Wiktionary

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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.

{{Infobox_Website |websitename = Wiktionary |screenshot = Image:Wiktionary screenshot.JPG |commercial = No |type = Online dictionary |reg = Optional |owner = Wikimedia Foundation |author = 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

Image:Wiktionary-logo-en.png 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 until May 1, 2004 when it switched to the current full URL. As of April 2006, the English Wiktionary has more than 130,000 entries, although in early 2006 it was surpassed by the French Wiktionary, which now has more than 165,000 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
1	French	Français	fr	173403	197381	763916	8	1620
2	English	English	en	135693	231706	863408	28	13042
3	Ido	Ido	io	41810	80393	132893	1	52
4	Polish	Polski	pl	40914	81635	216588	11	615
5	Chinese	中文	zh	40416	51445	104267	5	1018
6	Italian	Italiano	it	39883	45968	119616	4	588
7	Bulgarian	Български	bg	23905	892978	927117	4	253
8	Dutch	Nederlands	nl	22989	31032	109478	8	435
9	Finnish	Suomi	fi	20031	51545	112974	7	420
10	German	Deutsch	de	19425	31039	231477	13	3546

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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

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 is being used to move pages to uppercase as necessary.

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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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