[Creating a stub task for reference. Will expand later.]
In previous years ([[ https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?oldid=1163610#2012-11-06 | 2012 ]], [[ https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?oldid=1163610#2013-03-monthly | 2013]], [[ http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.org.wikimedia.wikidata/1856 | 2013 discussion]]), I've looked into how to improve Wikimedia [[ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Glossary | glossaries ]] to make them more useful. The glossaries were expanded and consolidated a bit, but there's still a lot of work to do before they're as useful as they could be. One particular hurdle is that it's difficult to maintain translatable glossaries.
Translatable and queriable glossaries would provide more flexibility in how their content can be reused in various forms and places. For example, @eloquence suggested that we could use glossaries to show tooltips-like information (similar to [[https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Reference_Tooltips | Reference tooltips]]) for technical terms. This could help users better understand technical updates and could complement our efforts to [[ https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Tech/News/Readability | keep technical texts readable ]].
I have a few vague ideas about how we could do this. I'll post them here once my thoughts are more organized.