Dictionary compilers cannot avoid having their political preferences... 


It is a very poor definition, because it looks at only one narrow issue (ownership and control of means of production), ignoring all the other aspects where socialism differs from the right-wing ideologies (capitalism, conservatism, neo-conservatism, whatever you call them), including those that I listed.  And that definition is quite wrong in that point, because socialism does not at all imply "social ownership of the means of the means of production".  Again, that is in fact the feature that defines communism, specifically, as an extreme type of socialism.  In fact, socialism does not imply democracy: nazism and fascism are standard examples of non-democratic socialist regimes, and that is the case of several countries today, including some monachies in the Middle East.  (So much so that the "social democrats" often feel the need to explicitly qualify themselves so.)