Chinese menu wiki?

[mikelove]

Had the idea for this just now - an open-source Wikipedia/CC-CEDICT-like Chinese menu reference, covering not only the actual menu item characters and translations but with descriptions and photos as well; combined with live OCR this would basically give every restaurant in China an English-language picture menu.

Is anybody aware of another project out there doing this? If not, anybody interested in helping to create one? (we can set it up and donate the web hosting, we'd just need editors)

 

[numble]

I'd be interested in helping with this.

I suppose Hudong or Baidu Baike might do some of this stuff in Chinese, but they're not focused solely on menu items.

An iOS/mobile-compatible interface (an app?) that lets you upload photos might be helpful.

Would this be focused solely on Chinese menu items? Or include Chinese names for Western foods? Chinese names for food ingredients, vegetables, herbs, condiments and/or animals/animal parts?

I took a photo of a Cow diagram in a supermarket the other week just so I would have a reference for how to say things like "Chuck" and "rib eye," which I don't think Pleco does a good job with.

 

[Entropy]

Had the idea for this just now - an open-source Wikipedia/CC-CEDICT-like Chinese menu reference, covering not only the actual menu item characters and translations but with descriptions and photos as well; combined with live OCR this would basically give every restaurant in China an English-language picture menu.

I had the idea of a Chinese food wiki a long time ago, but it seems like it would be more useful inside an app such as Pleco. (There are several fairly useful apps with pictures of food items, mostly dimsum but not entirely.) And, I'm pretty sure I suggested being able to add pictures to flash cards or dictionary entries precisely so I could add pictures of food.

But it *would* be nice if Pleco could look things up in *online* resources such as Wikis.

I took a photo of a Cow diagram in a supermarket the other week just so I would have a reference for how to say things like "Chuck" and "rib eye," which I don't think Pleco does a good job with.

A cow diagram with Chinese labels?!? I WANT that!

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

 

[numble]

I took a photo of a Cow diagram in a supermarket the other week just so I would have a reference for how to say things like "Chuck" and "rib eye," which I don't think Pleco does a good job with.

A cow diagram with Chinese labels?!? I WANT that!

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

Here is what I got, from a BHG supermarket.I guess I didn't take a photo that fully captured the diagram, just the definitions at the bottom.

I noticed another diagram in Carrefour that I think had some different words though, so I'm not sure how accurate this is.

 

[mikelove]

I'd be interested in helping with this.

Great! I'm thinking it may be best to just set up a MediaWiki site and start populating it with stuff, already own a spare vaguely-Chinese-food-related domain name (chaguan.org) so it'd be pretty easy to get it up and running, though there probably needs to be at least a little advance planning just to figure out what the articles would look like / what the moderation policy would be like / which flavor of Creative Commons license to use / etc.

An iOS/mobile-compatible interface (an app?) that lets you upload photos might be helpful.

Oh that's a must-have, yes - would dovetail with the work we're doing anyway on embedding media in flashcard databases and server-based flashcard sync.

Would this be focused solely on Chinese menu items? Or include Chinese names for Western foods? Chinese names for food ingredients, vegetables, herbs, condiments and/or animals/animal parts?

I think we'd want to mostly limit it to things you'd see on a menu, at least at first - Western menu items are fine, you see a few of those crop up on menus at a lot of Chinese restaurants (especially in the US - fried plantains are almost ubiquitous at neighborhood Chinese joints in NYC), but for general-purpose vocabulary like the names of animals and ingredients we're probably better off relying on an existing dictionary.

I had the idea of a Chinese food wiki a long time ago, but it seems like it would be more useful inside an app such as Pleco. (There are several fairly useful apps with pictures of food items, mostly dimsum but not entirely.) And, I'm pretty sure I suggested being able to add pictures to flash cards or dictionary entries precisely so I could add pictures of food.

You did indeed, but it'd be nice to have something more centralized and potentially comprehensive, and something that other people who were interested in the subject but didn't own iPhones could participate in.

But it *would* be nice if Pleco could look things up in *online* resources such as Wikis.

Still not wild about that idea, though we are toying with including two little online resource links in 2.2.2.

 

[Entropy]

You should post a note about this to Chowhound. Roust the sleeping masses.

An iOS/mobile-compatible interface (an app?) that lets you upload photos might be helpful.

Oh that's a must-have, yes - would dovetail with the work we're doing anyway on embedding media in flashcard databases and server-based flashcard sync.

Right, this would be much easier if you could edit it from the field. And I think on the iPad both a mini (exactly iPhone-sized) English keyboard should coexist with the HWR input field (and possibly also a pinyin keyboard to let you enter characters that way instead of switching the HWR input around.

I think this should be done in general, not just for the Wiki editing. The iPad's portrait keyboard is way too big for me to use as efficiently as I can use the iPhone's keyboard, so it could easily share space with the HWR input.

Would this be focused solely on Chinese menu items? Or include Chinese names for Western foods? Chinese names for food ingredients, vegetables, herbs, condiments and/or animals/animal parts?

I think we'd want to mostly limit it to things you'd see on a menu,

I think it would be useful to not limit it to menu items even at first; at least it should include detailed info on ingredients.

but for general-purpose vocabulary like the names of animals and ingredients we're probably better off relying on an existing dictionary.

Well, there's always Wikipedia for that.

I had the idea of a Chinese food wiki a long time ago, but it seems like it would be more useful inside an app such as Pleco.

The idea actually goes back to a time before I learned to read, meaning sometime in 2009. It's *much* more appealing to me now since I think actual progress could be made in a short time. So, not "inside" Pleco but with eStroke and Pleco in the editor's toolbox.

I'm pretty sure I suggested being able to add pictures to flash cards or dictionary entries precisely so I could add pictures of food.

You did indeed, but it'd be nice to have something more centralized and potentially comprehensive, and something that other people who were interested in the subject but didn't own iPhones could participate in.

Right--something more comprehensive, centralized, accessible, and *online*. I originally suggested this precisely because you're opposed to going online to look something up, so I wanted to put it into Pleco as I needed to. If I'm going through all the trouble of cutting and pasting into a Web browser, I want to then save the results in the new flashcard.

But it *would* be nice if Pleco could look things up in *online* resources such as Wikis.

Still not wild about that idea, though we are toying with including two little online resource links in 2.2.2.

So this Wiki would be on the net, at your website, but since Pleco doesn't just let you look things up online, you couldn't actually use live OCR to look things up in the Wiki unless you'd copied the latest version to the app. And of course, since your dining companions also can't just get the latest version online, you would need a mechanism to share your revisions using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi. :lol:

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

 

[mikelove]

You should post a note about this to Chowhound. Roust the sleeping masses.

If it gets a little farther along, yes.

Right, this would be much easier if you could edit it from the field. And I think on the iPad both a mini (exactly iPhone-sized) English keyboard should coexist with the HWR input field (and possibly also a pinyin keyboard to let you enter characters that way instead of switching the HWR input around.

I think this should be done in general, not just for the Wiki editing. The iPad's portrait keyboard is way too big for me to use as efficiently as I can use the iPhone's keyboard, so it could easily share space with the HWR input.

That one I'm not sure about - to justify the (substantial) amount of work involved this would need to be something a significant number of people would use, and I'm concerned that narrow key spacing on a giant iPad might be challenging for a lot of people; yes, you've still got bigger keys than an iPhone, but you're requiring people to position their hands accurately while much farther away from the edge of the screen.

I think it would be useful to not limit it to menu items even at first; at least it should include detailed info on ingredients.

Not sure about this either - if we presume that the number of early contributors is very small then it's best to keep their contributions as narrowly focused as possible.

Right--something more comprehensive, centralized, accessible, and *online*. I originally suggested this precisely because you're opposed to going online to look something up, so I wanted to put it into Pleco as I needed to. If I'm going through all the trouble of cutting and pasting into a Web browser, I want to then save the results in the new flashcard.

I'm opposed to going online in large part because a huge number of Pleco users don't have regular internet access on their devices - any resource we integrate that's only available online is something none of those people can use, and if we make it a central part of our software we're pretty much turning them away altogether.

So this Wiki would be on the net, at your website, but since Pleco doesn't just let you look things up online, you couldn't actually use live OCR to look things up in the Wiki unless you'd copied the latest version to the app. And of course, since your dining companions also can't just get the latest version online, you would need a mechanism to share your revisions using Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

You couldn't look them up "live" with an online resource anyway, it would be too slow. If we're running this on our server we can easily generate daily updates, and I suppose we could even add an optional link to the website, but I continue to believe that given the nature of our user base and the speed / reliability they depend on in their dictionaries, the primary mode of interaction with all of our databases should be offline.

 

[Entropy]

to justify the (substantial) amount of work involved this would need to be something a significant number of people would use, and I'm concerned that narrow key spacing on a giant iPad might be challenging for a lot of people

I want the same key spacing I currently use on my phone.

And, I find that when entering text in mixed languages, it really does help to have easy access to all of the keyboards you need. I'd be a lot less happy about editing if I had to switch keyboards all the time, and in fact I *am* pretty unhappy when I have to switch keyboards while posting to Chowhound.

I'm opposed to going online in large part because a huge number of Pleco users don't have regular internet access on their devices - any resource we integrate that's only available online is something none of those people can use,

*I* have to go online anyway, to search Wikipedia or Google images, or use Google Translate. The included dictionaries often get the wrong context for food terms (such as when I was demo'ing OCR to the owner of Lao Sichuan, and he observed it was finding medical terminology), and the lack of pictures doesn't help. (There are plenty of things like 大千干烧鱼 that Google succeeds in finding pictures of or blog postings about.) So by not letting me search directly from the app, I have to go through a copy-close-open-paste-close-open cycle that grows tiresome after a while, and would be unimaginably more so without "multitasking". Obviously a food dictionary would help with this, but a user-generated one wouldn't be comprehensive for a long time to come.

You couldn't look them up "live" with an online resource anyway, it would be too slow. If we're running this on our server we can easily generate daily updates, and I suppose we could even add an optional link to the website, but I continue to believe that given the nature of our user base and the speed / reliability they depend on in their dictionaries, the primary mode of interaction with all of our databases should be offline.

So it sounds like this isn't a real *Wiki* but instead a shared dictionary project that isn't always editable and accessible in real time via the Web, but only via Pleco updates? I guess I'm confused as to how this would be "combined with live OCR" to give "every restaurant in China an English-language picture menu."

~ Kiran <entropy@io.com>

 

[mikelove]

I want the same key spacing I currently use on my phone.

The ergonomics on that are really awful - have you actually tried hitting buttons that narrowly spaced in the middle of an iPad's screen? Without the side as an anchor point it's really pretty terrible - if we want to combine keyboard + handwriting on iPad there are better ways to do it, say by letting people draw anywhere in the definition area with a transparent overlay.

You could also turn on the off-by-default-because-it's-not-that-good letter input option for the handwriting recognizer and see how that goes...

*I* have to go online anyway, to search Wikipedia or Google images, or use Google Translate. The included dictionaries often get the wrong context for food terms (such as when I was demo'ing OCR to the owner of Lao Sichuan, and he observed it was finding medical terminology), and the lack of pictures doesn't help. (There are plenty of things like 大千干烧鱼 that Google succeeds in finding pictures of or blog postings about.) So by not letting me search directly from the app, I have to go through a copy-close-open-paste-close-open cycle that grows tiresome after a while, and would be unimaginably more so without "multitasking". Obviously a food dictionary would help with this, but a user-generated one wouldn't be comprehensive for a long time to come.

Well I suppose as long as we don't incorporate it into an interface that's designed for live input it might work... how would you want this to happen, as a text selection menu item (this one actually might be popular enough to justify adding by default) or as an extra button at the bottom of the live OCR screen? Google Translate would probably be easier initially since we don't have to deal with the windowing / RAM consequences of bringing up a popup web browser window, we can show the results in a simple alert box.

So it sounds like this isn't a real *Wiki* but instead a shared dictionary project that isn't always editable and accessible in real time via the Web, but only via Pleco updates? I guess I'm confused as to how this would be "combined with live OCR" to give "every restaurant in China an English-language picture menu."

It'd be a real Wiki with a live online version and real-time editing of that version online - a virtually unmodified build of MediaWiki, probably - but in order to make it work instantly in Pleco, to let you glide your device's camera across a menu and get English translations of items as you point at them, we'd be packaging up daily database dumps for use in Pleco. That wouldn't preclude you from accessing the online version in Pleco too, and it wouldn't mean we couldn't, say, add a link to easily submit new items, or add a link to get to the online entry from an offline entry and make corrections (if they hadn't already been made), but it's not going to be much of a menu reader if you have to wait 10 seconds every time you scan an item for the page describing it to load.

 

[Entropy]

Or... a forum+wiki?

Another thing that annoys me repeatedly, including at this very moment (since I'm in DC and looking for Shanghai food) is that there's no single forum where I can look for what I want to eat. For example, I have to use Chowhound in the Boston/NYC area, DonRockwell in the DC area, and LTHforum in the Chicago area. So I've been wondering whether there should be a single forum for posting about *traditional/authentic* Chinese food in the US. Obviously this would dovetail well with a Wiki describing the food being discussed.

 

[mikelove]

Another thing that annoys me repeatedly, including at this very moment (since I'm in DC and looking for Shanghai food) is that there's no single forum where I can look for what I want to eat. For example, I have to use Chowhound in the Boston/NYC area, DonRockwell in the DC area, and LTHforum in the Chicago area. So I've been wondering whether there should be a single forum for posting about *traditional/authentic* Chinese food in the US. Obviously this would dovetail well with a Wiki describing the food being discussed.

I suppose, but now this is becoming a full-fledged Chinese food portal site - might make sense eventually, but one-step-at-a-time.

 

[Entropy]

I suppose, but now this is becoming a full-fledged Chinese food portal site - might make sense eventually, but one-step-at-a-time.

Exactly! A full-fledged Chinese food portal, attracting flocks of hard-working, diligent people who will help to populate your Wiki with the information you want.

 

[mikelove]

Exactly! A full-fledged Chinese food portal, attracting flocks of hard-working, diligent people who will help to populate your Wiki with the information you want.

And we're going to lure in all of these people how exactly? It's a chicken-and-egg problem - a successful wiki might attract more Chinese food experts, but a mostly-empty brand-new site won't attract anyone... focusing on just the wiki aspects initially should make things feel fleshed-out and useful a lot more quickly than if we try to launch an entire Chinese food portal.

 

[Entropy]

Exactly! A full-fledged Chinese food portal, attracting flocks of hard-working, diligent people who will help to populate your Wiki with the information you want.

And we're going to lure in all of these people how exactly? It's a chicken-and-egg problem - a successful wiki might attract more Chinese food experts, but a mostly-empty brand-new site won't attract anyone... focusing on just the wiki aspects initially should make things feel fleshed-out and useful a lot more quickly than if we try to launch an entire Chinese food portal.

I don't think we're going to lure people into just populating a Wiki. I for example, would much rather be out eating and then posting about what I discovered. Clearly this (posting about food) dovetails with entering the information into a Wiki. But *just* doing that doesn't strike me as interesting enough that I'd actually do it. Heck, I haven't even bothered to send you the corrections and enhancements to sketchily defined food terms in Pleco, because I'm too busy actually using it. Amorphophallus Rivieri for dinner, anyone?

So, how do we get people to actually use the forum? Give them more of what they seem to spend time using, which in my case are forums and blogs with recipes, translations, sources for ingredients, for that matter even restaurants' Web pages. Also, give them a Wiki.

 

[mikelove]

I don't think we're going to lure people into just populating a Wiki. I for example, would much rather be out eating and then posting about what I discovered. Clearly this (posting about food) dovetails with entering the information into a Wiki. But *just* doing that doesn't strike me as interesting enough that I'd actually do it. Heck, I haven't even bothered to send you the corrections and enhancements to sketchily defined food terms in Pleco, because I'm too busy actually using it. Amorphophallus Rivieri for dinner, anyone?

So, how do we get people to actually use the forum? Give them more of what they seem to spend time using, which in my case are forums and blogs with recipes, translations, sources for ingredients, for that matter even restaurants' Web pages. Also, give them a Wiki.

But how do we create that other content? How do we get lots of people to appear on a discussion forum and start populating it with interesting talk about Chinese food? The wiki can work fine on its own if we give it a good foundation - say if we buy out the copyright to one of these existing menu reader titles and use that (rendered open-source by us) as a base, or just hire someone to generate a core list of a few thousand entries that we can build on.

 

[sburkle]

I don't know if you guys have seen this before or not, but Ben Ross seems to have a reasonable start already at http://www.howtoorderchinesefood.com/ though it is not user editable and hasn't really been updated in quite a while.

The difficulty I see in this is that Chinese like to give their dishes "beautiful" names, almost to the point that Chinese people have a tough time figuring out exactly what that dish is supposed to be. So be prepared to have the same thing with many different names.

 

[mikelove]

I don't know if you guys have seen this before or not, but Ben Ross seems to have a reasonable start already at http://www.howtoorderchinesefood.com/ though it is not user editable and hasn't really been updated in quite a while.

The difficulty I see in this is that Chinese like to give their dishes "beautiful" names, almost to the point that Chinese people have a tough time figuring out exactly what that dish is supposed to be. So be prepared to have the same thing with many different names.

Doesn't seem to be loading for me... but very good point about poetic-sounding names of dishes, we might have to list multiple definitions (maybe even with a helpful guide for how to ask the waiter which one of them this particular dish is).

 

[pleco10]

Perhaps Pleco can buy out "Handy Menu"? (It's currently free: http://appshopper.com/healthcare-fitnes ... -food-menu)

 

[mikelove]

Perhaps Pleco can buy out "Handy Menu"? (It's currently free: http://appshopper.com/healthcare-fitnes ... -food-menu)

Not sure how much content we'd be buying, the image of 油条 in the very first screenshot comes up several times in a Google image search so it's most likely a stock photo of some kind.

 

[Entropy]

How do we get lots of people to appear on a discussion forum and start populating it with interesting talk about Chinese food?

I think you merely need to offer them a place to do it, free of the ridiculous restrictions placed on them by other sites (such as Chowhound forbidding discussion of restaurants that have closed.)

The wiki can work fine on its own if we give it a good foundation - say if we buy out the copyright to one of these existing menu reader titles and use that (rendered open-source by us) as a base, or just hire someone to generate a core list of a few thousand entries that we can build on.

Well, okay, if you can afford to just BUY a whole book on e subject, you hardly need peons to do the writing.