Hey everyone :)
Wiktionary is our third-largest sister project, both in term of active
editors and readers. It is a unique resource, with the goal to provide
a dictionary for every language, in every language. Since the
beginning of Wikidata but increasingly over the past months I have
been getting more and more requests for supporting Wiktionary and
lexicographical data in Wikidata. Having this data available openly
and freely licensed would be a major step forward in automated
translation, text analysis, text generation and much more. It will
enable and ease research. And most importantly it will enable the
individual Wiktionary communities to work more closely together and
benefit from each other’s work.
With this and the increased demand to support Wikimedia Commons with
Wikidata, we have looked at the bigger picture and our options. I am
seeing a lot of overlap in the work we need to do to support
Wiktionary and Commons. I am also seeing increasing pressure to store
lexicographical data in existing items (which would be bad for many
reasons).
Because of this we will start implementing support for Wiktionary in
parallel to Commons based on our annual plan and quarterly plans. We
contacted several of our partners in order to get funding for this
additional work. I am happy that Google agreed to provide funding
(restricted to work on Wikidata). With this we can reorganize our team
and set up one part of the team to continue working on building out
the core of Wikidata and support for Wikipedia and Commons and the
other part will concentrate on Wiktionary. (To support and to extend
our work around Wikidata with the help of external funding sources was
our plan in our annual plan 2016:
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2015-2016_round1/Wikimedia_Deutschland_e.V./Proposal_form#Financials:_current_funding_period)
As a next step I’d like us all to have another careful look at the
latest proposal at
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Wiktionary/Development. It has
been online for input in its current form for a year and the first
version is 3 years old now. So I am confident that the proposal is in
a good shape to start implementation. However I’d like to do a last
round of feedback with you all to make sure the concept really is
sane. To make it easier to understand there is now also a pdf
explaining the concept in a slightly different way:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikidata_for_Wiktionary_announcement.pdf
Please do go ahead and review it. If you have comments or questions
please leave them on the talk page of the latest proposal at
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata_talk:Wiktionary/Development/Proposals/2015-05.
I’d be especially interested in feedback from editors who are familiar
with both Wiktionary and Wikidata.
Getting support for Wiktionary done - just like for Commons - will
take some time but I am really excited about the opportunities it will
open up especially for languages that have so far not gotten much or
any technological support.
Cheers
Lydia
--
Lydia Pintscher - http://about.me/lydia.pintscher
Product Manager for Wikidata
Wikimedia Deutschland e.V.
Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24
10963 Berlin
www.wikimedia.de
Wikimedia Deutschland - Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V.
Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Berlin-Charlottenburg
unter der Nummer 23855 Nz. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das
Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207.
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