OmegaWiki

» see omegawiki.org as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

The plan was every word of every language, defined in every language. Gerard Meijssen started it on 27 December 2005 with Erik Möller and Sabine Cretella under the name Ultimate Wiktionary, and it spent 2006 being renamed twice, first to WiktionaryZ and then to OmegaWiki, largely to stop people filing it as one more Wiktionary.

I have never edited a wiki dictionary. What I recognize in this one is the argument, because it is the argument I have had at work about nearly every data model handed to me: somebody wants free text because it is fast to write, and somebody else wants normalized tables because in two years the free text will be unqueryable. OmegaWiki was the second person, in 2005, about human language.

It never got infrastructure to match the ambition. The database ran to about 750 megabytes across more than four hundred languages, on private servers with a gigabyte of memory, which is why the people who used it mostly remember it being slow.

The end was not recorded anywhere. Wikidata gives its dissolution date as unknown value. The last working capture of omegawiki.org in the Internet Archive is 9 July 2023, there are no captures at all during 2024, and when the crawler came back in June 2025 the server was answering 503. It still is.

~ the case file ~

~ definedmeaning ~

A Wiktionary stores pages. OmegaWiki stored tables. A word was an Expression, a meaning was a DefinedMeaning, and because those lived in separate tables of a relational database, one concept could carry translations in hundreds of languages without any single language being the host of it. Everything else about the project follows from that decision.

It ran on a MediaWiki extension called WikiLexicalData. Unlike the Wiktionaries of the period it let you take the whole dataset away in bulk, and people did, for translation memory tools and offline dictionary software.

~ the adoption that never came ~

OmegaWiki wanted to be a Wikimedia project and it asked to become one. The proposal on Meta requested that the Foundation adopt it, and argued that it would coexist with the Wiktionaries rather than replace them, on the grounds that a Wiktionary is the better tool for a monolingual dictionary while OmegaWiki was the better one for translation.

The request for comment stayed open for years. It was closed in August 2021 with the words: no conclusion was reached. By then the thing it had been asking for had been built by somebody else.

~ what came after ~

In 2006 Erik Möller stood for the Wikimedia board and wrote up what he was working on. The goal with WiktionaryZ, he said, was not only to build something more powerful than the existing Wiktionaries, a system operating on relational data rather than flat wiki pages, but to construct a general Wikidata framework which could enrich wiki pages with structured data and act as a central repository for concepts in all languages.

Wikidata launched under that name in October 2012. In 2018 it began holding lexemes, which are words and their senses, stored relationally and shared across languages rather than owned by one. The whole OmegaWiki argument now runs inside Wikimedia at a scale OmegaWiki never came close to. The site that made the argument was sitting on a server with a gigabyte of RAM, and it answered its last request some time between July 2023 and June 2025.

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