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Germanic Lexicon Project
Message Board
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Author: Sean Crist (Swarthmore College)
Email: kurisuto at unagi dot cis dot upenn dot edu
Date: 2004-11-17 08:18:12
Subject: Re: A rival Bosworth & Toller project?
> As will be obvious, I know next to nothing about the technical side of
> things, but how different are the methodologies between this project
> and Bekie's? Are there major incompatabilities? Or could work
> done on one be incoporated into the other without too much difficulty?
> Are there significant advantages/disadvantages to one method of
> correcting or the other?
I was curious about this too. Last night I downloaded the work that Bekie's team has done so far and studied it. For the most part, the differences are minor, e.g. how they've decided to handle punctuation in connection with bold/italic tags. A script could do nearly all of the work of normalizing their form to ours, or vice versa.
When I did a careful comparison of the two versions of a page which we've both corrected, I found that we're both missing minor errors.
Exactlty how they're doing their corrections, I don't know; but the end result has essentially no incompatibilities with ours. There would be no major technical obstacle to incorporating the pages which Bekie's team has already corrected into our version here (or vice versa, although the number of pages which we've done and they haven't is much smaller). It's more a question of whether this is the right thing to do.
> I guess there would be benefits to formal cooperation, but as a worst
> case scenario, supposing this isn't possible for whatever
> reason, would it be simplest for volunteers to concentrate on the
> project that's nearest completion, giving their time on the
> understanding that the finished product will be free to view or copy
> or display wherever it can be, and in whatever way? I assume most
> people associated with either project are mainly intested in getting
> the complete dictionary available as quickly and efficiently as possible.
There's some unfortunate history here, but I'd still be willing to set aside our differences and work together with Bekie's team.
A bunch of other comments come to mind, but I think I'll wait to see what Bekie's response is.
--Sean