The Oxford English Dictionary has the same problem:
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/05/magazine/05cyber.html
"So anyone can be an O.E.D. author now. And, by the way, many try. "What people love to do is send us words they've invented," Bernadette Paton says, guiding me through a windowless room used for storage of old word slips. Will you put the word I have invented into one of your dictionaries? is a question in the AskOxford.com FAQ. All the submissions go into the files, and until there is evidence for some general usage, that's where the wannabes remain.
"Don't bother sending in FAQ. Don't bother sending in wannabes. They're not even particularly new. For that matter, don't bother sending in anything you find via Google. "Please note," the O.E.D.'s Web site warns solemnly, "it is generally safe to assume that examples found by searching the Web, using search engines such as Google, will have already been considered by O.E.D. editors." "
- d.
On 29/01/2008, Thomas Dalton thomas.dalton@gmail.com wrote:
All the submissions go into the files
They keep them? Wow! Those must be some impressive files - the OED equivalent of BJAODN!
Or the "interesting mail" queue in OTRS ;-)
I suspect a lot of things we observe on Wikipedia were encountered long ago by the OED - they were the original volunteer-submission reference project.
- d.