Muke Tever wrote:
Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:
Hoi, It is sad that the craze of creating more entries on a Wiki has made a wiki useless. I would support the removal of these 81.496 empty pages, they are not helpful at all.
Useful for checking if a word exists (i.e. spell check).
*Muke!
But spell check presents suggestions for correcting your spelling. These essentially content-less entries only inform you -- should you spell the word right in the first place -- that the word exists in English. If you happen to know another language well enough and are familiar enough with Wiktionary, you could hop over to a more developed edition like English. But if you search the Russian Wiktionary for "berd", you won't find anything, whereas a spell checker might suggest "bred", "bard", and "bird", among other things.
Many Wikipedia editions have used bots to generate large swaths of content-less articles. You might want to take a look at the arguments some of the bot owners present. [1][2] I'm still not convinced that these editions have a large enough community to handle the influx of what Vietnamese speakers would call "frames" (like the frames of an half-built house, not quite ready for occupancy).
When the Vietnamese Wiktionary imported around 200,000 entries from a free-content dictionary project, we at least had a lot of content to work with. Laurent Bouvier was very helpful in making this work. But the content contained many, many mistakes, both in formatting and content. With a "community" of two regular contributors at any given moment, it's been difficult to correct these errors on a significant scale.
The Vietnamese Wiktionary's errors don't impact its usefulness as much IMHO, because formatting and spelling issues can be corrected systematically and thoroughly by a bot. (I've got one in the works.) You'd need some serious AI to *write* original definitions for tens of thousands of words, and I'm not confident that a community of 500-some can pull off such a huge feat without some outside help (a free-content dictionary, for instance).
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_News#Year_stubs [2] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_News#Clarification_about_Nepal...