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