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Dictionary/Encyclopedia of Terms
How about a Wiki-style Dictionary or Encyclopedia of Jewish terms? This could either be a Category or maybe part of Community-specific Help.
Instead of each reference to a Jewish/Hebrew/Aramaic/etc. term either being left unlinked (requiring those who don't know the terms to spend a lot of extra time Google'ing just to understand the answer to a question) or explained in place (which often doesn't work well) or linked to numerous different 3rd-party sites (varying from general sites like Wikipedia to specific Jewish sites like Chabad, OU, Sefaria, etc., of widely varying quality), we build our own here. It could start as one-liners (e.g., more like a dictionary - e.g., Muktzah: An object forbidden for use on Shabbos or Yom Tov) and evolve (based on user interest in a topic) to a more encyclopedic style (e.g., in the case of Muktzah, listing the different categories and giving examples of when movement is forbidden, etc.).
The actual structure might be best as a Wiki - a large hyperlinked document rather than a series of separate separate posts, and community edited rather than a single "owner". Any terms that have associated tags could have a way to click from the tag to the Wiki (as well as from any explicitly linked key words in posts) and from the Wiki to the question list - e.g., read about Shabbos in the Wiki, learn out about Muktzah (a novel concept if you've never heard of it before) and then click to the list of questions matching the Muktzah tag.
2 answers
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We'll need to decide whether we want
- a glossary of terms people may come across on the site without other explanation (which I'll call a "glossary")
or
- a dictionary/encyclopedia of any and all terms (which I'll call a "dictionary").
The difference is profound — in philosophy, in scope (what terms should be included), and in the content of each entry.
Philosophy
A glossary is meant so that someone can post on the site, include a word like muktze, and not worry that people don't know what it means, because he's linking to its entry in the glossary. It's thus auxiliary to the main site and serves its purposes. No one uninterested in the Q&A category should edit the glossary, because he doesn't have enough knowledge of the site to know what should be in the glossary or enough interest in the Q&A to care what's in the glossary.
A dictionary, on the other hand, is meant so people can look up a word about Judaism and know what it means. It's not auxiliary to the Q&A category but a separate, parallel category, independent from the Q&A (though of course the Q&A posts will link to the dictionary, and the two categories will, technically necessarily, share tags). There's no reason to expect someone active in one category to be active in the other. And there's no reason to expect a word used in the Q&A category to necessarily have a dictionary entry; or, if someone chooses to link to some other dictionary to explain his word, that won't be weird (perhaps our entry will be too long-winded or something).
Scope
A glossary should cover only words that appear on the site or that someone might expect will appear there. A dictionary, on the other hand, has much broader scope, and can include all sorts of words.
Content of each entry
A glossary is meant as an aid. An aid to those reading the Q&A category (and maybe the Meta category). It should give enough information to fill that need and no more, or not much more. If a post on the Q&A site refers to muktze and links to the glossary for a definition, the curious reader will expect to find a one- or two-line explanation. An article-length explanation is wholly out of place; but not only that: even a full dictionary entry is out of place. No need for things that dictionaries have like pronunciations, grammatical/usage notes, arcane forms, or the like. Maybe etymology is justified in some cases where it helps the reader understand the word; probably an example phrase is good so the reader can know which of several definitions is relevant in his context. But mostly just a definition.
A dictionary, on the other hand… well, a dictionary can have all sorts of stuff. Pronunciation, etymology, synonyms and alternative spellings, translations into other languages. Heck, if we want to go encyclopedic we can include very long-winded explanations indeed.
I think deciding which of these we want — or something else perhaps — must be done before we start so that we avoid talking past one another and because the distinction makes a big difference in terms of how to plan the product.
I may be misunderstanding, but I think there's already some talking-past happening: the OP atop this page seems (as far as I can tell) to be referring to a dictionary, whereas Monica Cellio's answer seems to referring to a glossary (in that it entertains the notion that this could be in the help pages).
A wiki with a dictionary of terms sounds like a great idea. Here are some thoughts on how we could implement it. It partly depends on being able to use in-page anchors (so you could link to a specific part of a page); that appears to be possible if one uses HTML for those links (and anchors) instead of Markdown.
We could create a Wiki category (or choose another name if you like). This category would support the article post type but not questions and answers. There could be a "main" page that lists all terms with short definitions, each with an anchor for direct linking. When a topic calls for more explanation and somebody wants to provide it, that person would add another (article) post and link to it from the definition on the main page. To keep the main page discoverable regardless of posts' sorting order, we could link to it in the category description. Initially there would be one post, probably a few more soon, and I'm guessing there wouldn't be more than would fit on a page for quite some time.
We could link to the main page from the help. The reason I'm not suggesting putting the list in the help directly is that help can be edited only by moderators while anybody can edit (or suggest edits to) articles.
Articles require tags, same as questions. We can either share the tag set used for Q&A or create a separate one. We should think about what kinds of tagging (and tagging relations) we want. A search by tag finds all posts with that tag in all categories.
One thing that is not currently possible is some sort of Markdown extension to easily link to definitions from other posts. You would have to use the HTML links I mentioned earlier, instead of having some syntax around a word that would automatically generate that link. This sounds like something that could be done in a userscript; that's not as good as having it built in for all users, but I suspect that the people who'll think to add glossary links are going to be the more-invested users who are probably more willing to use a userscript, so that might be ok. I think building that in would be fairly low on the developers' priority list right now; there's a lot of other work we need to do yet.
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