Hoi, It was for the Wikimedia Foundation to adopt what was then called "Ultimate Wiktionary". The WMF decided at the time that it did not want to adopt our project and as a consequence Stichting Open Progress was founded and the name of the project was changed to "OmegaWiki" in order not to confuse with the Wiktionary projects.
The content of OmegaWiki is available under a different licensing scheme from the Wiktionary data. This has everything to do with the fact that you cannot license facts in the first place and because in our opinion there are many competing effectively incompatible Open/Free licenses that deal with lexical data. By providing our data both as GFDLD or CC-by, it is at least possible for everyone to collaborate with *us *and *our *data.
As to bringing OmegaWiki under the WMF, there was a time when this was the obvious solution. At this stage it is not so obvious nor necessary any more, What is needed is a wish to collaborate. Collaboration is something that is obvious for us. Contrary to some other projects we cherish a good relation with the Wikimedia Foundation.. There is plenty of room for people of good will to accomplish shared objectives. Thanks, GerardM
On Wed, Mar 5, 2008 at 12:37 PM, Oldak Quill oldakquill@gmail.com wrote:
On 04/03/2008, Mike mike_wikipedia@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Hi,
Lately, I have started wondering why we don't have a set of multilingual discussion pages - one to deal with English, say, which could be used for people interested in working on English words in any wiktionary. Another for Swedish, and so on... Then we could, I believe, reduce the amount of *repeatedly* produced "hot air".... ;)
I mean, I see right now a discussion concerning Romance languages' participles underway in en:wikt. I see no reason, however, why a such discussion won't arise again, in the Greek, or the Polish, or even the Italian wiktionary.
I see the same discussions concerning various details on certain Swedish words being held on both sv: and en: - and in how many more places are these words discussed without me noticing because I'm not active in those wiktionaries, and perhaps unable to understand the language in which it is held? Perhaps I (or someone else) familiar with other wiktionaries could point out how the same problem may have been solved already in this second wiktionary, would I only know about the discussion...
Someone found out a while ago that several wiktionaries had made mistakes in their treatment of Irish nation names - and had to rise the same issue over and over and over again, once in each wiktionary where this user found this particular error.
Though I know meta - in theory at least - has been multilingual for quite some time, I'm not very active there and hence don't really know about how successful (or not) their attempts to deal with large numbers of extensive multilingual discussions have been. (Perhaps someone could enlighten me?)
Of course I understand that there are some serious complications with any attempt of a "multilingual discussion" - maybe most importantly the continuous need to translate things, but I guess there also will be issues with various wiktionaries wanting to arrange things in very different manners.
Now the question is: would anyone be interested in trying to follow a multilingual discussion of their favourite language if it took place in meta or on another site than they ordinarily work on? Or would such an attempt be considered as an attempt of *someone* (=outsiders) to decide how "my" wiktonary is run?
Comments?
Regards, \Mike
(p.s. This actually makes me regret that we basically decided to split the wiktionaries according to the user interface language and not according to "content language", way back in 2003/2004 or whenever the first two non-English wiktionaries were created.... :/ Well, no point crying over spilled milk.)
I'm \Mike.
You'll find me at [[wikt:sv:Användare:Mike]], [[wikt:en:User:Mike]] and
elsewhere.
Since each Wiktionary project aims to define every word in every language, a single multilingual project would be more optimal than the current division per-interface language.
Interestingly, such a project has already started (albeit, not under the auspices of Wikimedia Foundation): http://www.omegawiki.org/
This project was started by Wikimedians and is almost identical to the aims of Wiktionary. The main difference is that omegawiki is based on a more dictionary-friendly version of MediaWiki, allowing definitions in different languages to be attached to an expression. The user selects their preferred language and definitions in this language are presented first.
One issue is the project works in a different way, it is not possible to simply transfer Wiktionary contents into it. To embrace omegawiki, we'd have to phase out Wiktionary in its current state. I think omegawiki as Wiktionary 2.0 is a controversial idea among many Wiktionarians, though I can't give you any more details on that.
A unified multilingual project could make progress far more quickly. That omegawiki is based on WikiData also makes it more flexible and useful (as part of the semantic web, for researchers, for end-users, for contributors, &c.) Also, because users from different languages aggregate together, correctness of spelling and definition is more likely.
Are there long-term plans to bring omegawiki under Wikimedia Foundation? Do Wiktionarians oppose this? Do omegawiki-people oppose this? Does the Foundation oppose this?
-- Oldak Quill (oldakquill@gmail.com) _______________________________________________ Wiktionary-l mailing list Wiktionary-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wiktionary-l