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Wiktionary

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Wiktionary is a Wikimedia Foundation project intended to be a free wiki dictionary (hence: Wiktionary) (including thesaurus and lexicon) in every language. It is a sister project to Wikipedia.

Wiktionary

Website name	Wiktionary
Commercial?	No
Type of site	Online dictionary
Registration	Optional
Owner	Wikimedia Foundation
Created by	Jimmy Wales

1 Mission
2 History
3 Multilingualism
4 Comparison to other sister projects
5 WikiSaurus
6 References
7 See also
8 External links

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Mission

Wiktionary serves to:

explain the meanings of words, multi-word terms, idiomatic phrases, and abbreviations;
act as a thesaurus by showing synonyms and related terms;
explain etymologies of words
translate words from one language to another.

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History

Growth of the largest eight wiktionaries.

It was set up on December 12, 2002 following a proposal by Daniel Alston. On March 29, 2004 the first non-English Wiktionaries were initiated in French and Polish. Wiktionaries in numerous other languages have since been started. Wiktionary was hosted on a temporary URL (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004 when it switched to the current full URL. As of May 2006, the English Wiktionary has more than 140,000 entries, although in early 2006 it was surpassed by the French Wiktionary, which now has more than 175,000 entries. More than a dozen languages now have Wiktionaries containing at least 10,000 entries.

Top Ten Wiktionaries

No.	Language	Language (local)	Wiki	Good	Total	Edits	Admins	Users	Images	Updated
1	French	Français	fr	175371	199935	987694	9	1749	11	2006-05-14 06:32:25
2	English	English	en	142544	241236	935847	33	13945	413	2006-05-14 06:32:31
3	Chinese	中文	zh	73464	87561	187984	6	1068	110	2006-05-14 06:32:51
4	Ido	Ido	io	50419	87791	157375	1	56	3	2006-05-14 06:32:44
5	Polish	Polski	pl	41536	82542	223125	11	673	117	2006-05-14 06:32:32
6	Italian	Italiano	it	40501	46836	127463	4	660	104	2006-05-14 06:32:44
7	Bulgarian	Български	bg	23924	893014	927381	4	265	19	2006-05-14 06:32:52
8	Dutch	Nederlands	nl	23178	31327	112380	8	456	80	2006-05-14 06:32:58
9	Finnish	Suomi	fi	20617	52380	119291	7	480	19	2006-05-14 06:32:59
10	German	Deutsch	de	20145	32036	241747	13	3762	20	2006-05-14 06:32:59

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Multilingualism

Unlike many dictionaries, which are monolingual or bilingual, Wiktionary is multilingual, meaning that the goal is to define every word from all known languages in every other language, as well as in the original language itself. For example, the English Wiktionary is written in English but accepts entries for words from all languages. The French Wiktionary can also have entries for all those same words, but the entries are written in French.

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Comparison to other sister projects

Wiktionary logo

One difference between Wiktionary and Wikipedia is that pages beginning with upper- and lowercase letters can refer to different things. For example, the entries on lowercase "i" and uppercase "I" are distinct. All of the existing entries in the English Wiktionary were converted to lowercase automatically in mid-2005; manual intervention was used to move pages to uppercase (or split entries) as necessary. Links from Wikipedia to Wiktionary must be made with care, as it may be relevant to link to a lowercase entry, link to an uppercase entry, link to an entry with diactrics or link to multiple entries.

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WikiSaurus

WikiSaurus is a category in Wiktionary whose purpose is to serve as a thesaurus, including a thesaurus of slang words.

See "Creating a WikiSaurus entry" for the structure of wikiSaurus entries. An example of a well-formatted entry would be the "wiktionary:WikiSaurus:insane" page.

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