Wiktionary

Wiktionary (from the words wiki and dictionary) is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary, available in 158 languages. Unlike standard dictionaries, it is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians", using wiki software, allowing articles to be changed by almost anyone with access to the website.

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

The goal of Wiktionary is to eventually define "all words in all languages."

History and development
Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002, following a proposal by Daniel Alston and an idea by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. On March 28, 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 domain name (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004, when it switched to the current domain name. , Wiktionary features well over 5 million entries across its 272 language editions. The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 3 million entries. The French Wiktionary is the second largest with over 2.2 million entries. Nineteen Wiktionary language editions now contain over 100,000 entries each.



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. Seven of the 18 bots registered at the English Wiktionary created 163,000 of the entries there. Only 259 entries remain (each containing many definitions) on Wiktionary from the original import by Websterbot from public domain sources; the majority of those imports have been split out to thousands of proper entries manually. Another 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 "third-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). It should be noted, though, that more detailed statistics now exist to distinguish more clearly the main entries from sub-entries.

The English Wiktionary, however does not rely on bots to the extent that newer editions do. The French and Vietnamese Wiktionaries, for example, imported large sections of the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project (FVDP), which provides free content bilingual dictionaries to and from Vietnamese. These imported entries make up virtually all of the Vietnamese edition's offering. Like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported the approximately 20,000 entries in the Unihan database of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean characters. The French Wiktionary grew rapidly in 2006 thanks in large part to bots copying many entries from old, freely licensed dictionaries, such as the eighth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1935, around 35,000 words), and using bots to add words from other Wiktionary editions with French translations. The Russian edition grew by nearly 80,000 entries as "LXbot" added boilerplate entries (with headings, but without definitions) for words in English and German.

Accuracy
To ensure accuracy, Wiktionary has a policy stating that entries should be attested, that is, verified through either:
 * 1) Clearly widespread use, or
 * 2) Usage in a well-known work, or
 * 3) Usage in permanently recorded media, conveying meaning, in at least three independent instances spanning at least a year, or
 * 4) For terms in extinct languages: usage in at least one contemporaneous source.