Dear all,

We would like to inform you about the project Wiktionary Meets Matica Srpska [1]. This project aims to increase support for Open Knowledge / Free Content movement through establishing long term strategic partnership with the venerable cultural institution Matica Srpska [2] and to increase the quality, accuracy and volume of Wiktionaries through digitization of two dictionaries, while developing a potential model for future development of cooperation across Wiktionaries through targeted mobilization of the communities.

There are two activities within the project that we need your support for. First, we are preparing a list of lexicographical terms (it would contain approximately 100 terms) that needs to be translated into as many languages as possible, in order to ensure further work on the project and to create the foundations for other lexicographical projects in the future. For this task, we would use a separate application, but all of the terms would be inserted into Wiktionaries, as well (making approximately 10,000 new entries per Wiktionary, counting that the terminology would be translated into 100 languages). That would also serve as the preparation for translating the Serbian Ornithological dictionary, which is the second activity.

The Serbian ornithological dictionary encompasses all local names of birds living on the Serbian speaking territory. All names are specified under the appropriate Latin name in accordance with the contemporary classification system. This creates the opportunity to translate it easily to various languages, since the basic list of terms is in Latin and it is fairly small (370 species of birds).

We would like to try and motivate as many Wiktionary communities as possible to participate in translating these two dictionaries, especially since the benefit for each particular Wiktionary would be great - for example, if we succeed to motivate people from 100 Wiktionaries to participate, the amount of primary entries to these 100 Wiktionaries would be 3,700,000 (37,000 per Wiktionary). If we succeed to motivate just 20 Wiktionaries, the amount of entries to these 20 Wikitionaries would be 148,000 basic entries. Of course, these entries would be incorporated into the respective Wiktionaries according to the interest and the rules of each community.

With this project, we are opening cooperation with the venerable Serbian cultural institution Matica srpska and we believe that this partnership will have major impact on future cooperation between Wikimedia organizations and similar institutions in Slavic countries. If this cooperation could be relevant to any other partnership you are trying to establish in your country or globally, we would be more than willing to share our knowledge and contacts.

Besides support in translation, we are open for Wikimedia volunteers to participate more substantially and thus build knowledge inside of the community on how to deal with this kind of data. For example, if you are willing to join the core team and help us in communication with the Wiktionary communities of the languages which you are speaking, please contact Milica (milica.gudovic@yahoo.com) or Milos (millosh@gmail.com) via email. The same goes if you are willing to contribute by coding in Python and/or PHP.

Please join us on project's discussion page [3] or send us an e-mail. If you are willing to participate but are not sure in your knowledge of English please check the list of languages organizational team is speaking - there is a chance we can communicate in your native language.

We are very excited about this projects and hope that you will be part of it as well!

Looking forward to hear from you!

Milica Gudovic

[1]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Interglider.ORG/Wiktionary_Meets_...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matica_srpska

[3]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:PEG/Interglider.ORG/Wiktionary_M...