[Wikipedia-l] Wikipedia and Wiktionary

[Ray Saintonge]

Delirium wrote:

> 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.

I agree that it would be futile to try to guess what words the reader 
does not know, (not to mention somewhat paternalistic).  A person who is 
not a native speaker of English would want to seek the meanings of more 
words than a native speaker.

Perhaps a question at the side with "Click here if there is a word you 
want to look up in Wiktionary".  Clicking would open a question mark 
cursor that could be positioned over the problem word and clicked.

Wiktionary is not yet full enough to adequately deal with this, but 
perhaps in another year it could be a nice feature.  By that time it may 
become feasible to ensure that every word in the other sister projects 
has a definition in Wiktionary.

Ec