File:ELex 2021 15 pp259-268.pdf

English: Semantic domains are a source of headaches in dictionary projects, and one was built haphazardly in the French edition of the collaborative online project Wiktionary called Wiktionnaire. Wiktionnaire is a lexicographical project that started 17 years ago. It is hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation and edited by a community of volunteers that made it a mature project, but with lacunas, with semantic domains being one of these. Between January 2019 and December 2020, this nomenclature of semantic domains was transformed by a small team with complementary expertise and skills. The team consisted of four people with academic knowledge in linguistics, lexicography and information science, as well as technical skills for coding, proofreading and community management. The strategy was the following: mapping the existing terminology, comparison and extension of the list, documentation, structuring, discussions with the community, deployment, cleaning of remaining irregularities, and monitoring the changes after this process. The result of this two-year operation is a complete reshaping of a messy folksonomy into an innovative lattice nomenclature fully integrated into the Wiktionnaire and adopted by the community, but also used in an RDF-based dictionary reusing that data, the Dictionnaire des francophones. This paper outlines the context of this work on continually changing content and presents the strategy used by the team, includingthe major issues and choices encountered during the process.