Kevin Atkinson wrote: > Aspell currently has official dictionaries for over 80 languages which must > all be kept up to date.
In my mind, the obvious reorganization of responsibilities would be to hand over the maintenance of the word lists to the Wikimedia Foundation, and to keep only the software-specific parts (such as suffix definitions) within the Aspell project. Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, was started in January 2001 and it soon became obvious that dictionary-like articles (word definitions) didn't fit in this encyclopedia. In order to have somewhere to direct people who still wanted to write dictionary-like articles, Wiktionary, the free dictionary, was started in December 2002. The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., was incorporated (in Florida) in June 2003 to handle these and other similar projects. Because Wiktionary was started as a spinoff for articles that didn't fit in an encyclopedia, its structure is more like the Oxford English Dictionary than any spelling dictionary. Wiktionary (www.wiktionary.org) is currently available in 80 languages, of which 25 have more than 10,000 words (basic forms). Within the same foundation, there is also a parallel project called WiktionaryZ that has a somewhat different structure. The spelling dictionaries for Aspell (and its predecessors spell and ispell) don't quite fit any of these structures, but would probably have to be kept separate. As long as they are in the public domain or released under "free content" licenses, I don't think there would be any problems with this. I'm not a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, but I've been following these projects since their inception and could help in talking to the right people, if you think this could be part of a useful solution. -- Lars Aronsson ([EMAIL PROTECTED]) Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se _______________________________________________ Aspell-user mailing list [email protected] http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/aspell-user
