The proof of the pudding for LocalisationUpdate

Don Alessandro was really helpful fixing one issue with the LocalisationUpdate. But the proof of the pudding is that all his localisations become available in his Wikipedia. It did not.

Roan found that there was another thing preventing his "crh-Cyrl" messages from being selected. The dash "-" was used in one part of the software while an underscore "_" was expected elsewhere.

Roan fixed this yesterday, and Don Alessandro reported that LocalisationUpdate now works dashingly.
Thanks,
GerardM

Localiser communities

As more applications are localised at translatewiki.net, we found that some people specifically come to us to do "their" thing. Some of them like the experience and start working on other applications as well.

There may be issues with the localisation of a specific application, it is for this reason that it is nice to be able to identify the other people who may be able to help..
Thanks,
GerardM

The best of news from ICANN

I am absolutely positely ecstatic with the news that URLs can be completely in other scripts. This is important news because it will make it that much more easy to use the Internet. Many people do not know a language that is written in the Latin script and so far they have been forced to use this script in order to use the Internet.

This will no longer be the case.

The Wikimedia Foundation wants to be the number five in reach in all countries in the world. They spend a lot of effort in making our software more usable. This is an easy and obvious way to reach out to so many more people. This video explains what it is, the BBC in its reporting explains how it helps .. truly this is one solution that is obvious and welcome and, it will bring us more people to our Wikipedias, Wiktionaries and other projects.

This is truly great news.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Where and when are people comming from

On our MediaWikiWave blog, Tom had added two nice little gadgets from FEEDJIT. FEEDJIT provides two tools that give a walking update of the visitors and, a map showing where visitors are coming from and what they are reading.

The map shows Europe and North America after less then one day of traffic. This is only the traffic from people who get directly to the blog.. Most of what I write is read through aggregators.

One of the interesting things I noticed is that old blogs are still read. So it is relevant to keep the history of the blog.
Thanks,
GerardM

An update for LocalisationUpdate

Don Alessandro, who localises MediaWiki into Crimean Tatar at translatewiki.net found that the LocalisationExtension did not work for him. His localisations just did not go live on his Wikipedia.

This is weird, we first checked if the cron job was running, this turned out to be the case, Raymond_ checked if it worked for German it did. Don Alessandro provided us with good information that showed that it did not work for him.

Roan had a look at the software and he spotted that due to the fact that Crimean Tatar falls back to Russian, it decided not to do an update. Roan changed the software, tested it and, it is now waiting for a single localisation that will trigger the delivery of all the pending localisations.

Small changes like this happen all the time. All of them are relevant, some are seen by everyone, some like this one make a big difference for only some of our communities.. It is great to see that they get attention.
Thanks,
      GerardM

World Day for Audiovisual Heritage

Today, the 25th of October is the "World day for Audiovisual Heritage". This UNESCO event is about the material generated by radio, television and movies. They have dominated much of the communication in the previous century. and will continue to do so.

On a daylike this, it is appropriate to reflect on what our role has been in the previous year and, what is likely to happen in the next.

In the last year the Wikimedia Foundation invested a lot of effort in making our MediaWiki platform ready for video. The result will be that next year many articles will gain videos. In the last year the upload limit was increased to 100Mb, hopefully this limit will be raised again.

I reported on the availability of the Polygoon newreels in a previous blog. The first examples are now in Commons and they will certainly find their way on the Dutch Wikipedia. They may become relevant for other Wikipedias when we support subtitling.

In a weeks time there will be a meeting in Paris, where we will define what issues we want to address to improve our support for audiovisual content. Given that Commons is intended to be a repository for such material and given our interest in historic material, I hope that next year we will report on the things we have achieved.
Thanks,
GerardM

Eating our own dogfood

In order to do the localisations at translatewiki.net, we run on the very bleeding edge of the MediaWiki development. This means that when buggy code is submitted to SVN, the users at translatewiki.net suffer the consequences.

There are two powerful consequences of running ahead of the pack.

• software is internationalised and localised before it goes live elsewhere
• it provides powerful quality assurance on our bleeding edge software

Typically things are fine, sometimes things go wrong.. Today we could no longer sign on. Merlissimo signalled the problem on our IRC channel and, one of our developers was available to roll back several revisions.
Thanks,
GerardM

Choosing a measure for success

The Wikimedia Foundation is defining its strategy. In order to define a strategy, you have to aim at achieving something. Obviously, our goal is a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.

The question is, how do you measure that you are achieving your goal.. What numbers help you understand this. Sue Gardner approached it by wishing for Wikipedia to be in the top 5 reach of every country. This is nice, measurable and really ambitious. According to Alexa we do not have that reach yet in any country. It also indicates room for growth; the reach of Wikipedia in the Netherlands for instance is currently at number nine.

I proposed in the strategy wiki, that our aim should be that our top 10 Wikipedias should have only 85% of our Wikipedia traffic. This would be a target to achieve in five years time and, it does not mean that the top 10 projects should stop growing, far from it. The idea is to seek to grow the other projects even more.

There are several reasons why this would benefit us.

• When the language versions improve in quantity and quality they will help us reach the number 5 spot in the rankings
• For many Wikipedias we need a bigger community badly in order to grow coverage and the quality of our articles for their country and the relevant languages
  
• Many of the most spoken languages have not passed the threshold where they really take off.. Russian is one that has, many others are promising.
• It brings us the cultural diversities that will help us reduce our current bias, it would make us more inclusive.

Another thing that I really appreciate in Sue's vision is her wish for more fun. What I am grappling with is how to realise this and then measure it.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Obscene ? It is certainly legal !

Some images became icons representing important moments in the past, the little boy in the ghetto of Warsaw, Douglas McArthur returning to the Philippines and Dorothea Lange's picture of despair of the recession of the thirties.

Most people know the original black and white. An important picture and a featured picture on Commons and the English Wikipedia among others. It being in black and white is considered by some as underlining the misery.

This picture can also be found on Commons.. It has been coloured and it gained a different atmosphere. This picture by Dorothea Lange is in the public domain and consequently it is perfectly legal to make this derivative. The provenance is ok; a reference is made to the original at the Library of Congress. But I am in two minds; on the one hand it is a derivative done in good taste, on the other hand it feels like sacriledge..
Thanks,
GerardM

A great Dutch chapter meeting

Yesterday I was at a Dutch chapter members meeting. It was fun, the board informed about the things that happened in the last year and explained about the things projected for the next year.

In my opinion it was a great meeting. The board was open in the choices it faced and explained about what made projects possible. The Wiki loves art/NL project for instance was possible because one of the partners in the project, had two people available during business hours to call museums or be available for calls. The yearly conference did not happen because much of the energy had gone in preparing for the Wikimania bid.

It was made quite clear that depending on what resources are available, things happen. People do volunteer, but there is only so much that you can ask. The question then became who and what do we do it for; is it for the "community" or is it for the Wikimedia movement. Also how do we do it, would it help when the Dutch chapter had an office or shared an office with other NGO's

One of the brilliant conversations was about the Polygoon news reels. They are now all available under a CC-by-sa license and a subset can be found on Commons. Multichill indicated that he could put them all on line. Then the questions started to flood.. Is there sufficient room on the servers. Can we subtitle them. Would it be possible for a search engine to look at the subtitles to find likely interesting fragments. How do I include video from Commons on my blog?

This is all happening because of the importance given to the Wikimedia movement. Making things possible, the art of choosing opportunities is what provides the community with new information, new material to integrate in our projects, giving relevance of our projects to new people, all this is how the Dutch chapter aims to bring people together in our movement, our community.

I am really happy with how the Dutch chapter is evolving, and I thank all the people who make this possible.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The power of openness

The United States government has a long standing tradition to make all the material that it creates either available in the public domain or it is considered a secret. As a consequence of a request to have some FEMA photos of the 9-11 disaster Multichil loaded all the FEMA photos to Commons, then for good measure he has progressed by starting to upload pictures from the US Navy.

Pictures like this F-A-18 Hornet that is readied to be catapulted in the air are awesome.

This is a great undertaking there are however a few questions;

• We take the pictures without asking / informing and as a consequence we do not build a relation
• These are pictures of the US armed forces.. we do want the pictures of all these other armies and navies as well ... 

Another picture that makes you drool..

Thanks,
     GerardM

How to google in Swahili

When I google for a Dutch or an English concept, I do not find many search results in other languages. When your language is Swahili, it is not that good. I learned that adding the word "kwenye" makes all the difference when you want to restrict the results to Swahili.

Martin Benjamin showed me how he uses it to determine the preferred spelling for a word.

As you can see from the results, the spelling of "anuai" is much more frequent and can be considered the preferred spelling.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Introducing the nail gun

Yesterday I blogged with the title "When the only tool you have is a hammer ...". Inspired by this Siebrand created a demo... It says so on the first message DEMO...

The people at translatewiki.net love a demo as well, they demonstrate their enthusiasm for a platform that helps translators do their thing and translate anyway. At the same time it is great for the writers as well; it is easy to fiddle with the text and the translating community will be asked only to work on what has changed.

Using a nail gun or a hammer both drive the nail in place but with a nail gun you do not get to hit your thumb.
Thanks,
GerardM

Bring it local and get the locale right

The ideal of the Wikimedia Foundation is to bring the sum of all knowledge to all people. Not everyone knows how to speak English, French or German and to provide those people in so many more languages we have Wikipedias in their languages.

The people behind Okawix understand this well, not only do they provide the information in all those languages, they also have their open source off line reader localised at translatewiki.net.
Thanks,
      GerardM

MediaWiki, localisation and scrum

For all kinds of reasons I am learning about agile and scrum. The one thing that will be important to me is how to combine this with internationalisation and localisation. I just read a blog about this by Colin Cooper.

Colin writes his observations from the perspective of a commercial company. This is quite different from what we do at translatewiki.net for Wikipedia and all the other MediaWiki implementations. However, even when there is no "official" scrum or agile project management in place, I find that it is possible to describe what we do in these terms.

The first key thing is the recognition that the language communities themselves are responsible for the quality of their localisation. When a language is not able or willing to keep up the localisation, it is essentially their problem. We do have in the developers at translatewiki.net a group of people who spend a lot of time on the Internationalisation and the quality of the English that is used. This is one essential requirement that Colin mentions for successful localisation. We add to this the annotation of the context of the messages in our "qqq" messages.

MediaWiki knows in effect three stages for the development of software;

1. Software that is being developed, maintained
   
2. Software that is in production on WMF projects
3. Software that is available in a stable release of MediaWiki

There used to be a waterfall of localisations; the localisations were entered in the first stage. When software was implemented, the localisations available at that time became available. In general step 1 was a continuous process, step 2 happened every few weeks and step 3 happened once every 3 or 4 months. To improve the available localisations, it happened that patches or "language packs" were made available for the stable releases.

With the implementation of LocalisationUpdate localisations became available on a daily basis everywhere after the technical translatewiki.net Q&A. This availability depends on the stability of the message. Given that both the development and Internationalisation happen in step 1, the messages are typically quite stable when the software goes into production.

Colin writes that the "waterfall" development method is problematic. The model for MediaWiki is one where the localisation is separate from the internationalisation. The provision of code with localisation is still essential but from a localisation process point of view it is no longer the moment of truth.

One thing a commercial i18n/L10n environment may want to implement differently is how the provisioning of the messages happens. There is no review of the language used in the localised messages. We assume good faith and are rarely disappointed.
Thanks,
GerardM

Shooting on moving targets

Siebrand formulated targets for 2009 for translatewiki.net . They are ambitious but doable and I think that he prefers to be overly ambitious then not to be ambitious enough.

Last week we were really happy that the target for the "most used" messages was achieved; 130 or more languages had at least 98% of the 472 messages localised. These messages are the most used messages and we consider that those languages without these messages localised have a serious issue with their usability for their language. The weird thing is that some languages that are actively localised do not support their most used messages 100%.

Today we are again two languages short of the 130 languages mark..

The reason for this drop in the numbers? Two messages got plural support, causing previous translations to be marked as outdated and no longer counting as translated messages.
Thanks,
GerardM

When the only tool you have is a hammer ...

Some time ago, I presented my answers to the question "What benefit of translatewiki.net as a WMF project". Today I found another fine reason why the Wikimedia Foundation would benefit from an infusion of some translatewiki.net usability.

As it is that time of year again, it is time to prepare for our fundraiser and as usual, in order to get the message out, the faithful are asked to translate texts into their language.

The screenshot of the Macedonian texts clearly shows that it is one page where all the texts are to be translated. A template has to indicate the status of the translation.

There are several reasons why this situation needs a review:

• As it is one blob, it is not easy to tune the text and communicate the difference
• Progress is to be indicated by changing a template
• There is no percentage indicating the work that is left to be done
• The translator effort is split between meta and translatewiki.net
• The software developed at translatewiki is "not invented here"

When the Meta translations have to be translated at Meta, there is nothing stopping the powers that be to use the Translate extension. MediaWiki is a tool, the Translate extension builds upon it, there is nothing preventing the WMF to use the best of breed solution for its translations. If anything, the translatewiki.net crowd would be happy to help with its implementation.
Thanks,
GerardM

The right tooling is half the job

Yesterday I used Internet Explorer. I tried to get an image out of a webpage. It came out as a bitmap and it looked horrible.

Today I did the same exercise with Firefox, the picture came out as a png and it looks as it should.

The library of Almere uses the latest offerings of Microsoft. I am glad that they also provide WIFI so next time, I take my trusted laptop with me.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Going to the library

When you tend to rely on the Internet to provide all the information that you require, you do not go to your local library. As I need to learn more about running projects, and as I find it comfortable to read "dead tree" copies of books, I find myself in the library of Almere reading "Agile project management" by Cary Chin.

The library has computers that may be used for the Internet and Wikipedia, my mail and Blogger are available to me. In order to secure the computers all kinds of functionality have been removed but it is a happy experience.

The librarians are a friendly lot; they helped me find my bearings, they saved the logo of the library for me ... on their website it looks a lot better :) The atmosphere is pleasant .. there is a friendly buzz of many people using the library services.

All in all, a happy experience ... Maybe it is time for you as well to get reacquainted with a library near you.
Thanks,
GerardM

MediaWiki uses the CLDR data

I travelled with Siebrand the other day and I learned that in order to provide plural support at translatewiki.net, he uses the information in the CLDR to know what languages need plural support and in what way.

The amazing thing was that for some languages the plural support in MediaWiki is different from the one indicated by the standard. There are also a number of languages where the CLDR did not have information about their plural support.

It is vital that the CLDR and MediaWiki agree on how to provide plural support for languages. The CLDR is the standard and should be complete and correct because it exists for any application.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The Maroon, a subject that deserves attention

When people are enslaved, they will do whatever it takes, whatever possible, to escape. Once they escape, they have to survive and remain free.

The Maroon are the Africans brought as slaves to America that escaped. Who had to build a life, a society in the jungles, the remote parts of what was a different world.

When the slaves in Suriname were made free in 1863, there were several different people living in the jungle. There are the Ndyuka, the Saramaka, the Matawai among others. All of them have their own culture, language and history.

When you read the history of the Maroon on Wikipedia, their stories are linked to the present day countries. There are however many clues that indicate that these borders are artificial; one of the languages is a creole of Portuguese or English or a war where some of the major players left Suriname and continued their struggle in French Guiana.

A visitor of the Maroon exhibition of the Tropenmuseum will get much information about these people. The book that goes with the exhibition will bring even more depth to this subject. The Tropenmuseum welcomes more attention to the subject of the Maroon on Wikipedia, people who are interested in writing on this subject can have access to the museum and, for those who demonstrate an effort on the subject a copy of the book may be available.
Thanks,
GerardM

Wikipedia in Sri Lanka

I am happy with another guest blogging on my blog. Mangala, Shehan and the rest of the team at Calcey Technology write about the relevance of Wikipedia in Sri Lanka.

Wikipedia is ranked within the top 10 websites visited by Sri Lankan web users. (No.7 according to the Alexa web ranking) It is therefore one of the most heavily used websites by Sri Lankans and it is a common sight to see many Sri Lankans routinely use Wikipedia as a first point reference. Sri Lanka has one of the highest literacy rates in South Asia. The penetration of ICT and computer usage especially among the rural Sri Lanka has been remarkable in the recent years. The rate of computer literacy and access to online global knowledge resources, especially among the rural youth who are more comfortable with Sinhalese, would doubtless be given a tremendous  boost thanks to the highly laudable effort by Wikipedia to develop a Sinhala User Interface.

Furthermore, the Sri Lankan government has recently commenced a One-Laptop-Per-Child (OLPC) in rural schools. The aim of the program is to increase the computer literacy and provide access to global online knowledge resources. The laptop computers have been designed to be powered by two power sources; hydro power and solar power. In addition to the operating system in English, the children can operate the computers in Sinhala.  The Wikipedia Sinhala interface could thus complement the Government’s OLPC program by providing the underprivileged kids in Sri Lanka access to Wikipedia’s immense knowledge resource, uninhibited by language barriers.

The Sinhala language is one of the oldest languages in the world with origins dating back to the 2^nd century and is used by 19 million people in Sri Lanka. Yet, due to globalization  it is increasingly under threat of devitalization, and some even forecast that it might face extinction in future if the usage declines.  In this context, the efforts by Wikipedia to vitalize the use of Sinhala in the world’s top online enclyclopedia would be heartily applauded by all Sri Lankans as a critical step towards enhancing its usage and preservation. All of us at Calcey Technologies are very excited and honored to be part of this.

Localising into Navajo

One of our Wikipedias is written in Navajo or Diné bizaad. With 699 articles it is a small one.

We were quite happy when someone came along to localise at translatewiki.net. This lasted until the time when we wanted to commit the localisations to SVN. We found that in stead of finding texts that we could not understand, the "localisations" were in English.

According to the person who provided this in stead of a localisation in Navajo, "there's a decision to leave roll-over messages and tooltips in English as the sociolinguistic setting dictates "bilinguality". That is all very good but at translatewiki.net we do not accept this as a practice; a language deserves respect even when bilinguality is considered to be the norm among some.

It is obvious that administrators can localise locally but it is equally obvious that this is detremental for the support of the Navajo language. It is also not much of a threat.

What is more problematic is that the names of namespaces are considered to be insulting. If true it needs to be remedied but the trust in this person is largely gone because of his refusal to localise all messages in Navajo and his level 1 understanding of the language. The question is what to do..
Thanks,
GerardM

Those wonderful statistics are getting better all the time

The strategy people made it quite plain to me that numbers provide great arguments when you want to see things change. The WMF is eating its own dog food because they have in Erik Zachte someone who provides us with the most wonderful numbers.

Erik recently introduced the "score cards", they are the numbers the WMF uses to formulate its strategy. These numbers are a condensed presentation of many charts. The traffic statistics are my favourite at the moment.

These statistics have seen several incremental changes that made it much more useful. It started with me finding several small things; the name of the Afrikaans language shown in Zulu, several languages missing and some sorting order problems. These were quickly dealt with and as a consequence these traffic numbers became meaningful to me.

The latest innovation I noticed is that a projection is given of what the likely numbers are going to be for the next month. When you follow the stats, you find that the order of the languages changes. It becomes clear that the gaps between certain languages is quite big; it will take Chinese quite some time before it overtakes Dutch as the 10th language on the list.

When you are interested in being part of the strategy planning, spending time getting to grips with the statistics will help you to be effective. Realising our potential is the name of the game. Understanding where a  potential exists is helped by understanding our statistics.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Building up an exhibition on the Surniname Maroon

The exhibition on the maroon of Suriname is being build at the Tropenmuseum. The picture shows the physical building of the exhibition but there is so much more to do.

In the Netherlands the subject of the Maroon is not well known and, the English Wikipedia provides typically the best information on the subject but you have to look hard to find it.

To provide more and better information, the Tropenmuseum will publish a book to accompany the exhibition. It will bring a lot of information together, and it can serve as a source for new and improved Wikipedia articles.

The purpose of the book and the exhibition is to improve the knowledge on the Maroon, as the Internet is becoming increasingly important as a source for information, the Tropenmuseum made many pictures available and is now taking a next step by helping the Wikipedia community write about this subject.

• they will help improve the articles on the Suriname Maroon
• they are willing to give access to their library to people who want to write on the subject
• they are happy when the new book is used as a source for information in Wikipedia

Thanks,
GerardM

Compare the stats

Both Erik and Siebrand maintain statistics that provide information for the 50 most spoken languages in the world.

Erik associates these languages with Wikipedias and knows two Wikipedias for English.

Siebrand associates these languages with localisations and has two localisations for Chinese, Portuguese and others. His statistics are new and they make it possible to relate information about localisation to the numbers about the Wikipedias. One innovation is the weight given to the "MediaWiki most used" (40), the "MediaWiki" (30) and the "Extensions used by Wikimedia" 30. This gives a single value for the localisation.

There are several ways to unify this value when multiple localisations exist;

• add them up and divide them by the number of localisations
• weigh them by the number of people likely to use a particular localisation
• weigh them by the number of people that have selected a localisation as a preference
• I am sure someone will come up with another algorithm

Whatever method is chosen, the point is that it allows for the reduction of multiple value to a single value. This value can be added to Erik's stats and it may help understand how our projects are doing. With better understanding it becomes possible to improve our strategy and move forward.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Plural support

Having a sophisticated community of localisers is a mixed blessing for software developers. When software is to be localised, they expect the constructs they need to properly localise for their language. Particularly the support for plurals is considered to be essential.

The way it works at translatewiki.net is, that when a new application is accepted for localisation, it is made clear what functionality needs work. Top of the list is the ability to import and export. As a consequence the list of supported formats has grown considerably.

Recently a lot of work has gone in the plural support of Ruby on Rails for OpenStreetMap and partial Javascript support for mwEmbed. All this is possible because of the cooperation between the translatewiki.net developers and the developers of the application that is supported.

Working together in translatewiki.net proves to be mutually beneficial; new applications like OpenStreetMap brings new people even languages to translatewiki.net and the existing community has adopted OpenStreetMap enthusiastically. Most importantly, the usability of the software is enhanced because not only are localisations in many languages added, the English texts also gain plural support and becomes better understood.
Thanks,
GerardM

Southern Nan in the Hanji script

There is a request for a Wikipedia in the Southern Nan language written in the Hanji script. Given the policy of the language committee it is a straightforward issue; the request is to be rejected.

The rationale is that there should be one Wikipedia per language and, when multiple scripts are allowed, it is for the people of that language to accomodate this. This may create significant issues for the community but on the other hand, the Serbian Wikipedia and the Chinese Wikipedia have proven that this can work.

The requests mentions that the the lack of a standard character set complicating the writing in characters is being overcome by the development of a standard character set by the Taiwanese Ministry of Education. The status of this development is not clear and it is equally unclear if this would be accepted in mainland China.

This request has added significance because it is the 26th language in the world by native speakers. As such the attention given to this language is significant.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Localisations for 112 languages

The Usability Initiative has made big steps in improving the usability of MediaWiki. While this project is to make the English language Wikipedia more userfriendly, the software has the potential to benefit all our projects in all languages. In order to benefit it is really important to localise this software.

It is really helpful when these localisations are done now that the software is still being developed, this helps make it clear if issues with the software have to do with language or with the programming. As such it is really helpful that there are localisations for 112 languages already.

Naoko, the project manager of the Usability Initiative expressed her delight with so many languages doing this well as it makes a big difference for the adoption by users of all the new functionality. She was particularly happy to notice that Arabic was almost done. As Arabic is written from the right to the left it makes it easier to learn if there are issues with the software.

When there are problems with the new software, please fix the language issues at translatewiki.net and report any other issues either in bugzilla or at this page at Meta.

No more illustrations from after 1900

The dbnl or "Digital library for the Dutch literature" has decided to remove all illustrations from after 1900 because a Dutch copyright organisation demanding millions for the use of pictures made by some photographers used by the dbnl.

The dbnl newsletter states that the position of the copyright organisation was such that there was no room for a less drastic action. Obviously many of the illustrations used by the dbnl were in the public domain and as obviously many of the illustrations are not by photographers associated by this copyright organsiation.

This incident shows again why Commons is such an important resource. Important cultural institutions are pushed into actions that are completely and utterly against the public interest. The amount of money demanded, millions, is utterly unrealistic. They are demands of organisations that try to create a niche for themselves and in the final analysis the photographers will not make much money in relation to what is extorted in this way.

Increasingly relevant material becomes available in the public domain or becomes available under a Free license. This and the noxious attitudes of these copyright organisations will make a great argument for organisations like the dnbl to consider making their content available under a Free license as well
Thanks,
GerardM

More pictures from the Deutsche Fotothek

New material has been uploaded to Commons from the Deutsche Fotothek, this time they were 6.000 Richard Peter and 11.000 pictures by Roger and Renate Rössing.

Richard Peter is known for his photos showing the devastation of the bombardment of Dresden. When you consider these two collections, you will find that they are important and, they help us illustrate our Wikipedias.

Thanks,
GerardM

Unicode 5.2.0 has been released

The Unicode consortium released a new version of the standard that bears its name. With this new release, several new contemporary scripts have been added; Bamum, Javanese, Lisu, Meetei Mayek, Samaritan, Tai Tham, and Tai Viet. But as importantly new character additions provide support for scripts like Abkhaz, Canadian Aboriginal Syllabics, Coptic, Devanagari, Khamti Shan, Malayalam, and Myanmar.

With this publication, there is an opportunity for improved support. The newly supported characters and the associated use descriptions of these characters have to be implemented in fonts before they are actually useful.

When you consider that Hindi among others uses the Devangari script, that Malayam, Javanese and Myanmar are among the 50 most spoken languages, you will agree that the need for support for these new characters is really important when we are to provide with our Wikipedias the sum of all knowledge to the people of our world.
Thanks,
GerardM

More support for OpenStreetMap

OpenStreetMap has only recently been added to translatewiki.net and it is a success. Several languages have been completed, localisation for many languages has started and for some languages the localisation has been proof read.

The first batch of localisations have gone live and the result is good. I found that the Dutch localisation is really good and I changed the language in my preferences..

With the process of getting localisations to OpenStreetMap pretty much under control, Siebrand and Ævar decided to add support for the Potlatch editor. I am really pleased that OpenStreetMap is doing superbly at translatewiki.net.
Thanks,
GerardM