Spelling non english words in english - search results

Question

The spellings issue has been raised here

Please use consistent spelling in your posts

but it only talks about within a post. What about across the site? Senshin did say this

It would be a fool's errand to try to get the whole site to agree on a standard way of spelling non-English words

I agree it is difficult or even impossible to enforce this kind of thing all over the site. But it is still a problem. Below are few searches with different results.

search for word shiva

search for word siva

It effects the searchability of the site. People looking for specific concept have to try different spellings. How can we address this problem?

Answer 1

I think we shouldn't police Shiva vs Siva vs Siva with a dot under the s. Those are all valid transliterations of the Sanskrit word in different Devanagari transliteration systems like IAST and ITRANS. (See here for a comparison of the schemes.)

But I think we should prefer Sanskrit spellings to other spellings like Hindi spellings. So we should prefer Shiva to Shiv, for instance, and prefer Vimana to Vimanam or Viman, because the Sanskrit spellings are by far the most commonly used and understood spellings.

Answer 2

How can we address this problem? - Two Ways

1. Users who are not sure enough about the spellings should search over Hinduism site or atleast on Google

2. Users on this site should start editing the post to maintain consistency with the spellings and grammar.

I don't think first point needs any explanation, it already states what a user should do.

Taking about point two :-

Few days back, I raised a question on meta - Users should make use of their privileges where one of the point was Edit questions, retag them if required, rectify grammar, spell check etc

I am highly active since the site started and I've seen very little number of users who are actively participating in site activities like editing posts, reviewing posts, re-tagging questions, up voting posts which are good, equally down voting if they are bad, flagging.

If I take your example, you are visiting the site since 17 days consecutively and visited for 36 days in total, and your review stats say that you have only one suggested edit. Its not only you, there are many others who are active but are not using their privileges so start using them.

Also, users should take care when they are creating tags, for example, take this post, now we already have a tag called aatma but because users are not taking efforts to check first, they create new tag, in this, it was athma which further leads to inconsistent tagging.

There was a similar scenario over here for mahabharata

If users are not sure about spellings, join the Hinduism room where others will help, if he is not sure about tags, ask questions on meta.

And again, about the post body, I would say users should start editing posts if they are aware of a particular topic. There is no other way to solve the issue.

Answer 3

I think we should follow a standard Hindu scripture dictionary from online. I have just found a link which looks promising.

MythologyDictionary