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Dictionaries are one of those things that should be free, at least the digital version. This is 2022 - shouldn't governments pay the dictionary creators using t
by akudha 4y ago
Dictionaries are one of those things that should be free, at least the digital version. This is 2022 - shouldn't governments pay the dictionary creators using tax payer money and make the digital version available for free, to anyone for any use?
How much does it cost to maintain a dictionary anyway? A few million dollars at best? It is crazy that a ton of projects don't even get started, because these APIs are so expensive and unfriendly
- CharlesW 4y agoWhat’s wrong with Wiktionary, which the author used for this?
- Tempest1981 4y agoSounds like it was a bit tedious (and expensive) to hammer the server for 30 hours... vs. a downloadable database (which, granted, could get out of date).
- CharlesW 4y agoYeah, I wonder why they didn’t just download it from https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/ https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/ per https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Help:FAQ https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Help:FAQ.
- davidjohnstone 4y agoI wondered the same. The main downside is that you need to do some processing to extract the entries from the dump and get the plain text of the fields you want. I'm also a little surprised they didn't think Wiktionary was sufficient for languages apart from English. I could be wrong, but my impression is that it's pretty good for major languages[1]. 1. https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wiktionary
- banana_giraffe 4y agoThe source they used (freeDictionary) does all of the work of parsing wiktionary and giving you simple json object for each word. (It actually started life as a way to get the definitions out of Google's "define:" operator, but it seems those days are over) It also, turns requests for some words, like "rolling" into definitions for their root word like "roll", even when wiktionary has distinct and useful definitions for the word, which makes it less than ideal for me.
- herewulf 4y agoTurning "rolling" into "roll" is something a stemmer does. I'd imagine there are a number of JavaScript libraries readily available for this.
- labster 4y agoWhy should governments get to decide which words we use? Unless you are a plusgood citizen making agitprop for the proles.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y agoThat's a strange take. They won't they would fund some other org or dept to do the work. Same way you have a public education system, or public health care.
- JackFr 4y agoA dictionary is a creative, curated and editorial work. While I could see, in the US for example, the National Endowment for the Humanities supporting the work, it is very far removed from something like the National Institute if Standards and Technology. It is not a given that such work is best handled through the public purse.
- 2muchcoffeeman 4y agoIt’s also not clear it won’t work. Governments fund the arts all the time. Why is there automatically an assumption that this will end with the government editing the dictionary to control speech?
- andrekandre 4y ago> Unless you are a plusgood citizen making agitprop for the proles. what?
- bigDinosaur 4y agoDictionaries are more free today than ever before. It's actually surprising how free they are given that (good) dictionaries are actually very labour intensive to create.
- dogweather 4y agoI just made something like that: https://public.law/dictionary https://public.law/dictionary Scraping government sites for glossaries, mashing up the definitions to create a free comparative international dictionary.