On 17-04-2001, lcrocker@nupedia.com wrote thusly :
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.
I second that proposal. But wouldn't it slow down the creation process ?
On a slightly different subject. Over several months I have gathered some 500 medical abbreviations. Where would they fit ? In wikipedia ? In the Wiktionary ? Or in a stand-alone abbreviation Wiktionary ?
Best regards, kpj.