User:Aphaia/WMF/Our projects/Wiktionary

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This is a draft. Your improvement is welcome.


File:Wiktionary-logo.png

Wiktionary is a project that aims to create free content dictionaries and thesauruses in every language.

The project was started in December 2002, initially because people started to add dictionary content to the wikipedia project. This was not seen as encyclopedic content and as dictionary content has a much different structure, it was decided to start the Wiktionary project. Initially wiktionary was an English dictionary with translations to any language.

When was its subdomain created?

There are now (March 2005), 5 languages with more than 10,000 articles and 17 langagues with more than 1,000 articles.

For an overview of the wiktionaries, to see which are the biggest and which ones exist, please refer to:

Wiktionary.org

The wiktionary project is growing very fast. People who contribute to wiktionary are not always the same like the ones contributing to wikipedia since the way one works on the articles is very different. On Wiktionary you don't write about a theme, but descrive words, add definitions, synonyms, antonyms, translations, proverbs, related words etc. Everyone can edit - every single word counts.

Wiktionary is also a good starting point to protect minor languages - it is easy to start to create the single words used and also non-native speakers can easily help to create an extensive database. For language identification we use ISO-639 codes - on some wiktionaries there's a special coding system that allows easy interchange of information and prepares data for the ultimate wiktionary. Active collaboration is taking place between languages.

And of course anyone is invited to contribute - search for your favourite Wiktionary here:

Wiktionary.org