Crowdsourcing vocabulary--thoughts on implementation, difficulty and costs?

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Like many people, I find it far more difficult to write rich, varied, interesting prose than to read it. One of the reasons I find it so difficult to write is that I can't easily retrieve suitable words from my large and messy vocabulary--I can't find the right words, or they just won't come to me. I don't think I'm unique in this respect.

Practice makes perfect, and one way to deal with this problem would be to simply write a lot more, while actively looking up the best words for every piece. However, I find it very frustrating to go about a task without having the right tools--the right words, for example--handy, and that kind of frustration can ruin a creative process like writing, for me. Conversely, when I do have the necessary tools, I find it very easy to get into a good flow and to produce something worthwhile.

Another way to deal with this problem would be to make a point of writing down interesting words as I come across them. I've had little success with that approach, because I've never found a way to do it that's easy enough, fast enough, or reliable enough for it to become both natural and useful. Moreover, that approach is always limited by my own reading.

I frequent a forum that's populated to a large extent by youngish would-be writers that are sometimes frustrated by the writing process, and I think that they, like me, would benefit greatly from enriching their vocabularies in a way that would be meaningful and useful to them. To that end, I'd like to set up a system that'd let us, as a group, amass a large searchable store of words, complete with tags, definitions and examples. Things people say, do, eat, see, in various situations and contexts and places.





This is the basic functionality that (I think) I'm looking for:

1. Member-privileges (eg. for adding and editing entries)

2. Words, with tags (eg. for context--politics, architecture, LittleFuzzy), definitions, and multiple examples. Like in a dictionary, I need different forms of a word to be associated with that word.

3. Sorting by word type (verb, noun, etc).

4. Search (esp. by tags).

In addition, I would (later on) like to be able to add entries through a browser addon.

I have little interest in reinventing the wheel from scratch, but I have no idea what tools there are out there that may be suitable for this task. I came up with this just half an hour ago, so I haven't really thought it out either!



If you have any information, thoughts, or ideas about this they'd be very welcome! How should it be done? How difficult can it be? How much could it cost? I know for a fact that the group is usually more knowledgeable than the Minx :)

Cheers!

-- P

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Originally Posted by Aimless

(scroll down for main point :))

Like many people, I find it far more difficult to write rich, varied, interesting prose than to read it. One of the reasons I find it so difficult to write is that I can't easily retrieve suitable words from my large and messy vocabulary--I can't find the right words, or they just won't come to me.

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When I'm writing and I want to enrich the prose, I use a thesaurus & dictionary. You have to be cautious with this because sometimes your resulting prose feels like you're using a thesaurus/dictionary (ie. oddly obscure words popping up in otherwise vernacular writing) which makes you look like a newby ding-dong. But that's what editing is for.