Rosetta Panglossia - A Wiki of The World's Languages

The Rosetta Collection is public and open - this means anyone can create new tools, mashups, interfaces using information stored in the collection. The collection has two main repositories:

Rosetta Collection in The Internet Archive All Rosetta media files and documents about the languages of the world now reside in a special collection at The Internet Archive. Information is organized by language, and identified by name as well as three-letter ISO code (an international standard identifier).

Rosetta Base in Freebase The Rosetta Base is a open public collection of data about languages of the world. It includes all of the languages in ISO 639-3 as well as language families and subgroups that denote descent from a common linguistic ancestor (we call these entities "Languoids").

Using these two repositories, Kurt Bollacker created and populated a wiki of the world's languages which we've dubbed Rosetta Panglossia. As you can see on this page for the French Language, the main elements of the page include:

1. A language description taken from Wikipedia if one exists (we rectified the approximately 600 language pages in Wikipedia to Rosetta Base data)
2. An overview section supplied with linked Freebase data (not strictly part of the Rosetta Base)
3. A language location map harvested with the permission of the LL-Map project
4. Language classification taxonomy structured by Rosetta Base language relationship data
5. Documents and media files from the Rosetta Collection in the Internet Archive

The site currently represents a static data push from Freebase and the Rosetta Collection in the Internet archive. In the future, we expect to have sections of the page that are wiki-editable (like the language description), while other aspects of each page (like ISO code, classification taxonomy) would be data pushed from Freebase. The site is therefore more constrained in its structure, content and interface than a regular Wikipedia page.

If you are working on your own mashup of Rosetta Project data or interested in building one, please let us know. We will use this space to feature user-contributed tools and visualizations.