Wikipedia and Wiktionary
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I have been talking about this since quite a while (although without any concrete proposal)... using Wikipedia's popularity to benefit Wiktionary.
Jimbo Wales showed up in IRC and I took the opportunity to talk with him about it. I had already discussed it on the IRC channel.
Here's a transcript of the chat
<Hemanshu> hello <jwales> Hello! <Hemanshu> I was wondering if Wikipedia should incorporate links to Wiktionary in articles? <Hemanshu> Wiktionary is really lacking interest <jwales> It sounds like a reasonable concept to me. <Hemanshu> we need to use Wikipedia's popularity to make Wiktionary more popular <jwales> I agree with that. <Hemanshu> good <jwales> I can think of two ways... <jwales> First, encourage more interwiki linking with wiktionary, somehow. <jwales> Possibly even go so far as to have a bit of new markup. <Hemanshu> yes <Hemanshu> maybe we can have a small icon link next to words <jwales> Second, we could put a link on every page of wikipedia, "Look for a definition of 'Article Title' in Wiktionary". <Hemanshu> yeah <jwales> That second one might generate resistance, though, because many many times the article title is not really a word that needs defining, per se. <jwales> Take a look at this: <jwales> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prime_Minister_of_Japan <jwales> just an example for us to brainstorm about. <jwales> Now, that article has interlanguage links for 'fr' and 'ja' versions of the same topic. <jwales> Perhaps a simple extension of the interlanguage syntax, but for definitions, would be sensible. <Hemanshu> yeah I see <Hemanshu> yes <jwales> Here's a better brainstorm: <Hemanshu> that would make it possible to link to definitions of article titles <jwales> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cladistics <Hemanshu> and that could be implemented really easily <jwales> There are 4 interlanguage links there. <jwales> We could have a new one, like: <Hemanshu> being able to provide quicklinks to definitions of word used in the article could be more difficult <jwales> [[definiton:paraphyletic]] could be the simple new markup. <Hemanshu> yeah <jwales> And that magically makes a a link, in the text at that point, to wiktionary. <jwales> I would support something along those lines. <jwales> Will you run this by wikipedia-l and wikitech-l? <jwales> I'll make noises of joy. <Hemanshu> :) <jwales> Maybe it will excite someone and then it might happen. <Hemanshu> I haven't joined the mailing list <Hemanshu> I just have to send an email to? <Hemanshu> wikipedia-1@? <Hemanshu> can I post this conversation on the wiki? <jwales> Yeah <Hemanshu> ok <jwales> Anyhow, talk to you later I'm going to have to go. <Hemanshu> ok <Hemanshu> nice talking