User:Dixtosa/Wiktionary:History of the English Wiktionary

Unsorted/To do

There is much to say about her layout. It sucked until [YEAR-(MONTH)-(DAY)], when [SOMEONE] proposed significant portion of WT:ELE.

Unsorted material:

• Bots, votes, bureaucracy and organization
• User:Bot-Jagwar raped one of her sister and even tried to rape her too.
• Then came javascript gurus who brought Editor.js (translation tables and API for editing) and NewEntryCreator.
• User talk:Wonderfool a legendary zombie-user who after having been blocked indefinitely several times on the same account turned into a ghost who magnificently edits the project to this day with constantly changing usernames getting blocked on each of them eventually. See: User:Aryamanarora/Wonderfool.

Then were some tearful walkouts with noisy door strikes.

• Citations namespace

Beginning

Wiktionary was born on December 12, 2002 to a great family of the Wikipedias'. By a proposal by Daniel Alston and an idea by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia. At that time there was only English Wiktionary. It was not until March 28, 2004 when her brothers and sisters started to appear. The first two siblings were Frenk and Polly. Main namespace pages were called "articles" like in Wikipedia, later they were renamed into "entries".

First entries

These are the first entry namespace revisions/pages: (oldids 1 to 10 are Wiktionary: and Wiktionary talk: namespace, most are lost revisions of the main page)

1. oldid 11 - Wiktionary (as of 12 December 2002)
2. oldid 12 - dictionary (as of 12 December 2002)

Case-sensitive entries

In the old days, all entry names started with a capital letter, like Wikipedia. Then Wikimedia people made her case sensitive making her no longer feel under her parents shadow!! See Wiktionary:Beer parlour/First letter capitalization for the discussion/vote created in February 2005 that made it possible.

On 30 June in 2005 now-unregistered user Conversion_script made every entry start with a lowercase. It made thousands of moves in an hour. The contributors were supposed to undo all wrongly moved pages like German

Format!!

Some time in 2005 it was realized by SemperBlotto (talk • contribs) that the majority of entries had no formatting whatsoever. Connel MacKenzie (talk • contribs) created several lists, automagically, of entries missing basic types of format. These entries were "fixed" manually. Over the following years simple quoted headwords were replaced with templatized headwords. Further templates (of the old sort) were created that would generate plurals and other inflected forms.

Old bots

Deceased administrator Robert Ullmann (talk • contribs) apparently had these bots constantly running from 2007 to 2010, thus playing a major role in standardizing/updating Wiktionary content in the early days:

• AutoFormat (talk • contribs) for formatting
• Interwicket (talk • contribs) for interwikis
• Tbot (talk • contribs) for translation tables

Technical/Templates

Gender/number templates

At some point we largely used gender number-specific templates such as:

• {{m}} to return m (as in masculine gender)
• {{f}} returned f for feminine
• {{p}} returned pl for plural
• and others

They've been deprecated in favor of {{g}}.

Language templates

In the past we had thousands of individual language code templates like {{en}} for English and {{ja}} for Japanese. As a side effect, {{also}} was created to generate a "See also:" link because {{see}} was the template for Seneca language. The language templates were eventually deprecated in favor of Module:languages.

Additions to the front page

• On 19 March 2005 a Words in the News section was added. This continued until 25 Mar 2009 when it was discontinued for lack of support.
• Some time later (?) a "Word of the Day" section was added; and later still a "Foreign Word of the Day".
• In 2009, a redesign proposal was put forth. It didn't go through, but the FWOTD was later revived.

Foreign relations

hewikt refugees?

• During the second half of the noughties, there was an informal competition between enwikt and frwikt over who had most pages. We won.

Internal feuds

Some old heated discussions:

• In the very early days, there was debate over whether FL entries should be added. People had quit over it.
• Using Serbo-Croatian or Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian headers.
• How to handle the transpondian differences in English language spelling and meaning.
• The Razorflame drama: should users who don't speak a language edit entries in that language?
• {{l}} vs. [[]]
• Inclusionism vs. deletionism
• Whether romanisations should be included as entries.
• Sneakily using appendices for fandom things like Harry Potter and Pokémon that aren't allowed in mainspace.