From The New York Times
Defining Words, Without the Arbiters
By Anne Eisenberg
Traditional print dictionaries have long enlisted lexicographers to scrutinize new words as they pop up, weighing their merits and eventually accepting some of them.
Not Wordnik, the vast online dictionary.
No modern-day Samuel Johnson or Noah Webster ponders each prospective entry there. Instead, automatic programs search the Internet, combing the texts of news feeds, archived broadcasts, the blogosphere, Twitter posts and dozens of other sources for the raw material of Wordnik citations, says Erin McKean, a founder of the company....
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist at the School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley, who talks about language on “Fresh Air,” the NPR program, appreciates Wordnik’s breadth. “There’s a lot of useful information here,” he said. (He has also written commentaries on language for The Times.)
But he thinks that hands-on lexicographers could fine-tune the entries.
“The idea that you can pull lexicographers out of the loop and have an algorithm to mediate between me and the English language is goofy,” he said. “Without hand citations done by trained people, you get a mess.”...