Template talk:websters-online

See: Wiktionary:Beer_parlour_archive/July_06#Webster.27s_Online_Dictionary_-_The_Rosetta_Edition for discussion leading up to the creation of this template, and Wiktionary_talk:Webster#Avoid_Webster.27s_dictionary.2C_Rosetta_edition for earlier notes about the site.

In the site's defence, it does cite its sources, do a nice job generating a number of interesting associations of it's words, and contains a large array of multi-lingual definitions, e.g. "meritähti", that I didn't find translated in any other online sources. The strict, and somewhat confused ToS seem to me to simply be the result of someone working with a limited budget, afraid of high bandwidth charges, and not that technically aware. That's not a reason not to use it as a reference, necessarily. JesseW 05:11, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

This Special:Linksearch may be useful. JesseW 05:19, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

I agree the site is useful. When these links were originally added, they were pure spam, added by an IP-anon across a whole list of languages, with a number of links that didn't quite work (because of language name differences). If someone did that now, they would get blocked nearly automatically. So the template makes the links less spammy (and Rosetta notably means [1]). Do note that one of the reasons you may find something that doesn't appear on other sources is that it is simply wrong ... a lot of the data seems to have been loaded from less-than-reliable sources. Robert Ullmann 12:07, 15 May 2007 (UTC)

Thanks, that's a useful further bit of context. I'll go ahead and use the links when I can't find a more authoritative online source, but with the proviso you suggested. Maybe we should make another template to refer to specific entries (as this one seems only for links to language pages)? JesseW 06:49, 21 May 2007 (UTC)