I can see three major advantages of a Wiktionary over a traditional
online dictionary, and several disadvantages. On the positive side,
(1) it would not be constrained by space limitations, so it could be
completely unabridged, contain many examples and citations, and be
more clearly written with fewer abbreviations etc., (2) it could take
advantage of the specialized knowledge of readers beyond what
lexicographers would be interested in, especially useful for
technical terms that many dictionaries, frankly, get just plain
wrong, and (3) it would be open content.
The major disadvantage, as Rose points out, is that Wikification puts
at risk a lot of good research by lexicographers, and would sacrifice
the their credibility. It would also suffer Wikipedia's depth-versus-
breadth problems, and probably encourage production of lots of
frivolous content for slang-of-the-moment and such.
Perhaps something like a user-annotated but not directly editable
version? The dictionary could be seeded from a credible paper
dictionary source and the main entries protected from editing;
then "discussion" pages attached to each entry (and free-form new
entries) could be added to by users, and some formal editing process
could be used to update the formal entries when appropriate from the
information gathered.
Just an idea.
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