LocalisationUpdate updates again

Today I learned from Roan that the LocalisationUpdate process had been broken for some time for extension messages. It probably broke while doing an "SVN update" on November 19th. This has now been fixed.

Since the last update of the MediaWiki software on all projects, 24090 localised messages have been added. You can find a breakdown per language here.

In order to be sure that we have all the possible messages available from LocalisationUpdate, Roan has triggered a full upgrade for all the message files. This was done by removing the "hash values" for the message files.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Dutch is the official language of Suriname

Dutch is the official language of Suriname. Dutch is the tenth Wikipedia in size in terms of traffic. You would assume that the subject of Suriname is of a high standard. Sadly, this is not really the case. Given that Suriname is a former colony of the Netherlands, and that many people who came from Suriname live there, there is an additional reason why it is reasonable to expect quality.

The Dutch Wikipedia is a white men's game.. It would be good when the composition of its community was a reflection of the people that live in the Netherlands. When the Surinamese, the Turks, the Moroccans write the encyclopaedic articles that are important to them, Wikipedia as a resource will better reflect its aim; "freely share the sum of ALL knowledge".

In the Strategy wiki, the question is raised: "What ratio of contributors to readers should Wikimedia aim for?". I argued that this ratio is not really meaningful to me. After more considerations, I come to the conclusion that it is more important to have a community of editors that reflects the composition of its readers, the population they come from.

I wonder if the lack of coverage of subjects about Suriname, Turkey, Morocco explains this discrepancy. I wonder if people are looking for articles on these subjects.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Happy to be a Wikipedian

I identified the #tropenmuseum picture I blogged about on Commons. For this picture there is already a translation on Commons in Indonesion... When a fellow Wikimedian does this for us on Eid al-Adha, I am truly amazed, happy and grateful.

Penarikan batu “Darodaro” untuk almarhum Saoenigeho dari Bawamatalua, Nias. Batu yang berasal dari dasar sungai ini ditarik menempuh jarak 3 km yang dimungkinkan dengan penggunaan konstruksi alat penarik khusus. Batu besar (megalit), kadang dihias dengan bagus, adalah bagian dari budaya di pulau Nias. Di Nias dijumpai patung batu besar, kursi batu untuk kepala suku, serta meja batu tempat pengadilan. Ada juga batu besar yang dibutuhkan untuk memperingati kematian orang penting. Sewaktu batu untuk tujuan peringatan tersebut dipasang, biasanya diadakan pula suatu pesta ritual yang bertujuan melapangkan jalan orang meninggal tersebut untuk bergabung dengan nenek moyangnya di kehidupan setelah kematiannya. Pada foto terlihat bahwa batu ditarik ke atas. Konon dibutuhkan 525 orang selama tiga hari untuk mendirikan batu ini di desa Bawemataluo. (P. Boomgaard, 2001)

Thank you Ivan..
GerardM

What can you tell us about this object ?

The #Tropenmuseum would like to know more about this object. It is silver, its dimensions are 11,2 x 17,5 x 14,1cm and it is from South Asia...
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Tropenmuseum donates 35K media files to Commons

Today we had a meeting at the Tropenmuseum where Multichil and me were given some 35,000 images to be uploaded to Commons. These images are from Indonesia and, there are more images to come. Richard, has been really busy cleaning up this collection in order to make sure that these images conform to the high standards of the Tropenmuseum.

This collection comes with annotations in Dutch and I am really happy that the Indonesian chapter is willing to organise translation into Indonesian. In this way this part of the Indonesian cultural heritage becomes truly available to the Indonesian people. It would be good if we are able to find people willing to translate all this in English as well; this makes it truly opens up as part of our global cultural heritage.

A good example is this picture of people from the village of Bawemataloeo on the island of Nias. While it is a great picture, it can only be understood with its annotations.

Het verslepen van de steen 'Darodaro' voor de gestorven Saoenigeho van Bawamataloea, Nias. De steen wordt uit de rivierbedding gehaald en over een afstand van ca. 3 km versleept waarvoor een speciale sleepconstructie wordt gemaakt.

Grote stenen (megalieten), al dan niet fraai bewerkt, waren een onderdeel van de cultuur van het eiland Nias. Er waren grote stenen beelden, stenen zetels voor de hoofden en stenen tafels waaraan recht werd gesproken. Er waren ook grote stenen nodig voor de nagedachtenis van belangrijke overledenen. Bij het oprichten van een dergelijke steen moest een ritueel feest gegeven worden. Dit alles om een edelman in staat te stellen zich bij zijn vergoddelijkte voorouders in het hiernamaals te voegen. Op de foto wordt zo'n steen naar boven gesleept. De overlevering wil dat het 525 mensen drie dagen gekost heeft om deze steen op zijn plaats in het dorpje Bawemataloeo te krijgen. (P. Boomgaard, 2001)

The dragging of the stone “Darodaro” for the deceased Saoenigeho of Bawamataloea, Nias. The stone came out of the river bed and was dragged over a distance of 3 km made possible by a special dragging construction.

Big stones (megaliths), some nicely decorated, were a part of the culture of the island of Nias. There were big stone statues, stone seats for the chieftains and stone tables were justice was done. There were also big stones needed to commemorate of important deceased people. When such a stone was errected, a ritual feast was to be given. All this to enable a nobleman to join his godly ancestors in the afterlife. On the photo such a stone is hauled upwards. The story has it that it took 525 people three days to erect this stone in the vilage of Bawemataloeo. (P. Boomgaard, 2001)

The upload of material from Suriname proved to be a great preparation; as the data is provided to us in the same format, Multichil was able to start with the upload the same evening.. :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Why the music industry has lost it

I am back at home ... I have been to a concert of the choir my sister sings in. One of the songs was a wonderful song by Krezip, "sweet goodbyes". There is an official clip, I asked a friend in the USA to listen to it.

She was not allowed to.. "… not available in my country..." was the reply I got.. Another clip just had the music, another had the lyrics. The music got me a "sounds pretty"..

Music is a social thing, when I am not allowed to share the music I appreciate, it angers me, it makes me sad. It makes me resent a stupid, stupid industry that prevents me from sharing great music with my friends.
Thanks,
      GerardM

A localisation is growing up

Every now and again we have at translatewiki.net a request that is a bit out of the ordinary. The request that OsamaK made today is one such; he asked for the support of gender to be enabled for the Arabic language.

Gender support was originally implemented for the Slavic languages and now this mechanism is requested for Arabic as well. MediaWiki is almost fully localised for the Arabic language and, I imagine that it will be a lot of work to implement gender fully.

Supporting this request is something that is ours to do in translatewiki.net, other aspects of support for right to left languages like having a proper layout for the preferences in Commons is for the Wikimedia Foundation's developers...
Thanks,
      GerardM

#statusnet supports #translatewiki

Making sure that our community knows that we truly value their work is a core value at translatewiki.net. This means that localisations have to feed back to the respective applications. When this is no longer possible, we prefer to stop the localisation effort for an application and not run the risk that localisation work is lost.

Today Siebrand had to decide to stop the localisation support for StatusNet. There are three show stoppers that prevent the feed back of our localisations.. Brion was informed about this situation and about our lack of developer capacity.

[21:30] siebrand: no worries. we'll start up again next week
[21:33] brion: it may take months. No developers at the moment.
[21:34] pretty sure i'm a developer, so i could take a peek :)
[21:34] but no time today, will look it over next week

What Brion will be looking at is how to provide plural support in Gettext. The good news is that once this issue is dealt with conclusively, any and all gettext application can be supported in a proper way.

When you are involved in language support, when you are interested in working on the cutting edge of internationalisation and localisation in an open source environment, you will find our environment really interesting. We support a bewildering array of languages and orthographies. We need you to improve our environment and our support for a growing number of applications.
Thanks,
GerardM

CLDR an important standard for translatewiki.net

At translatewiki.net we support many languages and many applications. As a consequence, it is important that the rules that apply for a language are consistent and correct. It is not just MediaWiki any more that is affected, it is also StatusNet or OpenStreetMap to name just two. The people administering translatewiki.net do not know what linguistic rules for a language are correct. It is equally plain that it is impossible to learn about and judge all the possible issues.

It is quite fortunate that Unicode in its Common Locale Data Repository (CLDR) provides a framework where the linguistic building blocks necessary to support a language are provided. That is, for as long as the information is correct and, for as long as people took the trouble to provide the information for their language.

The benefits of insisting on good information from the CLDR are huge; the CLDR provides the essential data for many other applications for instance, once this data is complete, a language can be supported in Open Office.

Unicode provides translatewiki.net with the surety and stability it needs.
Thanks,
      GerardM

A storycloth from the #Tropenmuseum

Many museums have magnificent works that are not on display. Some of them are not on display because of logistical reasons. The Tropenmuseum for instance has a story cloth that is at 15 meters just too long to be on permanent display... An additional reason may be that by preserving it in the dark, the colours do not fade.

The picture gives an indication what this story looks like, but too really appreciate it, you want to see the full picture. This is a bit of a problem. The total amount of data is over a gigabyte and, it was photographed in many parts. These parts are now being stitched together by Durova. This is a massive job. The first part is to get the parts lined up properly and, to ensure consistency between all the different parts.

This is an experiment, for both the Tropenmuseum and Durova; when the work is done the unrestored but stitched together file will be too big for Commons. When it is available to the Tropenmuseum, what digital manipulations make sense.. for instance the images at the very left have faded a lot.

Such big files are a bother, manipulating these files, transferring has crashed my puny laptop already twice ...
Thanks,
     GerardM