\Mike wrote:
Lately, I have started wondering why we don't have a set of multilingual discussion pages - one to deal with English, say, which could be used for people interested in working on English words in any wiktionary. Another for Swedish, and so on... Then we could, I believe, reduce the amount of *repeatedly* produced "hot air".... ;)
This sounds like a bad idea. If you mean that we should start to write in Swedish on the talk pages of the English and French Wiktionary, what good would that be? Who would understand those discussions? But Wiktionary is already ruined, so why don't you go ahead.
Earlier this year, I called a meeting in Stockholm about free dictionaries for the Swedish language. Ten people showed up, representing as many projects. But nobody from the Swedish Wiktionary bothered to attend. All who attended considered Wiktionary to be broken by design and not worth spending time on. And hey, I'm representing the Swedish chapter of the Wikimedia Foundation. I have fifteen years of experience of free dictionaries and I was among the younger at this meeting.
So the first issue should be: Why are there no discussions? I.e. skip the word multilingual. Why do the important and competent people, who do contribute to free dictionaries, shun Wiktionary? Shouldn't we just scrap Wiktionary and start from zero? If it is good and worth keeping, where is the good in it?