Saturday, January 27, 2007

Dictionary content in Wikipedia

In those days, there were articles in Wikipedia that were short. They were deemed to be too short, they were only a definition.. they were not even a stub. They got deleted. People started to add the kind of information you find in dictionaries. They got deleted. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia was the argument. The quarrels were intense and at some stage Brion Vibber created Wiktionary, a project aimed to include all words of all languages.

Today I was back in the "kroeg", the Dutch Wikipedia village pump. The same argument still exists; there are still articles that are little more than definitions. They still get deleted. These deletions are protested against. In a way it was comfortable, I was back and it was as if nothing had changed.

The same old argument is used; copy the information to Wiktionary. What these Wikipedians do not know or forget is that Wiktionary has its own format and stuff that does not comply with the rules gets .. deleted.

Thanks,
GerardM

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