Tremendous Wiktionary User Group/Annual Report 2019

Report of the Tremendous Wiktionary User Group for the third year: September 2018 to September 2019.

Report edit

The group edit

Started during Wikimania 2016, this User Group went recognized on September 26 the same year. After a year it reaches 42 affiliates, after two, 49 members, after three, 57 members.

Content creation edit

During this third year, Jberkel made the first talk about Wiktionary in itWikiCon. Noé made a whole course in French to teach during 6h Wiktionary to a class in a Master of Lexicography.

The user group welcomes the Wikimedia Foundation's grants to the Wiki Kouman project. This support has already allowed the addition of a few hundred words in local languages spoken in Ivory Coast. These languages are currently under-represented on the Internet and initiatives such as Wiki Kouman demonstrate the interest of the Wiktionary in the preservation, documentation and dissemination of minority languages.

Internal communication edit

During this third year, we had almost no conversations between the members of the group. In September 2019, Pamputt opened a dedicated space in Wikimedia Space to start something there.


Activities edit

LexiSession edit

We still promote LexiSession as a monthly dynamics for each Wiktionary. Publicity was made mainly in French and results are compiled on Meta. August to August: at least 32 participants (some of them being part of the User Group), 15 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 needs more dissemination in different languages for the monthly announcements. This action will continue with the same process, hoping to be more popular with the time going.

Actualités edit

French Wiktionary Actualités is a monthly news page about the project. It was translated in English during few months in the past but without any feedbacks from other community, translations stopped. 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 edit

There was a Wiktionary meet-up at Wikimania 2019.

The WikiConvention francophone 2019 hosted a talk on Wiktionary in Africa, a talk on feedback on Wikidata-Wiktionary lack of collaboration and a workshop about Wiktionary's thesaurus

Outreach edit

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 Wikimedia France chapter. This year, French Wiktionary community had a roll-up banner.

Meta and WMF activities edit

We took part in the 2019 Community Wishlist Survey to promote seven proposals. The most supported idea, Insert attestation exploiting Wikisource as a corpus was supported by 36 peoples and reach the rank 76.

Info-farmer went to the Wikimedia Summit in Berlin in behalf of the User Group.


Publicity of this report edit

Notifications may be send after publication to the most active Wiktionaries.

Plan for 2019-2020 edit

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 inbetween members. Wikimedia Space could be a good place for it.