Wiktionary

• De.wiktionary.org ( German version )
• Wiktionary.org ( Language Overview )

German version: 001 May 2004

Concept and project

In contrast to conventional printed mostly bilingual language dictionaries, the concept of Wiktionarys is open plan, that are desired in each language version lemmas to entries in all languages. In a theoretical final stage of each voice Wiktionary possessed the vocabulary of all languages, explains the basic language of the Wiktionarys and additionally all entries from the vocabulary of their own language, including translations into all languages.

License

Survey

In February 2014 together over 18.7 million entries are available in all 171 languages ​​. Most entries, approximately 3.6 million, it is the English version ready, followed by the madegassischsprachigen with around 3.0 million and the French-speaking with about 2.5 million entries. This largest Wiktionarys have their swapped places in the ranking according to the number of entries several times; for the first time in early 2006 was the French-language version with the most entries. Since mid-2010, however, is again the English version of the with most articles. Currently, the 32 largest Wiktionarys each represent more than 100,000 items ready. The German -language Wiktionary stands with over 350,000 entries on Rank 13

Here is a table with the entry numbers of the 20 largest Wiktionarys the state of 31 August 2012:

There are detailed statistics pages for Wiktionarys that depict the historical development. The number of entries in itself says little about the quality of a language version of Wiktionary; see also the chapter on growth spurts by bots. Statistics that classify the entries to quality characteristics are until now only limited availability.

Individual language versions of Wiktionary

German

English

Among the existing on January 7, 2013, some 3.2 million entries were divided by language of the words explained about 627,000 entries Latin, 488,000 Italian, 487,000 English, French 279,000, 245,000 and 109,000 Spanish Finnish; the remainder from more than 400 other languages.

On 29 March 2004, the French-language Wiktionary or Wiktionnaire was launched. Meanwhile, it has over 2.3 million records, making it according to the English version at number 2 of the most comprehensive language versions of Wiktionary. Of the existing on January 7, 2013 2.3 million entries about 1.2 million entries were in the percentages of the words explained by language French, 157,000 Russian, Bulgarian 156,000, 121,000 and 80,000 English Slovenian; the rest was distributed to over 900 other languages.

Vietnamese

The Wiktionary in Vietnamese language was launched in 2004. Of the now more than 230,000 existing entries were in the percentages by language of the words explained about 110,000 English, 44,000 French, 35,000 Russian and 31,000 Vietnamese; the remainder from 54 other languages.

Polish

The Polish-language Wiktionary was launched in March 2004 to life. Of the existing 20 August 2011 approximately 236,000 entries 35,000 entries were in the percentages by language of the words explained in English, 30,000 Polish, 21,000 Chinese and 19,400 in the constructed language Interlingua; the rest was distributed to 264 other languages. The approximately 7,900 entries in Yiddish make the Polish Wiktionary according to its own representation for the most modern dictionary of postwar Yiddish, the ', was published in Poland. Nearly 6,000 of these entries created in 2007 by a bot action (see the chapter on growth spurts by bots ).

Growth spurts by bots

Most entries in the most extensive language versions of Wiktionary caused by the use of bots. Your programmers found creative ways to generate large numbers of new entries or to import thousands of records from publicly available dictionaries machine.

Seven of its 30 bots that are in the English Wiktionary listed as such have created there about 163,000 entries. 259 complex entries which themselves contain many definitions have been imported from Websterbot from publicly available sources; most of these imports were manually split into thousands of entries. Another one of those bots, ThirdPersBot, created Verbnebenformen in the third person singular, which are listed in the printed dictionaries usually not individually. At the time of these actions in 2006, the English-language Wiktionary had without the approximately 163,000 Bot entries about 137,000 entries and was still significantly smaller than many printed dictionaries: So the Oxford English Dictionary contains about 615,000 word entries, and Merriam- Webster 's Third New International Dictionary of the English Language, Unabridged 475,000 entries; besides, many word phrases are only in the body of the other entries.

The Wiktionarys in English and French have approximately 20,000 entries of the Unihan database of CJK characters ( Chinese, Japanese and Korean) imported.

Also, the rapid growth of the French-speaking Wiktionarys in 2006 is mainly due to the work of bots back, the 1935 adopted many entries from old, royalty-free dictionaries as the 8th edition of the Dictionnaire de l' Académie française with 35,000 word entries, as well as by bots the concepts from other language editions of Wiktionary imported with French translations. The French- as the vietnamesischsprachige Wiktionary have imported large parts of the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project ( FVDP ). This offers free access bilingual dictionaries and into Vietnamese. The vietnamesischsprachige Wiktionary was after this action almost exclusively from these imported entries.

The Wiktionary in Polish has approximately 15,000 stub entries of the constructed language Interlingua with permission of the author from the website and imported interlingua.filo.pl using the bots Tsca.bot during the period 10 July to 27 November 2004. With the help of the same bots Tsca.bot nearly 6,000 entries were created in Yiddish from March 31 to April 2, 2007, mostly next to the Polish translation contained the IPA pronunciation, and the YIVO transcription.

The Russian-language Wiktionary took over with the help of bots LXbot from October 2006 about 80,000 stub entries ( "Boiler Plates" ) for English, German and French words. From June 2008 stub entries for Russian words were created by the bot TrudoBot in large numbers.

Importance

Out: language is seen Across wiktionary.org by Alexa Internet in the so-called " Alexa Traffic Rank " ranks 658 (2013 7. Januar state ). Of the registered queries were made to the language version about 41 % to the English, 15% French and 12% to the German version; the remainder from the many other languages ​​.

Assessment

2005 in the book The Internet and the autonomous learner: Free Lehr-/Lernangebote the internet for the English version of Wiktionary criticized that the accuracy is not comprehensible for laymen, the entries are incomplete, information about the pronunciation of the words usually were missing as well as audio examples only sometimes will be available and translations are often not available in other languages ​​.

In 2012 published book Electronic Lexicography is found that Wiktionary does better in comparison to WordNet, when it comes to list the meaning of the entries according to the most common use. The assignment of words according to certain characteristics such as Subject, linguistic variety, temporal and regional classification is for the English version better rated than in the German - and Russian-speaking, because there more entries has been assigned to at least one characteristic than in the German and has been russian-language version of the case. It is stressed that the majority of the assignment of words referring to after features on subject areas, from which the investigation on the involvement of appropriate specialists closes. Wiktionary is considered as a competitor of the generated expert lexicons, which opens up a wide range of applications.