#Wikidata - the grandson of King Thibaw

When the BBC writes an article about royalty, it makes sense for both Wikipedia and Wikidata to have correct information available.

Descendants of king Thibaw Min it helps when it is known that this king was part of the Konbaung Dynasty and that a dynasty is not a country.  This is relevant because any claim to Myanmar is based on being part of that dynasty.

It is simple; dynasty is family. It is why Mr Trump and his offspring are factually a business dynasty.. When we are to get our facts straight, it makes sense to understand such basics. A dynasty can lose control over its "assets" but it remains a family.

Historically there have been many families with claims to a crown. Understanding such a claim is of interest and it is relevant to know the history of the whole world. History is not only lived in the western world.'
Thanks,
      GerardM

Legacy projects II

When tools are no longer maintained, when they are no longer promoted, they die. The good news is that the tools created for the Myanmar language created by Keith Stribley have found a new home.

The question is to what extend are they salvageable and is it worth the effort. For software there are two primary considerations; copyright and licensing and, the source code.

Without source code the first question is less relevant and, the reference to the mercurial repositories is a reference to Keith's old website. This old website is gone. There are references to the CC-by-sa license on some pages but for software such a license is not really appropriate.

When you look at the subjects Keith covered, they are still very much relevant and impressive. At the Myanmar Wikipedia two out of three webfonts do not work for me. We do not have an input method yet. It will be great when we find that the tools Keith created can find another use.

The result of my previous post is this update. I hope that there will be a future update to this post bringing you more positive news.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Legacy projects

Last year, I reported the death of Keith Stribley. Keith was well known for the support he provided for the Myanmar language.  Keith used his own website where people could download the tools that he had written.

Today, I tried to visit his website. It was gone. I googled for some of his projects, I did not find them. It is truly sad when there is little to find of the good and relevant work that Keith did.

I am sure that Keith's projects are not the only relevant projects that came to an all too abrupt halt. I can only hope that someone will prove me wrong with regards to Keith's projects.
Thanks,
    GerardM

#Facebook appears to be broken

I have a sweet spot for the #Myanmar #Wikipedia and when I got the message from Zaw Thet Aung that all Wikipedians are taking a long wiki break, I was saddened but not surprised. Saddened because there is such a need for high quality, neutral point of view encyclopaedic information in Myanmar. Not surprised because it is so hard to write articles in the Myanmar language.

What I hope for is for someone to help us with fonts for the WebFonts functionality, combine this with the existing keyboard mappings we support in Narayam and my belief is that the Myanmar community will be enthused when they check this out at translatewiki.net. So much so, that they will enter a bug in bugzilla to enable both extensions asap for all their projects.

When I "View Post on Facebook", the result is underwhelming. It is broken.

It is not that strange that I only now notice Facebook is broken for me. All my posts refer to my blog posts and I have this automated. There is hardly ever a reason for me to Facebook.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Democracy in #Myanmar

Because of the economic boycott of Myanmar, investments in the technology of Internet that benefit the people from Myanmar and the people who speak Myanmar did not happen. The technology that enabled the recent Arabian revolutions passed as a consequence Myanmar by.

The Myanmar government does learn from what happens in this world, it did acquire the technology to frustrate the use of the Internet in Myanmar and from Myanmar to the world.

The lack of development for the Myanmar language does not hurt only people in Myanmar, the language is spoken outside Myanmar and the Myanmar script is used for other languages. The argument that it is because of a boycott of the country of Myanmar is misplaced. Not only does it prevent people from taking part of the Internet, it also prevents them from using the Internet to the fullest.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#WMFboard; the election is done

The #Wikimedia board election is done and, we have something of a scandal. In essence it is about politics. When our politics was about constituencies, it would have been fine. When our politics is about particular points of view it would be fine.

It is something of a surprise as our projects are embodied by our "Neutral Point of View" that the notions of a need for a "Catalan Point of View" even makes the rounds.

From "My Point of View", the Catalan Wikipedia is doing fine. Its localisation is under control, it gets a fair amount of traffic with an annual growth of 53%. It operates on a level playing field with English. There is not much special that needs to be done for the Catalan language to prosper in our projects.

When you compare this with languages without a level playing field, then it should be obvious where our attention should go. Where our attention will have a serious impact. Our attention is much better served in India, where attention for fonts and input methods will unlock our projects to languages like Hindi, Oriya. When we do the same for the Myanmar language we will make a difference that goes way beyond our projects.

I was amazed and saddened by the Catalan hoopla, it is not necessary and it is not the kind of politics that are appropriate; when elected you become a trustee. As a trustee you are responsible for all projects, all languages. The trustees are entrusted with the well being and the future of all our communities.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Myanmar #Wiktionary reaches 100,000 words!

I started contributing to Wiktionary at the end of last year. It was difficult to maintain a nearly inactive Wiktionary with a couple of regular members. So I decided to make the Wiktionary usable to certain extents first while I tried to recruit new contributors. I collected opensourced dictionary data online such as Ornagai, electrical engineering dictionary porject and Sealang Burmese dictionary. Online community generated data such as Ornagai has a lot of spelling mistakes in it and the format and definitions are inconsistent which need to be improved greatly. Then Myanmar NLP kindly provided me with the Myanmar lexicon database.

Pywikipediabot is a very handy and useful application. I used to run it for fixing minor encoding mistakes in Burmese. Now I used it to upload dictionary data. I spent the Myanmar new year (13th-17th April) formatting the data to Wiki markup. Now Myanmar Wiktionary is available in two languages as English-Burmese and Burmese-Burmese. While bot was uploading data, we tried to improve the homepage design and to add more words which were not in the collected dictionary data. Today, Myanmar Wiktionary reaches 100,000 words.

Unicode Font Usability

It might be confusing that why there are not a lot of Burmese Wikipedians or Wiktionarians. It was a complex drama that there were several pseudo Unicode fonts (they use Unicode codepoints for Burmese, but never follow the codepoints exactly or the encoding order) when standard Unicode fonts were still in development, and one of the pseudo Unicode font named Zawgyi became popular. Unicode fonts are used in Government offices and international projects such as Wikipedia. Yet a normal Burmese online citizen would only use Zawgyi font. We, the Unicode activists, tried to make awareness of Unicode standard and got some achievements as popular IT forums such as MyanmarITPros, Mystery Zillion and Mmitd between 2011 English new year and Burmese new year.

Before major OS vendors such as Apple and Microsoft support Burmese language in OSX and Windows, there should be solution for usability of Wikimedia projects for OS unsupported languages.

1. Font embedding

Burmese script is  one of many branches of Brahmi script. It needs complex shaping and reordering of glyphs. So Unicode fonts with proper contextual rendering are necessary. Most of the people don't have Burmese font or have Burmese font but Zawgyi. They wouldn't be able to see the Wikipedia or Wiktionary texts or wouldn't see them properly. So embedded font is needed for reading purpose. There are several opensourced fonts for Burmese in multiple platforms such as Windows, Linux, OSX and iOS. Some of them are cross-OS enabled. OS and browser detection javascripts were developed and TTF, compressed TTF, eot and woff can be embedded accordingly. As I am not a coder, I would be very glad if someone were to develop a font embedding module for MediaWiki and implement it in local wikis.

2. Build-in keyboard

Even after texts are readable, editing texts in local languages needs special keyboard inputs. Languages such as Burmese needs keyboards with reordering capability. People usually don't have keyboard installed in their computer or mobile devices. There is a project called Narayam which is a build-in keyboard plugin for MediaWiki and I helped writing Myanmar Unicode keyboard for it. There is also a Burmese local project called Keymagic and one of it's effort was web keyboard. I hope with the help of them, editing Wikipedia even in local language would be possible.

@=={Lionslayer>

The drama that is #Unicode support for the #Myanmar script

Unicode is a standard that defines the characters of a script and their behaviour. As it is a standard, implementing a font for a script and calling it Unicode means that the specifications have to be followed exactly.

I have written in the past about Zawgyi; it abuses Unicode by not having the characters in the designated places. This time it is the Ayar Unicode Group that is the focus of attention. The Ayar system gets the characters in the right place but there are questions about the placement of characters that  form the syllables. With 12% of them in the wrong order, this affects around 70% of the words in Myanmar.

With Myanmar people fighting over the "correct" implementation of Unicode it makes sense when the claims and counter claims are assessed by someone who can be accepted as an expert. It makes sense to do so and do it publicly because this ongoing madness has to stop.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Some #KeyMagic for #Malayalam

With Narayam you can type your script in #MediaWiki. This is already really powerful but sometimes, sometimes you want to do other things as well, writing a text document or sending a message in Facebook.

When it is hard to type in your Wikipedia, it is equally hard to do these other tasks. Enter Keymagic. Keymagic enables you to type and have a proper Unicode result. It works for Windows, Linux and Macintosh.

As a result of the collaboration on Narayam, Malayalam is now supported by Keymagic as well. With the experience and testing done to support an input method for a language in Narayam, it is relatively easy to implement them in Keymagic as well..

How relevant is it to have this for Kannada, Hindi, Oriya, Sinhala, Sanskrit ...
Thanks,
       GerardM

In memoriam Keith Stribley

Keith was the obvious person to invite to the conference on the Myanmar Wikipedia. In his soft spoken, unassuming way he has a reputation as a "can do" man for supporting the Myanmar script and all the languages that rely on it.

When you check out his website, you will be impressed with the relevance and the breath of his work for the Myanmar language.

• DocCharConvert
• ekaya
• Firefox Myanmar Converter
• openoffice.org-graphite
• LanguageBuddy
• MyanmarParser
• Myanmar OpenOffice Extension
• myWebDevelopment
• ThanLwin Font

Keith will be sorely missed. I can only hope that his legacy will inspire people to continue the important work he is known for.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Reportcards for each #Wikipedia language

One of the Wikipedia birthday gifts is a page with reportcards for the Indic languages. Inspired by the wonderful work by Shiju Alex, Erik Zachte prepared "at a glance" information. This is really helpful when you try to understand the vitality of particular projects.

Both for the Malayalam and the Myanmar Wikipedia there are issues with entering text properly in the Wiki. This has been largely solved locally at the Malayalam Wikipedia with an option that allows you to pick one of three choices.


Once issues with writing articles are resolved locally, it becomes clear that a similar solution is needed for Commons and wikis external to the WMF. Support for input methods has to be available together with the localisation.

At the Amsterdam hackathon, we discussed this and there is active support not only for supporting input methods in core but also for providing Indian developers with access to the MediaWiki code repository.

Providing support for input methods for the Myanmar language is critical when the Myanmar Wikipedia is to prosper and grow. When it is to be read, serving its content in both the mutually exclusive fonts from the same source would be a momentous improvement.

There is an understanding how we can move forward. The people who know how are invited to become MediaWiki hackers and they are invited to work together for an optimal result.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Ambitions for the #Myanmar #Wikipedia

A Myanmar times article informs us that the Myanmar Wikipedia community has the ambition to grow its number of articles to 15,000. It is ambitious not because there are too few people on the Internet but because of the technical issues they are facing.

This instructional screen shot shows that the localisation has improved a lot lately. It would have been fun to have Jimmy's message shown with all the nice boxy indicators that the Unicode font is missing but getting the core functionality localised is still more important.

When you read the article you will start to understand why achieving 15,000 articles is ambitious. Getting everyone to use Unicode fonts will be hard; some 90% of the Myanmar population use an incompatible writing system and, it will take some convincing that Wikipedia is worthy of the effort needed.

There are several scenarios that will make it possible to fulfil the 15K ambition. With out of the box thinking and some carefully targeted investments, this ambition is in reach.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Demonstrating the effect of #localisation

A workshop about localisation and #translatewiki.net was given last month to improve the usability of the MediaWiki user interface in Myanmar. The result has been really satisfying.

As you can see, currently 53.94% of the MediaWiki core messages have been localised and the numbers show in the Burmese script. Even more satisfying is that the user interface becomes more legible to the people in the many countries that have sizeable Myanmar population.

The translation rally proved also stimulating; 541 messages were localised in that time. There is a steady stream of new localisations and it is this kind of attention that makes the my.wikipedia.org ready for much needed growth.
Thanks,
       GerardM

More #mobile #Wikipedia news (continued X)

Critical for the #Myanmar Wikipedia is Unicode font support. The area where there is room for making a difference is in the mobile support for a language.

What is needed is for the manufacturers of mobile phones, the popular websites to support Unicode fonts. It is therefore a strategic choice to localise the Wikimedia Mobile messages. With a mobile main page, the service will be that much better.

PS I have not posted on mobile Wikipedia because there is not much happening as far as I am aware.
Thanks,
      GerardM

What is in a name .... when it can't be read?

Zawgyi is a writing system/font for the Burmese script. It is based on Unicode technology and there is overlap for many of the characters. The consequence is that a true Unicode compliant font will see some of the Zawgyi characters but will fail to see others.

When Lionslayer created his pangram, I wondered what is the use but the penny has dropped; it can be used to show if a font truly supports all characters. Below you find a true Unicode font and Zawgyi. Depending if your system supports the Burmese script you see either not much or either font showing all characters properly.

သီဟိုဠ်မှ ဉာဏ်ကြီးရှင်သည် အာယုဝဍ္ဎနဆေးညွှန်းစာကို ဇလွန်ဈေးဘေးဗာဒံပင်ထက် အဓိဋ္ဌာန်လျက် ဂဃနဏဖတ်ခဲ့သည်။

သီဟိုဠ္မွ ဉာဏ္ႀကီးရွင္သည္ အာယုဝၯနေဆးညႊန္းစာကို ဇလြန္ေဈးေဘးဗာဒံပင္ထက္ အဓိ႒ာန္လ်က္ ဂဃနဏဖတ္ခဲ့သည္။

The good news is that there are many fonts that support the Myanmar language with a true Unicode script.

Here is a blog post in Myanmar telling the story of Zawgyi and Unicode..
Thanks,
         GerardM

Taking care of the "little" things

The English #Wikipedia has many features that help define its community, its village pump, its own bureaucrats, its barn stars. The Myanmar Wikipedia decided at the Bangkok unconference to have such novelties.

There is now a vote that will decide if Zawthet will be the first Myanmar bureaucrat. It is quite important for a community to be able to organise itself. This will strengthen its community.

Picture original at Flickr

The equivalent of a "Village well" in the Myanmar culture is very much the teashop. So it was decided to have a teashop where people can discuss, inform about all things Wiki. So now there is a teashop and it will be very much for the Wikipedia to overcome its technical issues and enjoy their tea.



The notion of barnstars was discussed as well and, it was decided that it would be good to give a lotus in stead for those who deserve praise. Localising a great practice makes sense because it has to feel good for the local community.

As barnstars are awarded by a person, I would like to award a lotus to the people who came to the Bangkok unconference, to the people who make up what is now called the "Myanmar Wikipedia Working Group" for their wish to make their project do well and for the many great ideas that are surely going to make a difference.
Thanks,

       GerardM

Special events by special people

#Wikipedia is serious about fun. The #Myanmar unconference challenged people in more ways then one. One challenge was to create the first pangram for the Myanmar language. The best known pangram in English is

The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog

A pangram is particularly useful to test the Unicode work that is needed to improve the Internet experience. The expectation was that it would take some time before the prize of $100,- needed to be handed over. However, there were special people at the unconference and this is the result:

သီဟိုဠ်မှ ဉာဏ်ကြီးရှင်သည် အာယုဝဍ္ဎနဆေးညွှန်းစာကို ဇလွန်ဈေးဘေးဗာဒံပင်ထက် အဓိဋ္ဌာန်လျက် ဂဃနဏဖတ်ခဲ့သည်။

The genius from Sri Lanka read thoroughly the formula of the elixir of life in the Bardan tree next to the Zalun market.

The richer man

Lionslayer has listened quietly in his little corner only to come up with witty remarks. In the mean time he was busy localising the "most often used" messages.

It proved really motivating to see the localised messages arrive in production from translatewiki.net on the my.wikipedia and on Commons.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Work and fun, Wikipedia is fun :)

It is not only serious work in Bangkok. We had a boat trip on the Chao Phraya river, had a meal and enjoyed the performance of two Thai dancers.

There will be a visit to a cultural show tonight and tomorrow they will be seeing the Bangkok sights, sadly I will be taking my flights..
Thanks,
      GerardM

Reaching out to the #Myanmar people

On the third day of the Bangkok meeting, the "Myanmar Wikipedia Working Group" as these Wikimedians call themselves, the big topic is how do we reach out. How do we get the attention of the people. How do we achieve what Wikipedia aims to do.

Unicode is a big stumbling block, so it is important to consider how we can deal with it. Many ideas are considered, one of the more interesting is giving the internet cafes a sticker that shows to its customers that you can read and edit Wikipedia..

best practices are considered

Before such a sticker is handed over, it has to be checked that the computers do have the appropriate Unicode font installed. Setting up the right environment is a considered activity.

It turns out that Firefox has been localised in the Myanmar language. It just has not been made available to the Mozilla foundation... As this is a proper Unicode localisation, this is yet another activity.

More soon....
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Localisation for the Myanmar #Wikipedia

At #Wikimania in Alexandria, some Myanmar people asked me to find people to do localisation work for the Myanmar Wikipedia. I received a Myanmar 1000 kyat note to make things happen.

Current status at translatewiki.net

This note has been burning in my pocket ever since. I have now met many of the Myanmar Wikimedians and I finally found someone who is happily localising. I gave him the 1000 kyat in recognition for the good work he is doing.
Thanks,
       GerardM