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Comment by jan_Inkepa | Hacker News Reader

In my experience wiktionary is a pretty great+reliable source for word etymology. I've corrected a few things, but generally it gets it right faar more often than wrong, is good about citing sources, and it has an active + helpful community. It is pretty reliable in my experience for English/German/Latin/Chinese (in order of quantity of experience).

Growing up in my dictionaries etymology always stopped at Greek/Latin/Old English, which is a shame in some ways. Having easy access to wiktionary to plumb the depths further back to older reconstructed languages is a treat :)

Also many etymological resources are open/free - http://pielexicon.hum.helsinki.fi/ for instance.

[disclaimer: I can't compare it to closed resources, and I don't work professionally with this data.]

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> In my experience wiktionary is a pretty great+reliable source for word etymology. I've corrected a few things, but generally it gets it right faar more often than wrong ...

Serious question: How do you know if it's right or wrong?

How do I know the Oxford English Dictionary is accurate? I trust it because experts trust it, because experts write it, and because it's had over a century to mature and it has retained its reputation for that long. Also, they show and cite actual quotes.

> good about citing sources

Ever check cites on Wikipedia? Many of them do not at all support what is written in the article.

> Serious question: How do you know if it's right or wrong?

I don't know much linguistics, but sometimes the sound-changes involved seem plausible to me which leads me to trust it ("yeah that makes sense").

When I do follow the references they normally check out. In some cases where there weren't references I did some sleuthing myself and provided them (things checked out).

In another case it seemed that two words should be marked as related, so I asked on the etymology scriptorium ( https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Wiktionary:Etymology_scriptor... is their etymology messageboard - I find it highly entertaining to browse through people figuring out a random assortment of etymologies in the same place), and someone took the time to explain to me (to my satisfaction) that no it was just by random chance.

A few other times when I've found problems (last one was some vowel-length inconsistencies for a Latin word entry) I've asked about them, had them confirmed as problems, and fixed them (in the case mentioned, it was reverting someone else's erroneous change).

Also, some people I know who are a lot more experienced with linguistics [still amateurs, but...very highly skilled amateurs] than I am contribute to it.

All of these experiences lead me to have a high level of regard for wiktionary. As said, I'm not very experienced with linguistics, but I haven't gotten the sense that the people running the shop are anything other than competent.

>Ever check cites on Wikipedia? Many of them do not at all support what is written in the article

Dictionary citations of the sort you get on wiktionary tend to be less open to interpretation.

Thanks for the thoughtful answer! IMHO:

> seem plausible to me

> someone took the time to explain to me (to my satisfaction)

> I've asked about them, had them confirmed as problems, and fixed them

Based on that, Wiktionary's standard of accuracy is what will be accepted by a non-expert. That's a pretty low standard; that's people talking in a college dorm room or in a bar. It's nothing personal - my intuitions on etymology are no better.

That's also how misinformation is created and spreads; it's right out of the textbook. Research shows that our intuitions about what's true are terrible if we don't have expertise in the issue, and that is how we are most easily fooled.

"The first principle is that you must not fool yourself -- and you are the easiest person to fool." - Richard Feynman

Yeah as a non-expert I can only vouch so far. I can say that the time I did my deepest dive (about the various Latin words that look like 'pila' if you ignore vowel length, and their etymology - https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pila#Latin), using wiktionary as a starting point for trawling 'real' scholarly references I presented the work to my Latin teacher, a university professor of Ancient Greek, who said it checked out (though, he's a classicist and not a general linguist, so maybe that doesn't count. And maybe he was just humouring me).

What we need is a linguist to get on here and give their take, and tell us how it fares compared to the professional resources.

> What we need is a linguist to get on here and give their take, and tell us how it fares compared to the professional resources.

Agreed. BTW, regardless of Wiktionary, I love the research - it's such creative, intriguing, stimulating work to explore those things. When people react, as (IMHO) they are conditioned to, to intellectual things with fear, hesitation and/or negativity, I think 'ugh, you are missing so much, the most beautiful things in this universe and many others.'

And see my other comment about the OED. It's the best tool for it.

What are your thoughts on etymonline.com?

(To reiterate: I'm not very learned in this domain. This is just an amateur impression).

For English it's pretty solid from what I've seen, and the way it presents etymologies as coherently written readable articles is more accessible than Wiktionary, which is a lot rawer. It's nice that it goes back before written sources to reconstructions of older languages (which OED doesn't do IIRC, but Wiktionary does). On the Proto-Indo-European language front Wiktionary is slightly more luxuriant in this regard because you can search through non-English languages as well and explore etymologies a bit more freely because of this.

It seems to lacks citations as to where the info comes from, which is a bit unfortunate, but I guess it's part of its friendly vibe? But it also obscures how people know this stuff, and makes it harder to fact-check. (I'd be surprised if they didn't have the references stored somewhere that's not getting published - I imagine they're something you'd want to keep track of as you're writing the articles).

[I don't use Etymonline very much because I'm mostly looking at relating etymologies between words of different (Indo-) European languages I'm learning/know right now, rather than plumbing the origins of single English words.]

In fact, the basic sources used by etymonline.com are mentioned on the site's home page, which also links to this more extensive (complete?) list of primary and secondary sources: https://www.etymonline.com/columns/post/sources

A few of the individual entries do reference one or more of these sources by name; for example, the entry for "better" says "...Boutkan finds no good IE etymology", where "Boutkan" is one of the entries under "Other Sources".

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