For those of you who haven't looked at WiktionaryZ lately, browse
around a bit on
http://wiktionaryz.org/
There are now about 50 users with access to our edit functions. For
those without access, these two screenshots show the functionality
that is currently there:
http://wiktionaryz.org/File:Wz-edit.png
Adding and removing translations/synonyms, relations, and attributes.
http://wiktionaryz.org/File:Wz-edit2.png
Editing and translating existing definitions.
Some of the functionality for generating these forms is already
abstracted in a way which will make it suitable for other Wikidata
(wiki-based structured data) applications. WiktionaryZ also uses the
existing namespace mechanism of MediaWiki in order to access its
relational tables, so that mechanisms like Special:Allpages work to
retrieve content.
Our biggest challenge is to define a model that allows us to deal with
the complex versioning requirements of relational data in an abstract
fashion. This is what much of my personal energy will be focused on in
the coming months. Other developers will concentrate on the UI bits,
on import/export interfaces, and on adding new lexicological and
ontological functionality.
We're still working with an old MediaWiki codebase because the
namespace manager code which we use is not yet merged into MediaWiki
proper. (BRIOOOON ;-) I hope to finish that process in the next couple
of weeks. At that point, we will create a new WiktionaryZ branch in
SVN so that any changes we make to the main MediaWiki code can be
effectively maintained. These changes are currently minimal, and I
think we can actually put them in the trunk once they have been made
sufficiently abstract and secure (e.g. making it possible to load any
PHP class for handling a particular namespace).
We currently have one more developer besides myself, not counting the
ongoing work on multilingual functionality for MediaWiki proper (mlmw
branch). Hopefully, we will soon have one or two additional
developers, and will also be able to bring in some open source
volunteers into our team. My own role is increasingly transitioning to
that of managing development and defining future strategy, which I am
very comfortable with. :-)
For those interested in the project, if all goes well, I will be
talking a lot about it at Wikimania's hacking days, as well as the
main conference. FWIW, I also hope that we will be able to build
strong and meaningful bridges to the Semantic MediaWiki project, which
is in many ways complementary to our own effort.
Erik
