Sunday, January 15, 2006

Who is going to write the first blog .... that was the question.

Well ... I just thought I could write some notes on WiktionaryZ here.

Almost one and half a year ago there was that Dutch Wiktionarian, GerardM, who posted loads of, at that time, not understandable templates on the Italian wiktionary. Hmmm ... and what does a good wiktionarian do? He/she asks for clarification. Well, so I learnt that those templates where there just to reduce "workload" and that was something I was thinking about myself as well (not knowing templates my thoughts went completely different ways). And that day - it was the 30th of August 2004 was the starting point for this very particular projekt, known with its work name as Ultimate Wiktionary.

WiktionaryZ will provide a unique place for lexicological data, but not only. It is impossible to describe it in just a few words. Imagine all you can imagine in an online dictionary and you will only think about a small percentage of it.

Gerard and me dreamt that dream for some time - started to work on simplifying things ... then definitely Ultimate Wiktionary became a project and Gerard had a meeting with Kennisnet who were ready to pay 5.000 EUR for the programming of UW ... well Erik Moeller accepted :-) from that moment on we were in three.

Now you will ask yourself where we are today ... well, we have a nice name, WiktionaryZ, we have a subset of the software with the GEMET-data online (http://epov.org/wd-gemet/index.php/Main_Page) - it is a read-only version for now, but it is the first "visible" result of Erik's hard work. The database design ... well I let this to Gerard ... it is somewhat toooooooo huge to explain :-)

Being only in three was not enough to assure what needs to be assured (I like this sentence :-) and so there is that commission including some more people who hopefully will introduce themselves here and will write about their view.

Well ... now it is up to you, dear reader, to ask questions ... and it is up to my colleagues to write ... that's why writing the first entry of a blog sometimes is quite a favourable thingie ... you do not need to tell everything since you "must" leave something to others as well.

Thanks for taking the time!

Sabine

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