The WiktionaryZ project has made rapid progress in the last few weeks, thanks in no part to our growing team of developers, now including myself, Peter-Jan Roes, Karsten Uil, and Rod Smith. There's a growing community at http://www.wiktionaryz.org/ , and our intrepid editors have already added more than 20,000 words to the original GEMET database. While there are still many glaring deficiencies and lacking key features, the WZ core model of terminology works.

Key functionality added to the code in the last few weeks includes: - Basic versioning. All tables now have versioning information, based on a transaction model where each record has an associated transaction record. It is possible to get a simple aggregated history view on a per-page level; more advanced history views are to come. - Object identifiers. Key tables now have object IDs associated with their records. These object IDs are themselves linked to a database-independent universally unique identifier (UUID), which allows us to expose data through APIs without using IDs that may not be available in a target application. The object model also provides us with a flexible method of grouping or annotating entitites. - Sticky UI. Rod A. Smith has hacked a nice feature where your view of the "tree hierarchy" in WiktionaryZ will remain persistent if cookies are enabled. This allows editors to see only the information relevant to them. - New import scripts. We have some exciting new scientific data sources that will be imported into WZ soon (target date is mid/end October). - Small things: hacks for search, adding languages, finding words that need translation. Splitting exact meanings and imprecise ones. Improved changelogging.

The versioning is arguably the biggest step here and puts us one step closer to becoming a true wiki. Next in the roadmap: rollback and a better class model for ontologies.

Now, let me be absolutely clear: WZ is still pre-alpha code, and it's messy. We're still extending an old MediaWiki (not really a big deal since there are relatively few points of attachment, but we'll still need to fix it), and we have very little documentation. That said, if you follow the instructions below, you should be able to get your own edition up and running.

1) Download http://epov.org/temp/wz-sep14.tgz - it's a big file because it contains the entire database _and_ uploads of wiktionaryz.org.

2) Decompress the file to a directory in your Apache DocumentRoot.

3) Create and import the database from the .sql file in the dump (if you don't know how to do this, you should probably stop here).

4) Correct LocalSettings.php $wgDBname to point to the correct database and authentication, and fix the paths (/www/wz) to point to the appropriate subdirectory of your DocumentRoot.

5) Run the wiki. Create a user through the "Create an account" interface. Give the user the "wikidata" permission by inserting a row into the user_groups table with the ug_user being the user ID of the user you just created, and the ug_group being 'wikidata' (you should probably give it 'sysop' and 'bureaucrat' rights as well).

You should now be able to edit the relational data in your WZ installation, and can start playing with the code, particularly in the extensions/Wikidata/WiktionaryZ subdirectory. You may want to get updates to that code from the Wikimedia subversion repository.

I am currently unavailable but will be back on Sep 20 if you have questions or problems. We are happy to accept new developers and will prod Brion for you to give you Subversion access if necessary. ;-) We also always have fun and interesting small and large projects to work on.