[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

[Delirium]

Wikimedia PR wrote:

> I have been talking about this since quite a while (although without 
> any concrete proposal)... using Wikipedia's popularity to benefit 
> Wiktionary.
> Jimbo Wales showed up in IRC and I took the opportunity to talk with 
> him about it. I had already discussed it on the IRC channel.

[chat snipped]

I would support something along the line of interwiki links in the 
header, but to wiktionary, for article titles that are also words with 
definitions.  I don't think we should liberally spread through links to 
Wiktionary in running text though.  In the worst case that would result 
in every single word in Wikipedia being hyperlinked to its definition, 
which would be a bit strange.  Even if only "unusual" words were 
hyperlinked, it'd have a negative stylistic effect in highlighting the 
"big words".  It'd also have a subtle hint of "this is a word you might 
not know", and given the wide variation in vocabularies it'd be hard to 
come up with some reasonable set of such words---much better is to 
assume everyone knows all words, and let them use a dictionary (such as 
Wiktionary, or some other online dictionary, or one of their desk) on 
their own if they don't.

-Mark