Grants talk:IEG/A graphical and interactive etymology dictionary based on Wiktionary/Midpoint

Midpoint Report accepted

Dear Epantaleo,

Thank you for submitting this midpoint report. I am accepting it now with the following comments:

• It sounds like you have been busy! I appreciate the detailed summary you have provided of all that you have accomplished so far. As someone with little technical expertise in this area, I especially appreciate the time you took to walk the reader through a specific example of how your project looks in application.
• I am glad to hear that you are setting up the same Virtuoso server on Wikimedia Labs. I think there is added value, beyond frequent updating, in doing this, since it places your project in the common space designated for experimental projects like yours, making collaboration and feedback easier within the Wikimedia community.
• You mentioned that you will fix divergent information about relations between words (i.e. WORD1 derivesFrom WORD2 and WORD2 derivesFrom WORD3, versus WORD1 derivesFrom WORD3) can be fixed using the assumption that the longest path is the true path. I'm curious to know more about this assumption. Is this a default assumption that would be likely to be supported by linguistic communities, or by the Wiktionary community? To my mind, it seems conceivable that the shorter path might just as easily be the correct one.
• You provided links (under the heading "Third step: Testing") for an interactive visualization developed during testing after querying the database for "dolor" and "coffee." Both links appear to be broken (I get a 404-Not found message). If you still have access to those visualizations, could you please update the links? I'm interested to see how the interactive elements work! In the meantime, thanks for providing the screenshots, which give me an idea of how the end product looks.
• If it's still relevant, let's talk about getting you a technical mentor who can point you to the specific resources you need (in terms of people, infrastructures or links, as you indicated).
• Please let me know if you have any need for further support around socializing your tool. I imagine there are multiple audiences that will be interested in the work you are doing!

Congratulations on all you've accomplished to date. Our Senior Grants Administrator, Janice Tud, will be in touch with you about next steps.

--Marti (WMF) (talk) 20:56, 10 January 2017 (UTC)

@Mjohnson (WMF): Thanks for your feedback! I am working hard to make this project live and the good thing is that I am getting encouraging results. I have fixed the links that did not work for you, and also now I have a live version that works better (on the tool page) - although I need to improve it.

I agree with you there is not an easy way to filter the data. I am thinking that for now I could leave the data as it is, without filtering, and let users decide which path makes more sense, e.g. by editing Wiktionary etymological definitions.

I think it would be great if I could socialize my tool, any idea is very welcome! I was thinking of the Wiki Workshop in 2017 WWW2017 although I am not sure I have enough resources for that. Something I have in mind is to give seminars in France and Italy (possibly Germany and England) where I have contacts of Wikimedia people.

If you have time maybe we could have a chat sometimes soon? Epantaleo (talk) 10:50, 26 January 2017 (UTC)