Wiktionary

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See also: Criticism of Wiktionary

Wiktionary (a portmanteau of wiki and dictionary, and unlike other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, this word does not contain wiki) is a multilingual, Web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 151 languages. Unlike standard dictionaries, it is written collaboratively by volunteers using wiki software, allowing articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the Web site.

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 Thesauruses and lexicons. Additionally, the English Wiktionary includes Wikisaurus, a category that serves as a thesaurus, including lists of slang words,^[1] and the Simple English Wiktionary, compiled using the Basic English subset of the English language.

Contents 1 History and development 2 See also 3 References 4 External links

History and development

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002 following a proposal by Daniel Alston. On March 29, 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.^[2] As of November 2006, Wiktionary features over 1.5 million entries across its 171 language editions. The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 400,000 entries. It was surpassed in early 2006 by the French Wiktionary, only to regain the top position in September 2006. Since 2006, the growth of the French-language and English-language Wiktionaries has been similar - in October 2008 they both raced to the mark for 1 million articles. The English Wiktionary arrived there first, with the French following a few hours later. Ten Wiktionary language editions now contain over 100,000 entries each.

English Wiktionary now has more than 1,000,000 entries.

The English Wiktionary does not rely on bots to the extent that somewhat smaller 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.^[3] 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.^[4]

Most of Wiktionary currently uses a textual logo designed by Brion Vibber, a MediaWiki developer.^[5] Despite frequent discussion of modifying or replacing the logo, a four-phase contest held at the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki from September to October 2006^[6] did not see as much participation from the Wiktionary community as some community members had hoped. The logo that won was designed by "Smurrayinchester". As of June 2007, seventeen of the Wiktionary editions – French, Turkish, Vietnamese, Arabic, Italian, Swedish, Korean, Dutch, Lithuanian, Persian, Sicilian, Ukrainian, Albanian, Simple English, Corsican, Wolof, and Yiddish – have switched to the contest-chosen logo or variations of it. The remaining editions use either their language-specific version of the textual logo or, in the case of the Galician Wiktionary, a logo that depicts a dictionary bearing the Galician coat of arms. In April of 2009, the issue was resurrected and discussions aiming to result in a new logo by the end of the year.

See also

• OmegaWiki, a translating multilingual dictionary based on an extension of MediaWiki.

References

External links

Look up Wiktionary in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

• 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.
• The Wiktionary Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard which pulls up Wiktionary articles.

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Wiktionary. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of this Wikinfo article is available under the GNU Free Documentation License and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license. English | Română | edit

This page uses content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Wiktionary. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. The text of this Wikinfo article is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.