Wiktionnaire:Actualités is a monthly periodical about French Wiktionary, dictionaries and words, published online since April 2015. Everyone is welcome to contribute to it. You can sign in to be noticed of future issues, read old issues and participate to the draft of the next edition. You can also have a look at Regards sur l’actualité de la Wikimedia. If you have any comments, critics or suggestions, our talk page is open!
For one year, the different language versions of the Wiktionaries have all been linked by a tool called Cognate. This automatically detects the existence of a page with a similar title in other versions and adds all links in the side column. Previously, these links were added by scripts that modified the pages in each project to add the links regularly.
A new interface using this tool was officially released online the 14th of August, the Wiktionary Cognate Dashboard, after months of development by Goran S. Milovanovic, big data expert funded by Wikimedia Deutschland. This interface offers several informations: number of pages shared between two selected Wiktionnaries, Wiktionaries forming connection nodes, a list of words present in the most Wiktionaries, a list of all entries present in one Wiktionary but absent in another, a list of entries present in a large number of Wiktionaries but absent in a specific Wiktionary.
Based on the latter tool, the contributor Otourly has produced a list of missing words in the French Wiktionary, all languages combined. This list, updated daily by him from the automated interface, is kind of a roadmap of the contents that have most interested the contributors in the other projects, and that could therefore be the most important to create here. This is not the content most sought by the readership, but the pages created, which could therefore be of interest to French-speaking readers in the future as well. Between the publication of this list and the publication of this issue of Actualités, over 500 entries have been created from this list by a dozen different people.
+ 9,216 entries and 104 languages modified to reach 3,333,333 (August 30th) and 4,416 languages with at least one entry.
+ 3,347 entries in French to reach 365,642 lemmas and 542,594 definitions.
+ 4,242 quotations or examples in French to reach 354,450.
+ 8,174 pronunciations (including 1,953 for French) to reach, at August 31th, 100,928 audio pronunciations for 100 languages (including 23,222 for French).
+ 930 illustrative media (pictures and videos) in French Wiktionary pages, to reach 38,392.
+ 2 thesauri to reach 511 thesauri in 55 languages including 345 thesauri in French! New thesauri are about sand (by Cbyd) and phonetics in Minnan (by Assassas77).
+ 17 new languages (names in French here): sanie, lepki, kuruáya, lawa de l’Ouest, lolak, lamkang, laomien, nyaheun, ambae de l’Est, proto-germanique, oy, polci, sou, lave, bai du Sud, bai du Nord, kwegu.
Top three languages with most addition after French is Northern Sami (+ 1,195 entries), Esperanto (+ 953 entries) and English (+ 834 entries).
External stats tools offers each month a list of most viewed pages and pages modified by the most people.
Wiktionnaire:Questions sur les mots record in August 40 questions compared to 46 in July and 56 in June.
June Actualités mentioned the integration in progress from a specialized vocabulary of cartography and 38 % of those pages have been checked since! Your help is welcome to fulfill this collective task.
A list of expression including animals in French went created but there is no ox in the ditch yet.
The lexicon of occultism in French came to the light under favorable augury.
To get out of the summer torpor, a new book announcing the end of the French language has just been published: in Défense et illustration de la langue française aujourd’hui, Michel Serres wants to alert us to “the invasion of our space and our relationships by an Anglophone sabir”.
The article by Aliocha Wald Lasowski, entitled Michel Serres at war with the “Franglish” has the merit of reminding us that the word ordinateur comes from the Littré with a religious definition: one who confers an order of the Church. In 1955, Jacques Perret gave it the meaning we know in a handwritten letter in which he proposed to translate the English word computer : “How about ordinateur ? It is a correctly formed word, which is even found in the Littré as an adjective designating God who puts order in the world.” — a column by Romainbehar
Boosted by the Tremendous Wiktionary User Groupe, the LexiSessions aim at offering monthly themes to dynamize all of the Wiktionaries at a time. The themes are suggested on Meta and announced on the Wikidémie, the main talk area of the French Wiktionary. The LexiSession of August was about sand and gave birth to one thesaurus. The first LexiSession was in August 2016, so this work is two years old!
For September, the theme is deafness and hearing!
In France, in the field of law, it is difficult to miss the codes of law published by Dalloz, with its red slices. Editing more than a thousand titles, it is not surprising to also find a book to decode them all, a specialized dictionary. This glossary is updated annually, at the same time as the most common codes, both to follow the aesthetics of the series and to update it by adding terms that have appeared in the discipline in the past year. This month comes out the 26th edition, which contains 6,000 entries, for less than 20 euros, which is cheap compared to other books in the series.
The introduction to the book (in fact, of the 23th edition, which I found by chance) indicates that the book is intended mainly for law students, and that it was born from the diversification of profiles of people interested in this social activity. It is a book that aims to clarify the vocabulary of the discipline and to disseminate the legal standard. But is this lexicon made by lexicographers? Well, no, it is the product of law professors and professionals from different areas of law. The definitions refer to legal codes rather than examples taken from a corpus, and there is no information on how to use terms in a sentence, nor their grammatical categories. However, the definitions are precise and clear even for the layperson of the field that I am.
This other dictionary does not claim to give definitions of all legal terms but focuses on private law. It offers detailed encyclopedic records rather than definitions, not just a sentence but detailing the inclusion of concepts in the discipline. Among the 1,400 entries, most provide references to legal codes but also a bibliography of articles and legal commentaries. This work is regularly updated, here again not by people trained in lexicography but by professionals in the discipline who observe the practices around them. Note also that this work makes the choice not to indicate Latin expressions, instead referring its readership to the Wiktionary!
However, the latter only contains a few 2,000 entries in la catégorie Lexique en français du droit and most of the entries could be improved even further!
— a column by Noé