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
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