Wiktionary and dicologos

This document just tries to help to clarify the current Situation in oct 2005.

At Wikimania 2005 there was a presentation about dicologos and having two free dictionary projects on the web, might make sense to combine their content. Unfortunately it seems not to be possible to bring these two approaches together without giving up the key features of at least one of them. If no merging is possible, both projects might benefit from partial interchange of content and sharing ideas. Perhaps its even helpful torwards free dictionaries on the web to have the possibilities of two experiments instead of one.

There are differences in community approach, considered use and other things but the "problem" might be two main aspects:

• dicologos is highly integrated in the business structure of logos (used software, main usage as help for translators, as marketing attractor for logos). Since dicologos fullfills the needs of logos like it is today, the risk for problems if dicologos is subject to deep changes and (automatic) content merging is crucial for logos.

• the second main aspect is that a future logos foundation might need more options with licensing (for example Creative Commons non comercial instead of GFDL) and something like the "right to fork" by using things like wiktionary's cur and old tables might not be possible for them.

apart from that main aspects there are several less complicated diffs between the two approaches

Dicologos

(http://www.dicologos.org moved to http://www.logos.it/pls/dictionary/permuta.main?lang=en&source=anagram)

• grown and working since decades, a lot of experience over the years to let it work how it works (and there is a lot of content in it)
• intended as tool for translators
• authors are considered as experts and contributors (usually edit only entries of languages you are expert in, less user driven development)
• not derived from a wiki software
• except for e-mail to logos, there is no communication available about words, quotes and what have you.

Wiktionary

• something like wikipedia...
• rely more on community, benevolent users and on software than on access control and expert editors
• accepting vandalism as necessary
• before the version change which might cost some work but can enable unpredictable things on using the content
• communication is possible in talkpages, beer parlour, IRC mail-lists and private mail from within the Mediawiki software.