve the actual apparatus and navigation of the Wiktionary itself.  Any insight anybody?

 

Techie Help Needed with Wiki work

Lexicography – The art of writing dictionaries – has always been 99% Perspiration and 1% Inspiration.  But the ground has shifted massively in recent decades.  Now much of the sweat can be absorbed by computers.

I wanted to put this request out to techie-minded friends of our work: can anyone find a way for us to automatise the hyperlinking of words?

Let me explain: in Wiktionary, and Wikipedia too, a term can be further explored by hopping to a page for that particular word.  This is a crucial advantage in online dictionaries: if you don’t understand a word within a definition of a word, just click on it and you will get redirected to that word itself.

But the Kurdish Wiktionary often imports data from printed dictionaries – and these definitions do not contain hyperlinks.

Consider an example from the English Wiktionary:

———————————————–

step ladder (plural step ladders)

A ladder with steps or treads instead of rungs that is hinged in the middle…
———————————————–

If you were curious as to what a rung was, just click on ‘rung’ and you’ll be able to see.

If you cleck the edit icon, you will see that the code for this entry reads as follows:

# A [[ladder]] with [[step]]s or [[tread]]s instead of [[rung]]s.

You will notice that the word ‘rungs’ is not hyperlinked, but rather ‘rung’, because the headword to look up is rung not rungs.  So a dictionary editor has to take care what exactly he hyperlinks.  And it’s a judgment call as to which of the words he hyperlinks, because it is clearly not useful to hyperlink common words like ‘a’, ‘with’ or ‘of’.

But my basic question here is: how can we automate a lot of this work?  Can we at least set up a short-cut so that all we have to do is highlight a word and press something like Alt-H in order to hyperlink it: ie insert square brackets round it?

I know that you can choose between visual editing and source editing.  The former does automate some of the tasks, but we have found that once you know the code fairly well it’s quicker to do it using the source code.  But tailor-made shortcuts would be a godsend.

Please enter comments if you have any ideas.