Wikidata:Lexicographical data/Wiktionary FAQ

Why will this project be useful for Wiktionary editors?

Wiktionary contributors can—on an entry by entry basis, or based on a template—choose to take data from Wikidata and display it within Wiktionary. This way, for example, the Indonesian Wiktionary community can choose to populate Estonian entries from Wikidata instead of hoping for a sufficiently large sub-community of Indonesian Wiktionarians to create the project content about Estonian words. The data will be in one central place, where all projects can access it and where it has to be maintained only once.

In addition, making this data available in a structured machine-readable way will foster a tool ecosystem around Wiktionary. These tools will be useful for existing contributors, but also open up Wiktionary to many productive new contributors.

How can you put lexical information into a database?

The data model for Wiktionary is based on current research in lexicography and in analyzing the usage patterns on the Wiktionary projects. The data model is very flexible and will, as for Wikidata, be under the control of the community. Nevertheless, we don’t expect that all information from Wiktionary will be transferable to Wikidata—and that is expected.

In the end, if we can support a large amount of the data in Wikidata, that already can be extremely helpful to the Wiktionary communities and allow them to focus on the more challenging parts of the language within the respective communities. Wikidata does not have to be complete in order to be useful.

Why do we need the data to be machine-readable?

If we want to share the data between different Wiktionary communities, we need to have the data in a machine-readable form. It will also help with writing scripts that check the consistency and completeness of the data—Wikidata shows the large number of tests and constraints that have been written on top of Wikidata. Those would have been far too hard to write before Wikidata was available. Making the data accessible will help with increasing quality and coverage for the human reader and decreasing maintenance costs for the human contributors.

Many tools that people would like to build are currently impossible or too hard to build because of the lack of structured machine-readable data. While individual language versions of Wiktionary do structure their data to a certain extent, their structure is not uniform, and tools that should work on the data of all Wiktionaries cannot query it.

Will all the information be transferred from Wiktionary to Wikidata?

This is very unlikely, if not impossible. As stated above, it is expected that the data model in Wikidata will not be sufficient to express all lexical information that is currently in Wiktionary.

Wiktionary will always have more flexibility than Wikidata. There is plenty of content and community organization work that is being done on the Wiktionaries that cannot be transferred to Wikidata. Wikidata is just a tool to support the Wiktionary and other Wikimedia projects—it is not capable of replacing them, and it should not be used with that goal.

Will we be forced to make use of Wikidata’s data?

The Wikidata development team will not force any project, Wiktionary or others, to use Wikidata’s data, or force their editors to edit on Wikidata. It’s up to the individual projects and editors to decide which parts and what data from Wikidata will be useful for them.

The Wikidata development team’s understanding is that we provide the tools, and the editors decide whether to use them or not.

Will it be more difficult to contribute to Wiktionary?

If anything, it should be easier—albeit different. Many Wiktionary projects have a very strong reliance on templates, and it is clear that people who have spent considerable time using those templates have likely developed a certain affinity to these workflows. But such templates can also be a barrier for new contributors. It has been observed that many Wikimedia projects that integrated Wikidata into their editing workflow have received a significant influx of new contributors working on Wikidata-related tasks.

All Wiktionary contributors will be more than welcome on Wikidata, but they will also be able to stay within Wiktionary and do the work that is available there. In the end, Wikidata will hopefully be empowering to all current and future contributors to Wiktionary.

How can lexicographical data be inserted into Wiktionary?

This can be done using Lua modules. You can find links to detailed documentation on the page Wikidata:Wiktionary.