I very much agree with Lydia and Nemo that there should not be a separate Wikibase instance for Wiktionary data. Having a single community in a single project, and not having to vote for admins here and there, have two different watchlists, have documentation be repeated, policies being rediscussed, etc. sounds like a smart move. Also, the Item-data and the Lexical-data would be much tighter connected than with any other project, and queries should be able to seamlessly work between them.
The only reason Commons is proposed to have its own instance is because the actual multimedia files are there, and the community caring about those files is there and should work in one place. If there was only a single Wiktionary project, it might also be worth to consider having the structured data there - but since there are more than 150 editions of Wiktionary, a centralized place makes more sense. And since we already have Wikidata for that, I don't see the advantage of splitting the potential communities.
On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 8:35 AM Luca Martinelli martinelliluca@gmail.com wrote:
2015-05-08 15:33 GMT+02:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com:
+1. The Wikimedia community has been long able to think of all the
Wikimedia
projects as an organic whole. Software, on the other hand, too often
forced
innatural divisions.
Wiktionary, Wikipedia, Commons and Wikiquote (to name the main cases)
link
to each other all the time in a constructive division of labour. It
makes no
sense to make connections between them harder.
I start from here, since Nemo got the point IMHO: the fact that every project has its own scope doesn't imply that the whole of the community works on different scopes - we just decided to split up our duties among ourselves. But it's not just that.
TL;DR: Wikidata and Wiktionary deal with the same things (concepts), therefore are best-suited for each other, given some needed adaptations. Structured Data and Structured Wikiquote deal with different things (objects), therefore are not to be considered good examples.
Long version here:
In theory, one might just agree that a separate instance of Wikibase might be the best solution for Wiktionary, but Structured Data and Structured Wikiquote are different from a theoretical "Structured Wiktionary", because they respectively deal with images, quotes and words.
Images and quotes are describable *objects*, as the Wiki* articles/pages are, and there are billions and billions of those objects out there. This is the main, if not just the only, reason why we *have* to put up a separate instance of Wikibase to deal with them: thinking that Wikidata might deal with such an infinite task is just nuts.
Words, on the other hands, are describable *concepts*, not objects. They can be linked one another by relation, they have synonyms and opposites, they can be regrouped or separated, etcetera, which is exactly what we're currently doing with Wikidata items.
I know, words are even more than images and quotes, so it would be even more nuts to think to deal with this just with Wikidata - but Wikidata is *already* structured for dealing with concepts, making it the best choice for integrating data from Wiktionary.
In other words, Wikidata and Wiktionary both work with *concepts*, while all the other projects work with *objects*. From a more practical point of view, why should I have a Wikidata item about, say, present tense[1] *AND* a completely similar item on "Structured Wiktionary"? It's the same concept, why should I have it in two different-yet-linked databases, belonging to and maintained by the very same community? Why can't we work something out to keep all informations just in one database?
This is why I think that setting up a separate Wikibase for Wiktionary might end up in doubling our efforts and splitting our communities, which is exactly the opposite of what we need to do (halving the efforts and doubling the community).[2]
Sorry for the long post. :)
[1] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q192613 [2] Not sure if I have to remark this, but please, PLEASE, note this is just an exaggeration for argument's sake, I have of course no data that might confirm factually that the WD community will surge by 100%. I just want to make clear my concept (heh).
-- Luca "Sannita" Martinelli http://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utente:Sannita
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