Wikipedia's Projects

Submitted by tulvit on Wed, 12/28/2011 - 09:56

WikipediaWikipedia is a really great project, which can help us a lot with learning English. Practically all wiki articles are good quality with no grammar or other mistakes - it's worth to admit that it's a big value for the project with user generated content, on other social sites such as forums, blogs, social networks and so on, almost always nobody watching users' language and correct mistakes. With wikipedia you can be sure - all articles have no mistakes. And of course wiki in most cases contains well structured and useful information, so it's easy to find what you really want. And besides learning English, wiki helps you to improve your education as well.

As you know, wiki is not only a wikipedia.org but a bunch of different projects. Let's take a look at all of them (or at least at most important for us, as our main purpose is to learn English).

wikipedia.org

The main project. Approximately 4 million articles in English. It's a really great number. Furthermore, most of the articles are rather extensive. So, in my point of view, it will be a good practice to read wikipedia regularly. Not necessary every day, but rather often. And it's not a bad advice to read all the articles on subjects in which you're interested of. To the same, it's no secret that most of subjects have their own "vocabulary", set of specific words relevant to the specific topic. In this case if you're taking an interest in something, wiki is a good way to build or improve your vocabulary.

wiktionary.org

Just a dictionary. But as for me, one of the best. In additional to the word's meaning, wiktionary provides such information as etymology of the word, pronunciation (with audio sample), synonyms, derived terms and so on. Sometimes you can find also a link to the wikipedia (if there is an articles on this word), a picture (if a word is smt that you can represent as image), differences between UK and US pronunciation... In other words - wiktionary provides practically all information on each and every word that you can even imagine and not only a bare listing of the word's meanings.

Moreover, wiktionary have a bunch of very useful features, such as frequency lists, topical index and some another. For instance, what english words should you learn first of all? Obviously, the most frequency ones, and now you have a list with this words.

wikiquote.org

A well structured quotations' compendium. If you like quotes or a fan of some movie/person and want to read theirs quotes - so this site is especially for you. What is more, it will improve your mental outlook. Or your can think about it as a form a relaxation. Anecdotes or funny stories? Huh, quotations are better!

wikiversity.org

Another rather helpful resource, not very big as previous ones, but have some interesting materials too, for example English as a second language.

wikibooks.org & wikisource.org

As before, nothing special. But "nothing special" doesn't means nothing interesting or useful (for instance, some materials on "learning English language" in wikibooks.org you can find kind of helpful).

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