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.

OmegaWiki is a formal multilingual dictionary based on MediaWiki extension 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.

Gerard Meijssen, the founder of OmegaWiki project, doesn't have anything against adopting it as a Wikimedia project.

Feel free to discuss as well as to edit this page by adding your ideas.

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.

  Please explain this, I didn't understand anything here. One billion entries per each Wiktionary? Etc. Nemo 22:24, 19 July 2010 (UTC)

   :) Yes. I'll give the example through Serbian (Croatian, Bosnian) language, as a synthetic language with moderate number of inflected forms. The biggest dictionary of Serbian language has ~500.000 words. It can be said that Serbian language has around 1M of words. Every noun in Serbian has two numbers and seven cases, thus 14 semantically different forms, but usually ~10 different phonological forms. Every adjective has ~200 semantically different forms (probably ~100 phonological forms) and every verb has ~500 semantically different forms (probably ~200 phonological forms). So, without going into proverbs and their forms, we can easily have 100M of articles. And all Wiktionaries are multilingual dictionaries, too. As Wiktionary is a multilingual dictionary, too, Serbian Wiktionary need to add just 10 more similar synthetic languages (let's say, just other Slavic languages) to reach 1 billion of articles. (Thus, not 100, I've made mistake in counting first time.) So, all of the Wiktionaries are in that sense fully redundant. Instead of solving that issue just once in OmegaWiki, we need to solve it ~200 times. --Millosh 06:23, 20 July 2010 (UTC)

• It is structured formally, and therefore easier to export to other dictionary projects/formats.
• It is possible to have the interface and add definitions and translations in any language without the burden of requesting the opening of a new project.
• ...

Disadvantages

• Philologists like more open form for dictionaries.
• OmegaWiki is distant from the wiki principle. Software fixes should make it closer.
• It could partially vampirize Wiktionary community.
• ...

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)
• As omega.wiktionary.org, maintaining something of the existing community tradition
• ...?

The above could be done step by step:

1. start by moving to omega.wiktionary.org
2. discuss what to do with www.wiktionary.org
3. consider ways to migrate existing wiktionary work into an omegawiki framework

   without necessarily losing the separate individual community policies / cafes

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.
• Sources of content should be verified (automatic imports from external sources with possibly non-compatible licenses may be happened).
• ...