#MediaWiki #RTL support when upgrading to 1.18

Amir is a Wikimedian and a linguist who quickly gained expertise on how to support RTL languages like Arabic and Hebrew. Not only did he add many bugs in bugzilla, he provided us with a lot of fixes as well. His latest project is supporting the upgrade for RTL to release 1.18. This contains RTL fixes by him and by SPQRobin.
Enjoy,
      GerardM

Administrators can thoroughly customize every MediaWiki based wiki by editing CSS and JS files, such as MediaWiki:Common.css, MediaWiki:Common.js, MediaWiki:Vector.css etc. These customizations are usually requested by the editors community and fall into two general categories. The first category are changes to the design of the site, such as setting a different background image, a festive logo, a different font or a different color for the revision comparison (diff). The other category works around bugs until they are solved in the core code.

Customizations may need to be updated by the local site admins specially after the deployment of a new version or MediaWiki or of a customized extension. Sometimes old customizations that worked around bugs just quietly stop working after the bug is resolved. They don't affect the site much, but they fill up Common.css with now useless code that makes maintenance much harder, so it is best to remove them. Sometimes changes in the software break the customizations and the site appears broken to the users - in this case they MUST be removed or updated.

MediaWiki 1.18 was rolled out to several wikis a few days ago. Among them was mediawiki.org, the website about the software itself. MediaWiki 1.18 has many updates for the handling right-to-left (RTL) text, especially on pages where it is mixed with left-to-right text. Before the upgrade mediawiki.org had several customizations to fix the display of RTL text in the tabs on the top of the page. After the upgrade this text appeared badly until they were removed.

 All the other Wikimedia wikis will be upgraded next. If you are an administrator in any Wikimedia wiki, you should look at these customization files as soon as possible and also at the release notes of MediaWiki 1.18. Understand the purpose of the existing customizations and be prepared to remove the ones that aren't needed anymore immediately after the upgrade. A general rule of thumb is to take an especially good look at lines that have "rtl", "ltr", "right", "left" and "bidi" in them.

If you need more help understanding these files, contact Amir Aharoni preferably on IRC.
--  Amir

Think globally, act locally

Dedalus or Ad Huikeshoven is a Dutch Wikimedian and accountant. He has been a member of the audit committee for quite some time. It is therefore of interest what he has to say of the annual fundraiser.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The Wikimedia Foundation is a global organisation with a global mission and a global vision. Every year a lot of money is collected to financially support its organizational and technical infrastructure. The foundation and the chapters maintain a track record of raising funds on time and on budget, and every year for bigger dollar amounts. Changes in the design and banner and donation landing pages follow evidence based research findings for best effect.

A dozen local chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation participate in the online fundraiser. Chapter participation is part of the success of the last fund-raisers. Growth in dollar amount collected was partly a result of an increase in chapter participation.

All Wikimedians should be thankful to the many volunteers around the globe who have devoted time and energy to get a chapter organized. Institutionalizing a legal entity requires a lot of tough work. I am very glad fellow Wikimedians are willing to go through these motions. Eventually it pays of.

At Wikimania this year quite a lot of people were heavily upset by a letter and resolution from the board of the Wikimedia Foundation about the fundraiser. I happen to serve as a community member on a board committee, that is, the Audit Committee. The scope of its audits is the Wikimedia Foundation itself, not the chapters per se. My position is that I would love to see all local chapters participating in the annual online fundraiser or working towards participating in the future.

The Wikimedia movement as a whole has a responsibility to ensure accountability to donors about money received through the online fundraiser and the way that money is spent. Providing a link to the latest financial statement on [[m:Reports]] is a transparent way for a chapter to show they have fulfilled their accountability responsibilities toward donors. A September 1 deadline has been set for chapters to show financial reporting compliance for this year.

You can find links to recent financial statements for ten chapters that participated in the last fundraiser on [[m:Reports]]. The score so far is eleven out of twelve. Eleven down, one to go. Ok, have I mentioned Wikimania yet? Let me tell you this: I really enjoyed Wikimania this year (my first Wikimania ever). And I really would like to thank the local team from WMIL for organizing such a great event for the global movement as a whole. So, they have been very busy. In my humble opinion they should be forgiven that this year their financial report is late.
---Ad

PS just after I submitted this blog post there was this. Keeping my fingers crossed for the last financial report...

#CTM11 - #OrsayCommons at #Monumenta2011

Claire Solery was very much involved in the organisation at communicated the museum in Düsseldorf. Getting us Wikimedians to this conference was something she worked hard to achieve. Claire was happy with our activity, my blogging so I was happy to offer for her to be a guest blogger. Enjoy!
Thanks,
      GerardM

(Free) images are sometimes more appropriate than words.

I had the opportunity to present the work online I did for a project in France called Monumenta which featured a work of art by famous British artist Anish Kapoor named Leviathan for a month and a half at the Grand Palais in Paris. Part of the project was to work on the visual aspect on the piece and how visitors could relate to it on a more personal level and build a relationship to the art through their own vision, not mediated by images taken by third parties.

I was myself surprised by the quality, diversity and creativity of the images we gathered and how they were able to reinvent one work of art almost every single time. Because you are taking a picture does not mean you are being less active or opinionated than when writing a text, it would seem, and sometimes it can suit your goals more.  On our way to building this organic « guestbook » Monumenta was asked by a group named OrsayCommons to come and make a photo, livetwitt and discuss while the event was running.

OrsayCommons is a pro-photo, pro-remix and pro public domain group which was created after the ban by Musée d’Orsay in Paris of photography in its exhibition spaces. Initially based on forbidden actions within the Musée d’Orsay, they proceeded to come at Monumenta , which picture taking policy is about asking for authorization to photograph only when using a tripod, and requesting a simple copyright while publishing pictures taken in situ. The action generated photos, discussion (if your French is up the scratch) and above all a good deal of social bonding.

The argument often used against free photography in exhibition spaces is that it diminshes the quality of visitor experience by visual pollution and repetitiveness of the picture taking process which in turn gets in the way of a real appreciative experience. Is this bound to be the casehttp://monumenta2011.tumblr.com/ ? Maybe not. Another point is that in anyways, the quality of the pictures is going to be poor, and touristy-like. You will check out the Monumenta Tumblr account and let us how you feel about this point. I think above all there is concern over controlling the image of the museum through all the images circulating, which is, obviously impossible. With 175 pictures in our Tumblr account, which was enriched by OrsayCommons coming we are not exactly scary, but we offer the possibility for people to nurture and further their vision and appreciation of art.

Thanks to Communicating the Museum for letting me present and thanks to the trust of Monumenta teams in conducting this project together with Charles Dufresne.

-- Claire

#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>

Dear #Apple why do I need to jail break to support my language

When I want support for the #Ge'ez script on my #iPhone, the only option open for me is to jail break my phone and lose the warranty. This is very unsettling because I love my language and I love my iPhone.

Could you please make an app available that allows me to read content in my language and, while you are at it, please add a Ge'ez keyboard as well.
Thanks,
     Merhawie

Give us proper translation tools at #Wikimedia Meta

While #MediaWiki is excellent for writing encyclopaedic articles; it is not the right tool for all text jobs. We are asked to translate the Editor survey. It consists of a long list of short sentences, often repetitive. When translating these sentences, it would be useful to see the original text and existing translations to other languages. Add to this comments that make the context clear and the process of translation becomes easy and efficient.

The Translate extension developed for translating and localising at translatewiki.net provides all of these things in one convenient screen. Plain MediaWiki doesn't provide any of this and the translator has to laboriously move between screens.

Reviewing translated messages is a breeze with Translate. MediaWiki has this long list of translated questions which is very distracting. The Translate extension by comparison has a review mode that shows the translations juxtaposed with the original strings.

The Translate extension automatically offers translation for repeated sentences from its Translation Memory and automatic translations are suggested from Google and Microsoft. This is very efficient, but sadly MediaWiki doesn't have this either.

Modern browsers provide spell-checking functionality, which is very helpful for getting the translated text right. Mixing several languages in one editing box confuses the spell-checker and having a very long text in an editing box makes the spellchecker slow. With the Translate extension this is not a problem.

The Translate extension applies proper directionality to each language: Left-to-Right for English, Russian and Hindi; Right-to-Left for Hebrew, Arabic and Urdu. Translating using plain MediaWiki puts the original language - usually English - and the target language in one editing box and mixes up the directionality.

Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
"We're living in pieces,
 I want to live in peace." - T. Moore

A #GLAM is born

Germany is famous for its beer, sauerkraut and sausage. Germany is also famous in the Wiki world because our GLAM projects started with the cooperation with the Bundesarchiv in 2008. Sadly the news from the Bundesarchiv could be better and they have never provided high resolution material to be digitally restored.

The cooperation with the hamburgmuseum will be  different. Like with the Tropenmuseum, it will start small and evolve over time.

The hamburgmuseum in 1930 - from the Bundesarchiv

About the project:

The hamburgmuseum runs an exhibition called "Wachgeküsst" about the restoration of a neo-classical country house of the 1830's - the "Villa Rücker". Some 200 pictures of this country house; paintings, photographs, floorplans, watercolour paintings and several images depicting the workflow of the restoration will be made available. A handful images will be provided in the highest resolution to be digitally restored and nominated as featured pictures. Wikipedians from Hamburg and elsewhere are invited to contribute their knowledge by improving articles related to the museum and the culture of Hamburg in general. This first project is about the Hanseatics of Hamburg and it will introduce the hamburgmuseum in the Wiki world.

The music room of the Villa Rücker

About the tasks:

A GLAM page will be established, categories created, images uploaded, descriptions written and articles improved. The biggest hurdle will be the upload of 200 images and adding information templates to them. I hope to learn this from Multichill who has developed this into an artform. The images will be selected by the hamburgmuseum and represent a cross section of what is available in the museum's archives on the "Villa Rücker". Statistics and figures will help us understand how things develop for the hamburgmuseum and for the wiki community.

Analog restoration at the hamburgmuseum

About the speciality:

With this first pilot project we start small but the quality will be high. Finding a GLAM partner in Germany who is willing to provide such material and some of that in high resolution is a first time occasion for me. I'm happy to tell the story of Germany's cultural heritage and help the hamburgmuseum share its content with the world.

regards,

     Peter Weis

Get the #Wikimedia girls

For the past two months there are several discussions about how to get more girls involved in Wikimedia community. There are several news about that (the New York Times even made a "special" about it with several specialist opinions). Sue Gardner create a mailing list to discuss the problem  and now that is – in my opinion – one of the most productive mailings list out there right now.
 
Today, in the other hand, there is a posting in foundation-I mailing list created when they discuss the possibility of change MediaWiki to allow us to see a female version of “user” in our user pages (and I can be “usuária:Beria” and not anymore “usuário:Beria”) which in fact is a topic very discussed in Gender Gap mailing list, the possibility of be called by female words if we want to.
 
Well, apparently not everyone think that is a good idea. According with the boys – and here a note: Yes, there was no girl discussing that in Foundation mailing list, they are deciding our life for us, like in Middle Ages – girls “don’t” want to be called as girls, because since the female version of words are made by adding someone in the male version, that is “anti-feminist” and that “wouldn't really help to attract more new female users.” 

Well, I can tell what will for sure not attract us: That male centrist culture, that “James Bond” culture that treat girls as accessories and believe we can’t decide what we want, and decided that only because tech world is full of males we just are “used” to be treating as one.

Some of us will not use that option, for sure. But here we are talking about right to choose. And we can’t choose unless we had that option. Not all girls vote today, but when, back in 1920’s, girls fight for that; they fight for have the right to choose.

Maybe boys can imagine that is nothing, but that is very important for girls. And that small step can open the door to girls feel more include in Wikipedia “A place so, so good, who even call me as a girl”.

Thank you Béria Lima for being a guest on my blog.
        GerardM

Innovation at #Wikimania

Wikimania is such an intensive event, that I spend all my time on the people, the talks and the events themselves. This years Wikimania in Gdansk was no exception; as always it was a magnificent event and there were several new things to be welcomed.

My plan is to mention the highlights when the videos get on-line. However, one new thing is the creation of a multi lingual content project, a book with 104 Wikipedia articles about Lech Wałęsa.

I am happy that I may use the announcement as a "guest blog".
Thanks,
      GerardM

Hi all,

I'm pleased to announce that the book about Lech Wałęsa, which was
prepared for Wikimania 2010 in Gdańsk, has been published at Wikimedia Commons.

The book contains biographies of Lech Wałęsa[1] in 104 languages of
the world. Every biography comes from a different language version of Wikipedia. All the text was retrieved at the same moment - On the 1st of March, 2010. The book was prepared by volunteers from the Polish Wikipedia community and the whole book, including the cover, is available under CC-BY-SA 3.0. All the authors are listed on the book's last pages.

During the closing ceremony of Wikimania 2010 the book was shown for the first time in public. And a few days after Wikimania, the
President of Gdańsk, Wikimania organizers and Polish Wikipedians gave Lech Wałęsa the first copy of the book.

The book is available in PDF format on Wikimedia Commons:

Regards,
    Leinad

The state of the Wiki in India (part 1)

I am really happy that Salmaan Haroon accepted my invitation to be a guest on my blog. He took the time to write down his vision for Wikimedia in India. People who want to express a contrasting view are invited when they are as thoughtful.

Thanks,

      GerardM

I wonder what comes to mind when someone mentions India to outsiders; yoga, meditation, the Taj Mahal, strong deterring images of a hot third world country, huddled masses a billion strong- the second largest population in the world.

India currently provides the fourth largest traffic to Wikipedia according to Alexa.com, behind United States, Japan and Germany. The thing to bear in mind with this statistic is the sheer size of the audience here - Germany with its 81 million, Japan with its 127 million both represent a far higher number of internet users than India with over a billion in population. Currently, it only accounts for 7% of the population that is providing the 4th largest traffic to Wikipedia.org, in contrast to 75% in the case of Japan. This is staggeringly low even among developing nations; 36% of Brazil and 31% of China is currently online. The majority of the traffic originating from India is directed towards Wikipedia and the English Wikipedia in particular, the bulk of the traffic is being generated from Delhi and Mumbai according to Google Trends, followed by the states of Tamil Nadu and Karnataka. Also of note in the Google Trend figures is that traffic has been steadily rising since last year, nearly doubling from January 2009.

What are the factors behind a drastically low figure of 7% of internet usage in the Indian population in comparison to say China? It’s actually a myriad of factors in addition to poverty, corruption and highly uneven distribution of wealth that are endemic to developing countries. First it’s the uneven  population distribution, 70% of India still resides in rural areas, not as affected from the rapid urbanization in the recent years. There are currently 47 cities with over one million residents, the city of Mumbai is currently the largest city in India and the 5th largest in the world in terms of population with over 20 million denizens, followed by Delhi, the capital of the country as the 8th largest metropolitan in the world with over 18 million inhabitants. Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India is also a very important city in terms of internet usage with over 5 million of some of the countries most literate and technically versatile population. Other factors besides an uneven population distribution like the languid pace of IT infrastructure development, with years of bureaucratic protocols hampering the speed of technological progress and comparatively high cost of Internet availability are also to blame.

So what’s the point of interest for Wikimedia in the country? India is poised for exponential growth in terms of internet users in the coming year with the advent of newer technologies and massive investments by Private companies, this combined with the strong economic growth in the recent year rivalling china puts India on the forefront of growth in terms of internet users. India is already the second largest market in the world for mobile internet users. Secondly, one third of the population in India is currently under the age of 15, representing a massive opportunity in terms of social networking and other web 2.0 properties. A young population would not only provide a sustained growth for years to come but easier accessibility and visibility to a wider population.

The biggest Issue in engaging the Indian audience is language. India has one of the worlds most culturally, linguistically and genetically diverse populations. Here are some facts about Indian languages - There are 22 languages that are recognized as official languages by the Indian government, there are over 1600 other languages and dialects in total. India has two major and distinctive linguistic families: the Indo-Aryan used by up to 70% Indians and the Dravidian with over 22% of speakers. The Indo Aryan family easily dominates in terms of usage with Hindi having the largest number of speakers with over 350-400 million speakers, Hindi also happens to be the principal official language of the Republic of India. The second most spoken language in India is Bengali with over 83 million speakers followed by Telugu at over 74 million and Marathi at 71 million speakers and Tamil at 60 million speakers (all figures from 2001 census of India). The major Dravidian Languages are Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam. There are also some Austro-Asiatic and Tibeto-Burman languages making up a small minority.

Hindi being designated as the official Language has been a heated issue in the country for over 50 years. The official base for Hindi speakers is centered on North and Central India, including the capital and the seat of the government- Delhi and its neighbouring states. The rest of the country particularly some southern states have been less accepting of Hindi with objections towards a foreign language being unnecessarily forced on them while their own distinct cultural and linguistic identity was being de-emphasized since Hindi is not openly spoken or used in many southern states. Their have been multiple instances of Anti-Hindi agitations historically in the Southern states. Linguistic rights have become an even more delicate issue with some political parties voicing their opposition to Hindi.

The issue of note here is the lingua Franca of the country - English. English has enjoyed a long history of usage in India for centuries under the British rule; it became established as the language of administration and higher education. It is officially recognized as a subsidiary official Language or secondary official language by the Republic of India. The importance of English is agreed upon by the vast majority of the literates, aside from all the Anti-Hindi position; English is considered a necessity to remain globally competitive. English breaches the language barrier in many of the southern states reaching across very culturally and linguistically bifurcated communities. In some Metropolitan areas, it’s not unusual to find families who use and prefer English as their mother tongue and have been doing so for decades. A recent discussion about the Anti-Hindi issue on one news channel raised this issue to a young studio audience, when a suggestion of parting with English and having Hindi in addition to a mother tongue was raised. This suggestion was laughed off by the majority of the audience since the program itself was in English onring states. The rest of the country particularly some southern states have an English News Channel, It is also the only language the entire audience understood comprising of speakers from different states.

I had the privilege of attending Wikimania this year in Gdansk. In one of the discussions related to Strategic Planning, I was asked about the history and usage of traditional encyclopedias in India. Whether the encyclopedias we had during school were in English, I may not have been the right candidate for this question being a bit young; I was born at the right time for the Tech bubble, so I had Encyclopædia Britannica and eventually Wikipedia on my computer before I had to ever look for an encyclopedia in a bookstore. The answer however was yes. The point that I wanted to make was this, the computer that I used and the majority of the country used for years were pre-dominantly Windows based, Microsoft Windows didn’t have support for different Indian languages without the Language interface pack which came out much later and even then it was not used by the majority of the user base due to issues with character input, this might be in contrast to say China where localization was available easily and widely. So the majority of the Indian community that is online have to understand and use English to some degree of comfort. This might also point to some co-relation between literacy rate, economic factors and Internet usage in India.

India represents a very rich cultural and linguistic base for the rest of the world. Going ahead, the Wikimedia foundation needs to decide if it’s interested in pursuing a strong user base in India Full Stop regardless of which language of Wikipedia it uses or if it wants a diverse linguistic base. I personally would suggest establishing a strong user base first and getting a high visibility rate in India before a diverse base could be nurtured. So far none of Wikipedia’s Indian language projects have been able to break the 100,000 article mark- Hindi for example has slightly over 50,000 articles with over 250 active users, followed by Telugu at over 45,000 articles and Marathi at over 30,000 articles, needless to say these statistics don’t take into account the quality and the size of the
articles in question.

Recently, several Translation projects for Wikipedia have been being undertaken by Google and others community supported machine based translation project which might offer a hopeful avenue for growth but the community consensus so far, has been against the use of machine translation especially since Indian language present a very distinct linguistic subset. There have also been some concerns that this might be against the nature of the projects since such an approach is not community oriented and the articles themselves aren’t contributed to by individual editors, perhaps a more organic or a hybrid approach would be needed to tackle this issue.

Salmaan Haroon

All Statistics and Figures mentioned above are taken from the English Wikipedia except where explicitly mentioned otherwise. Traffic statistics from Alexa.com for Wikipedia.org, traffic analysis from Google Trends.

#Shapado, the free Q&A Software from South America

Hi all,

Gerard gently asked me to write a post about Shapado and so I obliged today.
We're a bunch of developers who live in South America, David and Jorge Cuadrado live in Colombia, the awesome country where they build castles on bridges because they're bad ass and I, truly yours, live in Peru where people enjoy cutting rain drops with scissors just because they can.

We all work on  Shapado which is a (buzz word alert!) free, useful, social, ajaxy, wikiy, HTML5y, reputationy, reddiggy Q&A forum.

What does that mean exactly? Well, Q&A means people can ask questions and answer them. Reddiggy means people can vote on the best questions and best answers. Useful means you don't have to read 10 answers before finding the best answer to a question, because the most voted answers get to the top of the page. Reputation means users can be trusted because when they give nice answers that get tons of votes, their reputation gets up, which is a sign of trust. HTMLl5 means that when your browser or computer gets a nasty crash, all is not lost thanks to local storage. Wiki means answers that suck can be edited, improved or just deleted. Ajax means you don't have to refresh the whole page every time you need to do something but it still work for noscript addicts. Social because you can login with your OpenID or even twitter and facebook and link your accounts together. Free means it's free as in freedom so you can hack it anyway you want, but if you just want to give it a try, there's a hosted version that enables you to create your forum in a couple of seconds.

Anyway, you get the idea. We also have a great moderation/admin interface and customizable UI with themes, JavaScript, ads, analytics and whatnot. Last but not least, thanks to the awesome translatewiki.net project, we're available in a gazillion language now so don't hesitate to help on that front or on the code.

We're also pretty edgy when it comes to our stack, the whole thing runs on Rails with MongoDB as the database through the MongoMapper ORM, which is pretty rad too. Anyway, I hope you find it interesting and, have fun giving it a try.
Cheers,
       Patrick Aljord

#MediaWiki - #SignWriting road map

It is a distinct honour and pleasure to have Steve Slevinski as a guest blogger. To appreciate why I consider it an honour, Valerie Sutton who read it in advance wrote: "This is an outstanding clarification and history and roadmap for SignWriting software in general."

Solving a desktop issue on the server

SignWriting is a universal script for all sign languages. SignWriting is covered by open standards. The second version of the International SignWriting Alphabet was recently completed. Called the ISWA 2010, the alphabet is ready for a 10 year freeze.

I'm currently working on the third major revision of the character
encoding model called Binary SignWriting. This revision is needed for improved searching. After this revision, the data model will be ready for a 10 year freeze as well.

The SignWriting script itself has not changed in many years. We still
write the same way with the same symbols. Fine tuning the alphabet and data model, while an inconvenience for programmers, has not effected the writers. All of our data has been and will continue to be automatically converted to the latest standards.

Now that we are approaching a stable standard, we are ready to consider a Unicode proposal. Thanks to the work of Michael Everson, 1024 code points have already been reserved for SignWriting in the Supplementary Multilingual Plane. With the third revision of Binary SignWriting, we can encode SignWriting with 1280 code points, requiring 5 rows compared to the 4 rows already set aside.

Inclusion in Unicode is very exciting, but it will take years to work
through the approval process. Ultimately, SignWriting will be solved
with the desktop. Server applications will simply store characters in
the database and use characters in the HTML pages. The desktop will receive the characters and generate the appropriate SignWriting font.

People have listed the shortcomings of the SignWriting MediaWiki Plugin. Every one of these issues do not exist for a script encoded in Unicode with a desktop font engine. Once SignWriting is encoded and a desktop font is available, the need for a SignWriting MediaWiki extension will largely go away. SignWriting will just be another script. Every feature of MediaWiki will work the same as for other scripts: page titles, interwiki linking, meaningful diffs, that are written vertically...

The future is bright, but we're not going to wait and just sit still. We
have writers to help and others to inform. The current method for
SignWriting is to store the characters in the database and send images to the desktop. We are using the server to solve a desktop problem.

The implementation of the open standards is called the SignWriting Image Server. This is a general purpose server package for creating and viewing SignWriting.

The current SignWriting MediaWiki Plugin is a simple cover to the
SignWriting Image Server. For the main body of the page, SignWriting data is replaced with equivalent images. This replacement happens at a superficial level and can break linking and some other features. Digging deeper into the parser and user interface, it is possible to solve any issue, but this requires time, effort, and expertise.

The official SignWriting Wiki will serve as an incubator to mature the plugin as we develop our tools and our writers. Next week, I will be updating the plugin to use the third revision of Binary SignWriting. Detailed instructions and video demonstrations are planned for the near future. A plugin update is planned for late 2010, early 2011.

Regards,
Stephen E Slevinski Jr.
slevin@signpuddle.net

Terminology support for the Swahili language

I am really happy to have my friend Martin Benjamin as a guest blogger. He is looking for improving ICT-terminology for the Swahili language.

Maneno Magumu ya Kiteknolojia

We are asking for your help on a quick, important project intended to improve access to computer technology in East Africa. The task is simple: look through a list of English terms that are used in information technology, and vote on the Swahili translations or suggest your own.

Twaomba msaada wako kwenye mradi muhimu unaolenga kuboresha matumizi ya teknolojia za tarakilishi katika Afrika ya Mashariki. Shughuli ni rahisi: tazama orodha ya maneno yanayotumiwa kwenye teknolojia ya habari na mawasiliano, na kupigia kura tafsiri zilizoko za Kiswahili au pendekeza neno lako (unalofikiri ni sawa).

We need volunteers with good knowledge of information technology and the Swahili language. To get started, just visit manenomagumu.

Tunahitaji watu kujitolea ambao wana ujuzi wa teknolojia za mawasiliano na pia lugha ya Kiswahili. Kuanza, tembelea: manenomagumu.

Several efforts have been made to produce Swahili ICT vocabularies, but three big problems remain. First, many terms have been given poor Swahili equivalents because the original concept was misunderstood. Second, many terms have been given different Swahili equivalents in different translation projects; the same English term might have five different Swahili translations, depending on whether you are using Microsoft, Google, KiLinux, Facebook, or Wikipedia! Third, many terms have not yet been translated, and new terms keep appearing as ICT continues to evolve.

Kumekuwepo juhudi mbalimbali za kuandaa istilahi ya teknolojia kwa Kiswahili, lakini matatizo matatu bado yangalipo. Kwanza, maneno mengi yalitafsiriwa vibaya kwa sababu ya maana asili kutoeleweka. Pili, maneno mengi yalitafsiriwa tofauti katika miradi tofauti tofauti ya utafsiri; inawezekana kuwa neno lile lile la Kiingereza kuwa na tafsiri tano, kutegemea ikiwa unatumia Microsoft, Google, KiLinux, Facebook, au Wikipedia! Tatu, maneno mengi hayajatafsiriwa bado, na maneno mapya yanazidi kuvumbuliwa teknolojia inavyozidi kuwa.

The Kamusi Project is working to harmonize the various "localization" efforts, in order to have unified, consistent Swahili ICT terminology as we head into the next decade. Excitingly, we have the encouragement of both Microsoft and Google, usually big competitors, which are both interested in greatly expanding access to their services for Swahili speakers.

Kamusi Project inafanya kazi ya kuunganisha juhudi hizi za "Uswahilishaji", ili kuwa na orodha moja inayokubalika, ya istilahi ya kiteknolojia kwa Kiswahili, tunapoingia enzi ya tarakilishi katika Afika ya Mashariki. Kinachosisimua ni kwamba tunaungwa mkono na Microsoft na Google, ambao kwa kawaida ni washindani, ambao wanataka kuongeza sana huduma zao kwa wanaozungumza Kiswahili.

We have inspected all of the existing ICT terminology lists that we know of, from which we have produced several "packs" of difficult terms. Now we are seeking community participation to help reach agreement on how to express each term in Swahili going forward. The first five packs are available at manenomagumu.

Tumekagua orodha zote zinazopatikana za istilahi ya kiteknolojia, na tumetayarisha mafurushi kadhaa ya maneno magumu. Sasa tunatafuta jamii kuchangia ili kufikia makubaliano ya namna ya kusema kila neno kwa Kiswahili. Mafurushi yapatikana manenomagumu.

A few more packs will be added later this week, but we want to start the community review project immediately so that we can get rapid feedback if we need to adjust the process. This is an experimental project: as far as we know, this is the first time that any linguistic community has invited to help develop the ICT terms that will be used for their language in the future. If the experiment is successful, we will use the experience as the basis for more formal terminology development in the future, for Swahili and other African languages.

Mafurushi mengine machache yataongezwa mwisho wa wiki hii, lakini tunataka kuanza juhudi hii moja kwa moja ili tupate maoni ya jamii wanaochangia, kama ni lazima kubadilisha jinsi ya kuendelea. Bidii hii kweli ni ya majaribio: tunadhani kwamba ni mara ya kwanza kwamba wasemaji wa lugha yo yote wanakaribishwa kusaidia kwenye maendeleo ya istilahi ya kiteknolojia itakayotumiwa katika lugha yao. Majaribio yakifaulu, tutatumia uzoefu huu kama msingi wa maendeleo rasmi zaidi ya istilahi za kisayansi, kwa Kiswahili na lugha nyingi za Kiafrika.

So, for several reasons, it is very important that we have the participation of as many people as possible who (a) have a good understanding of the concepts involved in information technology, and (b) have good knowledge of the Swahili language.

Kwa hiyo, kwa sababu nyingi, ni muhimu sana tukiwa na watu wengi watakaojitolea ambao (a) wanaelewa vizuri maswala ya kiteknolojia, na (b) wanaelewa vizuri Kiswahili.

Please join us, or tell other people who you think might be interested. The project will end on 7 March, so please contribute this week if you want your voice to be counted in Swahili localization! Again, the website is manenomagumu.

Twaomba uungane nasi, au ueneze taarifa kwa watu wengine. Juhudi hii itamalizika 7 Machi, kwa hivyo ni muhimu uchangie wiki hii ikiwa unataka sauti yako ipate kusikika katika Uswahilshaji wa teknolojia. Tena, tovuti ni manenomagumu.

Notice: this project is only for volunteers who are interested in promoting the Swahili language. No payments or prizes are available. This effort is organized by Kamusi Project International and ANLoc, and is NOT officially affiliated with Microsoft, Google, BAKITA, or KiLinux. All suggestions are highly appreciated, and will be given the most serious consideration in the production of a harmonized Swahili ICT terminology set that will be made freely available online within the next few months.

Tangazo: juhudi hii ni kwa watu wa kujitolea wanaotaka kuendeleza Kiswahili. Hakuna malipo wala tuzo. Bidii hii imepangwa na Kamusi Project International na ANLoc, na hauna mahusiano rasmi na Microsoft, Google, BAKITA, au KiLinux. Tutashukuri kwa mapendekezo yoyote, na yatafikiriwa sana wakati wa kuandaa istilahi ya kiteknolojia katika Kiswahili. Istalahi itapatikana bila malipo kwa wote baada ya miezi michache.

Dr. Martin Benjamin
Executive Director, Kamusi Project International

twitter: kamusi

Selecting images for Wikimedia Commons

I am really happy to present Richard as a guest on my blog.

Since the upload on Wikimedia Commons of 37.000 images from the photographic collection of the Tropenmuseum, I've been concentrating on a follow up concerning images of objects. Not all digital images that are currently shown on the Tropenmuseum's on-line collection have the quality that is required for this purpose. Therefore it is necessary to make a selection from the objects. 

Many images are digitalised slides from the seventies and eighties; they serve their purpose of object identification, but they no longer match today's standards for object photography.  Whereas the options for recording photographic collection is rather straightforward, objects can be photographed from many angles. An image should be a good representation of an object, show its shape and relative dimensions, and it should also be attractive to look at. The images that qualify for Wikimedia Commons must show the viewers in an instant what they are looking at. Furthermore, the fact that we consider the images on Wikimedia to be a sign board for the Tropenmuseum is not unimportant. And so, it takes some time to do the selection of objects one by one, but the result will be worth waiting for.

Richard van Alphen, coordinator of collection digitalisation of the Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam.

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.

A language's journey out of digital exclusion

I asked Waldir to write as a guest on my blog..

Kabuverdianu is a language spoken on the islands of Cape Verde. It is a creole language of Portuguese basis, it is the mother tongue of virtually all Cape Verdeans, and it is used as a second language by descendants of Cape Verdeans in other countries. This amounts to almost a million speakers worldwide.¹

However, it is still virtually nonexistent in the written and digital world. Even in Cape Verde, where it is the only language spoken on an everyday basis, the official language is still Portuguese, which is used in schools, press, TV and the Internet.

This happens primarily because the language hasn't been standardized. There are many works published in Kabuverdianu, but there's no official grammar or dictionary. Fortunately, there is an official alphabet, which aims to standardize the transcription of the language's sounds to written form, which until now was done following the taste and creativity of each author. But an alphabet is barely enough for a start! Much more needs to be done.

The language had already been assigned an ISO 639-3 code (kea), but that only gives it a name. In order to have a digital existence, a language must have an entry in the CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository), which is a project by the Unicode Consortium aiming to provide basic locale data for all languages in order to allow software to be translated.

This important step in the language's journey to digital existence was now taken. The next CLDR submission window is scheduled for October, so I gathered a few people² some days ago and we worked on translating the data through AfriGen, a project of ANLoc (the African Network for Localization). It took a while since there is no dictionary we could base on to translate things such as country or currency names. There were also meeting constraints, due to the different time zones we live in. At some point I started to be afraid we might not be able to finish it on time for this release. But yesterday we managed to discuss the last entries, and finally complete the locale! It can now be seen on AfriGen's statistics page, with every data block beautifully at 100%! :)

With this, many things can now be done. Since CLDR is used by many software packages, Kabuverdianu will soon become available as a language to which operating systems and applications can be translated to. We will be able to translate OpenOffice, the Linux and Mac interfaces, Firefox, and even the interface for websites such as Google, YouTube, Wikipedia or Facebook!

And this will be just the beginning! A toast to the bright future of Kabuverdianu.

Thanks for reading!
Waldir

1) adapted from the Wikipedia article Cape Verdean Creole
2) Thanks, Amílcar Tavares and Etelvino Garcia!