Wiktionary

Wiktionary

Detail of the English Wiktionary main page. All major wiktionaries are listed by number of articles.
Type of site	Online dictionary
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales
URL	http://www.wiktionary.org/
Commercial	No
Registration	Optional

Wiktionary is a Wikimedia Foundation project intended to be a free wiki dictionary (hence: Wiktionary) (including thesaurus and lexicon) in every language. It is a sister project to Wikipedia. It is located at wiktionary.org.

Mission

Wiktionary serves to:

• Explain the meanings of words, multi-word terms, idiomatic phrases, and abbreviations.
• Act as a thesaurus by showing synonyms and related terms.
• Explain etymologies of words.
• Translate words from one language to another.

History

Growth of the largest eight Wiktionaries, as of May 2006.

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002 following a proposal by Daniel Alston. On March 29, 2004 the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated in French and Polish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary URL (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004 when it switched to the current full URL. As of September 2006, the English Wiktionary has more than 200,000 entries, although in early 2006 it was surpassed by the French Wiktionary, only to regain the top position in September 2006. Seven languages now have Wiktionaries containing at least 50,000 entries.

Top ten Wiktionaries

No.	Language	Language (local)	Wiki	Entries	Total	Edits	Admins	Users	Images	Updated
1	English	English	en	298425	410294	1610838	45	23312	137	2006-10-31 00:10:35
2	Vietnamese	Tiếng Việt	vi	208527	212538	386716	3	433	7	2006-10-31 00:11:08
3	French	Français	fr	208214	237747	1453533	11	2471	16	2006-10-31 00:10:35
4	Chinese	中文	zh	91327	106390	366163	6	1591	108	2006-10-31 00:10:37
5	Ido	Ido	io	86826	124025	309174	1	86	3	2006-10-31 00:10:37
6	Greek	Ελληνικά	el	72228	82359	128125	3	189	16	2006-10-31 00:10:59
7	Russian	Русский	ru	63961	75207	151272	1	444	69	2006-10-31 00:11:01
8	Polish	Polski	pl	48428	89348	288867	12	1027	102	2006-10-31 00:10:36
9	Italian	Italiano	it	45031	51987	177835	6	997	95	2006-10-31 00:10:36
10	German	Deutsch	de	38563	53618	434911	14	5395	40	2006-10-31 00:10:39

Comparison to other sister projects

The current Wiktionary logo

One difference between Wiktionary and Wikipedia is that pages beginning with upper- and lowercase letters can refer to different things. For example, the entries on lowercase "i" and uppercase "I" are distinct. All of the existing entries in the English Wiktionary were converted to lowercase automatically in mid-2005; manual intervention was used to move pages to uppercase (or split entries) as necessary. Links from Wikipedia to Wiktionary must be made with care, as it may be relevant to link to a lowercase entry, link to an uppercase entry, link to an entry with diacritics or link to multiple entries.

Wikisaurus

Wikisaurus is a category in the English Wiktionary whose purpose is to serve as a thesaurus, including a thesaurus of slang words.

See "Creating a Wikisaurus entry" for the structure of Wikisaurus entries. An example of a well-formatted entry would be the "wiktionary:Wikisaurus:insane" page.

Criticism

As of early November, 2006, Wiktionary had over 300,000 entries. However, 7 of the 18 bots registered on Wiktionary^[1] created 163,000 of them.^{[2], [3], [4], [5], [6]} Most of the entries created are not found in other dictionaries. For example, the ThirdPersBot adds the third-person form for terms. For smoulder it created "smoulders," which reads, "Third-person singular simple present form of smoulder." If these 163,000 entries were excluded, Wiktionary would have 137,000 entries, making it smaller than most printed dictionaries. This number would be even smaller if terms unique to other languages were excluded. The Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000 headwords, while Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged has 475,000 entries (with many additional embedded headwords).

Unlike Wikipedia, Wiktionary has many competitors, who offer larger works online for free. Many users also prefer to post definitions on Wikipedia, instead of Wiktionary. On Wikipedia, they are called stubs. Indeed, the difference between a dictionary and an encyclopedia is non-existant for many. Encyclopedia articles begin with a definition. Many large works with mostly in-depth prose treatises are called "dictionaries" (e.g., the 29-volume Grove Dictionary of Music). On the other hand, many works called "encyclopedias" contain dictionary definitions. And even the larger articles within these works are organized as long dictionary entries (cf. Enciclopedia Unversal Larousse).

See also

• French Wiktionary
• Vietnamese Wiktionary
• Wîkîferheng, the Kurdish-language Wiktionary
• WiktionaryZ
• Wikipedia templates about Wiktionary

References

• "Wiktionary article". Top 101 Web Sites. PC Magazine. Retrieved 2005-12-16.

External links

• Wiktionary
  • In English
• Wiktionary's Multilingual Statistics
• Wikimedia's page on Wiktionary (including list of all existing Wiktionaries)
• The Wiktionary Widget for the Mac OS X Dashboard which pulls up Wiktionary articles.