Anthere, Jimbo, At this moment, we are in the position of getting the cooperation of all kinds of outside people with regard to Wiktionary. This is documented to a large extend on META and on the wiktionary-l mailinglist. Because of the quality of the data that we are allowed to enter and because of the quality of the persons that are involved, it would really help if we are able to import but also export wiktionary data using XML structures.
The benefits are: *We will open up to other open dictionary content for inclusion in wiktionary. *We will open up our content to other intrested parties. *The wiktionary content will not be only in our own "proprietary" format. *We will be able to import data from one wiktionary in the next. This will not only enhance the quality of the wiktionaries; it will also enhance the reputation of the wiktionaries. *We will prevent the duplication of effort. Much effort now goes in doing the same job over and over again. An example; the word "Nederlands" in nl:wiktionary has 68 exact translations; these words exist as well. Technically these words can be copied to ALL other wiktionaries. This is not possible at the moment. The human effort is huge and wasted as it can be automated.
When a consensus arrives on how to do this, it will also mean that some programming will be required. Without your backing, I expect that nothing is going to happen. When we have arrived at a road map, it will mean that a lot of work will be needed to make the wiktionary data conformant for inclusion in the new scheme and have the technique to get this done. We cannot reasonably ask this of the wiktionary community and the wikitech community when this road map is not co-owned by the wikimedia board.
Questions: *Acknowledge that you will consider this as being strategic to the development of Wiktionary. *Give a timeframe in which we will know that we can plan with a reasonable chance of getting things implemented. (basically when will we have an answer to the first question)
Thanks, Gerard Meijssen (GerardM)