Wiktionary

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Search for "Wiktionary" on Wikipedia, Wikimedia Commons, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Wikibooks, Mediawiki Wikia, Wikitravel, Google Advanced Search, Yahoo Advanced Search, WorldCat Advanced Search, Amazon, Recent NY Times, Older NY Times.

See also: Criticism of Wiktionary

Wiktionary (a portmanteau of wiki and dictionary, and unlike other projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, this word does not contain wiki) is a multilingual, Web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in over 151 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.

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. Additionally, the English Wiktionary includes Wikisaurus, a category that serves as a thesaurus, including lists of slang words,^[1] and the Simple English Wiktionary, compiled using the Basic English subset of the English language.

History and development

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.^[2] 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 400,000 entries. It was surpassed in early 2006 by the French Wiktionary, only to regain the top position in September 2006. Since 2006, the growth of the French-language and English-language Wiktionaries has been similar - in October 2008 they both raced to the mark for 1 million articles. The English Wiktionary arrived there first, with the French following a few hours later. Ten Wiktionary language editions now contain over 100,000 entries each.

Despite Wiktionary's large number of entries, most of the entries and many of the definitions at the project's largest language editions were created by bots that found creative ways to generate entries or (rarely) automatically imported thousands of entries from previously-published dictionaries. English Wiktionary now has more than 1,000,000 entries.

References

^ See "Creating a Wikisaurus entry" for information on the structure of Wikisaurus entries. An example of a well-formatted entry would be "Wikisaurus:insane".
^ Wiktionary's current URL is www.wiktionary.org.