[Foundation-l] Adopting OmegaWiki as Wikimedia project

[Milos Rancic]

(Just poking foundation-l, please continue with discussion at
wiktionary-l, or, better, at Meta [1])

During Wikimania I asked Gerard Meijssen would he be willing to give
OmegaWiki to Wikimedia. He said that he doesn't have anything against
it: software is free, content is free. More precisely, he told to me
"Take it!" :)

My initial idea was that it would be the best to replace all
Wiktionaries with OmegaWiki. However, the last day of Wikimania I was
talking with one Swedish guy who is working on Swedish Wiktionary. He
has complained that philologists like more open form for writing
dictionary. Thus, my suggestion is to adopt OmegaWiki as one of
Wiktionaries, probably as http://wiktionary.org/, similarly to the
multilingual Wikisource.

And, of course, before possible adoption we need discussion and some
software improvements of Wikidata extension.

[1] - http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Adopt_OmegaWiki

* * *

As multilingual projects are not in the scope of the [[Language
committee]], before the implementation (or not) of the idea, community
should discuss about it.

[http://www.omegawiki.org/ OmegaWiki] is a formal multilingual
dictionary based on MediaWiki extension
[[:mw:Extension:Wikidata|Wikidata]].

No matter would it be the only Wiktionary or it would be just one of
the Wiktionaries, OmegaWiki would raise quality of Wiktionaries. At
the other side, the project would get much more attention as a
Wikimedia project.

Wikidata extension should be improved (from user experience and
linguistic points of view) before implementation as Wikimedia project.

[[User:GerardM|Gerard Meijssen]], the founder of OmegaWiki project,
doesn't have anything against adopting it as a Wikimedia project.

== Advantages and disadvantages of adopting OmegaWiki ==

=== Advantages ===
* It is possible to create one billion entries per Wiktionary: All
synthetic languages could import at least ~10M of words, but probably
more if all common phrases are counted. Thus, it means that we need
just 100 synthetic or polysynthetic languages to create one billion
entries per Wiktionary. This is very large number and while it is
possible to keep technically one such project, presently it is hardly
possible to keep a number of projects with more than billion of
entries.
* It is structured formally.
* ...

=== Disadvantages ===
* Philologists like more open form for dictionaries.
* OmegaWiki is distant from the wiki principle. Software fixes should
make it closer.
* ...

== How to adopt OmegaWiki ==
* Instead of all Wiktionaries.
* As www.wiktionary.org, like www.wikisource.org is the place for
multilingual Wikisource.
* As mul.wiktionary.org (ISO 639-5 code for multilingual entities)
* ...?

== Minimums for adopting OmegaWiki ==

=== If OmegaWiki replaces all Wiktionaries ===
* Evaluation of software by linguists and adding necessary linguistic features.
* Fixing bugs in software if needed.
* Adding all needed features to satisfy philological needs.
* Importing all data from Wiktionaries.

=== If OmegaWiki becomes one of the Wiktionaries ===
* Evaluation of software by linguists and adding necessary linguistic features.
* Fixing bugs in software if needed.

== Licensing ==

OmegaWiki licences are CC-BY and GFDL. It is a bit of pleonasm, as
CC-BY is a subset of GFDL (and CC-BY-SA as well).

* Licensing should probably stay CC-BY, not CC-BY-SA. There is a legal
problem of copyrighting words, phrases, sentences and definitions,
which mean that it would be probably better to leave the least
restrictive license as the OmegaWiki license.
* ...

[[Category:Requests for comments]]