Project Wiktionary Meets Matica Srpska

Dear all,

We would like to inform you about the project Wiktionary Meets Matica 
Srpska [1]. This project aims to increase support for Open Knowledge / 
Free Content movement through establishing long term strategic 
partnership with the venerable cultural institution Matica Srpska [2] 
and to increase the quality, accuracy and volume of Wiktionaries through 
digitization of two dictionaries, while developing a potential model for 
future development of cooperation across Wiktionaries through targeted 
mobilization of the communities.


There are two activities within the project that we need your support 
for. First, we are preparing a list of lexicographical terms (it would 
contain approximately 100 terms) that needs to be translated into as 
many languages as possible, in order to ensure further work on the 
project and to create the foundations for other lexicographical projects 
in the future. For this task, we would use a separate application, but 
all of the terms would be inserted into Wiktionaries, as well (making 
approximately 10,000 new entries per Wiktionary, counting that the 
terminology would be translated into 100 languages). That would also 
serve as the preparation for translating the Serbian Ornithological 
dictionary, which is the second activity.


The Serbian ornithological dictionary encompasses all local names of 
birds living on the Serbian speaking territory. All names are specified 
under the appropriate Latin name in accordance with the contemporary 
classification system. This creates the opportunity to translate it 
easily to various languages, since the basic list of terms is in Latin 
and it is fairly small (370 species of birds).


We would like to try and motivate as many Wiktionary communities as 
possible to participate in translating these two dictionaries, 
especially since the benefit for each particular Wiktionary would be 
great - for example, if we succeed to motivate people from 100 
Wiktionaries to participate, the amount of primary entries to these 100 
Wiktionaries would be 3,700,000 (37,000 per Wiktionary). If we succeed 
to motivate just 20 Wiktionaries, the amount of entries to these 20 
Wikitionaries would be 148,000 basic entries. Of course, these entries 
would be incorporated into the respective Wiktionaries according to the 
interest and the rules of each community.


With this project, we are opening cooperation with the venerable Serbian 
cultural institution Matica srpska and we believe that this partnership 
will have major impact on future cooperation between Wikimedia 
organizations and similar institutions in Slavic countries. If this 
cooperation could be relevant to any other partnership you are trying to 
establish in your country or globally, we would be more than willing to 
share our knowledge and contacts.


Besides support in translation, we are open for Wikimedia volunteers to 
participate more substantially and thus build knowledge inside of the 
community on how to deal with this kind of data. For example, if you are 
willing to join the core team and help us in communication with the 
Wiktionary communities of the languages which you are speaking, please 
contact Milica ([email protected]) or Milos ([email protected]) 
via email. The same goes if you are willing to contribute by coding in 
Python and/or PHP.


Please join us on project's discussion page [3]  or send us an e-mail. 
If you are willing to participate but are not sure in your knowledge of 
English please check the list of languages organizational team is 
speaking - there is a chance we can communicate in your native language.


We are very excited about this projects and hope that you will be part 
of it as well!


Looking forward to hear from you!


Milica Gudovic


[1]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:PEG/Interglider.ORG/Wiktionary_Meets_Matica_Srpska

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matica_srpska

[3]https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants_talk:PEG/Interglider.ORG/Wiktionary_Meets_Matica_Srpska




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