Under the Christmas tree

On Christmas Eve, by magic presents appear under the Christmas tree. The great thing is the suspense. The suspense of what will it be or the suspense of how a particular present will be appreciated. Presents under the tree, Christmas wishes presented in many ways, it is a festive moment.

Well what do we find under our virtual Christmas tree. Today I received an e-mail from Erik who wants meat on the bones of his present. He does want to have "versioned tables" to be included even though the main purpose is that we have something to show :) . It is still very much intended to be on-line in the coming day/days.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with Jimmy Wales. We discussed many things. I was really happy to learn that he considers it necessary to have "committees" that take care for the board of Wikimedia Foundation projects that do not get the attention that they do deserve. Wiktionary would be one of these projects.

In the last month many things have happened, I hinted so some and not to others. Some of the highlights are the potential cooperation with several organisations. Two of these I want to highlight; the GEvTerm project and the ProZ organisation.

• GEvTerm is based on a great idea; when you have an international event somewhere. It will mean that many people will congregate to one place. They need to communicate but it cannot be expected that all people share one common language. The idea of GEvTerm is to concentrate on translations that are associated with the particular event and make it available to ease the human interaction.
• ProZ is a member based organisation of professional translators. It serves the largest community of translators. Proz has been active building glossaries, they have their kudoz where colleagues can help out with particular problematic translations. They were about to create their own dictionary and we were lucky to get into contact with them through Sabine who is a ProZ member. We are now talking on how we can create one fabulous resource together.

As these are only two wonderfull opportunities, you will appreciate that a consortium of likeminded organisations will realise an even bigger potential to bring a resource with lexicological, terminological and thesaurus information that is there to be used Freely.

I wish everyone the most joyous of Christmases..
Thanks,
GerardM