Grouping Tool

About the Kamusi Project Grouping Tool

The Grouping Tool enables registered participants to help arrange the online Kamusi Project dictionaries. We intend this tool to be used by participants with a good working knowledge of both English and Swahili. In addition to using your own best judgment, you are encouraged to use other Swahili dictionaries or English dictionaries (such as Merriam Webster, AskOxford.com, or YourDictionary.com) to help determine the appropriate order.

If you are a student in a Swahili class and you come across a Kamusi search result that has not yet been grouped (meaning that you have no way of telling which is the most likely result for the term you are searching for), please email your teacher and ask him or her to use the Grouping Tool to arrange the entries you would like to see grouped. When you refer someone to this page of instructions, please send them to this URL: http://research.yale.edu/swahili/serve_pages/groupingtool

This page consists of a long, wordy explanation of the Grouping Tool, and then a whole bunch of pictures that walk you through it. Click here to skip to the pictures.

The Grouping Tool allows you to do three things:

1) Group Entries. When you "group" entries, you are putting together all of the different entries that have a similar overall sense. For example, in an English dictionary entry for "fix," the entries "to correct," "to adjust," and "to repair" all have a similar sense, and therefore belong to the same group; the entries "to make ready" and "to prepare" are also definitions of "fix," but belong to a completely different group than "correct/ adjust/ repair." When you group entries, your job is to figure out which entries belong to the same cluster, and use the grouping tool to move them together. Once you have determined your groups, you click the "Add Break" button to introduce horizontal lines into the dictionary that you can place between the different groups.

2) Rank Entries. People who use dictionaries often want to know quickly which are the most common definitions or translations for the terms they are looking up. When you "rank" entries, you are putting the most common definitions on the top. For example, a user of an English dictionary would be more likely to need to know that "key" is the thing you use to open a door than that "key" is a tonal system in music, and more likely to need to know about musical keys than about the "key" painted on a basketball court. Of course, choosing which entries are "more important" can be arbitrary and subjective. Use your best judgement, and feel free to consult other sources. To rank entries, simply click on the appropriate line in the Grouping Tool and use the buttons on the right to slide it up and down. Please also follow the guide below the Grouping Tool that lists our standard order to rank entries for different parts of speech with similar senses:

Nouns
Verbs
Adjectives
Adverbs
Interjections
Conjunctions
Prepositions
Other Parts of Speech

3) Rank Groups. Not surprisingly, some Groups will be more important than others. You can use the Grouping Tool to put one group above another. Just use the buttons to move the lines from one group up and another group down, and make sure to keep a --break-- line between the groups. (Don't worry if you accidentally add too many break lines - our computer will clean up double breaks and extra breaks at the top and the bottom of the Tool box.)

Once you have finished arranging a term, click below the Tool box to submit your work to the project. Your arrangement will go live immediately. However, you will only get credit on our Participants page after the Editor has had a chance to review your submission. Often your entry will be reviewed and you will receive credit in a matter of hours, but sometimes the Editor travels and you may need to wait a few weeks for credit for "Editorial Content" submissions.

When you find entries that need to be edited, please use our Edit Engine to add, revise, or delete entries. You will receive credit for all of your Edit Engine submissions once the Editor has reviewed your work. If you use the Edit Engine to add an entry for a headword, we ask that you return to the Grouping Tool to rearrange that term after your submission has been processed - new entries will automatically be shown at the bottom until they are re-grouped.

A Photo Tour of the Grouping Tool

To access the Grouping Tool, search for any word, and then click on the "Grouping Tool" link that you'll find above the search results for that keyword. (If you do a wildcard search, such as *table* that will give you every result in the Kamusi that contains the sequence "table" anywhere in the entry, your results cannot be arranged with the Grouping Tool.) Here's what a search for "guni" looked like before it was arranged with the Grouping Tool - the links to access the Grouping Tool are shown inside the red circles:

When you click the Grouping Tool link, we will bring you to the Tool box, which looks like this:

Notice that the lines in the Tool box are pared-down versions of the lines in the search results. The buttons on the right of the Tool box look like this:

Now that you are inside the Grouping Tool box, you can use the buttons to move lines around. In our example, we clicked on the second line to highlight it:

Then we clicked on the "Move Up" button and slid the line up. (We could also have clicked on the "Move to Top" button to bring that line to the top of the Tool box.) What had been the second line is now at the top:

Looking at the other entries, it is clear that the top line belongs to a group all by itself. To split off that group, click on the "Add Break" button:

A line that says "--BREAK--|--KITENGO--" will appear in the Tool box, and you can use the buttons on the right to slide it up and down just like any of the other lines. After you submit your Grouping Tool arrangement, your "--BREAK--" lines will be displayed in future search results as thin horizontal lines between Groups. Don't worry if you accidentally add too many break lines - our computer will clean up double breaks and extra breaks at the top and the bottom of the Tool box.

After you have added several break lines to divide up your groups, and you have ranked all your entries, your Grouping Tool box will look something like this:

Click "Submit Ordering" under the Tool box, and you are done! You will get credit on our Participants page after the Editor has had a chance to review your submission.

Your changes are now live - the next time anybody searches for the keyword you have just arranged, this is what they will see:

We designed the Grouping Tool to be simple to use and understand. Please use it often - the more you use it, the better the Kamusi Project dictionaries will be for everyone!

Please also make use of our other Editorial features:

Edit Engine data fields and instructions