Wiktionary talk:Alternative vision of multilingual dictionary

Your vision is welcome. My reactions to your points are mixed, but that's fine.

The kind of linguistic articles that you describe for the Polish Wikipedia would all be fine on the English one. If they aren't there it's perhaps simply that even with its much larger size the right people to write that kind of article have simply not arrived. Your personal interest in linguistics may have given it a much higher profile in Polish, but I tend to view that as a statistical anomaly.

The rule that Wikipedia is not a dictionary shouldn't be a problem. I agree that it shouldn't be about defining words, but not to the extent that definitions are completely banned. A great deal of flexibility is required in regards to this rule. I also believe that it should be allowed to develop separately in each language. Each language must find its own balance in the Wikipedia/Wiktionary relationship.24 Jan 6, 200
 * Good dictionary, like ones on Polish Wikipedia, group similar words in single article. It's very difficult to learn anything when every word is in separate article, and there is no structure for information describing groups of related words.

That paragraph may be the basis of a musunderstanding. English makes a distinction between "dictionary" and "glossary". Does Polish not have a similar distinction between s&#322;ownik and glosariusz? For me a dictionary means a place where I can find out what an unknown word means. If I am looking at a piece of text which I already recognize as being in Polish, and it includes the word pies I want to know that it is referring to a dog. If further the context is about a family dog that bit a burglar, knowing the Polish word for other animals is not going to help me. On the other hand if I'm about to visit the Warsaw zoo, a glossary of the animals found there would be very useful.


 * To me, the difference between a dictionary and a glossary is this: A glossary is associated with a specific book, document, etc. For instance, if Tomasz were writing a paper about anime, he might have a page at the end defining anime-related words used in the document. This list of definitions would be a glossary. However, if he decided to be very ambitious and write a stand-alone book defining anime-related words, that book would be a dictionary.

Grouping by spelling in a dictionary is fine, but I do agree that a reader of the English Wiktionary will not be interested in knowing how a Polish word is translated into Bengali.

I agree that the name Wiktionary shows a West European bias, but I have no idea how that problem can be solved.

Double logging, and double preferences are really only a minor point. The duplication of recent changes should not be much of a problem either since they will mostly deal with different articles. I also see no need to move linguistic articles from Wikipedia to Wiktionary; most are probably fine where they are.

I tend to support most of what you list at the end of your vision. As things stand these are more likely to be successful in Wiktionary than Wikipedia. UTF-8 has already become accepted for Wiktionary, and we are beginning to see more fully accented words or words is other scripts. It is important to appreciate what a big forward step it is to accept this in an English language environment where the citizens of one country in particular have an intense dislike for anything foreign. Eclecticology 09:3 (UTC)

I know what you mean by the word wiktionary having a western european bias, but the word Wiktionary is an international word, shore the Etymology of the word comes from the word wiki and the english word Dictionary, but it does nto affetc teh word wiktionary being an international word.

Word glosariusz in Polish isn't really used and almost anything that has something to do with meaning of words is called słownik, including things that are called glossary in English.

Main problem with linguistics in English Wikipedia is lack of UTF-8. I'd translate some stuff from Polish Wikipedia, but it's impossible now.

Our dictionary should support both "browsing" and "searching for words" modes. I think that thematic structure is much better for browsing, and "single word searches" can be accomplished by some search engine.

Double logging/preferences/recent changes is a problem, as I already have to log 6 times to check all my user pages. But this is rather independent of other issues I have with Wiktionary.

It's not only me who does linguistics on Polish Wikipedia, it's just that I did a lot and then you see usual self-acceleration. Taw 13:32 Jan 6, 2003 (UTC)