Thank you very much! OK, then the Wikipedia author must have been looking for a quick example and stumbled.
Indeed, I see there are FORM, MEANINGS, and STROKE ORDER, often COMPONENTS sections, and liked it so far. Here, I have two questions (sorry if they've been answered before):
1. According to the website, the Expert edition will include "detailed information on each character's history." Will you trace how a character's meanings changed over time, how and when components were added to it or removed from it (which is probably quite rare), when it was simplified and again made more complex, and so on? Or would that require one to draw a tree-like structure, which would go beyond what a dictionary can do? I think that would be great for reading texts from different epochs, because then you can quickly recognize the changes of meaning a character has undergone.
2. Will there be an effort to classify the origin of each character by the traditional six categories from the 说文解字? I see that the wording "反 depicts" or "角 depicts" would mean it was pictographic, but it might be harder to tell for the other five categories. (I know it's sometimes hard to assign a single category, then one could of course name them all and give an explanation as to why that is so.) I think such a classification would help language learners remember characters through a deeper understanding of their formation, as well.
Answer to #1.
If you want to see what the Expert Edition looks like, check out the demo entries: 土 屮 攵 立 各 艸 足 尚 春 美 草 射 造 堂 黑 路 監 謝 藍 變 艹 攴 (or their simplified equivalents). As far as meaning, the dictionary focuses on a character's meaning in modern Mandarin. Having a dictionary like you mention would be super cool, but its out of the scope of this dictionary, which focuses on character learning. This dictionary does show you the logical connections between different senses of a character in modern Mandarin, but it focuses only on common meanings (because we want to minimize what people have to memorize).
Answer to #2.
We don't use the 6 categories for several reasons. Many top-notch paleographers, such as 陳夢家、唐蘭、裘錫圭 don't use these categories as they are inadequate to explain character evolution/form. Other scholars, such as 季旭昇 (I learned a lot of my paleography from him), still use them, but have to modify the categories to make things fit. To be honest, it gets pretty unwieldy. For instance, 詹鄞鑫 distinguishes 形聲字 whose sound component gives a meaning and 會意字 whose meaning component gives a sound. He criteria are rigorous, but the distinction isn't at all important for someone learning Chinese. In fact, it would be more of a burden. Abstract character-type categories are not useful for learners, because they require that you know a lot of characters to make use of them.
Our system explains characters in terms of their functional components, i.e., the parts of a character that are doing something in that character. Each component has 3 attributes: form, sound and meaning. There are 4 types of functional components: Form components, Meaning components (these two are collectively called semantic components), Sound components and Empty components. Each time these words appear in the dictionary, there is a link to an explanation of what they are. Understanding these 4 types is crucial!
In order to truly understand a character, you need to know how it breaks down component-wise and what each of those components are doing. If you get that, the type of the character itself is irrelevant, because you already thoroughly understand the character. And, your understanding is tied to concrete things, like meaning and sound expression, rather than abstract categories. We have blog posts that explain this stuff too, but we recently switched sites and the blog posts haven't been put back up yet.
Takeaway: one of the most important aspects of this dictionary is the character breakdowns and the system of functional components. These are much more important than looking at ancient forms (though I love looking at ancient forms!).
