Wiktionary API acceptable use policy - Wikitech-l

1 Sep 2009


      Hello,
I am interested in using the Wiktionary API (located at
en.wiktionary.org/w/api.php) and was having trouble finding any information
on what is acceptable commercial use.  If there are any controlling
documents on the subject, can you please direct me to them?  In particular,
I would like to know if there are any restrictions on the number of requests
allowed in a given time period, and if there are any other restrictions on
volume or frequency of use that I should keep in mind.
If determining acceptable use of the API remains a subjective exercise, let
me explain how I would like to use it and perhaps you can tell me if my
intended use is acceptable.
I am starting a new language translation service bureau that will use online
tools to make the translation process more accurate and less expensive for
the end customer.  We also intend to offer free access to our tools to any
open source project or non-profit organization (in such a case, they would
be free to use our project management, version control, and translator tools
free of charge, but they would have to find their own volunteer translators
to do the actual translation work).
As part of our translation tool set, we would like to provide access to
monolingual and bilingual dictionaries.  Wiktionary appears to be the
perfect choice for this.  We would like to use the Wiktionary API to fetch
words that are requested by our users (translators) and then render them on
our own servers for viewing in our translator tool.  We would keep a local
cache of fetched documents to minimize the number of API calls that we need
to make.  We will, of course, give proper attribution, etc., but it is
possible that we will eventually be making quite a large number of requests,
so we thought we should check with you first.
Is that acceptable use?
Cheers,
James