L.S.
I would appreciate your advice on how to best go about releasing a partial dictionary. The context is a flex database with 8000+ entries of which about 2000 are thoroughly checked, and can be considered high quality. Creating an app with just these 2000 entries creates the following problems:
it leaves gaps in the homonym numbering of homonyms
jumps to words not in the 2000 display “word not found”
etc.
What would your advice be for the release of a partial dictionary?
Thanks in advance for sharing your experience.
Bart
Thank you Rhina, that gives us a new perspective. So always the full dictionary, but adding some kind of marker, text or icon to let the user know that the entry may contain errors …
Although some users may not notice the quality indicator …
Food for thought. Merci beaucoup.
Bart
Confidence level for dictionary senses and subsenses can be published by editing, applying, and filtering on values in the Status field.
In FieldWorks, the Status field is provided for the compiler to keep a record of the checking status of dictionary senses and subsenses, but Status (full or abbreviated) can also be published if desired. The default values are Confirmed, Disproved, Pending, Tentative. These can be edited and re-ordered in the Lists area. For instance, you could set Status values to H-Confirmed | M-Tentative | L-Suspect and use abbreviations H | M | L in your publication to indicate the confidence level for each dictionary entry. Or you could choose to flag only certain senses as Tentative with abbreviation " * " so that only those entries are flagged with asterisk in the publication. There might be some bulk editing needed to arrange the “Publish In” settings and the Status tags.
Tagging and publishing confidence levels may not solve all your problems with Homograph numbers and missing links, though it should reduce their number by allowing you to publish more of those lower confidence items.
Another (hack-ish) way of dealing with missing homographs is to edit the homograph numbers, placing questionable items at the end of the list, so that if you choose not to publish them, the homograph sequence will not be affected.
Did you know that Homograph numbers can be edited? In Browse and Lexicon Edit views, you can choose Homograph number as a column, and FieldWorks will allow you to edit the numbers in those views to manually reorder your homographs.
For dead links to unpublished items, there may be a scheme for finding them using filters in FieldWorks. Or this checking task could be a good one for FLExTools.
Thank you, Dennis, I wasn’t aware of this field in FLEx. However, I would be rather surprised if this field exported to DAB, see this list of supported FLEx-markers in DAB. I will be very happy to be proven wrong, though!
For publishing in DAB, a quick bulk copy to a supported field could resolve this issue.
Could the list you have there be for LIFT export only ? For a while now we are doing exports to DAB via the “configured dictionary XHTML” and I have not seen a (custom) field that cannot be exported.
You are right that media files (audio) that is imported into flex and can be played in flex does not play in the DAB app, whilst audio recorded with Flex can be played in an app created by DAB.
The quality status in Flex is defined per sense and not per entry. So indeed, as you suggested, it required a new custom field to be able to express the quality of an entry.
Here is what we did (for now):
1.) Created a new custom LIST field “Qualité” to be able to note quality on the entry level.
added the category Corrected to that list and * as abbreviation.
created a style to attribute a color to that Custom field
Used Bulk edit to isolate the 1996 checked entries (tagged via a separate status field we use to keep track of different sub-wordlists, like the origional AFA wordlist etc …)
In flex this looks like this, with the quality field before the headword (we may change that later):
