New subject: Wiktionary

18 Apr 2001

I can see three major advantages of a Wiktionary over a traditional 
online dictionary, and several disadvantages.  On the positive side, 
(1) it would not be constrained by space limitations, so it could be 
completely unabridged, contain many examples and citations, and be 
more clearly written with fewer abbreviations etc., (2) it could take 
advantage of the specialized knowledge of readers beyond what 
lexicographers would be interested in, especially useful for 
technical terms that many dictionaries, frankly, get just plain 
wrong, and (3) it would be open content.

The major disadvantage, as Rose points out, is that Wikification puts 
at risk a lot of good research by lexicographers, and would sacrifice 
the their credibility.  It would also suffer Wikipedia's depth-versus-
breadth problems, and probably encourage production of lots of 
frivolous content for slang-of-the-moment and such.

Perhaps something like a user-annotated but not directly editable 
version?  The dictionary could be seeded from a credible paper 
dictionary source and the main entries protected from editing; 
then "discussion" pages attached to each entry (and free-form new 
entries) could be added to by users, and some formal editing process 
could be used to update the formal entries when appropriate from the 
information gathered.

Just an idea.
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Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiktionary