Hello everybody,

I am proposing a joint venture of Wikipedia with fdicts.com, a Free Dictionaries Project (not run by me, BTW)

The aim of fdicts.com is to provide free (GPL or GFDL) dictionaries in multiple languages. What makes fdicts.com unique is an algorithm for the automatized creation of new dictionaries out of existing. This process is similar to creating interlinks (to NONEXISTING pages) with a bot and is more effective, the more free dictionaries already exist.

An example for de, en, fr and tr (turkish): if there are these entries

[house - Haus] (en-de) [house - maison] (en-fr) [maison -Haus] (fr-de) [house - ev] (en-tr) [Haus - ev] (de-tr)

then you can be almost sure that the automatically generated

[maison - ev ](fr-tr)

will be correct, even if you know neither French nor Turkish. And that is true for thousands of other words.

Nevertheless the results must then be improved with by-hand-validating. This is a quite Wiki-like process, and the Wikipedia-community is perfect for that.

This may not be very exciting for English and German. But think of the language XY for which NO free dictionaries or JUST an English-XY dictionary exist, but no German-XY, French-XY, Chinese-XY and so on. This approach will produce a lot of fine free dictionaries easily.

What does that have to do with Wikipedia/Wiktionary? Wiktionary is also a free dictionary, but with a different approach. The translations in Wiktionary can be extracted to create free dictionaries for the "smaller" languages, fdicts.com can use its algorithm to multiply the entries and the result can be given back to Wiktionary for adding more details if necessary.

The final result would be a really global Free Dictionary. (sigh) Maybe then hosted by Wikimedia?

If you like, have a look at the project page. (http://www.fdicts.com) Maybe someone on this list has also ideas how to cooperate with that project.

Erdal