[Lexicog] online publishing

[Bill Poser]

I think that Ron's idea of a web site for distributing dictionaries is a
good one, and it shouldn't be too hard to set up. There are, however, a
couple of issues. One is cost. Running a simple web site does not cost a
lot, but it does cost something, unless you have an institution that will
host it for free. A basic web site at a commercial ISP in North America is
typically on the order of US$60 per year, plus the cost of the domain
registration, so let's say US$75 per year total. If there are a lot of
dictionaries, especially ones with images and/or audio, costs will go up
because of the need for more storage and bandwidth (assuming that there are
lots of downloads). It's hard to estimate, but since we're presumably
talking about relatively obscure languages, it doesn't seem likely that such
a site would run to more than a few hundred dollars a year. That isn't a
huge amount, but somebody has to pay it. Rather than requiring posters to
pay, which would deter some and be administratively a pain, it would
probably be best just to raise that from a few donors.

Secondly, allowing anyone to post freely presents a couple of issues. One is
that of spam. Some bot may come along and try to post a lot of junk. The
usual solution to this is a captcha to force the user to prove that he or
she is human. I don't like them, myself, as I seem to have considerable
difficulty proving that I am human and often require several tries, but that
may be just me.

The other issue is inappropriate posts. Sooner or later, somebody is going
to come along and post a large junk file or pornography or something like
that, or a scan of a copyrighted, published dictionary. My guess is that
this kind of thing won't happen real often, but somebody is going to have to
be responsible for keeping an eye on the site, removing obvious problems,
and responding to take-down notices for copyright infringement.
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