Wikimedia press releases/Wiktionary reaches milestone 1,000,000 words/text

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Wiktionary, a collaboratively created dictionary, today entered its one millionth entry. The entry, on the word "Insert word here" was added to [language name]-language Wiktionary. The word, translating to "[translation]", means "[insert definition here]".

On 12 December 2002, Wiktionary was launched as the first sister project of Wikipedia, part of the network of collaborative websites run by the Wikimedia Foundation.

On 29 March 2004, Wiktionary expanded to include its first non-English editions, in French and Polish. Since then, 142 languages other language editions have been created, the largest editions of which are in Chinese, Ido, Italian, Greek, German, Hungarian, and Bulgarian.

The contents consists of definitions, translations, synonyms, antonyms, parts of speech, related words and much more. In many of the projects, besides ordinary dictionary entries you will also find phrase books that can be helpful for people learning these languages. Some Wiktionaries also added soundfiles to their projects that are stored on commons, being the most relevant wiktionary in that sense the Dutch one with 13.000 pronunciations. This helps in particular the language learning users who cannot go to that specific country to hear the pronunciation of the language.

Like Wikipedia, Wiktionary was created solely by volunteer editors from all around the world. Thousands of contributors have contributed to the project in their language, connecting the definitions to other languages' editions. Any one is allowed to contribute, provided they follow the project's clear "Criteria for inclusion".

About Wikimedia

The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an international non-profit organization dedicated to encouraging the growth, development and distribution of free, multilingual content, and to providing the full content of these wiki-based projects to the public free of charge. The Wikimedia Foundation operates some of the largest collaboratively-edited reference projects anywhere, including Wikipedia, one of the 20 most visited websites in the world.

The Wikimedia Foundation was created in 2003 to manage the operation of existing projects, and is based in St. Petersburg, Florida, USA. Wikimedia has local chapters in the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Serbia and Montenegro, and Poland. Most of the Foundation's operations are funded by reader and contributor donations.

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