Tuesday, June 26, 2007

What language would be the one that provides the DefinedMeaning

At OmegaWiki we are of the opinion that the most valuable resource we have is the time of our contributors. It was what motivated to think beyond Wiktionary. We were wasting our time because we were not only interested in only one language. What we were working on was nice, but it was hard work to be relevant and we were with too few people to do the work well.

Now that we have OmegaWiki, we can enter data once and it is there for everyone. We now already have over 3.000 Expressions in Georgian, they are available to people in a Georgian, an English, a Dutch and many more interfaces. This makes OmegaWiki more relevant for Georgian then the Georgian Wiktionary; it has only 34 articles. We have some 11.000 Italian Expressions, this is roughly equivalent to the number of articles in the Italian Wiktionary that are actually about an Italian word. Our Expressions are available in all those user interfaces..

We are open to work together with other organisations, people. This is something that is also a standard practice in the Wiktionaries; much of the content is from different sources and is uploaded by bot. It is however sad that once the data has been imported, it is no longer possible to contribute back to the original source.

We are discussing how to collaborate with a great resource with more than 50.000 concepts in one of the major African languages with translations in English. This will get us enough concepts to have a relevant amount of content in two languages. The point is, they create their data in a completely different way; people suggest a word with a definition and an editor validates it and publishes it. So what could such a collaboration look like..

Well when our community adds content in this language, it can be seen as a suggestion to their editor. With new content accepted by the editor, it can be added to their database. Now here is the bit that some may find controversial; they have the copyright to their database and our choice of the CC-by license makes this collaboration possible. They retain their copyright, their license. This is not possible with the GFDL.

When we are going to import this data, what language would be the one that provides the defining Expression and the defining Definition.. I would say this African language :)

Thanks,
GerardM

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