As VisualThesaurus.com points out in a recent interview with Oxford English Dictionary editor Jesse Sheidlower, the OED has been using a type of crowdsourcing for years – originally in a very low-tech manner:
“The OED is a historical dictionary, which means that for every sense of every word it contains quotations from chiefly written sources, showing how that word has been used over time. Originally the way that you would get these quotations, which are called citations, was that you simply read a wide variety of texts. And any time you come across an interesting word, you write it down on a slip of paper…You take a file of these, you sort them into order, you divide them up into senses. And you have your dictionary there, based on the evidence that's in front of you.
In a way, it's a collaborative project, one of the earliest collaborative projects in a way that Wikipedia and things like that are thought to be now, where these books were read by a very large number of people, thousands of people spread all over the world.”
(Jesse Sheidlower in an interview with VisualThesaurus.com, July 30, 2008)
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