Proposal:Multilingual Wiktionary
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- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content
- Increase Participation
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
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Summary
The Wiktionary project, as it stands, is duplicating a lot of information across different languages. A multilingual Wiktionary has already been proposed, and adoption of this or a similar proposal would be a great benefit to all Wiktionaries.
Proposal
At present, the goal of the Wiktionary projects is to create a database of dictionary entries in all languages for words in all languages. Unlike standard dictionaries, which cover only one language, Wiktionaries aim to cover all dictionaries (including bilingual dictionaries and, for some projects, thesauri) in one project. This undoubtedly means some information will be repeated across different Wiktionaries, such as translations and word forms. If this information could be stored in a central database or other data storage mechanism, for all Wiktionaries to access, the project would undoubtedly be much better off.
This is not a new idea, nor a new proposal:
- A site with a similar goal exists at [1]. See the Meta page on OmegaWiki for more Wiktionary-specific information.
- A project by the name of Multilingual Wiktionary already exists on Incubator, very similar to OmegaWiki.
Motivation
Wiktionaries currently have differing levels of content in certain languages. For example, English Wiktionary has many Finnish translations, and Italian has recently overtaken English as the most represented language. Other Wiktionaries may have similar strengths and weaknesses. A central data store could help to make this data easily accessible to other languages.
Key Questions
- What level of integration would we want? One Wiktionary for everything? A central MySQL server? A central wiki?
- How would current data be migrated to any new database?
- How would data be integrated into Wiktionaries, if a central data store were to be used?
- Would Wiktionary projects be interested in participating?
- Would it make editing and contributing easier or more difficult?
- How would lexical differences in languages be overcome?
Potential Costs
- Setup of a new wiki/MySQL server
- Writing extensions to the software (possibly)
- A lot of work put in to migrate data (not necessarily a monetary cost, but a cost to Wiktionary editors)
Community Discussion
Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal Talk:Multilingual Wiktionary.
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