विक्शनरी:Wiktionary

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• This article also needs translation in Marathi Language atw:mr:विक्शनरी

Wiktionary is a multilingual, Web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 150 languages. Unlike standard dictionaries, it is written collaboratively by volunteers using wiki software, allowing articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the Web site. The project's name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and dictionary. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation. Because Wiktionary is not limited by print space considerations, most of Wiktionary's language editions provide definitions and translations of words from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found in thesauruses and lexicons.

Mission

The project's mission is 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.

Additionally, the English Wiktionary now includes Wikisaurus, a category that serves as a thesaurus, including lists of slang words.

History and development

The current Wiktionary logo is due for replacement.

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 November 2006, Wiktionary features over 1.5 million entries across its 171 language editions. The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 300,000 entries. It was surpassed in early 2006 by the French Wiktionary, only to regain the top position in September 2006. Nine Wiktionary language editions now contain over 50,000 entries.

Despite Wiktionary's large number of entries, many of the entries at the project's largest language editions were created by bots that automatically imported thousands of entries from previously-published dictionaries or found other creative ways to generate entries. Seven of the 18 bots registered at the English Wiktionary created 163,000 of the entries there. One of these bots, "ThirdPersBot," was responsible for the addition of a number of third-person conjugations that would not receive their own entries in standard dictionaries; for instance, it defined "smoulders" as the "[t]hird-person singular simple present form of smoulder." Excluding these 163,000 entries, the English Wiktionary would have about 137,000 entries, including terms unique to languages other than English, making it smaller than most monolingual print dictionaries. The Oxford English Dictionary, for instance, 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).

In 2005, PC Magazine rated Wiktionary as one of the Internet's "Top 101 Web Sites."

Wiktionary statistics

The use of bots to generate large numbers of articles is visible as "growth spurts" in this graph of article counts at the largest eight Wiktionary editions; data from 30 November 2006.

Ten largest Wiktionary language editions

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 sister projects

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.

Competition

Unlike Wikipedia, Wiktionary has many competitors who offer more comprehensive works online, free of charge. Many users also prefer to post definitions on Wikipedia, instead of Wiktionary. Although encyclopedia articles customarily begin with a definition, short articles at Wikipedia that contain only definitions would be classified as "stubs". Indeed, many are unaware of the difference between a dictionary and an encyclopedia. This distinction is blurred by the existence of many encyclopedic dictionaries, reference works with a mixture of shorter dictionary entries and longer, more in-depth entries. In some reference works, such as the Enciclopedia Universal Larousse, larger articles are also organized as long dictionary entries. On the other hand, a large work with mostly in-depth prose treatises may be called a "dictionary": the 29-volume Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, for instance, contains relatively few dictionary-length entries.

See also

• Kurdish Wiktionary

External links

• Wiktionary front page
  • English Wiktionary
• 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.