Organizing the Ultimate Wiktionary project

WiktionaryZ is going to be big. It is going to be seriously big. It is going to attract serious attention. It is likely to attract serious attention and it will because it already does. At first it was primarily a technological challenge; can we combine the data that is in the different language Wiktionaries. The open nature of these projects made them a combination of lexicological, terminological and thesaurus data.

We ended up with a design that will allow for a lot of refinement. However many people who looked at it think it has great potential. Ultimate Wiktionary, the project, is our dream. As we worked on it for the last year and a half we understood more and more the pent up demand that exists for information that can be stored in our project.

Our dreams are big. We want to realise them. We are fortunate as we are associated with the best organisation to make this happen, the Wikimedia Foundation. It has a great reputation, it has a great community and what they do with Wikipedia is astounding.

From an organisational point of view, the Wikipedia project will be different from the WiktionaryZ project. Wikipedia is community driven; they create the data they finance the project. WiktionaryZ will be different because much of the data that will be included already exists. Many organisations struggle while maintaining their resources. For WiktionaryZ the opportunity exists to focus all this energy in one place.

The development of WiktionaryZ was made possible by organisations supporting our effort. Kennisnet, a WMF partner, provided the initial investment. The Universität Bamberg was the second organisation to help. More work needs to be done and there are more organisations that are willing to collaborate technically and who are willing to share their resources to make WiktionaryZ happen.

WiktionaryZ is going to be big. I made the bet that we will need in the first year of full-featured production two hundred thousand EURO (not US$) in servers. There are people that have told me that my “guestimation” is on the low end.. :)

People that work on content are and will be attributed in the normal way; it can and will be found in the history of the content. Organisations that prove to be partners of our project could be credited on the left hand side and may end up under the toolbox. A link will refer to a page about our partner.

Our project is as much about collaboration as any of the other Wikimedia projects. There is however no other project where organisations will play such an important role. This calls for a different way of organisation their effort. I propose therefore to combine these organisations in a consortium that will be the focal point for the contributions of organisations.

The WiktionaryZ consortium will have two functions; managing the collaboration of organisations and finding the resources to make WiktionaryZ possible.

Thanks,
GerardM