(Not sure if posting to the right section, feel free to move it)
This a post about my project of free online dictionaries at http://lexica.linguax.com which I introduced here almost a decade ago and which seemed to have tracked a lot of users ever since.
First, thanks to everyone who sent even a little donation over the years. You may think that e.g. $5 is nothing, but often enough I found myself in a situation where every dollar sent my way meant a crucial difference in my life (and this is not an exaggeration). Thank you again!
This thread is just a sort of testing the waters and if it doesn’t tract any attention, I’ll abandon it (and continue as usual), so it is not a matter of life and death…
I’ve got basically two questions (which I want to elaborate on later in the post):
- should I expand the project
- and if so, what dictionaries to convert?
- will the expansion be big enough to warrant creating e.g. a Patreon?
\
So, this is the thing. I’ve got a real life job which has, sadly, nothing got to do with Latin at all. I also have very spare free time. But still, I would like to invest some of the free time to something I know which fulfilled me a lot in the past because I knew it helped a lot of people: production of online dictionaries (specifically targetted at classics: Greek & Latin).
The first question is: are there still more dictionaries which deserve such conversion? If they are not in a PDF/DJVU (or any other picture format), you can send a physical book my way, I will produce (as I have done with hundreds of pages worth of physical dictionaries in the past) a digital searchable dictionary in time (we’re talking a few weeks). In the past I was able to scan even very large books page by page, spend some time cropping and manually editing each image, indexing them, making the final product. It was mainly during my university years (when I was studying classical philology). I haven’t done it in a while, but it is not a problem (if we ignore the time/resources issue here). I can also take another digitally looking dictionary, which is cumbersome to use (it can be just a wordlist) and turn it into a proper easy-to-use digital dictionary, it may not be always visible on the linguax.com featured dictionaries, but I’ve got a vast experience with it, I’ve been always predominantly an IT guy/coder (who evolved into a Latinist).
- So, if you have any ideas of what could be turned, write them down
- When it comes to dictionaries which aren’t in a public domain: I’m not saying I cannot do that (or not willing to), but I cannot publish that/put it publically to my website, that is imaginable only for some private needs of those who own the dictionary in question physically… e.g.
The second question is: if we manage to compile a list long enough, would you, the contributors to this thread and passive readers alike, be willing to support my efforts on Patreon? (Let us say monthly) When I say support, I’m talking again about even a minimum amount like 3-4 euros / 4-5 USD a month, guaranteed that there is enough of you to make me at least feel that I’m not doing that just out of sheer love for the language (which is what powered me in the past largely). You know I’m nothing but a commercial money-grabbing type. If I was, there would have been tons of advertisements on the linguax page which some of you would block, but a majority wouldn’t and I would make some profit on it. But I hate ads, I block ads, I always thought that good Latin resources should be freely available. That aside, they still cost resources to produce and that is why I’m considering a thing like asking for a monthly support through Patreon. And I do that from a position of someone with some reputation and past results. It is true that my dictionaries had a donation button ever since their very inception, but in the first few years I received maybe 10 USD in total from some two donators; what it really took (some years later) was to ask you personally to support me (especially during harder stages of my life) so that more of you have sent a similar donation my way over the course of the following years, which I’m really grateful for!
I contributed a lot to the Latin community for free. Some of you know I’ve also been a forum developer on the other Latin forum (I spent an exuberant amount of time fixing or developing stuff there for almost nothing… just because I loved the place and believed in it), so it is not preposterous that I’m suggesting a project like this 
TL;DR:
-
can we compile a list of a dictionaries for me to convert (=all of them would be then freely available)
-
if the list is long enough, would there be enough of you who would be willing to support me with a tiny amount of money monthly on the Patreon while I produce new dictionaries?