Re: [Aspell-user] Help Needed To Maintain Aspell's Many Dictionaries

[Lars Aronsson]

Kevin Atkinson wrote:

> Aspell currently has official dictionaries for over 80 languages which must
> all be kept up to date.

In my mind, the obvious reorganization of responsibilities would 
be to hand over the maintenance of the word lists to the Wikimedia 
Foundation, and to keep only the software-specific parts (such as 
suffix definitions) within the Aspell project.

Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia, was started in January 2001 and 
it soon became obvious that dictionary-like articles (word 
definitions) didn't fit in this encyclopedia.  In order to have 
somewhere to direct people who still wanted to write 
dictionary-like articles, Wiktionary, the free dictionary, was 
started in December 2002.  The Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., was 
incorporated (in Florida) in June 2003 to handle these and other 
similar projects.  Because Wiktionary was started as a spinoff for 
articles that didn't fit in an encyclopedia, its structure is more 
like the Oxford English Dictionary than any spelling dictionary.  
Wiktionary (www.wiktionary.org) is currently available in 80 
languages, of which 25 have more than 10,000 words (basic forms). 
Within the same foundation, there is also a parallel project 
called WiktionaryZ that has a somewhat different structure.

The spelling dictionaries for Aspell (and its predecessors spell 
and ispell) don't quite fit any of these structures, but would 
probably have to be kept separate.  As long as they are in the 
public domain or released under "free content" licenses, I don't 
think there would be any problems with this.

I'm not a spokesperson for the Wikimedia Foundation, but I've been 
following these projects since their inception and could help in 
talking to the right people, if you think this could be part of a 
useful solution.


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (address@hidden)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se