alt Hacker NewsI don't think definitions "are" highly accurate precise things. Sometimes yes. The same scholarship, skill, and need to not mislead also applies for so many other things: encyclopedic articles, taxonomies, news, maps, operating systems. Do people still question the value of Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap? Yeah, there are problems with them, and with peer review. Using fuzzy words (or fuzzy phonetic symbols, fuzzy categories, fuzzy semantic links…) to define words is a problem (if at all) of literally any dictionary. I don't see any of these as particularly unique obstacles for Wiktionary.
Unabridged dictionaries take decades to release new editions and are still navigating transition into the exploding digital age. They are so expansive in scope, while often so limited in resources, and barely accept any crowd contributions. Such deliberately slow-going is often a good thing, but words also change quite quickly and these sources are now playing a very long game of catch-up. (Yesterday I tried to verify the latter English senses of "fandango" on Wiktionary with other dictionaries; OED's entry has not been touched for 131 years! What am I going to do with that, I need to use / understand the word now!)
Wiktionary is the big web-native word-resource (and is not cluttered with commercial junk) – allowing links, expandable quotes, images, diagrams, etc. that print's minimalism suffers from as you mention. When someone in 2025 wants information on a word, they'll likely use a search engine and click a link to Wiktionary (where Google blurbs steal some data from). Maybe they are a student wanting to confirm their nonstandard pronunciation with the IPA (still rarely used in mainstream English dictionaries) or if it's recognized in their own dialect (mainstream dictionaries rarely provide more than UK and US pronunciations) – if enough people have the same question, Wiktionary seems like the best place to put the answer – or see an accessible etymology tree. While you probably know this, it's also worth reminding that English Wiktionary isn't just for English words, it is a dictionary of all languages' words, which is written in English. It has metadata and links connecting languages' words that you can't find elsewhere.
Yes, I indeed do want people to just write what they think a word means – as a starting point in a collaborative refining process. I believe the number of word-users in the world with valuable potential contributions is a lot closer to a billion than the thousand gatekeepers working hard on classical dictionaries. The barrier to entry is really low, but the tooling could still be much better. This is one reason i'm putting my appeal under this article - because I think (professional) lexicography can stand to evolve more in the 21st century. (And are people today really buying enough dictionaries to sustain a professional version of Wiktionary, or even a professional dictionary offered in structured data form?) If we don't contribute to a crowdsourced dictionary, then we won't have any such thing.
(Meta-lookup sites are link/search engines, not dictionaries and IME really don't do a good job synthesizing their information or conventions.)
Wiktionary can be of great value without denigrating others.
> Unabridged dictionaries take decades to release new editions and are still navigating transition into the exploding digital age.
OED is now a 100% online service - a website - that releases updates every quarter, like much software. I don't see them 'still navigating' at all.
> barely accept any crowd contributions.
OED is famous for being arguably the first crowd-sourced research project. James Murray, the first great editor and driving force behind the first edition, solicited contributions from the public of usages of words and had a massive filing system of slips with all the contributions.
"Dictionary work relied on so much correspondence that a post box was installed right outside Murray’s Oxford home ...". "His children (eventually there were eleven) were paid pocket money to sort the dictionary slips into alphabetical order upon arrival." [0]
Today OED still solicits contributions, including specific appeals to the public. Every entry in the OED has a 'Contribute' button.
https://www.oed.com/information/using-the-oed/contributing-t...
> (Yesterday I tried to verify the latter English senses of "fandango" on Wiktionary with other dictionaries; OED's entry has not been touched for 131 years! What am I going to do with that, I need to use / understand the word now!)
You are misunderstanding what 'revise' means to the OED (which is unnecessarily confusing); they still update entries without a full revision. If you look at the entry history:
fandango, n. was first published in 1894; not yet revised.
fandango, n. was last modified in March 2025.
> I don't think definitions "are" highly accurate precise things. Sometimes yes. The same scholarship, skill, and need to not mislead also applies for so many other things: encyclopedic articles, taxonomies, news, maps, operating systems. Do people still question the value of Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap?
I think there's a difference between requirements - or expectations - for a dictionary and Wikipedia:
My guess is that people don't question Wikipedia because they have different expectations for it: They don't expect accuracy, as defined by the Three Cs: Completeness, Correctness, Consistency. Wikipedia is more the accumulation of information generally believed about a topic (with some standards, imperfectly followed, for secondary source support - but secondary sources reflect general, consensus belief). It's not expected to be Complete; no encyclopedia can completely cover any topic - the point is to be a starting place, a summary - and anyway Wikipedia is a sort of work in progress. It's not expected to be Correct; it's what people generally believe. And Consistency is tough with so many authors. It's really an product of the post-truth era; that's what people want - just try questioning it.
People's expectation for dictionaries - or my expectation at least :) - is not a starting point but the final word. Almost always I already have an idea of what the word means - from partial knowledge, from experience, from context, from its components. I'm expecting the Three Cs from the dictionary, to put a fine point on my understanding and use of the word, to fill in my blind spots - including knowledge of how others have been understanding and using the word.
Maybe Wiktionary just isn't for me. But I worry that people do assume it's CCC - many people believe anything they read is accurate, especially something from an authoritative-looking source - and are confused by it.
[0] https://www.oed.com/information/about-the-oed/history-of-the...