Proposed by @jstac on PR #69 (2026-08-17 and 08-19) after the Japanese glossary review: a first-pass, automatable rule for machine-drafted glossary terms — cross-check each candidate term against the target-language Wikipedia; if still unsure, revert to English; flag for native-speaker review.
Why
The ja review showed the shape of the problem. @xuanguang-li ran the check by hand with ChatGPT on the 357-term draft: 268 terms were found on Japanese Wikipedia, of which only 3 differed from the draft (産業連関表 vs 産業連関モデル — a false positive, the table vs the model; 限界収益 vs 限界収入 and 割引現在価値 vs 現在割引価値 — both adopted). 89 terms were not found at all, and that set overlapped heavily with the terms the native reviewers ended up sending back to English (Forcing variable, Forward-looking difference equation, Authority centrality, Cost-to-go function, Lake model). So "not on Wikipedia" is a useful signal for "no established term — keep English", and "on Wikipedia under a different name" is a short, reviewable diff.
The policy the check would serve is recorded in .dev/decisions/D-2026-09-01-ja-terminology-policy.md: Japanese where a well-known, standard counterpart exists, English otherwise, if in doubt English. The same shape should apply to any future glossary that sits between full translation (zh-cn, fa, fr) and keep-English-dominant (ml).
Sketch
A script (alongside the glossary-review skill, which already finds the terms two models disagree on) that takes glossary/<lang>.json, queries the language's Wikipedia search API per en term, and emits three buckets: match (article title equals the draft rendering), differs (article exists, title differs — show both for review), not found (candidate for reverting to English under the if-in-doubt rule). Output as a markdown table a native reviewer can work through, the way @xuanguang-li's table was. Name-context entries are skipped (names stay Latin script by policy).
Open questions: proper-noun entries with a Wikipedia article under a katakana title (e.g. economists) would pass the check but the policy still wants English — so the policy filter runs before the lookup, not after; and disambiguation pages / redirects need handling so a redirect from the draft term to the canonical title counts as a match, not a difference.
Refs
PR #69 thread (2026-08-17 → 08-19), .dev/decisions/D-2026-09-01-ja-terminology-policy.md, glossary/README.md "Which terms belong in a glossary".
Proposed by @jstac on PR #69 (2026-08-17 and 08-19) after the Japanese glossary review: a first-pass, automatable rule for machine-drafted glossary terms — cross-check each candidate term against the target-language Wikipedia; if still unsure, revert to English; flag for native-speaker review.
Why
The
jareview showed the shape of the problem. @xuanguang-li ran the check by hand with ChatGPT on the 357-term draft: 268 terms were found on Japanese Wikipedia, of which only 3 differed from the draft (産業連関表 vs 産業連関モデル — a false positive, the table vs the model; 限界収益 vs 限界収入 and 割引現在価値 vs 現在割引価値 — both adopted). 89 terms were not found at all, and that set overlapped heavily with the terms the native reviewers ended up sending back to English (Forcing variable,Forward-looking difference equation,Authority centrality,Cost-to-go function,Lake model). So "not on Wikipedia" is a useful signal for "no established term — keep English", and "on Wikipedia under a different name" is a short, reviewable diff.The policy the check would serve is recorded in
.dev/decisions/D-2026-09-01-ja-terminology-policy.md: Japanese where a well-known, standard counterpart exists, English otherwise, if in doubt English. The same shape should apply to any future glossary that sits between full translation (zh-cn,fa,fr) and keep-English-dominant (ml).Sketch
A script (alongside the
glossary-reviewskill, which already finds the terms two models disagree on) that takesglossary/<lang>.json, queries the language's Wikipedia search API perenterm, and emits three buckets: match (article title equals the draft rendering), differs (article exists, title differs — show both for review), not found (candidate for reverting to English under the if-in-doubt rule). Output as a markdown table a native reviewer can work through, the way @xuanguang-li's table was. Name-context entries are skipped (names stay Latin script by policy).Open questions: proper-noun entries with a Wikipedia article under a katakana title (e.g. economists) would pass the check but the policy still wants English — so the policy filter runs before the lookup, not after; and disambiguation pages / redirects need handling so a redirect from the draft term to the canonical title counts as a match, not a difference.
Refs
PR #69 thread (2026-08-17 → 08-19),
.dev/decisions/D-2026-09-01-ja-terminology-policy.md,glossary/README.md"Which terms belong in a glossary".