Tremendous Wiktionary User Group/Annual Report 2018/ug-arab
Report of the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group for the second year: September 2017 to September 2018.
Report
The group
Started during Wikimania 2016, this User Group went recognized on September 26. After a year it reaches 42 affiliates and after two, 49 members.
Content creation
During this second year, TWUG members did not produce any new shared material on Meta. Several slides were produced but only in French, such as Enjoy Wiktionary (S’amuser dans le Wiktionnaire) workshop support slides.
Internal communication
During this second year, we encountered some trouble to communicate inside the group. After some effort, a template were created to ping TWUG participants, but someone did not accept the use of this template and request a deletion. Since then, there is no convenient way to notify TWUG participants and internal activity in Meta stopped. Of course, most of the participants are more active on a Wiktionary rather than on Meta. This is a challenge for the third year to find a way to solve this issue and to build a way to communicate inside the User Group.
Wikidata:Wiktionary debates
One topic of debate was the creation of a new project about lexicography. Several participant of the User Group went to Wikidata pages to participate in a discussion about the licencing footnote to integrate the new Lexeme namespace in CC0. Without a prior debate on the licencing of lexicographical data, most of the wiktionarian vote against this procedure. An attempt to sum-up the disagreement did not solve the issues raised by Wikidata project on lexicographical data. With the choice of CC0 licencing, no data from Wiktionary have been used in Wikidata and both project evolve without any contact nor interference.
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The Tremendous Wiktionary User Group welcomes the development of the Wiktionary Cognate Dashboard, a development specifically made for the Wiktionaries by a Wikimedia Germany developer. This tool provides to the Wiktionary contributors some statistics that can help them in their contributions. The user group hopes that further developments will follow in this field or others.
Activities
LexiSession
We promote LexiSession as a monthly dynamics for each Wiktionary. Publicity was made mainly in French, English and Spanish and results are compiled on Meta. August to August: at least 30 participants (some of them being part of the User Group), 19 large thesauri created in French Wiktionary, where this initiative is more known and followed.
This action is managed by very few people and have erratic results, depending on the topic. To be more effective, this action need more dissemination in different languages of the monthly announcements. This action will continue with the same process, planning to be more popular with the time going.
Actualités
French Wiktionary Actualités is a monthly news page about the project. It is translated in English since August 2016 and one of the editor will promote a conversation about wikipress at Wikiconvention francophone 2018 to discuss about the pro and con of this kind of publication for a project like Wiktionary.
It is not a publication by the User Group but it participates to the promotion of the projects and it's the only Wiktionary-related online newspaper.
Conferences
The User Group did not submit any proposal for Wikimania 2018 but took part of WikiIndaba conference 2018 with a talk on How to increase the visibility of minority languages in Wiktionary and offer a workshop for Wiktionary. A member of the user group attended to ESEAP Conference 2018 and discussed with some participants about the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group and the Wiktionary.
The WikiConvention francophone 2017 hosted a public presentation, a talk on sources and neutrality and a meet-up with about ten participants.
Outreach
There is not enough material to diffuse Wiktionary during fairs or conferences. There is very few slides in English to present Wiktionary. The page Wiktionary/Internal Communication suggests a leaflet and a draft for a poster, both in French, but no collaborative efforts were made yet to translate them and to work on a new material. This is due to the fact that other wiktionarians do not participate in public events where this kind of material is needed. French wiktionarians may support the creation of an easy-translatable support document for Wiktionaries, probably with the support of the chapter Wikimedia France.
Meta and WMF activities
We took part in the 2017 Community Wishlist Survey to promote eight proposals, twice more than the previous year. The most supported idea, Wikisource dictionaries for Wiktionary was supported by 40 peoples.
Psychoslave went to the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin in behalf of the User Group and Wiktionary interests and wrote an unpublished report.
The User Group did not participate as a group to the Strategy/Wikimedia movement/2017 but affiliates animated their own communities as for French Wiktionary (original in French). The User group did not endorse the strategic direction, mainly due to the lack of established processes to take a decision as a group.
Publicity of this report
Notifications will be send after publication to the most active Wiktionaries.
Plan for 2018-2019
As mentioned in the report, many actions have been planned since the beginning and most of them are still ongoing. A focus on documenting languages was planned but has had to be postponed for the future. Shorter-term activities will be to communicate more about the group on Wiktionaries and to build a better way to communicate inside the group.
