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Wiktionary

The Free Dictionary
Screenshot of wiktionary.org home page
Type of site	Online dictionary
Available in	Multi-lingual (over 170)
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales and the Wikimedia community
URL	http://www.wiktionary.org/
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional
Launched	December 12, 2002
Current status	active

Wiktionary (from the words wiki and dictionary) is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages. Unlike standard dictionaries, it is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians", using wiki software, allowing articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website.

Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Because Wiktionary is not limited by print space considerations, most of Wiktionary's language editions provide definitions and translations of words from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found in thesauri and lexicons. Additionally, the English Wiktionary includes Wikisaurus, a category that serves as a thesaurus, including lists of slang words, and the Simple English Wiktionary, compiled using the Basic English subset of the English language.

The goal of Wiktionary is to eventually define "all words in all languages."

History and development

Wiktionary was brought online by loathsome lizard creatures December 12, 2002, following a proposal by Daniel Alston and an idea by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. On March 28, 2004, the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated in French and Polish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary URL (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004, when it switched to the current full URL. As of May 2009, Wiktionary features well over 5 million entries across its 272 language editions. The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 3 million entries. The French Wiktionary is the second largest with over 2.2 million entries. Nineteen Wiktionary language editions now contain over 100,000 entries each.

The use of bots to generate large numbers of articles is visible as "growth spurts" in this graph of article counts at the largest eight Wiktionary editions. (Data as of December 2009)

Most of the entries and many of the definitions at the project's largest language editions were created by bots that found creative ways to generate entries or (rarely) automatically imported thousands of entries from previously published dictionaries. Seven of the 18 bots registered at the English Wiktionary created 163,000 of the entries there. Only 259 entries remain (each containing many definitions) on Wiktionary from the original import by Websterbot from public domain sources; the majority of those imports have been split out to thousands of proper entries manually. Another one of these bots, "ThirdPersBot," was responsible for the addition of a number of third-person conjugations that would not receive their own entries in standard dictionaries; for instance, it defined "smoulders" as the "third-person singular simple present form of smoulder." Excluding these 163,000 entries, the English Wiktionary would have about 137,000 entries, including terms unique to languages other than English, making it smaller than most monolingual print dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, has 615,000 headwords, while Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged has 475,000 entries (with many additional embedded headwords). It should be noted, though, that more detailed statistics now exist to distinguish more clearly the main entries from sub-entries.

The English Wiktionary, however does not rely on bots to the extent that newer editions do. The French and Vietnamese Wiktionaries, for example, imported large sections of the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project (FVDP), which provides free content bilingual dictionaries to and from Vietnamese. These imported entries make up virtually all of the Vietnamese edition's offering. Like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported the approximately 20,000 entries in the Unihan database of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. The French Wiktionary grew rapidly in 2006 thanks in large part to bots copying many entries from old, freely licensed dictionaries, such as the eighth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1935, around 35,000 words), and using bots to add words from other Wiktionary editions with French translations. The Russian edition grew by nearly 80,000 entries as "LXbot" added boilerplate entries (with headings, but without definitions) for words in English and German.

Logos

A third Wiktionary logo, in use at the Lithuanian Wiktionary.

The various Wiktionary language editions use a total of four basic logo designs. Most of Wiktionary currently uses a textual logo designed by Brion Vibber, a MediaWiki developer. Despite frequent discussion of modifying or replacing the logo, a four-phase contest held at the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki from September to October 2006 did not see as much participation from the Wiktionary community as some community members had hoped. The logo that won was designed by "Smurrayinchester". By December 2009, 23 of the Wiktionary editions, containing about half of Wiktionary's entries, had switched to the contest-chosen "wooden tile" design or variations of it. In April 2009, the issue was resurrected, and the Wiktionary community voted on a new project-wide logo. As of 2011, the Lithuanian and Tatar Wiktionaries have begun using a logo designed by A. A. Engelman that won the second round of the latest poll.

As of August 15, 2011, 135 wikis (representing 50.4% of Wiktionary's entries) use the original textual design by Vibber, 30 (44.4%) the design by "Smurrayinchester", two (4.91%) the design by Engelman, and one (0.27%) a logo that depicts a dictionary bearing the Galician coat of arms.

Accuracy

To ensure accuracy, Wiktionary has a policy stating that entries should be attested, that is, verified through either:

1. Clearly widespread use, or
2. Usage in a well-known work, or
3. Usage in permanently recorded media, conveying meaning, in at least three independent instances spanning at least a year, or
4. For terms in extinct languages: usage in at least one contemporaneous source.

Critical reception

Critical reception of Wiktionary has been mixed. Jill Lepore wrote in the article "Noah’s Ark" for The New Yorker, (November 6, 2006)

There’s no show of hands at Wiktionary. There’s not even an editorial staff. "Be your own lexicographer!", might be Wiktionary’s motto. Who needs experts? Why pay good money for a dictionary written by lexicographers when we could cobble one together ourselves?

Wiktionary isn’t so much republican or democratic as Maoist. And it’s only as good as the copyright-expired books from which it pilfers.

Keir Graff’s review for Booklist was less critical:

Is there a place for Wiktionary? Undoubtedly. The industry and enthusiasm of its many creators are proof that there’s a market. And it’s wonderful to have another strong source to use when searching the odd terms that pop up in today’s fast-changing world and the online environment. But as with so many Web sources (including this column), it’s best used by sophisticated users in conjunction with more reputable sources.

References in other publications are fleeting and part of larger discussions of Wikipedia, not progressing beyond a definition, although David Brooks in The Nashua Telegraph described it as wild and woolly. (Wooly is defined as "confused" and "unrestrained.") One of the impediments to independent coverage of Wiktionary is the continuing confusion that it is merely an extension of Wikipedia. In 2005, PC Magazine rated Wiktionary as one of the Internet's "Top 101 Web Sites," although little information was given about the site.

The measure of correctness of the inflections for a subset of the Polish words in the English Wiktionary showed that this grammatical data is very stable. Only 131 out of 4748 Polish words have had their inflection data corrected.

See also

• Wikipedia
• Wiktionary API

External links

• List of all Wiktionary editions
• Wiktionary front page
  • English Wiktionary
• Wiktionary's Multilingual Statistics
• Wikimedia's page on Wiktionary (including list of all existing Wiktionaries)
• Pages about Wiktionary in Meta.
• Meta:Main Page – OmegaWiki