Leximo: a social dictionary? (What’s missing)

Submitted by elenaberu on Mié, 03/18/2009 - 08:59

Yet another? Not quite.

It’s an open community-driven initiative by means of which users can submit words from every single language in the world. They want to be the Wikipedia of dictionaries. Nonetheless, they have an “issue” there: accuracy. Just like there is some expertise feature on Wikipedia, what about Leximo?

Let’s take a closer look at their TOS: Wait, no TOS! Anyway, their CC license is at the bottom of the page: CC-BY-SA. Ok, so users are forced to accept this license (will it be BY Leximo? or by THE USER?…who’s getting the traffic?) instead of giving them the option to choose the CC. In any case, I don’t think I would mind sharing my words with others…the problem here, as usual, is that ONCE AGAIN, the users are generating content that may yield benefits they won’t get but the owners/company of the site will. This is what 2.0 gurus call crowdsourcing and democracy and user-generated content…I call it: we’re doing whose job? And I love open and free knowledge generated by users (long live Wikipedia) but is it free as in free beer? I mean, why aren’t all Wikipedia users invited to conferences and talks? Just Wales? This is not about singers or bands and fans…who are just supporters but don’t generate the content…we’re talking about people whose contribution is the only cause of (way to) success.

Ok, let’s get back to Leximo. I like the idea, but even though I’m currently focused on apparently different and diverse fields such as social media, learning, online community management and so on, my background is -as you might know- linguistics and philology and that’s why I think I could have a lot to say about this initiative. I have (as usual) brainstormed a little bit and came up with some features I’d love to find (I won’t say they’re missing…if you don’t share the picture I figured out: turning it more into an app rather than just a social networed database by aggregating X features).

But, I will skip those and point out some missing (basic) features: