comp 491: report | what is ekşi sözlük?

What is Ekşi Sözlük ?

Ekşi Sözlük, founded on February 15th, 1999, is a site in Turkish which can be classified as a “collaborative hypertext dictionary”; the content is formed by its more than 10,000(*) active users. The users prefer to call themselves in many different ways; susers (sözlük users), “sözlükçü”s or “yazar”s (writer, author). Users, according to their membership dates, are divided into generations:

1st generation: Member as of February 1999
2nd generation: Member as of May 2000
3rd generation: Member as of May 2001
4th generation: Member as of May 2002
5th generation: Member as of April 2003 (after a book donation campaign)
6th generation: Member as of May 2004
7th generation: Member as of November 2005 (after a book donation campaign)

Information in Ekşi Sözlük is organized under titles (tr. başlık) which can be potentially about anything one can think of; some are meant to be informative, some are hilariously funny, while many of them are generally silly or weird and for reasons unknown, are limited to 50 characters. Although the site is in Turkish, the six letters that are not in the English alphabet (ç, ğ, ı, ö, ş, ü) are not used in the titles. However there is no such limitation for the entries. What makes Ekşi Sözlük a hypertext dictionary are the cross-references, named “bakınız” and abbreviated as bkz (translatable as “see”). There are several types of cross-references, and they are:

• References that link to a title, which have the format (bkz: xyz)(**) , xyz or *; the basic reference, hidden reference and the clever reference, respectively. A clever reference displays the name of the title it refers to when pointed by the mouse, and redirects to the title when clicked.
  

Fig. 2: An example of a "clever" reference

• References that link to an entry, which look like the first two specimens of title-bound references, but they also include numbers. These numbers carry two meanings differing in context;
• When given in (bkz: xyz/n) format, it refers to the nth entry of title xyz.
• When given in (bkz: xyz/#n) or (bkz: #n) format, it refers to the entry having the unique id #n. In Ekşi Sözlük, entries have unique IDs, like records inside a database table with an automatically generated integer assigned as its primary key.

• References that link to the entries of a certain suser under a specific title: When given in (bkz: xyz/@john doe) format, a reference links to the entries under the title xyz that pertain to a certain suser “john doe”.

This taxonomy of reference formats in Ekşi Sözlük will be of much aid when discussing ek$iVista, the graph drawing tool.

Ekşi Sözlük also provides mechanisms for user-to-user messaging, entry voting, moderation and entry reporting (done by moderators and hilariously named ekşi sözlük senior gammaz staff. Gammaz translates from Turkish as “informer”.), and has many sub-sites to cater different needs:

• soursummitz: Site for organizing meetings (zirves: summits)
• eksi sozluk muzesi: Site for displaying deleted entries for their humor value
• s.c.r.e.e.n: Screenshot archive for susers
• eksi rss: RSS feed of Ekşi Sözlük, displays the last 50 active titles upon subscription
• smkb: Short for sözlük menkul kıymetler borsası – “sözlük stock exchange”; auction site
• sourworkz: Webspace for getting software related to Ekşi Sözlük
• sour fx: A graphical art portal consisting of susers’ creations
• sourlemonade: Entry backup facility
  

All in all, Ekşi Sözlük is a vast and diverse community (calling it a mini-Turkey would not be overshooting) of people actively engaging in discussions and contributing to the content of the site.

(*): For current statistics, visit http://sozluk.sourtimes.org/stats.asp.
(**): Text coloured purple correspond to hyperlinks.