4 ms·
Sounds 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 vs. a downloadable database (which, granted, could get out of date).
by Tempest1981 4y ago
Sounds 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 vs. a downloadable database (which, granted, could get out of date).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.