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Need for a timestamped meta-entry
Hello everyone,
One common refrain I've heard from Japanese learners is that although JMdict is a ample resource that is amended often, applications that use it rarely incorporate updates. In an ideal world, these apps would indicate when they last parsed the export, but most don't. In fact, some don't even mention that they're using JMdict...
As an end-user of JMdict, it's important for me to know how outdated an app's entries could be. [0] It's important for the integrity of the project that users are aware that the information they have is current as of $DATE. [1] As a contributor, it's important to me that the project is properly attributed, and in lieu of that, that users have some way to quickly confirm that they're using JMdict. (obvious for us, but might not be for novices or if there are ever forks)
My proposed solution for these problems is to have a dictionary entry for JMdict itself, containing a timestamp in a note. So I could simply search for "JMdict", and the entry's note would confirm for me that the app uses JMdict. This way, the timestamp is tied to the dump itself, and we don't have to rely on countless developers to include this information. Normally, a proper name like this would go into Enamedict, but a lot of apps don't include that, and that's why this is a "meta" entry.
I understand some might opposed to this as too navel-gazy (since it's not an actual dictionary entry), but there is precedence for these kinds of things in real-world dictionaries [2]. There could also be concerns about clogging up the change feed, but the timestamp could instead be made weekly or monthly, since almost no apps are updated daily. [3]
Please let me know what you think or if there is some better solution. Thanks.
– Opencooper
[0]: One litmus test I currently use is whether there's an entry for 「令和」, but this isn't granular nor will it be as useful in the future.