Hello, people of the press!
What is wordia.com?
wordia.com is a next-generation online dictionary; a ‘visual dictionary’ video repository that encourages members of the public to contribute to a collective pool of produced and user-generated video dictionary definitions.
Just like a traditional online dictionary, wordia.com allows users to search for the spelling, meaning and etymology of a word, but wordia.com is more than just a dictionary: it’s a destination where anyone can upload their own personal meaning of any word - where you can discover what a word means to a complete stranger, suggest for someone to define a word that you’re intrigued by etc.
Where once a dictionary user would have just found a textual definition, wordia.com encourages individuals to film and upload their definition of a word – a word that matters to them. Each ‘authored’ video definition is appended against the correct textual entry and made searchable within a high-quality textual dataset supplied by our good friends at HarperCollins.
We’ve found that this visualisation works; place a word into context visually and it helps you to recollect its meaning much more easily then a textual definition. The ‘author’ breathes life into it – and their video acts as an easy-to-remember reference - an aide memoire or mnemonic as it were. We film with people in the public eye – we call them ‘orators’ - as a way of encouraging users to define and upload their own word definitions. These are comedians, entertainers, actors, sporting heroes etc – each orator is someone closely associated with the word that they are defining. Someone with a relevant story to tell.
How is wordia.com moderated?
We want to create a safe, moderated environment. A fun destination where users can discover what words mean and what they mean to other people.
Like YouTube, we have a no-nonsense approach to dealing with abusive behaviour and we ask our community to be vigilant and ‘report to moderator’ any content or comments that aren’t within our community guidelines.
We also ‘watch-list’ potentially sensitive words and their interpretations. We are busy setting up a community moderation programme where the user community decides what action to take about videos that have been reported to the moderator as “inappropriate”.