Remaining gaps in Pleco coverage

For beginning learners, pleco has a huge variety of useful Chinese-English dictionaries. For advanced users, with the inclusion of Hanyudacidian, Pleco now has 2 modern Chinese-Chinese dictionaries, 2 classical C-C, 1 Chengyu c-c (+ an additional classical c-c and 2 budhist c-c dictionaries from the user created selection). There are also additional tools for specilized areas like Chinese medicine. There really is amazing coverage of basically any word one might want to look up.

I have put some thought into what gaps might remain in pleco coverage - ie, things I might want to look up under the current system and still have to reference outside sources to get a satisfying answer. Note that all of these are at least somewhat removed from the normal dictionary arena, and are more in the nature of an encyclopedia. While treating pleco as a substitute for 百度百科 clearly is not feasible nor desirable, I believe there are some small, defined areas of not-quite-traditional-dictionary-coverage that may be useful within pleco.

I am not sure if any of these would be cost effective or easily done within the limits of current programing, so I am not so much recommending these as simply wondering whether they would be feasible. I'll write the list in terms of things I would want to look up:

1) Place names. Current coverage for important places sometimes gives a province and county (if a historical name), but what might be useful is to have more comprehensive coverage of modern (and perhaps historical) place names, perhaps even with a tiny map graphic that identifies the approximate place within China.

2) Historical figures (definitely throughout Chinese history, perhaps including the chinese transliterations for figures from the rest of the world). The user created MoE dictionary already has some of these, but coverage remains somewhat spotty.

3) Animals and Plants. Current C-E dictionaries seem to often give a technical name for the animal or plant in english (which I most often do not recognize), and C-C dictionaries tend to give a very long and technical description of the animal in Chinese. Usually, what I would prefer is a picture of the animal together with a short, non technical description of it, either in english or chinese. I imagine pictures would not be feasible for pleco (I imagine the download size would be far too large), but perhaps there is some clever way to provide more information than currently available in a less technical format.

Not that these come up that often, or are particularly difficult to look up through other means. But with coverage so good in the traditional dictionary role, these are the only places I could come up with that I would find additional coverage useful. Perhaps others have additional gaps in coverage that they have noticed?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Chinese Wikipedia isn't bad (not as nice as 百度百科 but that's not open-source), would it maybe help if we simply offered a Pleco-downloadable offline version of that? (since it's quite large, we would probably have to charge something for it to cover the bandwidth costs)
 
Certainly - that would be great, and address virtually every concern. I didn't think that would be an option!

I know I'd definitely be willing to pay for the ease of accessing within pleco.
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
It's something we'd thought about for a while - would be very basic compared to a "real" Wikipedia reader, but the data exists and is open-source so at some level it's just another data file conversion project.
 

denmitch

探花
Chinese Wikipedia isn't bad (not as nice as 百度百科 but that's not open-source), would it maybe help if we simply offered a Pleco-downloadable offline version of that? (since it's quite large, we would probably have to charge something for it to cover the bandwidth costs)
It does sound interesting to download material for offline use. What size do you suspect it to be?
Also I would expect Chinese Wikipedia is morphing continuously just as in English. How often would updates push out and would each come with a price due to the bandwidth issue you mention?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
Could be 1 GB or more, depending on how aggressively we full-text indexed it. I think we'd rather charge people just once and then let them download updates whenever we release them rather than charging a fee for every download - the hassle of converting / checking / uploading a new version means that we'd be unlikely to release more than a couple of updates a year regardless.
 

Wan

榜眼
It's not exactly for Pleco, but offline readers exist. One of them is Aarddict. It's non market, it's free, and you can find links on their website to a great number of different dictionaries (like wiktionary etc.) and Wikipedias in different languages. The French, German, English and Chinese Wikipedia and some other, smaller dictionaries are around sixteen GB of data, text only (English Wiki alone taking a vast amount of that).
While Aarddict doesn't offer Pleco's Chinese translation functionality, it's free, quick, stable, and you can double check entries in different languages.
Snapshots are usually no older than a year, but same as with Pleco's use dictionaries, they are provided by the crowd.

I suggest you give it a try!
 
Honestly I would not mind if there were years between updates - 95% of the use comes from looking up things that aren't likely to change much (or at all) in the short term. It would just be so incredibly useful to have in any form.

Wan - interesting, but it wouldn't actually get at what most of what makes this option within pleco so incredibly useful. If I want to switch out of pleco to look up things, I usually just go online and use 百度百科. The magic here is having A) the ability to look up things with a tap of the finger within the pleco document reader, and B) the ability to integrate wikipedia's entries into the list with all the other dictionaries, and have a one-stop method of getting all that information. In other words, I think the usefulness (for me) is less about the offline function, and more about the integration within pleco. But your suggestion is well taken - some of th0se programs can be useful, especially when in places with no internet access.
 

blueboxkid

Member
i bet it does; some of it anyway. A bad old one cant be all that bad though. Worth considering if anybody in the community knows of something.

I know there is extensive literature on various local dialect and expressions written in chinese (although sadly i couldnt point them out) but i dont know about any dictionaries. A lot of dialect words that i encountered are basically part of standard chinese but with altered frequency of use and some shifts in meaning. Even a phrase book/flashcard set would be cool
 
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