by hftf | 2025-06-03 18:19:57+00:00
I don't think definitions "are" highly accurate precise things. Sometimes yes. The same scholarship, skill, and need to not mislead also applies for so many other things: encyclopedic articles, taxonomies, news, maps, operating systems. Do people still question the value of Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap? Yeah, there are problems with them, and with peer review. Using fuzzy words (or fuzzy phonetic symbols, fuzzy categories, fuzzy semantic links…) to define words is a problem (if at all) of literally any dictionary. I don't see any of these as particularly unique obstacles for Wiktionary.

Unabridged dictionaries take decades to release new editions and are still navigating transition into the exploding digital age. They are so expansive in scope, while often so limited in resources, and barely accept any crowd contributions. Such deliberately slow-going is often a good thing, but words also change quite quickly and these sources are now playing a very long game of catch-up. (Yesterday I tried to verify the latter English senses of "fandango" on Wiktionary with other dictionaries; OED's entry has not been touched for 131 years! What am I going to do with that, I need to use / understand the word now!)

Wiktionary is the big web-native word-resource (and is not cluttered with commercial junk) – allowing links, expandable quotes, images, diagrams, etc. that print's minimalism suffers from as you mention. When someone in 2025 wants information on a word, they'll likely use a search engine and click a link to Wiktionary (where Google blurbs steal some data from). Maybe they are a student wanting to confirm their nonstandard pronunciation with the IPA (still rarely used in mainstream English dictionaries) or if it's recognized in their own dialect (mainstream dictionaries rarely provide more than UK and US pronunciations) – if enough people have the same question, Wiktionary seems like the best place to put the answer – or see an accessible etymology tree. While you probably know this, it's also worth reminding that English Wiktionary isn't just for English words, it is a dictionary of all languages' words, which is written in English. It has metadata and links connecting languages' words that you can't find elsewhere.

Yes, I indeed do want people to just write what they think a word means – as a starting point in a collaborative refining process. I believe the number of word-users in the world with valuable potential contributions is a lot closer to a billion than the thousand gatekeepers working hard on classical dictionaries. The barrier to entry is really low, but the tooling could still be much better. This is one reason i'm putting my appeal under this article - because I think (professional) lexicography can stand to evolve more in the 21st century. (And are people today really buying enough dictionaries to sustain a professional version of Wiktionary, or even a professional dictionary offered in structured data form?) If we don't contribute to a crowdsourced dictionary, then we won't have any such thing.

(Meta-lookup sites are link/search engines, not dictionaries and IME really don't do a good job synthesizing their information or conventions.)