The affordances of Internet-mediated crowd-sourced platforms have also led to the emergence of crowd-sourced online dictionaries. In the case of Wikipedia for instance, inaccuracies, edit wars and destructive interactions between contributors and biases in coverage and content are only a few to name among many undesirable aspects of the project that have been studied in detail. Although the success of most of these examples is beyond expectation, there are challenges and shortcomings to be considered as well. All these projects are based on contributions from volunteers, often anonymous and non-experts.
#URBAN DICTIONARY SCITE SOFTWARE#
Examples of such projects are open software development, citizen science campaigns and most notably Wikipedia. The low threshold to include new material in Urban Dictionary enables quick recording of new words and new meanings, but the resulting heterogeneous content can pose challenges in using Urban Dictionary as a source to study language innovation.Ĭontemporary information communication technologies open up new ways of cooperation leading to the emergence of large-scale crowd-sourced collaborative projects. Urban Dictionary also contains offensive content, but highly offensive content tends to receive lower scores through the dictionary’s voting system. Furthermore, Urban Dictionary covers many informal, unfamiliar words as well as proper nouns. We measure a high presence of opinion-focused entries, as opposed to the meaning-focused entries that we expect from traditional dictionaries. We combine computational methods with qualitative annotation and shed light on the overall features of Urban Dictionary in terms of growth, coverage and types of content. In this work, we focus on Urban Dictionary, a crowd-sourced online dictionary. On the other hand, the decentralized and often unmonitored environment of such projects may make them susceptible to low-quality content. On the one hand, the promise of the ‘wisdom of the crowd’ has inspired successful projects such as Wikipedia, which has become the primary source of crowd-based information in many languages. The Internet facilitates large-scale collaborative projects and the emergence of Web 2.0 platforms, where producers and consumers of content unify, has drastically changed the information market.
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