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/Wikime...)
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... 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.... 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