Dr. Christian M. Meyer

Methoden bei kollaborativen Wörterbüchern

Abstract. In this article, we study lexicographical methods of collaborative dictionaries. We are particularly interested in the question to what extent they differ from the methods of expert lexicographers and how editorial dictionaries can leverage the user-generated data. We find that the preparation phase is equally important in expert-built and collaborative works and will fundamentally shape the final dictionary. For collaborative dictionaries, it is, however, essential to encourage discussion, define transparent decision workflows, and continually motivate the authors. The large user communities provide a high coverage of language varieties, trans­lations, neologisms, as well as personal and spoken language, which often lack corpus evidence. Instead, their descriptions of general language terms are largely based on expert-built dictionaries. This is why we see great potential in the cooperation between expert lexicographers and collaborative user communities. Besides joint work on editing the dictionary articles, we consider quality assurance methods based on user feedback as a clear enrichment for dictionary making.

Submitted: 28.02.2014 | Published: 04.11.2014
Voting procedure of the English Wiktionary.
Voting procedure of the English Wiktionary.