Like its sister project Wikipedia, Wiktionary is run by the Wikimedia Foundation, and is written collaboratively by volunteers, dubbed "Wiktionarians".

Wiktionary was brought online on December 12, 2002,[2] following a proposal by Daniel Alston and an idea by Larry Sanger, co-founder of Wikipedia.

[6] This means that even without such entries, its coverage of English is significantly larger than that of major monolingual print dictionaries.

Like the English edition, the French Wiktionary has imported approximately 20,000 entries from the Unihan database of Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Indian characters.

The French Wiktionary grew rapidly in 2006 thanks in a large part to bots copying many entries from old, freely licensed dictionaries, such as the eighth edition of the Dictionnaire de l'Académie française (1935, around 35,000 words), and using bots to add words from other Wiktionary editions with French translations.

[e] Some communities adopted the winning entry by "Smurrayinchester", a 3×3 grid of wooden tiles, each bearing a character from a different writing system.

In 2012, 55 wikis that had been using the English Wiktionary logo received localized versions of the 2006 design by "Smurrayinchester".

In 2006, Jill Lepore wrote in the article "Noah's Ark" for The New Yorker,[g] There's no show of hands at Wiktionary.

And it's only as good as the copyright-expired books from which it pilfers.Keir Graff's review for Booklist was less critical: Is there a place for Wiktionary?

And it's wonderful to have another strong source to use when searching the odd terms that pop up in today's fast-changing world and the online environment.

[citation needed]References in other publications are fleeting and part of larger discussions of Wikipedia, not progressing beyond a definition, although David Brooks in The Nashua Telegraph described it as "wild and woolly".

[h] The measure of correctness of the inflections for a subset of the Polish words in the English Wiktionary showed that this grammatical data is very stable (a study showed that only 131 out of 4,748 Polish words have had their inflection data corrected).

[19] Wiktionary lexicographic data can be converted to machine-readable format in order to be used in natural language processing tasks.