2018-02-28 23:09 GMT+02:00 James Salsman <jsals...@gmail.com>: > > > building an authoritative dictionary is considerably > > harder than building a (de facto) authoritative encyclopedia. > > What reason is there to think that? My any measure of editor hours, or > the amount of money it would take to replicate the effort, or the > maintenance load going forward, I'm sure that even a three shelf foot > encyclopedia is harder than a 100,000 word dictionary.
A couple of reasons: * For the particular case of Wikimedia, we are using the same software for Wiktionary as we do for Wikipedia. It's insane. MediaWiki wasn't made for that. It was made for Wikipedia. * An *authoritative* dictionary needs authority. It must be built by a team of trained and certified linguists. It needs a large and systematized collection of citations. It's just harder to do this for a dictionary than for an encyclopedia. Citations for an encyclopedia these days are often easily googlable, and the form of an encyclopedia article is freer than the form of a dictionary entry, which must be super-strict. The English Wiktionary community is overcoming both of these problem valiantly. It is overcoming the first problem by using lots of templates and gadgets, which kinda work in practice, but which are hard to learn and to replicate for other languages, and hard for software to process. It is overcoming the second problem by being more practically useful than authoritative, similarly to Wikipedia. Lexicographic citations in English are particularly easy to google up, given that: * English is the #1 language on the web * Google is a company based in an English-speaking country and (probably) getting most of its revenue from English-speaking customers * English has a simple morphology, for which it is particularly easy to build a well-working search engine for However, while it's easy to google up examples for English word usage, I strongly suspect that googling won't produce results that will be as systematized as a citation database of Merriam-Webster is. Wikipedia had proved long ago that it can compete—even if not necessarily win—with the authority of Britannica, but Wiktionary hasn't yet proven that it can compete with the authority of Merriam-Webster, Oxford, Houaiss, Duden, etc. (The English Wiktionary is not necessarily special; I also got to use the French, German, and Dutch Wiktionaries a bit, and they all do it at a level of quality that is comparable to the English one.) Is it desirable for Wiktionary to get better? Of course it is. Can Wiktionary get better? Yes, and path is quite clear. Wikidata's Lexeme project is progressing slowly, but its direction is right. It will finally build a technical platform that is actually good for a dictionary. At https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T186421 I've been writing my ideas about how Lexical Wikidata can actually be used by editors and readers. So I'm very much on board with the idea of better Wiktionary. (Before you jump to conclusions: These ideas were not solicited by Wikidata developers. They are totally mine, and they are not in any way "official". I'm just writing them down as a brain dump, in my personal volunteering capacity, hoping that they will be useful to Wikidata developers.) > > We are not *teaching* encyclopedia articles. > > What is the difference between delivering the text of an encyclopedia > article and teaching it? Encyclopedias are not written to be > accompanied by a lecturer, tutor, or teacher. We even teach how to > write them, to students, in schools, and the students often if not > almost always get academic credit for their work: > https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Education_program/Educators Exactly: As Wikimedians, we are actively teaching people to write in Wikipedia (and in other Wikimedia projects), but we are not teaching the *subjects* of the articles. Not as Wikimedians. Some Wikimedians are also teachers, and they use Wikipedia articles as handouts, but this is not really a Wikimedia activity. As Wikimedians we just make materials available, and we teach others *to make them available*. > > Wikimedia should be busy getting even better at its main thing: wiki articles. > > Why? We are already the best at that. We may be the best, and we are definitely the most popular, but we could be so, so much better. And we should be. As a simple high-level example, it's still not NEARLY as easy to become a Wikipedia editor as it should be. I often wish that Wikipedia had more substantial competitors, so it would drive us to be faster at improving ourselves. Medium.com, Quora.com, Genius.com, and some other web properties are occasionally mentioned as Wikimedia's competitors, but none of them is doing quite the same thing as Wikimedia does, and though each of them is quite popular, none is as popular as Wikipedia is. (I will readily admit, however, that Google is a competitor for providing quick facts, and Facebook and Instagram are competitors for people's spare time, especially on mobile devices. This is widely admitted, but unfortunately we are not doing much to compete with them in these areas, at least not yet.) > Why not make the wiki articles > in Wiktionary better by not just playing audio recordings of words, > which volunteers (not the Foundation) already provide, but meeting > that initiative by recording utterances and predicting whether they > are intelligible pronunciations, and doing the same with recording > gadgets in Wikipedia's pronunciation articles? http://j.mp/irslides Cool! I've never said I'm opposed to such a thing. Collecting data that is useful for teaching anything, including languages, is exactly what Wikimedia should be doing, and doing it in new ways and media is welcome. It's not just my opinion; it's explicitly written in the strategic direction, and it makes a lot of sense. But again, it's not *teaching*. It's *collecting data that is useful for teaching*, which is not the same thing. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l New messages to: Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
