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WIKTIONARY

Wiktionary is a Wikimedia Foundation project intended to be a free wiki dictionary (hence: Wiktionary) (including thesaurus and lexicon) in every language. It is a sister project to Wikipedia. It is located at wiktionary.org.

Wiktionary
Detail of the English Wiktionary main page. All major wiktionaries are listed by number of articles.
Commercial? No
Type of site Online dictionary
Owner Wikimedia Foundation
Created by Jimmy Wales

Contents

Mission

Wiktionary serves to:

History

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.[1] As of May 2006, the English Wiktionary has more than 140,000 entries, although in early 2006 it was surpassed by the French Wiktionary, which now has more than 175,000 entries. More than a dozen languages now have Wiktionaries containing at least 10,000 entries.

Top ten Wiktionaries

No. Language Language (local) Wiki Good Total Edits Admins Users Images Updated
1 French Français fr 193102 218151 1049861 10 1908 15 2006-06-17 18:11:41
2 English English en 151513 254592 1036319 38 15234 409 2006-06-17 18:11:42
3 Chinese 中文 zh 90598 105086 293704 6 1160 107 2006-06-17 18:11:49
4 Ido Ido io 57409 93869 185938 1 61 3 2006-06-17 18:11:48
5 Polish Polski pl 41975 83039 234285 11 739 106 2006-06-17 18:11:42
6 Italian Italiano it 40930 47561 137446 6 748 105 2006-06-17 18:11:43
7 Greek Ελληνικά el 31171 40876 65644 3 105 11 2006-06-17 18:12:16
8 Hungarian Magyar hu 25182 37803 92598 2 276 35 2006-06-17 18:12:09
9 German Deutsch de 24940 37419 297623 13 4057 22 2006-06-17 18:11:56
10 Bulgarian Български bg 23933 893047 927805 4 289 20 2006-06-17 18:11:55

Multilingualism

Unlike many dictionaries, which are monolingual or bilingual, Wiktionary is multilingual, meaning that the goal is to define every word from all known languages in every other language, as well as in the original language itself. For example, the English Wiktionary is written in English but accepts entries for words from all languages. The French Wiktionary can also have entries for all those same words, but the entries are written in French.

Comparison to other 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.

Wikisaurus

Wikisaurus is a category in the English Wiktionary whose purpose is to serve as a thesaurus, including a thesaurus of slang words.

See "Creating a Wikisaurus entry" for the structure of Wikisaurus entries. An example of a well-formatted entry would be the "wiktionary:Wikisaurus:insane" page.

References

  1. ^ Wiktionary's current URL is www.wiktionary.org.

External links

Look up Wiktionary in
Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
Projects of the Wikimedia Foundation
Wikibooks (Wikijunior) • Wikiversity • Wikimedia Commons • Wiktionary • Wikinews • Wikipedia • Wikiquote • Wikisource • Wikispecies • Meta-Wiki • Wikimedia Incubator