Comment by zehfernandes | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zehfernandes | Hacker News Reader

Hey Hacker News!

I'm thrilled to read all the comments with ideas and improvements. I will try to answer and keep up with the thread.

Kudos to all the similar initiatives trying to solve the problems I outline in the article. It's wonderful to see a zeitgeist about dictionaries.

Who wants to jump the article and try the version I built, feel free to download the iPhone [1] or Android [2] version or run it by itself with the open source repo [3]

1: https://apps.apple.com/app/wordnote-dictionary/id1596537633

2: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.zehfernand...

3: https://github.com/zehfernandes/wordnote

Cheers!

How did you manage to get the dictionaries for all those languages? If I didn’t miss it, that part is left open in the article after explaining how highly priced they are…

From the article: "I landed on the freeDictionary API that uses the Wiktionary as a source.".

Why didn't they just download the dumps via https://dumps.wikimedia.org/enwiktionary/ (as explained in https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Help:FAQ#Downloading_Wiktiona...)

Scraping, even via an api, is way less efficient imho.

They’re in wikitext, which looks to be considerably less semantic than the crawled data. I’m not sure that’s the reason, but it could be a reason.

I'd say not the reason, since the wiki text is pretty semantic. the wiki source of https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/subbureau#English is:

  ==English==

  ===Etymology===
  {{prefix|en|sub|bureau}}

  ===Noun===
  {{en-noun|s|subbureaux}}

  # A [[district]]-level public security bureau in [[China]].

so as long as one can parse wikitext, it's split pretty well up!

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