How much does it cost to maintain a dictionary anyway? A few million dollars at best? It is crazy that a ton of projects don't even get started, because these APIs are so expensive and unfriendly
They won't they would fund some other org or dept to do the work. Same way you have a public education system, or public health care.
It is not a given that such work is best handled through the public purse.
Governments fund the arts all the time. Why is there automatically an assumption that this will end with the government editing the dictionary to control speech?
> Unless you are a plusgood citizen making agitprop for the proles.
The Académie Française is not a ruling body anymore, however, there is a committee that decides on which words to use, following a very bureaucratic process. French people are still free to use French as the way they want (thankfully!), but it is mandatory for official government communication.
And in case you are wondering, the ones who decide are usually famous French writers who got a honorific position for their past work. They tend to be completely out of touch with the modern world, and with a bureaucratic process that doesn't help the result is more silly than manipulative.
Scraping government sites for glossaries, mashing up the definitions to create a free comparative international dictionary.
I'm also a little surprised they didn't think Wiktionary was sufficient for languages apart from English. I could be wrong, but my impression is that it's pretty good for major languages[1].
It also, turns requests for some words, like "rolling" into definitions for their root word like "roll", even when wiktionary has distinct and useful definitions for the word, which makes it less than ideal for me.