I reckon this will take a while to sort out, but unless some thumb is kept on the pulse it will die and disintegrate like so many proposals here. I suggest to have idea-splurging for a month, finishing 2010-5-30, by which time we'll have a clear idea of the direction we want to head. Clarifications and updates for a fortnight (probably involving WT:BP) 2010-6-13, and start a vote for acceptance on or around 2010-6-20 after a final clean up. Conrad.Irwin23:42, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
The purpose should be explained in terms of why we need/want a Wiktionary, and whose existence we want Wiktionary to improve. Policy issues such as how exactly we should achieve this shouldn't need stating here, but hopefully what this page creates will give us a sound base to start building a dictionary that makes coherent sense. Conrad.Irwin23:42, 21 April 2010 (UTC)[reply]
We want to help native english speakers, english learners, EFL students, english students learning foreign languages, people interested in characters and symbols.
So what have we done then? Why The Century Dictionary Online? It needs to be emphasized, though the marketers and publicists referred to above are loathe to do so, that no dictionary can satisfy everyone's requirements completely. This is one reason that there are so many specialized dictionaries of various kinds: learner's dictionaries, technical dictionaries, dictionaries of slang, dictionaries of regional or historical English, bi-lingual dictionaries, dictionaries of new words. It is also why there are general dictionaries of different sizes: school dictionaries, pocket dictionaries, concise dictionaries, collegiate dictionaries, and, of course, the so-called unabridged dictionaries, though these expensive, flagship products seem to have become a rare, perhaps even a dying breed. With paper books, the decision about which kind of dictionary you actually needed was relatively easy to make. If you needed quick information about relatively common words, you needed a book you could hold in one hand and perhaps carry around with you, a pocket dictionary or a collegiate, but not a six-inch thick three-column affair or one in multiple volumes. If you were a scholar, on the other hand, and had to find out about rare or even obsolete words, a collegiate, in spite of the appellation, simply didn't have enough words (collegiates typically define fewer than 200,000 terms).
The advent of online dictionaries has changed this "rule of thumb" in interesting ways. It is hard to tell from an online user interface and even from the look of some entries just what kind of dictionary you are dealing with, and thus whether it is really what you need. Another rule of thumb, unfortunately true for the most part with online dictionaries as with those sold as books, is that the cheaper it is, the less you have. To get access to the unabridged wordlist of the OED, even if you have no special taste for its Anglicized spellings, pronunciations, and general approach, you have to pay out a considerable amount of money. You can get the little Webster's and the little American Heritage free, on the other hand, but a little dictionary is all you are getting. There is a free version of the 1909 edition of Webster's New International Dictionary which has a few more, if older, terms than a modern collegiate, but it is a fairly sloppy affair and considerably smaller than the revised version of the same edition which appeared only a few years later. Unfortunately, its initial keyboaders, in addition to introducing errors, neglected to preserve such important information as the pronunciations and Greek words in the etymologies. This is a noble effort to provide a full-sized, free dictionary to the Internet community, but its flaws of design and execution make it unlikely to trouble any dictionary publisher's sleep. What might be called the Internet dictionary gap remains.
Why The Century Dictionary Online — http://global-language.com/CENTURY/
