OmegaWiki and universities

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

OmegaWiki is intended to be a resource for all people of all languages. To truly achieve this goal, we need to achieve a tipping point for each and every language. We need to have so many words, so many defined meanings and so many translations that people will know that we provide a reasonable resource. A resource that people will be willing to improve by adding and improving content.

Much research has been done on many languages. Many universities are involved in the fields in this kind of research and every now and then you hear about this like the recent South American language that was newly described that did not have words for the numbers. Much information has been gathered and is known within many universities. Often this information is even confined to these Universities most often not by design but by happenstance.

Many universities are in the process of opening up much of their material to the world. When they do this, it is a great improvement but you still need to be able to find it. The great thing of the Wikimedia Foundation is, that it is considered by many as an honest broker. OmegaWiki is a project to aggregate all lexicological information.

Universities often have many of these resources. They have also spend a considerable amount of research in improving this information over many years. When these resources become generally available, it may help the people that speak these languages; it will often be a start towards a translation dictionary, it may help in the creation of a spell checker. When it helps us create a dictionary in languages like Nepali, Swahili or Bambara or any other it will bring our aim to bring knowledge to all the people of this world one step closer.

It is therefore that I would like to get into contact with universities and explain why we would appreciate their cooperation. We would not come empty handed because OmegaWiki is intended to be a resource that we hope will be of interest to the universities as well.