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October 2, 2007

Lingoz: Wiktionary Done Right?

Roi Carthy

23 comments »

lingoz_logo.pngCan a user-defined dictionary be done better than Wikipedia’s Wiktionary? Babylon, a maker of popular for-pay translation/dictionary desktop software, certainly thinks so, and they are launching Lingoz to prove it.

Lingoz is a collaborative, online dictionary where users are encouraged to participate by contributing terms and definitions, as well as by voting, commenting and aggregating words into helpful glossaries.

Considered a modest Israeli success story, Babylon has been around since 1997 and has sold 1.6 million licenses in over 160 countries. As the company’s first pure Web play, Lingoz is being kicked-off with a substantial base of 4.5M terms in 8 languages, leveraging the vast 9M definition database Babylon has amassed over its 10 years of operation. An additional 42 languages will be rolled-out in the coming months.

Back to Wiktionary for a moment. The editorial back-and-forth process that works so well for encyclopedic entries on Wikipedia seems less successful when applied to defining dictionary terms, a process more suited towards voting on multiple versions of a definition.

Cognizant of Wiktionary’s shortcomings, Lingoz is being launched with a sensible set of social/UGC features: Terms can be submitted or requested. Voting on content quality is performed with a simple thumbs-up/down. Users can also define brand-new glossaries themselves, or request ones to be created. Glossaries may prove quite sticky as there are virtually an infinite number of potential themes that can be built out (think Web 2.0 terms, 60’s Hollywood actresses, etc—although a good starting point might be an actual definition for Web 2.0, which does not yet exist on the site.

The main competition Lingoz faces is from Answers.com—ironically, another Israeli company. Answers.com doesn’t embrace UGC yet. If Lingoz can become the Wikipedia of online dictionaries, perhaps one day it will give Answers.com a run for its money. That would especially be true if Lingoz could attract substantial Google traffic. As Google’s default “definition” provider, Answers.com is especially vulnerable to any changes in referrals from Google. (For instance, a recent Google search algorithm tweak reduced their traffic by 28%). How do you define opportunity?

  • Sphere It

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 2nd, 2007 at 12:10 pm and is filed under Company & Product Profiles, Web 2.0 News & Ideas. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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    October 2nd, 2007 at 3:06 pm

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Comments

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  1. rfre

    October 2nd, 2007 at 12:21 pm

    Anyone heard of Urban Dictionary? I think they’ve already done it right.

  2. Alex

    October 2nd, 2007 at 12:30 pm

    I am a huge fan of wordsource (http://word.sc). They have done a terific job. One of the nice things is you can look up a word directly from the address bar. Just type in word.sc/the-word-you-are-looking-for

  3. Steve Ballmer

    October 2nd, 2007 at 12:33 pm

    I’m gonna cotirbuthe to this dicshunary persunaley!
    http://fakesteveballmer.blogspot.com

  4. Rob

    October 2nd, 2007 at 12:38 pm

    Looks rather promising. Not really like Urban dic - it’s not all about the pussy.

  5. Apple

    October 2nd, 2007 at 1:11 pm

    Very strange English:

    I’ve type ‘Apple’ in their search results, which give me this —
    “round fruit which grows on trees (usually red, green or yellow)”

    I never seen red and yellow trees. Why would they put trees after parentheses?

    They should print something like this:
    Apple — is a fruit, which has stem, seeds inside, and it usually grow from tree. Its shape is almost like rounded cone and sometime round. An Apple can also have four different colors: (Red, Red-Yellow, Green or sometimes light green. )

  6. Lewis - Web Design

    October 2nd, 2007 at 1:25 pm

    Isn’t this what urbandictionary.com has already done? Although it started off as a joke, it has turned in to a very handy dictionary for slang, internet and terms that other dictionaries just don’t cover.

  7. Andrew

    October 2nd, 2007 at 1:58 pm

    yeah urban dictionary already done it.

    I think we are starting to see more and more recycled ideas.

    From search engines that make specific link pages(old school yahoo). To group buy services like mobshop. To this.

  8. Daliso Zuze

    October 2nd, 2007 at 2:23 pm

    I think there is a lot of potential in the online dictionary space that has not been fully tapped…..

    I’m leading the development of http://www.vocabo.com, a website that aims to help people take a managed approach to learning vocabulary. The website searches for ways the word has been used on the web, providing real life context which should help improve retention.

    It allows you to save the words you’ve looked up in the past, enabling you to analyse how your vocabulary is growing and test how well you can remember the words’ meanings. Additional features are in the works, such as ‘word alerts’ that can feed users samples of how their word is being used in popular publications based on their topics of interest…

  9. rob

    October 2nd, 2007 at 3:05 pm

    What’s missing here is some sort of GNU license. You contribute, they own. How does that further the knowledge space? Will they offer an API to spread the love? Doesn’t look like it.

    What is needed is a system like wikipedia with a standardized format for terms and an API. That could open up the locked world of bilingual language referecens.

  10. Eyal Barzilay

    October 2nd, 2007 at 3:56 pm

    Hi All,

    My name is Eyal and I run the LingoZ operation at Babylon. Thank you for your comments; we appreciate the feedback!

    I noticed that UrbanDictionary was mentioned several times in the comments and I would like to comment on that.

    We really like UrbanDictionary and think they are doing a great job in being a cool site for American slang, but LingoZ is fundamentally different.

    LingoZ is first and foremost a multilingual (both in UI and in content), general-purpose dictionary. It is not about a certain niche (such as slang) but rather a comprehensive resource, starting from the basic terms to the most up-to-date and esoteric, all are mapped to relevant categories, allowing users an in-context lookup for dictionary definitions and translations in multiple languages.

    Building on our vast existing repositories, part of them user-generated (long before this became a hype), we believe we bring real value to the user right from the start. LingoZ is also introducing a unique glossary concept, encouraging users to contribute also by aggregating existing terms in topical lists for others to explore, and further cool features and APIs are in the works.

    So thanks again for your attention, and we invite you all to further share with us your impressions.

    Best wishes,

    Eyal Barzilay

  11. Daniel

    October 2nd, 2007 at 4:23 pm

    Hey ,
    looks like very clean and promising tool .
    For sure I’ll save lingoz in my favorites together with Urbandictionary and WS .

    O ….. and of course Urbandictionary is ruler !!!

    Daniel

  12. rfre

    October 2nd, 2007 at 5:04 pm

    Eyal,

    Thanks for the clarification. You have a great site.

  13. phenom

    October 2nd, 2007 at 5:52 pm

    Urban dictionary ?? are they down ??
    http://vidsonly.blogspot.com

  14. Whit

    October 2nd, 2007 at 11:33 pm

    Nice site. If this gains traction it will be interesting to see if Google does look to use their service as the definition link.

    Roi….One error in the article you said Answers does not embrace UGC yet, Answers actually has a UGC Q&A site http://wiki.answers.com. I believe it is a distant 2nd to Yahoo! Answers.

  15. Erik Möller

    October 3rd, 2007 at 12:43 am

    Lingoz does not appear to use any free content licensing scheme like Creative Commons or the GNU FDL - instead, they expect a grant of license to Babylon in the Terms of Service. If that’s their policy, then putting content in amounts to working for free for a for-profit company that can use the fruits of your labor, while nobody else can. No thanks.

    The free content, non-profit alternative to Wiktionary is OmegaWiki, a structured wiki-like database. It is much more feature-rich than Lingoz (it can be used to maintain very complex ontologies), but still has some ways to go in terms of usability.

  16. John

    October 3rd, 2007 at 9:44 am

    Anyone interested in this should also check out http://wordie.org, which is sort of a hybrid user-contributed dictionary/social network. It’s less a pragmatic tool than a place where people enjoy and celebrate language. It was profiled on TechCrunch last December, and has been going strong since.

  17. Jorge

    October 3rd, 2007 at 10:48 am

    Very interesting and useful online dictionary .
    I liked the fact that with single search you can find your term in among variety of sources and glossaries ( including Wikipedia ) .

    why no one thought about this before ?

  18. Boaz Rossano

    October 3rd, 2007 at 1:35 pm

    Hi guys,

    I am part of the team that helped creating LingoZ, and following on Erik’s comment (#15), I can assure you that many new cool features will be planned in the upcoming future.

    Our company, Netica (http://www.neticagroup.com or in Hebrew: http://www.netica.co.il), helps companies like Babylon in creating new Web 2.0 community applications and design their applications’ GUI, as it does for many years for Israeli high tech leaders (some are more famous and some will become famous soon, hopefully).

    This is a part of an Israeli market trend (and I guess global as well) of outsourcing and relying on specialized companies to assist existing development teams in specific proficiencies that involve high quality user experience, e-branding and GUI design and development.

    We are anxious to get some feedback on these aspects as well.

    Feel free to leave me here notes or write me directly to:
    boazrossano {at} hotmail.com

    Thanks!
    Boaz Rossano
    Netica, CEO

  19. Slim Amamou

    October 5th, 2007 at 1:22 pm

    i agree with #19, the GUI could be better, especially in French, my default setting.
    IMHO, the most important thing in dictionaries is the page Layout. and they fail in this respect.

  20. tomer

    October 11th, 2007 at 10:53 am

    use wiktionary with autocomplete - no more misspellings…

    http://www.qwiktionary.com

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