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Wiktionary
Logo of English Wiktionary
Screenshot
Main Page of the English Wiktionary on April 2, 2021.
Type of site
Online dictionary
Available inMultilingual(169 active)[1]
OwnerWikimedia Foundation
Created by
URLwiktionary.org
CommercialNo
RegistrationOptional
LaunchedDecember 12, 2002;21 years ago(2002-12-12)
Current statusActive
Look upwiktionaryorWiktionaryin Wiktionary, the free dictionary.

Wiktionary(UK:/ˈwɪkʃənəri/ⓘ,WIK-shə-nər-ee;US:/ˈwɪkʃənɛri/ⓘ,WIK-shə-nerr-ee;rhyming with "dictionary" ) is a multilingual,web-based project to create afree contentdictionaryof terms (includingwords,phrases,proverbs,linguistic reconstructions,etc.) in allnatural languagesand in a number ofartificial languages.These entries may containdefinitions,imagesfor illustration,pronunciations,etymologies,inflections,usage examples,quotations,related terms, andtranslationsof terms into other languages, among other features. It iscollaboratively editedvia awiki.Its nameis aportmanteauof the wordswikianddictionary.It is available in 193 languages and inSimple English.Like its sister projectWikipedia,Wiktionary is run by theWikimedia Foundation,and is written collaboratively byvolunteers,dubbed "Wiktionarians". Itswiki software,MediaWiki,allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries.

Because Wiktionary is not limited by print space considerations, most of Wiktionary's language editions provide definitions and translations of terms from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found inthesauri.

Wiktionary's data is frequently used in variousnatural language processing tasks.

History and development

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002,[2]following a proposal by Daniel Alston and an idea byLarry Sanger,co-founder of Wikipedia.[3]On March 28, 2004, the first non-EnglishWiktionaries were initiated inFrenchandPolish.Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporarydomain name(wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004, when it switched to the current domain name.[a]As of July 2021,Wiktionary features over 30 million articles (and even more entries) across its editions.[4]The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 7.5 million entries, followed by theFrenchWiktionary with over 4.7 million and theMalagasyWiktionary with over 3.5 million entries. Forty-three Wiktionary language editions contain over 100,000 entries each.[b]

The use ofbotsto generate large numbers of articles is visible as "growth spurts" in this graph of article counts at the largest eight Wiktionary editions. (Data as of December 2009)

Many of the definitions at the project's largest language editions were created bybotsthat 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 in 2007[c]created 163,000 of the entries there.[5]

Another of these bots, "ThirdPersBot",was responsible for the addition of a number of third-personconjugationsthat would not have received their own entries in standard dictionaries; for instance, it defined "smoulders"as the" third-person singular simple present form ofsmoulder."Of the 1,269,938 definitions the English Wiktionary provides for 996,450 English words, 478,068 are" form of "definitions of this kind.[6]This means that even without such entries, its coverage of English is significantly larger than that of major monolingual print dictionaries.Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionaryof the English Language, Unabridged,for instance, has 475,000 entries (with many additional embedded headwords); theOxford English Dictionaryhas 615,000 headwords, but includesMiddle Englishas well, for which the English Wiktionary has an additional 34,234 gloss definitions. Detailedstatisticsexist to show how many entries of various kinds exist.

The English Wiktionary does not rely on bots to the extent that some other editions do. TheFrenchandVietnameseWiktionaries, for example, imported large sections of the FreeVietnameseDictionary Project (FVDP), which provides free content bilingual dictionaries to and from Vietnamese.[d]These imported entries make up virtually all of the Vietnamese edition's contents. Like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported approximately 20,000 entries from theUnihandatabase ofChinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian characters.The French Wiktionary grew rapidly in 2006 thanks in a large part to bots copying many entries from old, freely licensed dictionaries, such as the eighth edition of theDictionnaire de l'Académie française(1935, around 35,000 words), and using bots to add words from other Wiktionary editions with French translations. TheRussianedition grew by nearly 80,000 entries as "LXbot"added boilerplate entries (with headings, but without definitions) for words in English andGerman.[7]

As of July 2021, the English Wiktionary has over 791,870glossdefinitions and over 1,269,938 total definitions (including different forms) for English entries alone, with a total of over 9,928,056 definitions across all languages.[8]

Logos

Wiktionary has historically lacked a uniform logo across its numerous language editions. Some editions use logos that depict a dictionary entry about the term "Wiktionary", based on the previous English Wiktionary logo, which was designed by Brooke Vibber, aMediaWikideveloper.[9]Because a purely textual logo must vary considerably from language to language, a four-phase contest to adopt a uniform logo was held at the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki from September to October 2006.[e]Some communities adopted the winning entry by "Smurrayinchester",a 3×3 grid of wooden tiles, each bearing a character from a different writing system. However, the poll did not see as much participation from the Wiktionary community as some community members had hoped, and a number of the larger wikis ultimately kept their textual logos.[e]

In April 2009, the issue was resurrected with a new contest. This time, a depiction by "AAEngelman" of an open hardbound dictionary won a head-to-head vote against the 2006 logo, but the process to refine and adopt the new logo then stalled.[10]In the following years, some wikis replaced their textual logos with one of the two newer logos. In 2012, 55 wikis that had been using the English Wiktionary logo received localized versions of the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester".[f]In July 2016, the English Wiktionary adopted a variant of this logo.[11]As of 4 July 2016,135 wikis, representing 61% of Wiktionary's entries, use a logo based on the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester", 33 wikis (36%) use a textual logo, and three wikis (3%) use the 2009 design by "AAEngelman".[12]

Multi-lingual

As of July 2024, there are Wiktionary sites for 193 languages of which 169 are active and 24 are closed.[1]The active sites have 40,169,833 articles, and the closed sites have 339 articles.[13]There are 7,322,079 registered users of which 6,310 are recently active.[13]

The top ten Wiktionary language projects by mainspace article count:[13]

№ Language Wiki Good Total Edits Admins Users Active users Files
1 English en 8,089,047 9,577,673 80,711,258 80 4,202,591 2,301 14
2 French fr 5,987,132 6,607,107 35,411,280 32 373,880 536 6
3 Malagasy mg 4,314,559 4,379,944 33,115,428 2 12,193 48 3
4 Chinese zh 1,734,263 2,380,450 8,563,027 9 121,358 81 1
5 Greek el 1,527,934 1,584,554 6,909,674 10 61,782 70 23
6 Russian ru 1,364,530 2,879,639 13,441,723 15 318,058 250 191
7 German de 1,133,559 1,315,804 10,089,477 13 239,807 190 107
8 Kurdish ku 1,000,764 1,096,720 6,012,574 7 12,657 41 15
9 Swedish sv 946,130 985,315 4,049,041 13 57,464 61 1
10 Spanish es 929,081 986,698 5,493,674 8 169,076 108 14

For a complete list with totals see Wikimedia Statistics:[14]

Critical reception

Critical reception of Wiktionary has been mixed. In 2006,Jill Leporewrote in the article "Noah's Ark" forThe New Yorker,[g]

There's no show of hands atWiktionary.There's not even an editorial staff. "Be your own lexicographer!", might beWiktionary'smotto. Who needs experts? Why pay good money for a dictionary written by lexicographers when we could cobble one together ourselves?

Wiktionaryisn't so muchrepublicanordemocraticasMaoist.And it's only as good as thecopyright-expiredbooks from which it pilfers.

Keir Graff's review forBooklistwas less critical:

Is there a place for Wiktionary? Undoubtedly. The industry and enthusiasm of its many creators are proof that there's a market. And it's wonderful to have another strong source to use when searching the odd terms that pop up in today's fast-changing world and the online environment. But as with so many Web sources (including this column), it's best used by sophisticated users in conjunction with more reputable sources.[citation needed]

References in other publications are fleeting and part of larger discussions of Wikipedia, not progressing beyond a definition, although David Brooks inThe Nashua Telegraphdescribed it as "wild and woolly".[16]One of the impediments to independent coverage of Wiktionary is the continuing confusion that it is merely an extension of Wikipedia.[h]

The measure of correctness of the inflections for a subset of the Polish words in the English Wiktionary showed that this grammatical data is very stable (a study showed that only 131 out of 4,748 Polish words have had their inflection data corrected).[17]

As of 2016,Wiktionary has seen growing use inacademia.[18]

Wiktionary data in natural language processing

Wiktionary hassemi-structured data.[19]Wiktionarylexicographicdata can be converted tomachine-readable formatin order to be used innatural language processingtasks.[20][21][22]

Wiktionary'sdata miningis a complex task. There are the following difficulties:[23]

  • (1) the constant and frequent changes to data and schemata
  • (2) the heterogeneity in Wiktionary language edition schemata[i]and
  • (3) the human-centric nature of awiki.

There are severalparsersfor different Wiktionary language editions:[24]

Examples ofnatural language processingtasks which have been solved with the help of Wiktionary data include:

"Wikidata:Lexicographical data "was started in 2018 to provide structured data support to Wiktionaries. It stores word data of all languages in a machine readable data model, under a dedicated"Lexeme"namespace in Wikidata. As of October 2021, the project has amassed over 600,000 lexeme entries of various languages.[47]

See also

Notes

  1. ^Wiktionary's current URL iswww.wiktionary.org
  2. ^Wiktionary total article counts arehere.Detailed statistics by word type are available here[1].
  3. ^Theuser listat the English Wiktionary identifies accounts that have been given "bot status".
  4. ^Hồ Ngọc Đức,Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project.Detailsat the Vietnamese Wiktionary.
  5. ^ab"Wiktionary/logo",Meta-Wiki,Wikimedia Foundation.
  6. ^[Translators-l] 56 Wiktionaries got a localised logo
  7. ^The full article is not available on-line.[15]
  8. ^In this citation, the author refers to Wiktionary as part of the Wikipedia site:Adapted from an article by Naomi DeTullio (2006)."Wikis for Librarians"(PDF).NETLS News #142.Northeast Texas Library System. p. 15. Archived fromthe original(PDF newsletter)on June 5, 2007.RetrievedApril 21,2007.
  9. ^E.g. compare the entry structure and formatting rules inEnglish WiktionaryandRussian Wiktionary.
  10. ^Quotations are extracted only from Russian Wiktionary.[33]
  11. ^If there are several IPA notations on a Wiktionary page – either for different languages or for pronunciation variants, then the first pronunciation was extracted.[39]
  12. ^The source code and the results of POS-tagging are available athttps://code.google.com/p/wikily-supervised-pos-tagger

References

Citations

  1. ^abWikimedia'sMediaWikiAPI:Sitematrix.Retrieved July 2024 fromData:Wikipedia statistics/meta.tab
  2. ^"Wikipedia mailing list archive discussion announcing the opening of the Wiktionary project".December 12, 2002.Archivedfrom the original on June 20, 2014.RetrievedMay 3,2011.
  3. ^Wikipedia mailing list archive discussion from Larry Sanger giving the idea on WiktionaryArchivedJune 20, 2014, at theWayback Machine– Retrieved May 3, 2011
  4. ^"Wiktionary".www.wiktionary.org.Archivedfrom the original on September 13, 2008.RetrievedOctober 28,2021.
  5. ^TheDaveBotArchivedOctober 11, 2007, at theWayback Machine,TheCheatBotArchivedOctober 11, 2007, at theWayback Machine,WebsterbotArchivedOctober 11, 2007, at theWayback Machine,PastBotArchivedOctober 11, 2007, at theWayback Machine,NanshuBotArchivedOctober 11, 2007, at theWayback Machine
  6. ^Detailed statisticsArchivedJuly 23, 2021, at theWayback Machineas of July 21, 2021
  7. ^"LXbot".Archived fromthe originalon May 24, 2008.
  8. ^"Wiktionary:Statistics".March 29, 2022.Archivedfrom the original on March 6, 2023.RetrievedMarch 6,2023– via Wiktionary.
  9. ^"Wiktionary talk:Wiktionary Logo",English Wiktionary, Wikimedia Foundation.
  10. ^"Wiktionary/logo/refresh/voting",Meta-Wiki, Wikimedia Foundation.
  11. ^phab:T139255
  12. ^m:Wiktionary/logo#Logo use statistics.
  13. ^abcWikimedia'sMediaWikiAPI:Siteinfo.Retrieved July 2024 fromData:Wikipedia statistics/data.tab
  14. ^"Wiktionary Statistics".Meta.Wikimedia.org.Archivedfrom the original on September 2, 2020.RetrievedSeptember 11,2020.
  15. ^Lepore 2006.
  16. ^David Brooks, "Online, interactive encyclopedia not just for geeks anymore, because everyone seems to need it now, more than ever!"The Nashua Telegraph(August 4, 2004)
  17. ^Kurmas 2010.
  18. ^Sascha & Müller-Spitzer 2016,p. 348
  19. ^Meyer & Gurevych 2012,p. 140.
  20. ^Zesch, Müller & Gurevych 2008,p. 4, Figure 1.
  21. ^Meyer & Gurevych 2010,p. 40.
  22. ^Krizhanovsky, Transformation 2010,p. 1.
  23. ^Hellmann & Auer 2013,p. 302, p. 16 in PDF.
  24. ^Hellmann, Brekle & Auer 2012,p. 3, Table 1.
  25. ^"DBpedia Wiktionary".Archived fromthe originalon May 4, 2013.
  26. ^Hellmann, Brekle & Auer 2012,pp. 8–9.
  27. ^Hellmann, Brekle & Auer 2012,p. 10.
  28. ^Hellmann, Brekle & Auer 2012,p. 11.
  29. ^"Welcome".DKPro JWKTL.Archivedfrom the original on January 23, 2021.RetrievedJune 23,2019.
  30. ^Zesch, Müller & Gurevych 2008.
  31. ^"Wikokit - Machine-readable Wiktionary".December 19, 2022.Archivedfrom the original on October 2, 2020.RetrievedNovember 7,2015– via GitHub.
  32. ^Krizhanovsky, Transformation 2010.
  33. ^abSmirnov et al. 2012.
  34. ^Krizhanovsky, Comparison 2010.
  35. ^"Gerard de Melo's Research at ICSI, Berkeley".gerard.demelo.org.Archivedfrom the original on March 27, 2023.RetrievedMarch 6,2023.
  36. ^Otte & Tyers 2011.
  37. ^McFate & Forbus 2011.
  38. ^Schlippe, Ochs & Schultz 2012.
  39. ^Schlippe, Ochs & Schultz 2012,p. 4802.
  40. ^Schlippe, Ochs & Schultz 2012,p. 4804.
  41. ^Meyer & Gurevych 2012.
  42. ^"ConceptNet 5".conceptnet5.media.mit.edu.Archived fromthe originalon October 19, 2011.RetrievedSeptember 23,2023.
  43. ^Lin & Krizhanovsky 2011.
  44. ^Medero & Ostendorf 2009.
  45. ^Li, Graça & Taskar 2012.
  46. ^Chesley et al. 2006.
  47. ^"Wikidata:Wiktionary".Archivedfrom the original on January 3, 2023.RetrievedOctober 12,2012.

Sources

  • Krizhanovsky, Andrew (2010). "Transformation of Wiktionary entry structure into tables and relations in a relational database schema".arXiv:1011.1368[cs].
  • Krizhanovsky, Andrew (2010). "The comparison of Wiktionary thesauri transformed into the machine-readable format".arXiv:1006.5040[cs].
  • Li, Shen; Graça, Joao V.; Taskar, Ben (2012)."Wiki-ly supervised part-of-speech tagging"(PDF).Proceedings of the 2012 Joint Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning.Jeju Island, Korea: Association for Computational Linguistics. pp. 1389–1398. Archived fromthe original(PDF)on May 22, 2013.RetrievedMay 10,2013.
  • Lin, Feiyu; Krizhanovsky, Andrew (2011). "Multilingual ontology matching based on Wiktionary data accessible via SPARQL endpoint".Proc. of the 13th Russian Conference on Digital Libraries RCDL'2011.Voronezh, Russia. pp. 19–26.arXiv:1109.0732.Bibcode:2011arXiv1109.0732L.
  • "Wiktionary".Top 101 Web Sites.PC Magazine.Ziff Davis. April 6, 2005. Archived fromthe originalon December 21, 2005.RetrievedDecember 16,2005.
Look upWiktionaryin Wiktionary, the free dictionary.
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