[Wikipedia-l] Re: Wiktionary?

Thu Jun 10 12:50:44 UTC 2004

> I'm amazed at the poor quality of the English
> Wiktionary, it seems to
> miss so many important English words. Most new pages
> seem to be slang,
> jargon, and people adding a few dozen words from
> their native tongue.
> Plans to import a public domain dictionary were
> abandoned, and now there
> seems to be little organisation or direction.
> Perhaps Wiktionary can be
> revitalised with extra features, but I doubt
> stylesheet changes will be
> enough. It needs a different look and a whole raft
> of features. It needs
> methods for easily adding new words, and for
> categorisation and listing.
> But I'm neither excited by the project nor
> optimistic about its future.
> So most of all, it needs people who want to work on
> it.
> 
> -- Tim Starling

I think the reason for this is that a dictionary
cannot really take advantage of the wiki structure. 
Consider the dense interlinking that occurs in any
decent encyclopedia article; how would something like
that be useful, or even apply, in a dictionary? An
encyclopedia is, I think, ideally suited to the wiki
format--that's why all those predictions of "7 years
to 100,000 articles!" seem hopelessly naive. 
Wikipedia took off because it's the best type of
structure to exploit its format, and that attracted
contributors.  In Wiktionary, you're basically just
asking people to write an online dictionary, and the
wiki concept is less useful to them.

Meelar

=====
"The difference between extra-marital sex and extra marital sex is not to be sneezed at."

--George Will, on hyphen use

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Friends.  Fun.  Try the all-new Yahoo! Messenger.
http://messenger.yahoo.com/ 