[lojban] Re: jbovlaste query

[Robin Lee Powell <lojban-out@lojban.org>]

On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 06:24:44PM -0400, Matt Arnold wrote:
> I was wrong to use such a disparaging word and I'm sincerely
> sorry. Your efforts are appreciated. I brag about jbovlaste's PDF
> dictionary production system at every presentation and it always
> impresses the crowds.

Thank you.  I have no officially been mollified.

> There is an element of subjectivity to it. "Working" or "not
> working" begs the question "working/not working for what?" When my
> IRC client functioned intermittently on the channel, I thought it
> was working, in that it was meeting my needs, but you did not seem
> to. We had different expectations for it.

Amusingly, I'm pretty sure that I referred to your IM client as
"broken" at least once.  .u'i ru'e .u'u ru'e

> Similarly with jbovlaste, it turns out that the administrator has
> a concept of the intent of function which is different from the
> assumption of an uninformed user. It's good for the user to know
> what question he is asking: "show me the word if there is a vote
> for it in both directions, and ignore its occurence of this string
> of characters anywhere but the Word field." By the Word field, I
> mean as distinct from the Type, Gloss Word, rafsi, or Definition
> fields.
> 
> I was using it to ask the question "show me every occurence of
> this string of characters anywhere in the dictionary's text,
> including all fields." That's why Supermemo is so useful for word
> lookup.
> 
> So this is why we need to let the users know what question the
> jbovlaste query is hearing them ask. I recommend "To improve the
> quality of results, jbovlaste search does not return words with
> insufficient votes. To qualify to be returned in search results, a
> proposed lujvo is required to have received a vote in favor in
> both directions: for instance, in English to Lojban and in Lojban
> to English." I'm not sure what other restrictions the search
> involves.

That's a lovely start.  I've put that there, and a bit of other
stuff besides.

> Also, it would be interesting to allow users to vote against a
> word. 

Yeah, a lot of people have suggested that.  Lately I think it's
probably a good idea, but lately I haven't done any jbovlaste
development either.  I've been trying to save my "serious" Lojban
work for BPFK stuff.

-Robin



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