Wikimedia Quarto/3/wiktionary
- State of the article : Editing - Proofreading - Translating
Wiktionary is a dictionary[edit]
by GerardM
To be excited about a dictionary, you have to be nuts. So, I do confess, I am guilty as charged. Not only am I obsessed with what I consider a very important project of the Wikimedia foundation I also want to make it more relevant. Consider, you cannot understand if you do not have the concept, the word to describe what you try to understand. A dictionary is where you should be able to find all the words for all the concepts. A Wiktionary is where you find all the words of all the languages and the Ultimate Wiktionary is where all this is to come together.
Right, that was the sales pitch, but what does it mean? Dictionaries can be found in many ways, there are the traditional dictionaries, list of words with a definition. There are the glossaries, the thesauri, the translation dictionaries and Wiktionary is bold enough to want to be all this. With the current software, a Wiktionary has its base in one language and intends to do all this for all languages.
The result is many wiktionaries all doing the same thing. When you analyze the content of the wiktionaries, you find that 80% of the content is basically the same. A word like glossary is an English language word, it is a noun, it means, list of words with explanations. The only thing that is structurally different in another language is the meaning, as this needs to be translated for every other language. So would it not be nice if these 80% were the same for all wiktionaries. Would it not be nice when work done on a word would be available automagically in all other Wiktionaries??
The Ultimate Wiktionary is a beautiful dream for people who care about these kinds of resources. It is a dream because it brings it all together, the specialist wordlists, the relations between terms, and the pronunciations. It is something that is so tantalizing because it should bring together the best of everything, maximizing the effectiveness of all the hard labor by the communities. Merging all the different communities is the hard part, the standard and the specialist content be merged because we have the room as hardware is cheap.
The thing that I personally like best is that I will finally have a proper place for the glossary of botanical terms compiled by Herman Busser. Herman was a remarkable person in the Dutch cactus and succulent world. He published several papers on cacti. His glossary was given to me before his death to give it another lease of life.
Technically, the ultimate Wiktionary requires an extension to the Mediawiki software. To make this 80% similar information available in all languages, we need a relational database back-end. This is what Wikidata is to provide. It will give you fields where you can select predefined values for instance to indicate that a word is an English language word or to indicate that the pronunciation is in SAMPA or can be listened to and other fields that may include text with wikisyntax.
At the moment that I write this, I am still dreaming, I have mirages like “what would it be like if we had not just the GEMET thesaurus but the other EU thesauri as well”, would it not be grand if we had a resource in Papiamento or Hopi?
At the time when this article is published, we will have progressed on our merry way towards the implementation of Wikidata and the Ultimate Wiktionary. I wonder how many dreams will come true and, what we will be dreaming up to be the next thing after we have our Ultimate Wiktionary..