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Wiktionary (US: /ˈwɪkʃənɛri/ ⓘ WIK-shə-nerr-ee, UK: /ˈwɪkʃənəri/ ⓘ WIK-shə-nər-ee; rhyming with "dictionary") is a multilingual, web-based project to create a free content dictionary of terms (including words, phrases, proverbs, linguistic reconstructions, etc.) in a large number of natural languages and a number of artificial languages. These entries may contain definitions, images for illustration, pronunciations, etymologies, inflections, usage examples, quotations, related terms, and translations of terms into other languages, among other features. It is collaboratively edited by volunteers via a wiki. Its name is a portmanteau of the words wiki and dictionary. It is available in 198 languages and in Simple English. Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians". Its wiki software, MediaWiki, allows almost anyone with access to the website to create and edit entries.

Key Information

Because Wiktionary is not limited by print space considerations, most of Wiktionary's language editions provide definitions and translations of terms from many languages, and some editions offer additional information typically found in thesauri.

Wiktionary's data is frequently used in various natural language processing tasks.

History and development

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Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002,[2] following a proposal by Daniel Alston and an idea by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia.[3] On March 28, 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 domain name (wiktionary.wikipedia.org) until May 1, 2004, when it switched to the current domain name.[a] As of July 2021, Wiktionary features over 30 million articles (and even more entries) across its editions.[4] The largest of the language editions is the English Wiktionary, with over 7.5 million entries, followed by the French Wiktionary with over 4.7 million and the Malagasy Wiktionary with over 3.5 million entries. Forty-three Wiktionary language editions contain over 100,000 entries each.[b]

The use of bots to generate large numbers of articles is visible as "growth spurts" in this graph of article counts at the largest eight Wiktionary editions. (Data as of December 2009)

Many of the definitions in the project's largest language editions were created by bots that found creative ways to generate entries or (rarely) automatically imported thousands of entries from previously published dictionaries. Seven of the 18 bots registered at the English Wiktionary in 2007[c] created 163,000 of the entries there.[5]

Another bot, "ThirdPersBot", was responsible for the addition of a number of third-person conjugations that would not have received their own entries in standard dictionaries; for instance, it defined "smoulders" as the "third-person singular simple present form of smoulder." Of the 1,269,938 definitions the English Wiktionary provides for 996,450 English words, 478,068 are "form of" definitions of this kind.[6] This means that even without such entries, its coverage of English is significantly larger than that of major monolingual print dictionaries. Merriam-Webster's Third New International Dictionary, for instance, has 475,000 entries (with many additional embedded headwords); the Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000 headwords, but includes Middle English as well, for which the English Wiktionary has an additional 34,234 gloss definitions. Detailed statistics exist to show how many entries of various kinds exist.

The English Wiktionary does not rely on bots to the extent that some other editions do. The French and Vietnamese Wiktionaries, for example, imported large sections of the Free Vietnamese Dictionary Project (FVDP), which provides free content bilingual dictionaries to and from Vietnamese.[d] These imported entries make up virtually all of the Vietnamese edition's contents. Like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported approximately 20,000 entries from the Unihan database of CJK characters. The French Wiktionary grew rapidly in 2006 thanks in a large part to bots copying many entries from old, freely licensed dictionaries, such as the eighth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1935, around 35,000 words), and using bots to add words from other Wiktionary editions with French translations. The Russian edition grew by nearly 80,000 entries as "LXbot" added boilerplate entries (with headings, but without definitions) for words in English and German.[7]

As of July 2021, the English Wiktionary has over 791,870 gloss definitions and over 1,269,938 total definitions (including different forms) for English entries alone, with a total of over 9,928,056 definitions across all languages.[8]

Logos

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Wiktionary has historically lacked a uniform logo across its numerous language editions. Some editions use logos that depict a dictionary entry about the term "Wiktionary", based on the previous English Wiktionary logo, which was designed by Brooke Vibber, a MediaWiki developer.[9] Because a purely textual logo must vary considerably from language to language, a four-phase contest to adopt a uniform logo was held at the Wikimedia Meta-Wiki from September to October 2006.[e] Some communities adopted the winning entry by the user known as "Smurrayinchester", a 3×3 grid of wooden tiles, each bearing a character from a different writing system. However, the poll did not see as much participation from the Wiktionary community as some community members had hoped, and a number of the larger wikis ultimately kept their textual logos.[e]

In April 2009, the issue was resurrected with a new contest. This time, a depiction by "AAEngelman" of an open hardbound dictionary won a head-to-head vote against the 2006 logo, but the process to refine and adopt the new logo then stalled.[10] In the following years, some wikis replaced their textual logos with one of the two newer logos. In 2012, 55 wikis that had been using the English Wiktionary logo received localized versions of the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester".[f] In July 2016, the English Wiktionary adopted a variant of this logo.[11] As of 4 July 2016, 135 wikis, representing 61% of Wiktionary's entries, use a logo based on the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester", 33 wikis (36%) use a textual logo, and three wikis (3%) use the 2009 design by "AAEngelman".[12]

Multi-lingual

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As of October 2025, there are Wiktionary sites for 198 languages of which 174 are active and 24 are closed.[1] The active sites have 46,480,077 articles, and the closed sites have 339 articles.[13] There are 7,653,648 registered users of which 8,913 are recently active.[13]

The top ten Wiktionary language projects by mainspace article count:[13]

№ Language Wiki Good Total Edits Admins Users Active users Files
1 English en 8,592,502 10,416,878 87,574,466 76 4,318,780 2,439 18
2 French fr 6,763,413 7,608,398 38,921,559 33 396,025 1,067 6
3 Malagasy mg 5,732,620 5,857,240 36,382,787 2 14,694 187 3
4 Chinese zh 2,205,320 2,981,272 9,446,864 9 129,037 174 1
5 Thai th 2,160,056 2,276,173 5,619,374 4 17,996 56 0
6 Greek el 1,566,000 1,626,521 7,266,799 9 67,753 177 23
7 Russian ru 1,446,420 2,996,565 13,875,306 15 334,622 419 196
8 German de 1,212,358 1,401,979 10,425,446 12 250,721 314 93
9 Kurdish ku 1,004,763 1,101,845 6,127,061 7 14,061 71 1
10 Dutch nl 989,048 1,276,643 5,393,143 7 64,933 130 7

For a complete list with totals see Wikimedia Statistics:[14]

Critical reception

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Critical reception of Wiktionary has been mixed. In 2006, Jill Lepore wrote in the article "Noah's Ark" for The New Yorker,[g]

There's no show of hands at Wiktionary. There's not even an editorial staff. "Be your own lexicographer!", might be Wiktionary's motto. Who needs experts? Why pay good money for a dictionary written by lexicographers when we could cobble one together ourselves? Wiktionary isn't so much republican or democratic as Maoist. And it's only as good as the copyright-expired books from which it pilfers.

Keir Graff's review for Booklist was less critical:

Is there a place for Wiktionary? Undoubtedly. The industry and enthusiasm of its many creators are proof that there's a market. And it's wonderful to have another strong source to use when searching the odd terms that pop up in today's fast-changing world and the online environment. But as with so many Web sources (including this column), it's best used by sophisticated users in conjunction with more reputable sources.[citation needed]

References in other publications are fleeting and part of larger discussions of Wikipedia, not progressing beyond a definition, although David Brooks in The Nashua Telegraph described it as "wild and woolly".[16] One of the impediments to independent coverage of Wiktionary is the continuing confusion that it is merely an extension of Wikipedia.[h]

The measure of correctness of the inflections for a subset of the Polish words in the English Wiktionary showed that this grammatical data is very stable (a study showed that only 131 out of 4,748 Polish words have had their inflection data corrected).[17]

As of 2016, Wiktionary has seen growing use in academia.[18]

Wiktionary data in natural language processing

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Wiktionary has semi-structured data.[19] Wiktionary lexicographic data can be converted to machine-readable format in order to be used in natural language processing tasks.[20][21][22]

Wiktionary's data mining is a complex task. There are the following difficulties:[23]

  • (1) the constant and frequent changes to data and schemata
  • (2) the heterogeneity in Wiktionary language edition schemata[i] and
  • (3) the human-centric nature of a wiki.

There are several parsers for different Wiktionary language editions:[24]

Examples of natural language processing tasks which have been solved with the help of Wiktionary data include:

A page called "Wikidata:Lexicographical data" was started in 2018 to provide structured data support to Wiktionaries. It stores word data of all languages in a machine readable data model, under a dedicated "Lexeme" namespace in Wikidata. As of October 2021, the project has amassed over 600,000 lexeme entries of various languages.[47]

See also

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Notes

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References

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Revisions and contributorsEdit on WikipediaRead on Wikipedia

Wiktionary

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Wiktionary is a collaborative, multilingual, web-based project operated by the to create open-content dictionaries covering definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, and translations for words in all languages. Launched on December 12, 2002, with the English edition initiated by Brion Vibber, Wiktionary quickly expanded; the French and Polish editions followed on March 22, 2004, and on May 1, 2004, developer Tim Starling initialized 143 additional editions for languages that already had Wikipedias. As of September 2025, there are 174 active Wiktionary editions, each maintained by volunteer editors who contribute entries under free licenses such as Attribution-ShareAlike. Unlike traditional dictionaries, Wiktionary entries often include detailed linguistic information, such as parts of speech, synonyms, antonyms, and usage examples, with a focus on inclusivity for lesser-resourced languages through community-driven efforts and support from groups like the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group. Test projects for new language editions are hosted on the Wikimedia Incubator to ensure viability before full launch. The project's structure uses software, featuring case-sensitive page names and namespaces for entries, discussions, and appendices, making it a dynamic resource that evolves with global contributions.

Introduction and Overview

Definition and Purpose

Wiktionary is a multilingual, web-based project operated by the Wikimedia Foundation to create a collaborative, free-content dictionary covering terms in all languages. It provides definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, translations, and related linguistic information for words, phrases, idioms, proverbs, abbreviations, and other lexical items. As a descriptive rather than prescriptive resource, Wiktionary documents how languages are actually used, serving users such as language learners, writers, and researchers seeking comprehensive lexical data. The project was founded to address the need for a freely editable , extending Wikipedia's encyclopedic model by focusing on linguistic entries rather than broader topics. Proposed as the second Wikimedia project after , it launched on December 12, 2002, with the goal of building an international through open contributions from volunteers worldwide. Wiktionary's content is licensed under the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) and the GNU Free Documentation (GFDL, version 1.2 or later), allowing free access, reuse, modification, and distribution while requiring attribution and share-alike conditions. This open licensing supports its purpose of fostering a global, reusable . Wiktionary operates in numerous editions to accommodate diverse linguistic needs.

Key Features and Scope

Wiktionary employs a hierarchical entry structure that organizes information under language-specific sections, with subsections for parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Each part-of-speech section includes numbered definitions, etymologies detailing word origins, pronunciations in International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) notation alongside optional audio files, synonyms and antonyms listed under dedicated headings, translations into other languages, and usage examples often presented as italicized sentences with context. This standardized layout ensures comprehensive lexical coverage while facilitating easy navigation and editing. The scope of Wiktionary is exceptionally broad, aiming to document all words in all languages without imposing notability requirements, unlike encyclopedic projects such as . It includes proper nouns like names and place names if attested, neologisms provided they meet recent attestation criteria, archaic and historical terms, slang, regional dialects, and entries for constructed languages such as , , , and . Entries require attestation through reliable sources to verify usage, emphasizing a descriptivist approach that captures linguistic diversity across natural, sign, and select artificial languages. Search and navigation tools enhance accessibility, with the MediaWiki-powered search bar supporting queries filtered by language namespaces (e.g., "English:" prefix) and categories for parts of speech (e.g., Category:English nouns) or etymological themes. Interproject links connect entries to sister Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia for contextual articles and Wikimedia Commons for related images. Multimedia integration features audio pronunciations embedded via templates like {{audio}}, which pull files from Commons, and illustrative images similarly linked to provide visual or auditory support for definitions. This inclusive framework is maintained through community-driven editing, where volunteers adhere to guidelines to ensure accuracy and consistency.

History

Founding and Early Years

Wiktionary originated as an idea conceived by , co-founder of , in 2002, to serve as a collaborative companion to the project. The formal proposal was made by Daniel Alston (user Fonzy) on the Meta-Wiki discussion page, envisioning a wiki-based under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) that would include definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, synonyms, and multilingual translations linked to entries. The English Wiktionary was launched on December 12, 2002, by developer Brion Vibber using a basic setup initially hosted at wiktionary.wikipedia.org, with an early focus on English-language entries contributed by volunteers. The first entries appeared shortly after launch in late 2002 and continued into 2003, covering simple definitions and basic linguistic data drawn from public domain sources and user knowledge. In June 2003, following the establishment of the on June 20, Wiktionary was integrated as one of its core projects alongside , providing nonprofit oversight and technical support for its volunteer-driven expansion. Early operations under the GFDL license faced hurdles, including concerns over content and risks of error propagation in the open- model, as discussed in initial talks. Growth was slow, reliant on a small volunteer base without automated tools, leading to modest entry accumulation in the first few years; for instance, significant acceleration only occurred later with bot-assisted imports in non-English editions around 2006. The absence of formalized guidelines in the outset resulted in inconsistent entry formats, prompting ongoing debates on structure, such as handling multilingual links and elements, which evolved through . In 2009, Wiktionary transitioned to a dual licensing model incorporating the Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license alongside GFDL to enhance reusability, approved by the Wikimedia and implemented across all projects.

Growth and Milestones

Wiktionary's growth has been marked by steady expansion in content and community participation since its early years. The English edition reached its one millionth entry, "good job" as an , on October 18, 2008, signifying a major milestone in collaborative . By July 2021, the project surpassed 30 million total articles across all editions, reflecting the cumulative efforts of volunteer editors worldwide. As of November 2025, the active Wiktionary editions contained a total of 46,723,809 articles, demonstrating sustained scaling through multilingual contributions. Key drivers of this expansion include the proliferation of language editions, which grew from a few initial versions in 2003 to 174 active ones by 2025, enabling diverse linguistic coverage. Community engagement included 9,741 active users across editions as of November 2025, supporting ongoing additions and refinements. Notable events further bolstered development, such as the 2009 migration to the Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license, which facilitated broader reuse and compatibility with other open resources. In 2018, integration with advanced the storage and querying of lexical data, enhancing interoperability for editors and external applications. In 2023, the licensing was updated to Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 to further improve compatibility and reusability. The project's quantitative scope underscores its impact, with the English edition exceeding 8.6 million entries by November 2025. Leading non-English editions include French with over 6.8 million entries and Malagasy with more than 5.7 million, highlighting the role of dedicated contributors in less-resourced languages. Visual identity evolved alongside, from an initial dictionary-inspired in 2004 to the current stylized tile design adopted across most editions. These milestones illustrate Wiktionary's transition from a nascent project to a comprehensive, globally accessible lexical .

Multilingual Nature

Language Editions

Wiktionary is organized into distinct language editions, each accessible via a dedicated subdomain such as en.wiktionary.org for English or fr.wiktionary.org for French. These editions function as independent wikis, allowing communities to develop dictionaries tailored to specific languages while maintaining the project's overall multilingual scope. As of November 2025, there are 198 Wiktionary editions in total, of which 174 are active, meaning they receive ongoing contributions and maintenance. The creation of a new language edition begins with a formal proposal submitted through the Requests for new languages process on Meta-Wiki, the central coordination site for Wikimedia projects. Proposers must demonstrate sufficient community interest, typically by developing initial content and establishing an active group of editors, often starting within the Wikimedia Incubator to test viability. The Wikimedia Language Committee evaluates these requests based on criteria such as linguistic eligibility, community commitment, and potential for sustained growth before approving the subdomain and enabling full operation. Across editions, Wiktionary editions share the underlying software, which provides consistent technical infrastructure including editing tools and database management. Core policies on content quality, neutrality, and licensing are harmonized through Wikimedia-wide guidelines, though each edition adapts them to linguistic and cultural contexts via consensus. Inter-edition connectivity is enhanced by cross-language links, which allow users to navigate translations and related terms directly between editions, such as linking an English entry to its French equivalent. The English edition plays a pivotal role as a meta-hub, hosting coordination resources, shared templates, and discussions that support project-wide initiatives. A number of editions have become inactive over time due to waning editor participation, resulting in 24 dormant or closed sites as of November 2025. Examples include proposals to revive low-activity editions like the Rusyn test project, which stalled without sustained contributions. The supports revival efforts through targeted grants, such as the 2025 Wikimedia Libya Community Support aimed at reactivating the Arabic edition by engaging new contributors in .

Content Across Languages

The content volume in Wiktionary exhibits significant disparities across its language editions, reflecting differences in contributor engagement and resource availability. The English edition stands as the largest, with over 9.7 million entries as of November 2025. In contrast, the French edition contains approximately 6.8 million articles, while smaller editions such as have under 50,000 articles, highlighting the uneven distribution of effort among the project's 174 active language versions. Collectively, these editions encompass over 46.7 million articles in active sites, underscoring Wiktionary's expansive but imbalanced scope. Content focus varies notably between editions, shaped by community priorities and linguistic contexts. The English Wiktionary places strong emphasis on etymology, tracing word origins in depth, and includes extensive coverage of slang, idioms, and regional variants to capture contemporary usage. Non-English editions, such as German and Russian, often prioritize cross-lingual elements, with many entries derived as translations from dominant languages like English to facilitate accessibility for learners and speakers of minority or less-resourced tongues. Coverage of indigenous and endangered languages benefits from collaborative projects like , which supports documentation efforts integrated into Wiktionary through oral histories and lexical data contributions. Quality initiatives address these variations through targeted efforts tailored to specific languages. Language-specific glossaries, such as those for and in under-documented tongues, aid in standardizing entries, while periodic cleanup drives focus on verifying attestations and removing unsubstantiated content. However, low-resource languages face persistent challenges, including a of native speaker contributors, which limits depth and accuracy compared to well-supported editions. These hurdles are compounded by the volunteer-driven model, where motivation and expertise unevenly influence content reliability across editions. Cross-lingual features enhance connectivity despite these disparities, enabling users to navigate related content seamlessly. Translation tables, embedded within entries, list equivalents in multiple languages, promoting comparative lexicography and aiding multilingual research. Additionally, Wiktionary includes dedicated sections for reconstructed proto-languages, such as Proto-Indo-European, where hypothetical forms and cognates are documented to support , often drawing on scholarly reconstructions. These elements foster a networked approach, allowing smaller editions to leverage insights from larger ones without duplicating efforts.

Content Creation and Structure

Entry Format

Wiktionary entries follow a standardized structure designed to organize lexical information systematically across multiple languages. Each entry begins with the headword, represented by the page title in lowercase (unless a ), followed by a level 2 heading for the , such as "==English==". This is succeeded by a section under a level 3 heading, featuring International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) transcriptions, audio pronunciations, rhymes, and hyphenation where applicable. The section, also a level 3 heading, details the word's origin and may be numbered for homonyms (e.g., "Etymology 1"). Subsequent subsections for parts of speech, such as "======", contain the core content: numbered definitions (#) with glosses and examples, often linking key terms for clarity. Additional level 4 headings cover synonyms (words with similar meanings), derived terms (morphological derivatives like compounds or inflections), and translations (organized by sense and ). This hierarchical layout ensures comprehensive coverage while maintaining readability. To promote consistency and efficiency, Wiktionary utilizes templates that automate formatting and categorization. For instance, the {{en-noun}} template for generates the headword line, including forms, patterns, and automatic addition to relevant categories, as in {{en-noun|pl=works}}. Similarly, {{head}} serves as a generic template for various languages and parts of speech, while {{t|language|term}} standardizes translations with gender and sense indicators. This modular approach allows templates to be reused and adapted across the project's 174 active language editions (as of November 2025), reducing redundancy and enabling machine parsing for applications like . Templates are invoked via wikitext, with parameters for specifics like senses or qualifiers, fostering a semi-structured format that balances flexibility with standardization. Special sections enhance depth beyond core definitions. Usage notes, under a level 4 heading, provide contextual guidance on , regional variations, or connotations. Quotations subsections illustrate historical or contemporary usage with sourced examples, often formatted as bulleted lists. Coordinate terms list semantically related words, such as hyponyms or meronyms, while appendices link to external pages for idioms, proverbs, or variant forms (e.g., [Appendix:English idioms]). These elements are optional but encouraged for idiomatic or complex entries, supporting Wiktionary's goal of exhaustive lexical documentation. The entry format originated with basic wiki markup upon Wiktionary's launch in December 2002, evolving through community discussions to incorporate structured templates by for better and parsability. Ongoing refinements, driven by votes and feedback, have focused on , such as improved rendering and template , ensuring adaptability to new linguistic data and user needs. policies enforce this format to maintain uniformity.

Editing and Contribution Guidelines

Contributing to Wiktionary involves a straightforward workflow that encourages broad participation. Registration is optional, allowing anonymous edits, though creating an account enables features like marking minor edits and accessing user-specific tools. Editors can preview changes before saving via the "Show preview" button in the edit interface, which helps catch errors without affecting the live page. Discussions about edits occur on talk pages associated with entries, fostering consensus among contributors. Recent changes are monitored through the Special:RecentChanges page, where experienced editors patrol edits—marking them as reviewed to flag potential or errors for the . Wiktionary's inclusion guidelines differ from Wikipedia's strict sourcing requirements, relying instead on consensus and verifiability rather than mandatory citations for every claim. Terms and senses must meet the Criteria for Inclusion (CFI), which emphasize attestation through widespread use or at least three independent citations from durably archived sources, such as books or corpora like , spanning at least one year. For disputed entries, the Request for Verification (RFV) process is used: editors add templates like {{rfv}} or {{rfv-sense}} to flag unverified terms, requiring proof of usage; if unattested after a period, the entry may be deleted. While votes are held for major policy changes, individual entry inclusion proceeds via informal discussion and attestation, promoting a vote-like approval without formal ballots. Several tools assist editors in creating and refining content. The Visual Editor provides a WYSIWYG interface for easier formatting, available alongside the source editor for those preferring code-based changes. Gadget extensions, enabled via user preferences, include the Edittools gadget, which adds dropdown menus for inserting special characters, such as IPA symbols for pronunciations. Bots, approved by the community, handle repetitive tasks like linking translations; for example, Tbot automates updates to translation templates across entries. Despite these aids, a key barrier for new editors is the associated with Wiktionary's template system, which structures entries using specialized markup for sections like and definitions. To address this, the community employs templates, such as {{welcome}}, automatically added to new users' talk pages to introduce policies and basics. Help portals in the Help: offer tutorials and FAQs, guiding beginners on common tasks and encouraging experimentation in sandbox areas without risk.

Community and Governance

Editor Community

Wiktionary's editor comprises approximately 9,741 as of November 2025, defined as those making at least five edits per month across all language editions. These volunteers represent a diverse mix of professional linguists, language hobbyists, and polyglots who contribute out of a shared interest in and multilingual documentation. The community exhibits a global distribution, with particularly strong participation from English-, French-, and German-speaking regions, reflecting the scale of those editions as the largest in the project. Contributors are primarily driven by a passion for languages and advocacy for open knowledge, viewing Wiktionary as a tool for preserving and democratizing linguistic resources. Many participate in organized events such as edit-a-thons focused on underrepresented languages, which foster contributions to lesser-documented tongues and promote inclusivity within the project. The community is also supported by groups like the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group (TWUG), which promotes participation through initiatives such as the Million Wiki Project 2025 aimed at expanding content in lesser-resourced languages. The community's dynamics emphasize collaboration, facilitated through discussion forums like village pumps for policy debates and IRC channels for real-time coordination among editors. Conflicts, such as edit wars over the inclusion of neologisms, are typically resolved through consensus-building processes rather than escalation, maintaining a focus on verifiable attestations and etymological accuracy. enforcement by administrators supports these interactions by intervening only when necessary to uphold guidelines. To enhance retention, the community employs mentorship programs that pair experienced editors with newcomers, providing guidance on contribution standards and tool usage. Annual reports on editor engagement, such as those from Wikimedia's Community Insights, track participation trends and inform initiatives to sustain volunteer involvement.

Policies and Administration

Wiktionary maintains core policies to ensure the reliability and openness of its dictionary entries. Central to these is the principle of neutrality, requiring entries to present all significant viewpoints on a term's usage without , focusing on descriptive rather than prescriptive definitions. The project prohibits original research, mandating that all content, including etymologies and definitions, be supported by verifiable, durably archived sources rather than novel interpretations by editors. Attribution is enforced through the Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0), which requires proper crediting for any borrowed content while allowing reuse under share-alike conditions. Language-specific conventions, such as entry formatting and inclusion thresholds, are detailed in dedicated appendices on each language's "About" pages to accommodate linguistic variations. Administrative roles on Wiktionary are community-appointed to uphold these policies and manage operations. Stewards, a global group of trusted users, handle cross-wiki permissions, including on Wiktionary, such as granting administrative rights or investigating abuse when local administrators are unavailable. Bureaucrats, elected locally, manage user rights like promotions to administrator status, which involves tools for deleting pages, protecting content, and blocking vandals. Checkusers, another specialized role, access IP data to detect coordinated vandalism or sockpuppetry, operating under strict privacy guidelines that limit data use to policy enforcement. These roles align with broader Wikimedia policies, including the confidentiality agreement for handling nonpublic information and the Universal Code of Conduct to combat harassment. Decision-making in Wiktionary occurs through community consensus, primarily via discussions in the Beer Parlour forum and formal votes on the project's votes page for significant changes like policy updates. Proposals require broad participation, often achieving supermajority support, and global issues may escalate to Meta-Wiki for cross-project input. The supports these processes with grants, such as Rapid Fund allocations for tools and community initiatives that enhance administration and content quality. Controversies often arise around inclusion criteria, particularly for sensitive content. Debates over offensive or derogatory terms center on attestation requirements, where such entries must demonstrate verifiable usage within two weeks or face deletion to balance documentation with harm prevention. Trademarks and brand names spark discussions on whether they qualify as generic terms, with past votes clarifying that product-specific brands are generally excluded unless they enter common parlance, resolved through dedicated policy pages. These issues are addressed via community votes and evolving guidelines to maintain inclusivity while adhering to legal and ethical standards.

Technical Infrastructure

Software and Hosting

Wiktionary operates on the software platform, which has powered the project since its launch in December 2002 as part of the Wikimedia Foundation's suite of collaborative tools. This open-source wiki engine, licensed under the GNU General Public License, enables the creation and management of multilingual dictionary entries through a flexible, extensible architecture. The site is hosted on the Wikimedia Foundation's distributed server clusters, which leverage Cloud VPS instances for dynamic scalability to handle varying global traffic loads. A core set of MediaWiki extensions enhances Wiktionary's functionality, including the Cite extension for generating footnotes and reference lists to support etymological and definitional sourcing, ParserFunctions for implementing conditional logic and string manipulation in templates that structure linguistic data, and , which provides a what-you-see-is-what-you-get interface for editors unfamiliar with wikitext markup. These tools collectively facilitate the precise formatting of entries, such as pronunciation guides and inflection tables, while maintaining consistency across language editions. For redundancy and performance, Wiktionary's infrastructure spans multiple data centers in countries including the (Ashburn and Dallas), the (Amsterdam), (Marseille), (São Paulo), and , allowing failover capabilities and reduced latency for international users. Database dumps, encompassing full content exports in XML and SQL formats, are produced twice a month and hosted on Wikimedia's download servers to enable offline analysis and integration into external projects. Maintenance involves periodic upgrades to MediaWiki's core, with the current stable version 1.44 deployed as of July 2025 and weekly branch updates (such as 1.46 in November 2025), while the previous long-term support version 1.39 remains supported until December 2025. Automated editing via bots is regulated under Wikimedia's bot policy, which requires approval for tasks like bulk translations or reversal to prevent disruptions while promoting efficient content growth.

Data Accessibility and APIs

Wiktionary offers several methods for accessing and exporting its data programmatically, facilitating integration into external tools and research applications. The project provides database dumps in XML and SQL formats twice a month through the Wikimedia dumps site, enabling users to download complete snapshots or language-specific subsets, such as the English Wiktionary's enwiktionary-latest-pages-articles.xml.bz2 file, which contains all article content in a structured, importable format. These dumps are generated automatically and updated regularly to reflect the latest edits, supporting offline analysis and custom database imports without relying on live server access. For real-time or on-demand data retrieval, Wiktionary leverages the Action , a RESTful that allows querying individual entries, retrieving translations, accessing edit histories, and performing searches across the dictionary's multilingual content. Developers can use endpoints like action=query&prop=revisions&titles=example to fetch raw wikitext or parsed for specific words, making it suitable for dynamic applications. This builds on the underlying software platform, providing flexible parameters for filtering results by language or section. Wiktionary's data has been integrated into various software tools, including browser extensions like Contextual Wiktionary, which uses the to display definitions in pop-up windows during web browsing, and mobile apps for instant word lookups. Such integrations comply with the project's Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0) license, which requires attribution to Wiktionary contributors and mandates that derivatives be shared under the same terms, ensuring open reuse while preserving community contributions. Despite these accessibility features, certain limitations affect programmatic use. requests are subject to rate limits enforced by the , including a cap of 500 requests per hour per for unauthenticated access, to prevent server overload and ensure fair usage. Furthermore, the inherently multilingual and semi-structured format of Wiktionary entries—featuring varied templates, inconsistent markup across languages, and non-standardized fields—poses challenges for data normalization, often requiring custom tools to achieve uniformity for computational tasks.

Applications and Impact

Use in Natural Language Processing

Wiktionary's lexical resources, including definitions, synonyms, translations, and etymologies, have been adapted for various (NLP) tasks, particularly in generating word embeddings. Researchers have developed methods to extend embeddings using Wiktionary data. For instance, these embeddings leverage the structured glosses in Wiktionary to produce vector spaces that improve performance in tasks compared to traditional corpora-based models. Additionally, Wiktionary's synonym lists and etymological data aid in (WSD), where synonyms help cluster related senses and etymologies provide historical context to resolve ambiguities in polysemous words. This approach has been combined with resources like to enhance WSD accuracy across languages by mapping Wiktionary's multilingual senses. In low-resource languages, Wiktionary serves as a vital source, offering bilingual lexicons and translations that enable alignment of word vectors without parallel corpora, thus supporting cross-lingual for under-resourced tongues. A prominent project integrating Wiktionary data is Wikidata's feature, launched on May 23, 2018, which structures lexicographical information including senses derived from Wiktionary entries to create a multilingual . As of 2025, Wikidata exceed 1.3 million entries, facilitating the import and standardization of Wiktionary's senses, forms, and translations for broader reuse. This integration supports Wiktionary editors by providing queryable data dumps and APIs, while enabling NLP applications such as lexical enrichment in models like , where parsed Wiktionary dumps via tools like Wiktextract supply lemma and morphological features for pipeline customization. Similarly, Wiktionary-derived datasets have been used to fine-tune transformer models like BERT, augmenting training corpora with definitional and translational data to boost performance in downstream tasks such as and semantic parsing. In research, Wiktionary translations have contributed to multilingual NLP benchmarks, exemplified by the , which draws example sentences from Wiktionary to evaluate contextual invariance across 12 languages, informing models on cross-lingual . Open-source efforts have further amplified this through contributions to , where datasets like paion-data/wiktionary-data provide processed lexical entries for over 100 languages, supporting fine-tuning of multilingual models on tasks like and . Despite these advances, challenges persist in utilizing Wiktionary for NLP due to inconsistent formatting across editions, necessitating extensive preprocessing and normalization to extract reliable structured data. Usage has surged post-2020 amid the , with increased citations in NLP papers for lexical augmentation, driven by the demand for open, diverse resources in development.

Broader Reception and Criticisms

Wiktionary has received positive reception for its comprehensiveness and openness, particularly in documenting obscure and specialized terms that traditional dictionaries often overlook. In a 2007 review published in , critic Keir Graff emphasized its utility, noting the "industry and enthusiasm of its many creators" as evidence of its value in providing accessible lexical resources for niche linguistic needs. This openness has facilitated its integration into educational contexts, such as university courses on language variation where students contribute entries to illustrate principles of and research methods. Additionally, Wiktionary's data has been incorporated into mobile applications, including the official Android app released in 2012, which was discontinued in subsequent years but enabled offline access to definitions, etymologies, and translations for language learners and travelers at the time. Criticisms of Wiktionary have centered on the absence of expert oversight, which can lead to inaccuracies and inconsistent quality. Historian , in a 2006 New Yorker article, critiqued the project's collaborative model as "Maoist" in nature, arguing that it relies heavily on pilfered public-domain sources without rigorous editorial control, potentially undermining reliability. Non-English editions have drawn particular scrutiny for inconsistencies, including errors in translations, varying usage conventions, and incomplete cross-references across language versions, as highlighted in linguistic studies analyzing multilingual Wiktionary data. remains a notable issue, with deliberate disruptions requiring constant community vigilance to maintain entry integrity, though tools like automated bots help mitigate this in high-traffic editions. In terms of impact, Wiktionary has garnered significant academic attention. As of 2023, it had received over 1,700 citations in scholarly works from 2006 onward according to database analysis, with citations continuing to grow, particularly in fields like NLP and AI. When compared to established dictionaries like the (OED), Wiktionary's primary advantage lies in its free, unrestricted access, democratizing lexical information that the subscription-based OED restricts to paying users or institutional subscribers. However, reviewers often note that while Wiktionary excels in breadth and multilingual coverage, it lacks the depth and authoritative verification of expert-curated resources like the OED. Recent evaluations continue to praise its role in open-access but caution against potential biases in volunteer-contributed definitions, such as overgeneralizations or cultural skews in less-moderated sections.

References

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