WT
Wiktionary is a collaborative, web-based multilingual dictionary project hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, where volunteers contribute definitions, etymologies, pronunciations, translations, and related linguistic data for words across thousands of languages.[1][2] Its English edition alone exceeds 9 million entries, encompassing not only standard lexical information but also thesauri, rhyme guides, phrasebooks, and appendices on topics like proverbs and idioms.[1] Launched in the early 2000s as a sister initiative to Wikipedia, Wiktionary operates under open licensing (Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike and GNU Free Documentation License), enabling free reuse while relying on community editing for content generation.[1] The project's defining strength lies in its expansive scope and accessibility, fostering contributions from a global user base to document obscure dialects and neologisms that traditional dictionaries often overlook.[1] However, this volunteer-driven model has drawn criticism for inconsistent quality, with issues such as unreferenced examples, violations of editorial guidelines, and deletions of specialized entries like those for historical Frankish terms, highlighting challenges in maintaining rigor without centralized expertise.[3] Similar to its encyclopedic counterpart, Wiktionary's content can reflect biases prevalent among its predominantly progressive-leaning editors, particularly in definitions of politically charged terms, underscoring the need for users to verify claims against primary sources.[1] Despite these limitations, it remains a valuable resource for linguistic exploration due to its breadth and ongoing expansion.[2]