Analysis of the quotation corpus of the Russian Wiktionary

The quantitative evaluation of quotations in the Russian Wiktionary was performed using the developed Wiktionary parser. It was found that the number of quotations in the dictionary is growing fast (51.5 thousands in 2011, 62 thousands in 2012). These quotations were extracted and saved in the relational database of a machine-readable dictionary. For this database, tables related to the quotations were designed. A histogram of distribution of quotations of literary works written in different years was built. It was made an attempt to explain the characteristics of the histogram by associating it with the years of the most popular and cited (in the Russian Wiktionary) writers of the nineteenth century. It was found that more than one-third of all the quotations (the example sentences) contained in the Russian Wiktionary are taken by the editors of a Wiktionary entry from the Russian National Corpus.