23:0323:03, 13 November 2025diffhist+43zoopsia→Noun: Rewording definition because "The visual hallucinations of animals." sounds like it's the animals who are hallucinating.current
09:2509:25, 5 November 2025diffhist+158 N
GizelleCreated page with "==English== ===Pronunciation=== * {{IPA|en|/ʒɪˈzɛl/|/dʒɪˈzɛl/}} ===Proper noun=== {{en-prop}} # {{given name|en|female|from=French|varof=Giselle}}."currentTags: Mobile editMobile web editAdvanced mobile edit
As a reader I'm here because I'm fond of language, linguistics, and history – because I check words' etymologies, definitions, and senses obsessively – and because Wiktionary helps me improve my Polish and other languages I'm studying.
As an editor I'm here because I like contributing to free and open collaboration projects – because I like improving coverage of topics I care about (upon discovering a word has no Wiktionary entry, it's nice to give it one so more people can learn that it exists) – and because I like discovering and adding the earliest known citations of words and phrases.
I was born in Poland, grew up in Canada, and moved back to Poland in adulthood. Polish is technically my first language, but English overtook it in proficiency by age 6. I learned rudimentary French in school and studied Japanese, Latin, and Jamaican Creole in adulthood. English creoles interest me. All my knowledge of language is autodidactic. My username's etymology and pronunciation is:
Check Category:English phrases for entries without an etymology and search for their earliest appearance on Archive.org books. Add it as a book-quote or citation. This helps us date the phrase. Plus, it's fun to discover the earliest-known use of a phrase, especially when a phrase turns out to be older than you expect.
The normal course of Wiktionary editing is to improve a little bit of everything, a little bit at a time. But here is an alternative for its utmost opposite. Choose a word you like, and strive to make its page as complete as possible. Check all major dictionaries to collect all possible senses of the word; add a usage example and 3 quotations for every sense; list all its semantic relations; write a complete etymology and etymology tree; give a SenseID to every sense, find its translations in every attested language; provide pronunciation IPA for the word in every accent; and so forth. Your adopted word is grown when there is nothing more to add, and it is graduated upon becoming word-of-the-day. ("adopt" as the metaphor here is akin to adopting a baby and putting ones time and effort into helping it grow into an adult.)
Having a userpage is a good thing. Since this is inherently a social project, ones userpage is valuable for briefly informing others of ones proficiencies and areas of interest. Having ones userpage intentionally be a redlink or blank is a humblebrag.
In definitions, word links should be used sparingly! Choosing which words – if any – to link is a delicate act of curation. Contrary to expectation, the more words are linked, the less likely anyone is to click any of them! Thus, link only words that (1) may not be understood by someone who had to look up the word, (2) words that are topical to the definition, or (3) that have specific senses that lead to increased understanding of the definition. Users who link practically every word in a definition are actively making definitions worse! It's clear which example is better:
Swimble: a penalty issued in the Irish variant of the game of balleyhoggie once more than 10 players have reached a state of being dimbled.
Quotations mostly ought to be put in the Citations:namespace, for two reasons:
A properly-crafted usage example is almost always superior at demonstrating how to use a word over most book quotations.
Quotation templates are long and cluttersome - they take up a lot of text space in the source editor. Wedged in there between definitions, they make it quite hard to read the definition segment of a page's source.
