I'm amazed at the poor quality of the English Wiktionary, it seems to miss so many important English words. Most new pages seem to be slang, jargon, and people adding a few dozen words from their native tongue. Plans to import a public domain dictionary were abandoned, and now there seems to be little organisation or direction. Perhaps Wiktionary can be revitalised with extra features, but I doubt stylesheet changes will be enough. It needs a different look and a whole raft of features. It needs methods for easily adding new words, and for categorisation and listing. But I'm neither excited by the project nor optimistic about its future. So most of all, it needs people who want to work on it.

-- Tim Starling

I think the reason for this is that a dictionary cannot really take advantage of the wiki structure. Consider the dense interlinking that occurs in any decent encyclopedia article; how would something like that be useful, or even apply, in a dictionary? An encyclopedia is, I think, ideally suited to the wiki format--that's why all those predictions of "7 years to 100,000 articles!" seem hopelessly naive. Wikipedia took off because it's the best type of structure to exploit its format, and that attracted contributors. In Wiktionary, you're basically just asking people to write an online dictionary, and the wiki concept is less useful to them.

Meelar

===== "The difference between extra-marital sex and extra marital sex is not to be sneezed at."

--George Will, on hyphen use

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