Open Kids Dictionary

textbook-l received a cool email today. Karen Fasimpaur, an occasional Wikibooks contributor and open-education activist, wrote to tell us about an open dictionary project that's aimed at children and K-12 education: http://dictionary.k12opened.com. This website seems neat by itself, but what's really cool is the new glossary tool which hopefully could be adapted for use at Wikibooks. We're always talking about increasing our suite of book-building tools, and a glossary builder tool would be a great thing for us to have.

One thing that we at Wikibooks have been kicking around for a while, but have not been able to get developed, is some kind of system for extracting metadata from the pages of a book (word definitions for a glossary, references for a unified bibliography, keywords and terms for an index, etc) and displaying that data on a separate page. Think about our tags, but instead of having the references appear at the , it would appear on a separate page entirely. Now, extend that same concept to be more general, not just for references but for bibliography, indices, glossary, etc. It's a big and ambitious feature request to be sure.

Anyway, if you have some spare time today you should head down to the Kids Open Dictionary project and take a look around. Their project is all PD, so content reuse in Wikimedia-world shouldn't be a big problem. I wonder if some kind of synergy would be possible between them and Wiktionary? Maybe we could get some of our precious few Wikijunior enthusiasts interested as well.