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