What is WikDict?
WikDict aims to provide free bilingual dictionary data for all use cases. You are currently looking at the WikDict web interface, which provides a simple way to look for translations in the WikDict data. One very important aspect of WikDict is that all data is available under a free license (Creative Commons BY-SA), which is not the case for most other dictionaries.
The WikDict Web Interface
How do I search WikDict?
- Search for single words or common phrases. WikDict can do intelligent lookup in a dictionary, but it can't translate sentences or arbitrary word combinations.
- Don't worry about writing in upper/lower case. Both "haus" and "Haus" will match the dictionary entry "Haus".
- Skip accents and other diacritics if you want to. Typing "Tur" will find "Tür".
The WikDict data
Which data is available and where does it come from?
All data is extracted from Wiktionary by the DBnary project. So for data to be available, it has to be in one of the Wiktionaries supported by DBnary. On top of the extraction work done by DBnary, WikDict
- parses HTML and Wiki formatting from the results to provide proper human-readable output
- reduces the differences in data structure between different language Wiktionaries
- combines translations from different language Wiktionaries in a smart way to increase the number of translations
- assigns importance scores to words and translations for better sorting, filtering and suggestions
- merges translations to give more concise output
- converts the data into other formats
- provides a web interface
The source code for all this can be found in the repositories for the dictionary generation and the web interface. Both are licensed under the MIT license.
Contributing
The easiest way for non-programmers to contribute is to provide feedback and bug reports. This can be done by mail or by creating GitHub issues. Improving the content of the Wiktionary of your choice (especially the translations section) will also help improving the data quality in the long run.
If you are willing to write code or want to contribute in a different way, please get in touch to avoid duplicate work and get you started in the right direction.
Contact
Karl Bartel
www.karl.berlin
karl@karl.berlin
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