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When there are too many specific fields, such as different types of acknowledgements (source, recorder, speaker, citation, etc), there are more opportunities to make mistakes or have different interpretations. It is more confusing for the people inputting the data, and it is harder for developers to format the data in a way that will work for all teams.
We have found that a list of general acknowledgements is simpler and more useful than separating types of references, credits, and thank you notes. The exception is data about speakers for audio files, where it is important to be able to group audio by the person or people speaking, separately from other types of acknowledgements.
In most fields, wysiwyg or html formatting is rarely used and not essential. We reserve this feature for longer formatted text such as stories, rather than for smaller text items like notes on dictionary entries.
Including an alternate spelling field helps avoid duplicate input work by teams
The distinction between words and phrases is different depending on the language context. We use the same data schema for both, and distinguish them based only on the type field.
Different languages have different needs related to tracking parts of speech. For example, some language teams enter prefixes as their own dictionary entries. We use a standard list of parts of speech for all teams to avoid confusion, but we are looking for ways to give each team a customizable view of their most used options.
For people’s names, whenever practical we use a single “full name” field to allow for whatever naming convention is best for that person.
While we currently do not specify the type of relationship between dictionary entries, this is something that some teams would be interested in. E.g., marking another dictionary entry as the “root” or “plural”.
For related dictionary entries, we use directional relations (with a “from” and “to”) to account for situations where a word or phrase has many incoming links. In those situations, the team may wish to specify a few outgoing links that are highlighted differently, for example a few “example phrases” for a common word.