Hi,

As an avid Wiktionary user and editor, I was wondering: how difficult would it be to fork the Wikipedia app into a Wiktionary app? If MediaWiki doesn’t want to make an official Wiktionary app, I might still want to make my own fork, because I think Wiktionary has a lot to offer compared to other dictionaries available in mobile app stores.

Looking through Phabricator, https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T205727 (“Decide on the future of Android Wiktionary app”) was declined in favor of

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165495 (“Generic MediaWiki Android app”), and that was closed in May 2020 because “Since the app is now wholly dependent on Wikipedia-specific RestBase services, we can no longer officially support a generic mediawiki flavor.” https://blog.go2tech.de/2016/02/how-i-customized-the-wikipedia-app-to-match-the-needs-of-droidwiki-de/ makes it sound like all it takes to make a Wiktionary app is some simple text replacement, but that was in 2016. If the Wikipedia API has since substantially diverged from the Wiktionary API, perhaps it would be a lot harder now.

Other related bugs:

• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T124602: asking to add Wiktionary in the Wikipedia app as a pop-up dictionary
• https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T215097: Dedicated view for Wiktionary search in Wikipedia mobile apps

There are some apps in the app stores which source data from Wiktionary, such as Livio on Google Play, but they don’t replicate the full Wiktionary experience.

Thanks for your time and any insights you may be able to provide!