Saturday, November 15, 2008

In need of more glue

Wikipedia is about encyclopaedic content. Articles about the same concept are connected by "InterWiki" links. Links may exist to the Wiktionary in the same language for lexical information and when there are many files in Commons, there may be a link to Commons as well. These connections are the glue that bind the projects, and the languages together. They add real value to the projects. This value is already recognised in the way the search engine now provides links to sister projects in the same language.

The links between projects are extremely valuable. Some are inferred as in the search engine and some are made explicit as in the InterWiki links. When you read an article in a language where the article is only a stub, you can find more information through the interwiki links.

Everything should be linked in order to provide the best information and to make life easier for our readers, we should not forget the projects with little or no content. For them there is no place to make these connections. For these languages the least amount of information is not available anyway therefore the challenge is to provide a place where they can start connecting information for their people.

OmegaWiki starts with a concept. This concept is defined in a language and on average nine tranlsations are known for it. When a language is added, slowly but surely a web of connected starts to build. Links to Commons, links to Wikipedia articles in other languages and links to other concepts in OmegaWiki.


When the Wikimedia Foundation has sufficient resources, it may consider to support the not supported languages in this way. OmegaWiki proves that its concept works.

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Thanks,
GerardM

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