Inspiration for working on content in OmegaWiki

When you are working on a wiki, you want to make sure that the work you do has relevance. Certainly when there is much content to be added, it is not difficult to find more to add. When you add the right words, the content gains relevancy for some constituency of a project.

At Wikimania I showed that we are supporting with real time semantic support for Wikipedia. The information that it uses is content that exist in all the databases of OmegaWiki. This means that when you look in one of the articles in this dump of the English language Wikipedia, you will find many concepts that do not yet exist. When you add these concepts, the Semantic Support will only become better once we have the process of updating the new terminology implemented.

Another way it is stimulating is that the existing concepts exist mostly in the UMLS database. In order to start providing Semantic Support for other languages, we need translations. This is done by creating a DefinedMeaning in the Community Database and linking it to the UMLS database.

It turns out that we already have a number of languages that are really doing well considering that we have mapped almost 4% of the records of the Community Database.

Thanks,
GerardM

micropledge.com

Erik Moeller wrote on his blog "Micropledge.com & paying for free culture". In many ways it is a really nice idea. All the Micropledge projects as they currently listed have one big failing, they do not state how much money is needed for any of the projects.

Erik proposed and probably pledged some money for a project called "RSS extension for namespaces with smart quality filtering". Twenty dollars have been pledged (US / Canadian / Taiwan it does not say..) and two people bothered to comment on the project .. they like it :) . I however would not pledge money to it as it is completely unclear how much money is needed for this job.

Micropledge is a young project and it deserves a chance. So I asked the CTO of Open Progress to come up with a budget that would allow an expensive developer to do the job. Some money would also be set aside for the necessary overhead. The point is not that Open Progress wants to do this job, the point is that there will be at least one Micropledge project that has a target amount associated with it.

In many projects like Rentacoder, you can post a project and developers can bid for the project. I sincerely hope that a good developer will want to do the job and will do it for less then the amount we will post. Bidding for projects is however not something that Micropledge caters for at this moment in time.

When in the end it turns out that enough money has been pledged, Open Progress will do the job. For us it is an experiment as well. Will posting a realistic amount of money get more pledges, will we in the end be asked to do the job ??

Thanks,
GerardM

Court Rules: Novell owns the UNIX and UnixWare copyrights! Novell has right to waive!

Groklaw reports some of the best news. We owe a debt of gratitude to Novell for defending the GPL and for fighting the shameless opportunism of the people that came new to SCO.

Thanks,
GerardM

Equipment for an Internet traveller on the cheap

So you get on a plane and land somewhere outlandish. You have your instructions on how to get to your hotel and then what.. Well, you get want to get back on the Internet. You brought your power adapter, and an extension block and all the stuff you need to load the battery of your phone, your PDA and what not.

Your PC does not pick up a network, so you get out your Meraki router and with the extra long distance antenna you have you find a Fon network. A Ethernet cable is welcome, it allows you to reconfigure the Meraki if need be. When you are in luck, the hotel provides you with WIFI but with you own router, you can connect to your preconfigured network and connect a bit more securely to your own network and move from there.

Before you leave the hotel, you check again the position of the hotel on your GPS system, you take your directions and move to your destination. With some luck you have the GPS location of your destination and off you go. The good news of the GPS is that even when you cannot read the street signs, you know have a tool that tells you if you are getting closer or getting further away from your destination, it beats getting a cab to get to your destination.

Typically you do not bring a T-shirt to sleep in, when you are really lucky you have a new clean one for every night of your stay.. T-shirt, proof of: “been there, done that”.

Thanks,
GerardM

WiktionaryDev

WiktionaryDev was pointed out to me and there is much to like. I really like the fact that they brought some tables to the party. The system now knows when there is content in a language. I experimented a bit and added both the word Cherokee and a word in that language.

Superb is the possibility to indicate that two labels indicate content in the same language, this brings the content of Greek and Greek (modern) for instance under the same heading. Having indexes for each language is really powerful; it allows people that are interested to work on one specific language.

The WiktionaryDev functionality builds upon the standards that were adopted in the en.Wiktionary. It is absolutely fabulous that the hard work of standardising Wiktionary results in all this new functionality.. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Licenses are often not even a nice pain

Many people produce content and many people collaborate on such content. They have a reason to do so, they want to make their work available to the work so that select a license. Often, this content is produces as an extra to something else.

You would create a spell checker under the GPL, but it is incompatible with the GFDL, the CC-by-sa ... You would create a machine translation engine under the GPL ...

The best reason for selecting a Free or Open license for software is because you want to ensure that the freedoms will remain available to the people who receive the programs downstream. In essence it is a defensive measure using copyright law.

Facts are different from programs. You cannot copyright facts. You can copyright collections of facts. Large collections of facts are available under a Free / Open license and these are incompatible with other Free / Open licenses. This means that you either take these collections and just use them, or you get into long discussions about licenses. Either option has its issues.

When you get into discussions about licenses, you have to indicate that the license does not liberate the facts for use in another setting. People get really grumpy even upset when they are told that their favourite Open or Free license is the issue.

The worst thing happens when you are asked to cooperate on a project. A project that has obvious merits. You are asked to help out because you know the subject matter. You are asked to help and comply with their license. You are asked to collaborate for free but you are not permitted to use your own work. When you then tell these people that you do not want to collaborate because their Free / Open license is an issue, you first get stunned silence and disbelief and then you get the same old religious arguments why their license is best. To me licenses are only great if you belief in the copyright system. I believe the copyright system is evil.

In OmegaWiki, we make our community data available under a combined license, CC-by and GFDL. In this way we reach out to both the Free and the Open communities. The people that use our data downstream can pick either license or when their license is more restrictive, they can even re licence our data. Our data will remain Free / Open. People can come back to us and improve and append our data and from OmegaWiki it will be available to the people who use the data downstream.

We are happy to cooperate with anyone. We are happy to collaborate on any database of facts but we have to insist that we work in our community environment. Facts need to be liberated and be available to all. This notion I learned from the people I met in the Open Access world.

Thanks,
GerardM

Happy news

This article on the BBC-news website had me smile. It is excellent news and it indicates a big milestone towards a Free Culture.

Congratulation to all the people who are involved and make it happen :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

The amount of e-mails on the Wikimedia mailing lists has been somewhat less the last days. I expect that many, like myself, have enjoyed or are enjoying the latest tome by JK Rowlings. It is a great time sink. If I would have been smart I would have saved it for the plane to Taipei... Resistance was futile.

Thanks,
GerardM

Ishi could have spoken Coos

According to a study from 1962 there were two people in Oregon who spoke Coos. It is not an unreasonable assumption that in 2007 nobody speaks Coos any more. Suppose that Ishi had some profound things to say; his message was recorded and it was recorded on a wax cylinder in 1911.

So let us consider this situation. Ishi spoke Coos, his language is now extinct and he used the technology of the day and left a recording of his message. We do not speak the language any more and we have problems with technology less than hundred years later. This wax cylinder is owned by the Phoebe Hearst Museum of Anthropology and we might be lucky; there could be a complete set of annotations including translation of Ishi's words. When we are lucky, we can listen to the the Ishi recording 96 years later and have some understanding through the possible annotation; a window is opened in our past.

When Ishi had spoken his message in English, we would consider it to be easier for us to understand it. The message would still be from a different culture, it would still require the same annotations for us to understand it properly. Now Bill who was also living in Oregon, had an as profound message. Suppose Ishi and Bill knew each other, Ishi's background would be Coos, and Bill's background would be Welsh. Our ability to understand their true message would depend on our understanding of that time. Without sufficient understanding of the culture, the profound message of either Bill or Ishi will not reach us. It would be an artefact of a museum, an artefact to be studied.

For Bill and Ishi it might have been of great significance that their profound message was recorded. For Ishi it would be natural to communicate in Coos, it was his language and it is not unlikely that is was only recorded and annotated because it was Coos. Bill's message was not recorded, his English and his message was not considered of similar significance.

Much of what is said and done, is done only for the present moment. My message is written in English because it is the best way for me to convey my message. Many of the messages of Sabine are in Neapolitan when she reaches out to that particular audience. My message is written on Blogger, I do not spend much thought considering its format. If at all, it may be saved for posterity thanks to the effort of the Internet Archive. When people cannot read it, understand it in 100 years time, I do not really mind as they are not my intended audience.

Much of what we do on our Wikis is for our current audience. Our content is transient, its shelf life is limited. We aim to bring information to our public and we to do this now. We provide Free content and when a wealth of content is available in a format like Flash, we should imho provide it because we aim to provide the best possible service now. With the continued development of Gnash, I feel reasonably safe that a future generation will still be able to experience some of what our day and age is about. The stuff that I really enjoyed.. well that is another story.. some people try to preserve it..

Thanks,
GerardM

Ishi meets IRENE

Ishi was a native American who was recorded in 1911 on a wax cylinder. It is unique authentic material and reproducing the sound can deteriorate the wax cylinder. There are many such recordings and for those who have an interest in such things the invention of IRENE is absolutely fabulous.

IRENE is a method that in stead of a needle uses a camera to find all the little grooves in the track. With this information it is able to emulate what a needle would find and, play the music. There are many priceless recordings and it will be great when they are digitised. This will ensure that they are less likely to get lost.

Obviously, given the age of this material, is it all public domain.

Thanks,
GerardM

Today's word of the day: hypoxia

An article on the BBC news website informs you about the dead zones of the Gulf of Mexico. There are several reasons why I like the word hypoxia. The first is that this word is not part of the GEMET thesaurus while it is a genuine term that deals with the environment. OmegaWiki, does know the term and as such it shows that an interested community can add value to a resource that is considered to be authoritative.

The sad thing about hypoxia is that it is preventable. Hypoxia was a phenomena that happened in the Wadden Sea as a result of the pollution that came in from the Rhine. As a result of cleaning up this river, the hypoxic areas or dead zones have diminished, the areas where seagrass is growing are on the rise again. The same could happen with the Mississippi and the Gulf of Mexico. The main things required is the prevention of nitrate and phosphate getting into the waterways. It is well known how this can be done, it just takes the political will to make this happen.

My interest in this subject can be understood from the fact that I wrote most of the articles about the fresh water fish of the Benelux on the Dutch Wikipedia.

Thanks,
GerardM

Copyfraud

There is an interesting read about copyfraud on slashdot, it refers to a paper published by the Social Science Research Network. I have been reading this paper now for some time and it does a good job at explaining the problems with the copyright claims of works that are in the public domain. The issue is very much that as the paper explains nobody cares about what is technically an offence.

Organisations that deal in copyfraud are legally fraudsters. While reading this paper one question that comes up to me is, how can industries that do not implement the law themselves on such a massive scale expect their customers to respect the law ?

The paper informs of the many ways it prevents people to use material that is public domain. There have been many threads on the WMF mailinglists about this subject and it is quite clear that our projects would benefit enormously from a strengthened public domain.

This paper does address the issue of how the public domain can be strengthened, it mentions among other things that courts ruled that those with dirty hands because of the assertion of copyright on public domain material were denied copyright enforcement.

Industry protects its copyright through organisations that represent them. With an industry massively breaking the law by claiming copyright where it is not theirs to claim, the moral footing of their representatives is undermined. There is legislation where the court denied copyright enforcement to copyright owners with unclean hands. Many industries have engaged in the implementation of digital rights management. These implementation do not take into consideration the fact that copyrights expire. Consequently I would argue that these implementations are broken by design and consequently they are not a legal correct implementation of copyright restrictions. I think it could also be argued that combined with the massive copyfraud perpetrated by the industry copyright enforcement should not be allowed because of the fraudulent behaviour of these industries by organisations representing the whole of an industry.

Thanks,
GerardM

Deletions of pictures

At one time I was a prolific writer on Wikipedias. This was when there was no Commons yet. At the time all pictures had to be present at the individual wikis in order to be seen. In 2004, we won the Prix Ars Electronica and I received an e-mail off to the organisation behind this price; we got permission to use their logo with our articles. There was a restriction that it was to be used with an article about the price, price winners. A reasonable restriction because we are talking about their logo, their trade mark.

I have had two instances now of people insisting on deleting this logo because it is not Free. It will be probably be deleted from the Dutch Wikipedia where the information about the permission is documented and it will after this be deleted from the English Wikipedia because the reference for the permission will no longer be readable.

There are several issues that I want to raise. Commons is as far as I am concerned not as good as it could be because it does not have a way to deal with a restrictive use of logos of organisations that allow for the use of their organisation within the limitations that they have to insist on because of it being part of a trademark.

Permissions given on one project, are often referred to on another. This is not considered when the licenses of pictures are evaluated. This is understandable because there is so much. Much of the older material does not have all the templates and doodahs because these did not exist at the time. The consequence is that much is lost because of this insistence on the compliance with later policies.

For the photos I made, I do not care too much if they are kept on projects or not. Everybody can make a photo of a building, an animal ... The problem is with material that is of benefit to our projects that we do not consider because it requires licenses that are by necessity restrictive. Restrictive in a way that even the organisation that puts the restriction on cannot help.

One additional benefit for accepting a license for logos and stuff would be that as a result our own logos would no longer have a "status aparte" on Commons.

Thanks,
GerardM

Proposal: localisation sure but enable languages first !!

The Pan African L10N had a conference in Morocco in February. I learned about it through a blog I read today. I am really happy with the progress that is reported on of more languages being supported. I am however coming more and more to the conclusion that there is a need for a stage before actual localisation that will provide a service to the bilingual people of a language.

At this stage, the support of a language is very much an all or nothing affair. There is a localisation or there is nothing. This is not how it needs to be. When a language is known to exist, the lowest level of support for that language is the acknowledgement that this language exists. This is currently not done, and I think it is a missed opportunity.

The first thing to consider is, what languages and linguistic entities exist and, how do you support this. This is a surprisingly complex question. Languages are recognised in the ISO 639 standard. There are several versions of the standard and not all languages have a script that is supported in Unicode. Even when a script is supported in Unicode, it does not mean the an associated font is available for a language. The consequence of these two points is that a subset is needed on computer. On the other hand the currently recognised versions of the ISO 639 do not recognise orthographies or dialects or other entities that make a difference to how documents are to be supported.

This is not an issue the organisations that develop and localise software want to tackle. For them this a distraction. Deciding what linguistic entities can be supported is something that is best addressed by one organisation that exists to deal with issues like these. The World Language Documentation Centre (WLDC) is that organisation. Through its association with Geolang and because its board of experts in many of the relevant fields, it is already in a prime position to the research that goes into the development of the ISO 639-6.

With the WLDC and Geolang able to provide researched and verified information about linguistic entities that can be safely supported, it is then up to the applications to at least acknowledge the existence and allow a user to create content in that language. As more information becomes available, spell checkers can be added specific to that linguistic entity. In this way slowly but surely the functionality grows without the need to first localise the application.

In a way this is a solution for a "chicken and egg" problem. This problem is solved when you think of it in an evolutionary way. First there was the egg, the support of the language, and then the chicken evolved, the localisation of the application.

Thanks,
GerardM

Paypal

I have postponed it long enough, I need to be able to pay abroad and, I have to be able to pay to and receive money from outside of Europe as well. To me this is not a straight forward affair. In Europe it is not customary to pay by credit card and, transferring money within the EU does cost nothing or, it costs as much as a national transfer.

Credit card payments cost money, paypal payments cost money. I would expect that credit card payments are more expensive and it seems customary that you pay your paypal bill with a credit card as well. I have the option to pay a paypal bill directly with my checking account. Intuitively this seems to be the option that is less expensive. So I have opted for this.

The question I am left with is how paypal compares with transferring money using traditional banking methods. As paypal exists for some time now, I am sure it will have had an effect on the banks. Paypal benefits from ubiquitous Internet and highly automated procedures, these benefits are available to banks as well...

One of these days I will know the answer to these questions.

Thanks,
GerardM

PS Yes, I am going to Taiwan :)

Finaly, Ariana may stay

I know Ariana for many years, I see her every so often. She is a nice bright woman, a registered nurse and a university student. She is also from Kosovo and escaped the atrocities of war and fled to the Netherlands.

When Ariana got her nursing diploma she was not allowed to work, she was a refugee. After many years she finally got her permit to stay in the Netherlands. Many of the people that know Ariana have been appalled by the, in our eyes un-just, policies of the Dutch government. Not only my mother was willing to provide her with a sanctuary and sabotage these loathed policies that deal with refugees.

I am happy that Ariana can stay and now has more of a future. It is a shame that she has had to suffer all these years of uncertainty and doubt that have added to an already troubled past.

Thanks,
GerardM

RTFM, read the fine manual

SignWriting is the script that gives sign languages the potential of writing. It is way beyond an experiment, it is used. It is used in daily life, one of the telling things is that they have message pads with layouts that indicate who called, who left a message.

There is a mailing list and the last week there were two things that really got my attention. The first one said that not all the symbols that make up the total character set are to be used for one language. There are for instance characters specific to the Italian and the Ethiopian sign language. This lead to the observation that there is a need to identify the characters that are used for a particular language. This is similar to for instance the Latin script where only so many character are used for a language.

In the same way I appreciate this latest amazing story unfolds; there is a lot of documentation on how to use the SignWriting characters... People do not really read it. This is of course to be expected but it brings these wonderful moments where people find that there is more to it. That like for any other language, the basic tenets have to be really understood. That you can go find a character, a movement and it will be readable but it might prove not be the best one. What makes it so nice to read is the wonder and delight these people express that such great documentation exists.

I am impressed with SignWriting and I believe that it would be good when serious funding would find its way towards the further development of SignWriting. To sum up some points why; kids who learn to write their first language first have an easier time to learn the dominant written language that surrounds them, it gives the deaf people of the whole world the opportunity to express themselves in their own language. It allows for a better preservation of so many cultures that do not have anything but video.

Thanks,
GerardM

Another BBC journalist comes home

Another BBC journalist came home. I was so happy to write about Alan Johnston coming home. In the same week Frances Harrison is coming home from Iran. Frances was the bureau chief of the BBC in Tehran, in her last presentation she writes how people are afraid to talk to the BBC because they fear for their liberty, their freedom. Frances writes how she struggles with her conscience because she has to justify her need as a journalist with the danger that goes with it.

I am moved, I know several Iranians; they are wonderful people. I have been to concerts of Persian music, it is enchanting. I am saddened because with this continued breakdown of the free exchange of ideas with the deterioration of the freedom of the press, this wonderful country, these wonderful people may become painted even more as an enemy of our culture.

Frances writes: "The Islamic system of government has deliberately erased much of what was Persian culture and it is only by looking hard that you can catch glimpses of the past." It is self righteous politicians that try to make the world in their own image. It is self righteous politicians that do not allow their own and their own actions to be judged in the same way as they judge others.

Thanks,
GerardM

Who cares about the process ...

A lot of "drama" can be observed in how the elections for the WMF board are run. There are many ways in which the process can be seen. The thing that bothers me most is that even though the process was defined prior to the actual running, the way it is run has changed a lot during the process.

The best example is the effort of Gregory Maxwell to "get the votes out". The way he has done it, is really American. Bringing people to the registration office and then actually getting them to the voting booth is done by all US-American parties. This is accepted in that system while it is not done in the systems I am familiar with. Greg invited everyone from the English language Wikipedia who had not voted yet to vote.

As it is so clear that the process is allowed to change while under way, I invite you to Danny Wool's question list where he is asked why he has not bothered the call for him not to stand. The reason why he was not prevented from running is that the process of the vote was considered to be defined. Danny proved unwilling to answer the question.

The process of the vote is that once the results are known, the board is to pass a resolution announcing the result. As a result of the previous vote, the board nominated three people in stead of the one the vote was called for. So I agree with our "drama queen"; the board can repudiate results it does not like. I am known to be of the opinion that Danny should not be a candidate in the first place as his behaviour makes it quite clear to me that he his hostility towards other board members. Also given the statutes of the WMF when Danny were to be elected, he can be removed when my misgivings about him prove to be correct.

What we have observed in these elections is that many aspects of the process have been changed while it was under way. We have observed that our Foundation has become more politicised, that this time around projects and languages are being pitted against each other.

In our Wiki world the notion of "so fix it" is accepted. In the mail of Jan-Bart it was clear that the board did not change the process re Danny's candidature because the process was considered to be under way. Given the many changes to the process that have happened during the process, I think it is fair to ask Danny again, WHY DO YOU STAND !!!

I am sure the answer will remain the same; because he does. It is the best answer he can give as there is no good answer for him giving the compelling arguments why he should not stand.

Thanks,
GerardM

Alan Johnston is free

The best news of today is the release of Alan Johnston. Alan is a reporter for the BBC who was kidnapped by some criminals and held hostage for 114 days. It is wonderful news because at least one reporter is alive to tell the tale.

When you read what UNESCO has to say about Freedom of the Press, it is sickening to see how many journalists have been killed for keeping our society Free and informed. When you are part of the Wiki world like I am, many of the notions what makes good journalism, what makes for providing people with good information are the same.

Today we celebrate the release of Alan Johnston, it is wonderful that he is Free. The price of the kidnap may be that there will be no journalist of Alan's stature left to report from places like Gaza. The price may be that we will not be informed of what is happening in many parts of the world. The price may be that we will only know our point of view without the possibility of getting something like a neutral point of view.

• 03-07-2007 - Hamed Abd Farhan
• 21-06-2007 - Filaih Wadi Mijthab
• 19-06-2007 - Sahar Hussein Ali al-Haydari
• 19-06-2007 - Serge Maheshe
• 13-06-2007 - Saif Fakhri
• 11-06-2007 - Zakia Zaki and Shokiba Sanga
• 29-05-2007 - Luiz Carlos Barbon Filho
• 25-05-2007 - Ali Khalil
• 24-05-2007 - Abshir Ali Gabre and Ahmed Hassan Mahad
• 22-05-2007 - Alaa Uldeen Aziz and Saif Laith Yousuf
• 18-05-2007 - Suleiman Abdul-Rahim al-Ashi and Mohammad Matar Abdo
• 15-05-2007 - Raad Mutashar, Imad Abdul-Razzaq al-Obeidi and Ageel Abdul-Qader, and of their driver Nibras Razzaq
• ... I wish it would stop ... it does not stop here ...

Thanks,
GerardM

An organisation gets the governance it deserves

Hoi,
The Wikimedia Foundation is selecting three members for their board. You may also have noticed that there is a lot of anxiety for what the result may be. There is a distinct feeling that the result may be biased. Of particular interest will be the perception of the English language Wikipedia. This perception of some seems to be that the WMF is US-America centred, the feeling that I get is that some Americans feel that they are losing their influence of "their" project, their Foundation.

So let us consider all this for a moment, the English Wikipedia is with its 1,8 million articles only 0.2 million articles bigger than Commons and is likely to be eclipsed by it in the near future. It used to be that it was growing faster than every other project or language version, this is no longer true. Over time the relevance of the English Wikipedia grew, its quality is great, its coverage is broad, it is what people turn to when they need a first impression on a subject. This has not changed, the English Wikipedia is splendid.

So why this anxiety.. it is not as if the English language Wikipedia is likely to become less dominant in the perception of what it is we do. Many issues of other projects however have not really been considered. There are nasty situations that do not get attention, issues about POV, issues of good faith, issues with living people.

The real issues have little to do with the English language Wikipedia, they have everything to do with the example it has given. It is now for our Foundation to make this promise for the other projects and language versions come true. There are basically two scenario's; our Foundation is allowed and enabled to deal with these issues or the Foundation is to primarily deal with the big projects that insist that they should be the beneficiary of all this attention.

To me, the Wikimedia Foundation is an organisation with many projects, many languages it provides support for. In reality it is the projects that mostly organise themselves. It is for this reason that I am really bewildered why there is so much fear of our organisation not being American. This bewilderment also comes from my appreciation that the WMF never was American but global.

Thanks,
GerardM

AGF

Yesterday there was an interesting meeting in the Netherlands billed as a "moderator workshop". There were many nl.wikipedians and some of them, myself included, were no nl.wikipedia moderator at all. To my delight this was deemed to be good; it was even considered that the name for this recurring event is wrong; in order to get more interest also outside the fairly limiting group of moderators, it is considered to have these meetings under a different name.

The most interesting presentation was the one where Siebrand informed about the state of play at Commons. I knew that Siebrand was one of those working hard to keep Commons clean and sane. It was another thing to hear him explain how these things are done... seeing the amount of pictures moved, the amount of duplicate pictures deleted. It is really impressive.

At the same meeting there was a guy who was articulating his opposition to Commons and its policies. He gave examples why he was disgusted with Commons. The issue as I understand it is in two things; the balance between the need for getting things done and the need for discussing individual issues and the understanding of the procedures used at Commons.

The need to get things done is easily explained. With 1.6 million images, and a growth that exceeds the English language Wikipedia, it is a big project. With all the pictures of all the different projects that should have their home at Commons, the amount of work that needs doing is mind boggling. On the other hand there are people who have a few pictures, who have strong feelings about their work and or who do not know and understand about the procedures at Commons. There is a balance between these two needs.

Over time, many changes have happened to the procedures at Commons, many things have been automated and have been improved to better reflect the needs that people have. If anything this is what I got from Siebrand's presentation. Siebrand indicated that there is still room for improvement and I got the distinct impression that a lot of work is done to do achieve even more.

AGF, Assume Good Faith, I do expect that the better nl.wikipedia moderator sign up to this notion. I was disappointed when it was not even acknowledged the improvements in Commons that were made. Well, that is probably the difference between a long serving moderator and a moderator that will help the community move forward in this brave new world where we cooperate and seek consensus on a continuously bigger scale.

Thanks,
GerardM

What language would be the one that provides the DefinedMeaning

At OmegaWiki we are of the opinion that the most valuable resource we have is the time of our contributors. It was what motivated to think beyond Wiktionary. We were wasting our time because we were not only interested in only one language. What we were working on was nice, but it was hard work to be relevant and we were with too few people to do the work well.

Now that we have OmegaWiki, we can enter data once and it is there for everyone. We now already have over 3.000 Expressions in Georgian, they are available to people in a Georgian, an English, a Dutch and many more interfaces. This makes OmegaWiki more relevant for Georgian then the Georgian Wiktionary; it has only 34 articles. We have some 11.000 Italian Expressions, this is roughly equivalent to the number of articles in the Italian Wiktionary that are actually about an Italian word. Our Expressions are available in all those user interfaces..

We are open to work together with other organisations, people. This is something that is also a standard practice in the Wiktionaries; much of the content is from different sources and is uploaded by bot. It is however sad that once the data has been imported, it is no longer possible to contribute back to the original source.

We are discussing how to collaborate with a great resource with more than 50.000 concepts in one of the major African languages with translations in English. This will get us enough concepts to have a relevant amount of content in two languages. The point is, they create their data in a completely different way; people suggest a word with a definition and an editor validates it and publishes it. So what could such a collaboration look like..

Well when our community adds content in this language, it can be seen as a suggestion to their editor. With new content accepted by the editor, it can be added to their database. Now here is the bit that some may find controversial; they have the copyright to their database and our choice of the CC-by license makes this collaboration possible. They retain their copyright, their license. This is not possible with the GFDL.

When we are going to import this data, what language would be the one that provides the defining Expression and the defining Definition.. I would say this African language :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Bolango anyone ??

Bolango is a language. It is spoken by some 20.000 people in Sulawesi, Indonesia. There is also a place called Bolango where some 5.000 people speak this language. That is to say, in 1981 there were some 5000 people who spoke that language in Bolango, how many people are still speaking Bolango I have no way of knowing.

Bolango is the 1000th entry on OmegaWiki of the ISO 639-3 collection. For most if not all the languages recognised by this standard we have a portal, there are over 7000 of these, so many more words will need to be added before this collection is complete. This notion of a work in progress makes it very much a wiki. As people work on particular content, OmegaWiki becomes more relevant for such a domain. Typically there are not that many words needed to cover the concepts associated with a specific subject and typically once these associated concepts have been defined texts about any of these concepts will not yield many more new terms.

Working on a list like the ISO 639-3 is different. It is a list and all these languages are quite distinct. It is particularly the language of linguists that connects any language with another. Having a collection like the one I am working on becomes relevant when people involved in languages find it relevant. Until that time, it seems like stamp collecting :)

Thanks,
GerardM

NB I just created a Bolango stub on Wikipedia

Did I miss something

With increasing amusement I have been reading Kelly Martin's assessments of the people aspiring to become WMF board members. Many of the candidates have had the pleasure of Kelly's caustic pen. At some stage however, it got too much for me. Her latest had a few gems in it. Frieda, who happens to be the president of the Italian chapter, was attacked because a photo was showing some cleavage.. I had to go back and see.. did I miss something ??

Giving Frieda's position it is only natural that she wants to make the chapters more prominent. Kelly's assessment that the Italian chapter is run as a social club and chapters are for social networking.. Well, it is clear that Kelly needs some education on this. Given that she refers to Clay Shirkey's hell, I wonder what her role would be in such a social network.

In her "Nonbovine Ruminations" Erik Moeller was seen in at least as friendly a light. Erik took the trouble to answer; his conclusion after a lot of debunking: "Nothing I could say, no explanation I could offer, would allow you to rationally analyze what is really happening. You know all about me already, after all."

The high point comes in what Kelly has to say about Danny.. Here I feature as "Erik's trained attack dog". Well, I must show you sometime the certificate to prove the training I had to qualify.

Given all these pleasantries, there is a blog entry that explains why Kelly does not run herself: "it would only be good to get a great deal of attention (that is, drama)". Well, apparantly she has a craving for drama, it is the best way I can explain her ruminations. It also expect that this strenghtens her position in her home community.. in her own words: "I am widely disliked at the English Wikipedia".

The voting for three seats of the WMF board is imminent. I hope that the people who bother to vote take the time to read what board members do, what candidates have as their platform and particularly come to an understanding if the person they consider to vote for will have a positive and collaborative influence on our organisation. There is a lot of work to be done and when the board is burdened by people with a negative attitude, outlook it will make it that much harder to get something done.

Thanks,
GerardM

Godwin's law

The Polish want to get their way in the European Union. They are talking about the number of Poles that would exist when there would not have been the second world war. There would have been SO many more Poles...

Well, think of it this way, if there had not been a second world war, how many Germans would have been there... or Russians... or Jews.

Really, our Mr Godwin is right; do not use the Nazis, the second world war as an argument.. it only demonstrates that you failed.

Thanks,
GerardM

Logos dictionary

The Logos dictionary is one of my favourite resources on the Internet. I know the people well, I respect their work and their dedication, I even worked there for a month.

Logos has the ambition to make their resource the premier lexical resource on the Internet. They work hard on it and, I regret that we are not working together. We are not working together because the basis for cooperation needs to be very much a more wiki way of doing things. The software Logos uses does not provide a Wiki environment and the structure of the database does not allow for functionality that I would expect. This is one reason why we have persisted in developing OmegaWiki.

One issue that prevented cooperation was a license. the Logos dictionary did not have one, all it had was a copyright statement. This was fixed at the time, a GFDL license was added to the copyright. This means that all of the data was and has always been copyright Logos.

Sadly I became aware that Logos has removed the license information. Being the copyright holder to all the data they are allowed to do this. For collaborators and users of the Logos dictionary it is now less clear what the status is of this data. When you translate the Logos "Quote of the Day", are you entitled to attribution for instance ... ??

Facts cannot be copyrighted, collections of facts can be copyrighted. Really, without a license it is less clear what you can do with the data that is and has been for such a long time been freely available on the Internet. Be advised that this resource is older than any of the licenses that are currently so popular..

Really I love to collaborate with anyone but I would especially love to collaborate with Rodrigo, Cinzia, Gianni and Magdalena..

Thanks,
GerardM

Why I should join Citizendium

Today was yet another day to swell my head. I was invited to a discussion with one of the greats of the Internet. We talked for more than an hour and I was told that I was one of the thinkers of the Internet...

Thirty minutes later I received an e-mail from this amazing professional and academic organisation that started with "Dear Dr. Meijssen". In this e-mail I was urged to do something. Something I now have done...

I am part of an organisation that states that I am so really cool. Well, I work feverishly to achieve what this organisation wants to do. The other people in this organisation ARE doctors, professors, leading in professional organisations...

So Dr Sanger what do you say, should I join Citizendium ??

Thanks,
GerardM

WIFI

Yesterday I had a meeting for the second time in the village of Lage Vuursche. The first time we were in a nice restaurant. It did not have WIFI for its customers. "There is no demand for this." I found this reaction astounding as I had just asked about it.

This time we were in the next door restaurant the "Kastanjehof". It did have WIFI; we had called prior to going there. We sat outside, it had stopped raining, we had our talk and our WIFI.

Thanks,
GerardM

Meta data for education

Wikipedia has proven itself to be really valuable for educational purposes. This is best illustrated by the support the Wikimedia Foundation gets from Kennisnet. When other countries would follow the example of the Netherlands, the WMF would not have a cash crunch.

Given that Wikipedia is particularly used by students, it makes sense to provide a better service to the educational process. The IEEE-LOM is a standard way of describing learning object meta data. Meta data can be associated with many of the resources that exists in the many projects of the WMF. There are two issues to consider; the data is relational in nature and the data has to be made available.

At the Holland Open Software Conference I met Erik Duval who is a professor from Leuven and who has a wealth of expertise on the IEEE LOM. He astounded me when he said that people should not enter the IEEE LOM data, automated processes should. Given that Erik is in the organisation behind the IEEE LOM standard, it means that for some of the dialects of this standard such processes must exist.

The data is relational. With the functionality that we created for OmegaWiki, we can have relational data natively in a MediaWiki environment. It is just a matter of associating this data with the articles that need tagging. This is not rocket science but the application of parts that already exist.

For the Wikimedia Foundation supporting educational meta data is a great method of making its content more relevant. The use that it will generate in education will provide a powerful argument why providing sustainability and investment in its organisation is in the interest of the national educational systems.

I invite the Wikimedia Foundation to consider this, not only as a method of raising funds, but first and foremost as a way to make good on its aim; to provide information to the world.

Thanks,
GerardM

More Anthere at the Holland Open Software Conference

I have been on the lookout for the video registration of Anthere's presentation at the Holland Open Sofware Conference, it has not surfaced yet. What I did find was an exclusive interview that Anthere gave to the ANP. As ANP is a press agency, the same content could be found in several places, for instance here and here.

Several topics that were not covered in her speech can be found in the interview:

• Anthere expressed the wish to adapt our software and improve the accessibility, the visually impaired are specifically mentioned
  
• There is more about promoting our content in developing countries, not only do we want to make our content available as relevant is making their information available in our projects
• With the growth of the Wikimedia staff, it is increasingly important for the WMF to be well organised and not only have finance be the top priority
  
• Quality has a high priority particularly in the bigger projects
• Self promotion is mentioned
• The lack of sources is mentioned as a reason for deletion on some projects
  
• Anthere indicates that she would not follow the Citizendium model where specialists check up on articles, they are fallible too.

Thanks,
GerardM

What do you do for the smaller projects

As I mentioned earlier, Anthere gave a great presentation at the Holland Open Software Conference. One question was asked and answered and it is still going around in my head. "What does the Wikimedia Foundation do for the smaller projects and languages ?" Anthere's answer was truthful; her answer was that we do not do much. When it does not happen now, we will wait for it to happen later.

It is a truthful answer and given the resources we have as an organisation, there is not much more that we can do. There are all the issues, all the dramas all the opportunities of the big projects to deal with. And these are to be dealt with either by the community of a project itself or by one of the staff of ten people that is to keep some of the biggest websites of the world going.

I discussed this with people like Sabine, and the conclusion is very much, there is no Wikipedia. There is an English language, a German language, a Neapolitan language etc Wikipedia. They are all individual projects. They may share many of the basic values, but in the end these communities, these projects are very much left to themselves.

So what do we do for the smaller projects. We very much want these projects to succeed. We now insist on some initial content and some initial localisation before we start a project in a new language but really once they are started they are on their own. There is no evaluation, no monitoring of the project and only when things are deemed to be REALLY problematic it may get attention.

So what should we do for the smaller projects. There are people, organisations who are willing to pay money for content in specific languages. This content can be truly in the spirit of the Wikipedia, it may be geared towards certain subjects. One of the best reasons for accepting and promoting this is that by creating a supply, a demand will follow.

Having created content on many Wikis, we have a grasp of what it takes to create content. The most relevant deliverable however is not the content, the hardest and most valuable deliverable is the creation of a community. This is hard because you cannot buy a community, this is hard because it is not clear what a community will consider to be important and this is hard because their opinion may not coincide with what is important to you or to an organisation that makes a content creation project possible.

We live in a world where deliverables need to be measurable. Content creation can be measured; you can pay a translator or a writer. You can spend money and deliver a product that includes interwiki, wiki links, images and conforms to style guides. But you can not guarantee that you build a community at the same time. Building a community takes time, it means that the people that make up this community need to be able to influence the process. All the right things can be done, but there is no guarantee that an autonomous community will evolve.

Anthere is right in many ways when she says we do not do much to help new projects. The Wikimedia Foundation cannot do much because it does not have the resources and it will happen; the smaller projects will take off. This process can be helped along by the creation of content. Growing the projects is a process, it takes people and effort. The growth of projects can be accelerated with investment however the mix has to be right to make a project truly part of the Wiki movement.

Thanks,
GerardM

The day after the Holland Open Software Conference

Anthere gave the keynote speech in Amsterdam at the Holland Open Software Conference. It was a great speech, it was so great because the speech was wholly dedicated to the Wikimedia organisation and its finances. This was possible because there was nobody at the conference that indicated not to know what Wikipedia was. For me there was little that was new, it was however great to hear it put coherently together. Many avenues of funding are closed to the Wikimedia Foundation because of the real or perceived problems that will result from within the community. Many avenues of funding are still very much closed because there is not sufficient staff to deal with acquiring funding. Anthere did a great job, it was a great opener because it put the sustainability of Open/Free projects as an issue very much on the map of the conference.

It was well published on the Dutch Wikimedia projects that the community was invited to attend the conference. It was cool to see Siebrand, Galwaygirl, Effeietsanders, Brabo. It is however a mystery to me where all the others were. This was a high grade conference with many speeches extremely relevant to what we do and there were so few of us.. A missed opportunity..

For me there were several new connections to make. I liked what Erik Duval said about forms to fill in for meta data like IEEE-LOM. He knows that much of this can be done in an automated way. I liked many of the things Massimo Mauro had to say about the European Union; I hope we will be able to cooperate in OmegaWiki. I loved the presentation of Eliane Metni, she connected the spirit of the open and free community with education in a compelling way; it is great that there is so much but it has to be adaptable in order to be useful in the setting of an educational process. A tool may be great but when it does not fit it is useless. There were many more but these are some of the highlights for me.

Next year the Holland Open? I will do my best to be there again :)

Thanks,
GerardM

The point of OmegaWiki

Sabine wrote a great blog the other day about how combining content from Wikinews Positano news and OmegaWiki creates something that is really fascinating. Please read her blog first if you have not read it yet.

The great thing is that things have moved forward already. Martin Mai, who is with the University Bamberg, has written a first incarnation of software that assist the reading of an article on the Positano News. It provides you pertinent information one click away; it gives you translations and definitions it even allows you to go to for more details to OmegaWiki.

For me the most important point is that much more will be possible because OmegaWiki has its data in a database and not as a MediaWiki page. What Martin created is very much a mock up. It even works, but it is only a start. More is possible, it needs a fertile mind and some cool programming.

Thanks,
GerardM

Reputation

There is a long article in Informationweek about reputation. I read it with much interest. It covers most of the ground. The question that I do not find answered is, what does reputation buy me and, why would I care for an on line reputation.

My reputation is a consequence of the things that I have done. Some of the things I do have made me recognisable, I learned at a Wiki meet that my standard salutation, "Hoi" made me the first person that was recognised as an individual by someone who is working hard to understand the Wikimedia Foundation. This is my 250th entry in this blog, a growing group of people read this. I have written tons of articles in Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Commons and am now particularly active in OmegaWiki. But my reputation as I have it is a consequence of what I have done. It does not give me necessarily credibility; in Doctor Sanger's eyes it won't as he advocates certification in stead of reputation.

Much of the talk about reputations is defensive in nature; it is about vandalism, about pretensions, about why we should trust a resource and to what extend. This negative emphasis is self defeating because it does not value how a reputation helps in achieving goals. The cost of this absolute negative appreciation is that after a controversy a person like Essjay is no longer considered. He was once one of the most valuable Wikipedians and this was based on the good work work that could be observed.

The biggest problem that I can see with looking at reputation in a negative way is that you do not allow people to be wrong and the consequence is that this does frighten people off. People with a stellar reputation find it necessary to write under a pseudonym in Wikipedia because they are fearful of their reputation. When people are to be identified it does prevent people from contributing.

It is valuable to know what things are wrong. Scientific publications are a celebration of the positive discoveries. The dark side is that the discovery of things that are wrong is not as readily published, known. Many,many experiments are repeated over and over again because the fact and the proof why something is wrong is not published.

To me, a person gains his reputation by the work that he does. The more work done means the more opportunity for issues to arise it is however only the people that do that make mistakes. The people that allow themselves to be wrong should be celebrated. They are the giants on whose shoulders we can see further.

Thanks,
GerardM

A long tale ISO 3166-2:US

At OmegaWiki we are awaiting some new functionality.. Erik is away for a meeting and it will go life when he gets back. In the mean time I have been playing with a new collection; the ISO 3166-2:US is a list of US American administrative units including states and territories.

I was prompted by a guy who is really working hard to add vocabulary in Khmer. He had already done the countries and territories of this world and he followed that one up with this info. What I really liked was the distribution of the translations in other countries.. There was already quite a lot. There were the languages that were almost complete, while adding the collection I added the Dutch translations.

I hope people will find the collections a good start for adding translations in their language. Particularly the Swadesh list and the language lists are relevant. The language lists are particularly relevant because they are used in the user interface.

What you notice in all these collections is that there are some that are complete or almost complete and then there is a long tail of languages with some translations.. With time we will get more languages but we will also get more languages completed for the collections.

Thanks,
GerardM

Uploading texts to Wikipedia

A friend of mine had worked on a text for Wikipedia. It was a great text and, I urged him to upload it. This did not happen. I tried to be polite and did not prod him aggressively. At some stage, it was almost a month later, I asked him about it.

His complaint was that it did not work. He had tried it many times only to find that the file was not one of those that could be uploaded. It finally dawned on me that my terminology was the problem; had I said that he had to copy and paste the article everything would have been fine.

Thanks,
GerardM

A license for SignWriting

The SignWriting script is the product of a process that is already under way for over 30 years. It is a process that has been getting more and more momentum.

The script has been available on line for everyone to use from the start. When people have questions, need support, it has always been provided. People are learning to write their sign language all over the world. The last time I spoke to Valerie Sutton, the creator of the SignWriting script, it had to be short because people from Switzerland wanted to talk to her :)

As the SignWriting movement is ancient in Internet time, it started before licenses and copyright were considered. People needed to be able to use it, so it was made available. In a reply to a previous post on the subject of SignWriting, David Gerard asked about the license and the copyright and asked if there is an organisation behind SignWriting.

Yes, there is an organisation, the "Center for Sutton Movement Writing Inc." which is a USA nonprofit, tax-exempt educational membership organization. The copyright I understand is with Valerie Sutton and, she is considering what license to use. I have been discussing this with Valerie and the license that we are considering is the SIL Open Font License.

The big question she asked me to ask David and my readers is: "If all SignWriting symbols were under the SIL Open Font License (OFL) would you feel free to use the symbols?"

Thanks,
GerardM

More on scripts, fonts and SignWriting

There were two bits of interesting news this week on scripts and fonts;

• The Chinese script is much older, it is some 8000 years old. This makes the Chinese script some 3500 years older that previously thought.
• Redhat made available the "Liberarion fonts", they are fonts that allow for the replacement of the proprietary Microsoft fonts. This is one of the impediments of adopting Linux. It is also one of the more visual aspects where Microsoft shows not to care about interoperability.

The Chinese script is old, it has had a long evolution and it is a living script. It is very much being used and one of the important aspects is that it brings together who speak different languages. The script is very much what unites the Chinese. It is not realistic to change Chinese for the Latin script because it, being based on sounds, will not serve in a same way.

The SignWriting script is young, it represents a revolution in the signing world and it has to be adopted by many signing communities. It is different from other written representations of signing languages because it is actually used for day to day use. As a script, it is different from Chinese because it represent movements like the Latin script represents sounds while a Chinese character represents in essence a concept. For this reason the SignWriting characters will mean different things in different sign languages.

The Liberation fonts make it possible to replace the Microsoft fonts without a need for reformatting the text. When you analyse this, it means that Unicode characters are now available in two interchangeable sets of fonts.

SignWriting does not have Unicode characters and it does not have fonts. The symbols that it uses are complete for most sign languages and some missing characters for the Ethiopian Sign Language are being added at the moment.

One really powerful argument why SignWriting is so important is because it helps deaf people to learn a written language that is foreign to them. English is in essence foreign to a person who grew up with American Sign Language; the written English language is not connected to the every day language of the student. When you learn a second language, you learn the shared concepts quickly. Now in order to know what these shared concepts are, you use a dictionary. Without a dictionary, without a written representation of the primary language, it is extremely hard to learn. It requires a really well trained memory.

It is exactly because of deaf people having to live in a world based on sounds that the bridge that the written word is so important. There is anecdotal evidence that kids who learned to write their sign language are better able to learn the written language of the spoken language that surrounds them.

It is for all these reasons that SignWriting emancipate the deaf. It will emancipate them because as a group they will become better able to communicate in their own world. A world that is both signing and speaking.

Thanks,
GerardM

Dumb

Over the last month I have become interested in SignWriting. It is a fascinating subject for someone who is passionate about dictionaries. Given that OmegaWiki aims to include all words of all languages, it had bugged me for a long time how to include sign languages as well as written languages.

SignWriting is a recognised script, ISO-15924 Sgnw. It is only recently that it became possible to write a sign language grammatically correct using computer programs. It is written from top to bottom and it does not have its characters included in Unicode. There are some 30.000 characters at the moment and they are being converted from a bitmap into SVG.

I have been watching an instruction video on SignWriting, I have watched a video of some kids singing in sign language. When you see these people sign, I cannot even distinguish the individual signs, it goes way to quick for me. It is quite something, it makes me realise that I am dumb when it comes to signing and illiterate when it comes to writing sign languages. My redeeming quality would be that I am willing to be informed about it.

As the aim of OmegaWiki is to include all languages and as sign languages are as relevant as any other, I hope that the signing communities and particularly the SignWriting community will work with me to achieve this goal. Along this road there is the Unicode challenge and the challenge to get MediaWiki to support SignWriting.

This is likely to happen as SignWriting fulfils its promise and becomes the universally accepted script for sign languages.

Thanks,
GerardM

Wiktionary quality issues II

In a previous blog I wrote about the Russian Wiktionary being ostracised by the Polish Wiktionary. There was not enough content and consequently they did not want to have links on the Polish Wiktionary.

Yesterday, I blocked a bot run by an Arab Wiktionarian. I blocked it because it did not comply with the way interwiki links are created, it also did not have a bot flag. A link is only created when the words are exact matches. The problem at the Arab Wiktionary is that they have imported with a bot many words, English words, and they are all upper case.

I have blocked the bot because it is technically wrong. I do run my bot to correct the "damage". The biggest damage however is in the lack of communication between the Wiktionary projects. It is for this reason that I am of the opinion that though courageous efforts, many of them are failures.

Thanks,
GerardM

Looking at Encyclopedia of Life differently

There has been a lot of comments on the Encyclopedia of Life in the Wiki community lately. All of them miss the most important point. The point is made by the Encyclopedia of Life itself; it will provide "aggregation and will use mash-up technology and Wiki style editing and accumulation of content".

Key in all this is that the Encyclopedia of life is not only Wiki style editing, it also provides for aggregation and mash up technology. It is the one thing that Wikipedia and Citizendium alike are incapable of. With the functionality MediaWiki provides, you are restricted to copying data into the article and having done that, it loses the connection with its origin in a practical way. This reduces these projects to sources of information because of the functionality.

When you look at the examples on the Encyclopedia of Life website, you find that they have information from many sources and present them together. In this way they provide a composite view on the subject that is considered. The data can remain fresh because once data is changed in the sources it consists of, this can be reflected because of the methodology.

One of the exiting things they provide in their mash up is the connection to old literature. This literature is extremely relevant to taxonomy as the oldest name that described a taxon is the one to be used to describe it. The consequence is that many names that were valid once are not valid anymore. It is interesting to learn how they will manage the linking of old valid names to the newer names. This has other applications as well, when an old paper mentions aspects of a species, it may mean that there is no mapping. It is then of relevance to consider the mapping to a subspecies or a different species that is referred to in the old literature.

Mapping the historical names of taxons in time is a hell of a job but an important job because it opens up the understanding of the old literature. For plants, the IPNI resource is of immense value. If anything, I hope that IPNI will be or become part of the mash-up.

Thanks,
GerardM

aderente

adarente is an Italian word. This word was defined in OmegaWiki. It has multiple meanings. One of these meanings, not the most common one, became a DefinedMeaning.

When you want to understand all this from what it says, it is extremely relevant to know that indeed "adarente" is the expression that is relevant to all this. When you do not, you will not appreciate that "conforme" is a synonym.

The whole notion of the DefinedMeaning is extremely important to OmegaWiki, it is fundamental. It is sad that, while we do record the word the Expression that goes with the DefinedMeaning, we still not make this visible.

Thanks,
GerardM

Orientation of text

When you have a text, you write either in a right to left direction, like in Arab or Hebrew, or you write in a left to right direction, like in English or Russian. In OmegaWiki, we are going to support the orientation for right to left once Multilingual MediaWiki is integrated in our software.

I have given SignWriting a lot of thought lately. This is a script that goes top to bottom. What I just realised is, that as as consequence a left to right word mixed into such an environment would also go top to bottom. It makes however as much sense to have a right to left word also go in the same direction.

The problem is that when you have both RTL and LTR in a top down environment, it will seem odd.

Thanks,
GerardM

Google video

For a lark I checked Google Video for Wikipedia articles. It was no surprise to find stuff there. There was all kinds of stuff including this political rant about articles and NPOV on Wikipedia. The guy was insulting and threatening a Wikipedian in a way that I would ban him for a substantial amount of time. This is not freedom of speech is about.

I have no opinion at all about what this guy is on about. What I do know is that he does not help his case. This kind of gangster mentality is really obnoxious. His problem is that by behaving in this way he polarises to the extend that I would not even consider his arguments.

Skype ..

I have been using Skype for so long now. It is absolutely essential to me. Today I had a first and, the person I spoke to also had a first in the way we were using Skype. To her Skype is an essential tool too.

I spoke with Valerie Sutton, her first was to use Skype and actually listen to it. Valerie is using Skype with video and uses sign language to communicate.

For me it was a first to actually see Valerie while communicating on Skype. It was all really accidental; I was about to disconnect when I found that the video was actually supported as well.

We discussed licenses.. I asked for some pictures to illustrate Wikipedia articles that are about sign languages. She told me that i could have any picture of her that I wanted and have it under a Free license.. We discussed the quality of pictures as well..

Now that the conversation is over, I thought of this, I would like to have a video fragment with every Wikipedia article about a sign language and have someone who is native in that language sign it :)

Thanks,
GerardM

How the Wiktionary interwiki bot is running

In a previous blog about Wiktionary quality issues, in a mail to the Wiktionary mailing list and a post on the English language bear parlour, I informed of the Polish Wiktionaries request / demand not to include the Russian and Vietnamese Wiktionary in the interwiki link.

The general reaction is that the Polish can wish what they want and that I should be willing to accommodate them. It is however not a zero sum game. Whatever I do, it has repercussions and it is in the end for me to make the choice that fits me, as the runner of the bot, best.

I have talked with Andre Engels about this. The result is that I will not update the Polish Wiktionary any more. All other Wiktionaries will still be updated with information with information about all Wiktionaries including the Polish.

I really dislike this situation. The good news is that the Vietnames Wiktionary is aware of this problem and is working on a solution, they just need time. The Russian Wiktionary is in my opinion a wasteland that is not really inviting to work on. Then again it is stubs on a grand scale.. people are working on it though. The Polish .. I am sorry that they feel this way. I do think that this only isolates them and that isolation is the major weakness of the Wiktionary projects.

Thanks,
GerardM

The lamest technology mascots ever

Wired has an article with some mascots. The idea was funny enough to get my attention. I got two things out of it. I did not know about the existence of Wikipede or that we might have had a mascot if it had not been for "a slow death by consensus". The other thing is the way our encyclopaedic project is described: " Gangware encyclopaedia Wikipedia".. Funny

Thanks,
     GerardM

Lies, damned lies and statistics

It has often been said that the only "reliable" statistics are the ones that you compile yourself. Strike that, I am not great at this science of statistics, I just use them to blind people with what is made obvious in this way. A week ago we celebrated that we had 15.000 Expressions for German. Today we celebrate that we have over 10.000 Expressions in Italian.

According to Kipcool, the statistics are wrong. His statistics take into account the fact that we occasionally have reason to delete Expressions. According to his figures we have 14.020 German and 9.776 Italian Expressions. This means that we may celebrate the round numbers again at a later date.. :)

For the Destinazione Italia project in OmegaWiki, we will need translations in many languages with an emphasis on European languages. As we already have a lot of content in Italian, it is important to mark what is already there also is known to be part of this collection. In this way do we know how many Expressions are there to process.

It seems to me that numbers, statistics tell a story, they tell as much about what is represented as about the person who uses the data. It is after the collaboration on statistics that you find what the numbers actually mean and what they truly represent. After such a process, they have become the statistics of a project and are owned by its community.

Thanks,
GerardM

Wiktionary quality issues

On the Wiktionary project I run the interwiki bot. The process is simple; when an article exists in another language spelled exactly the same, I create an "interwiki" link. This allows you to see the information on another language Wiktionary. This process is an automated process, it works on all Wiktionaries and it is an unattended process.

I have received a request from the Polish Wiktionary to stop adding interwiki links for the Russian and for the Vietnamese Wiktionary. The reason given is one of quality. On the Russian Wiktionary many of the articles are created by a bot and they do not provide good information. An example is dispersion, there is nothing really in there. The Vietnamese Wiktionary is more problematic because a bot was used to generate declension and conjugation tables of Russian words and they got it wrong.

The Russian Wiktionary has some 81.000 empty shells and refuse to remove it. The Vietnamese are not willing to remove there incorrect data.

I have been asked to stop including the Russian Wiktionary and the Vietnamese Wiktionary when I run the interwiki process. To be honest, I run the bot as a service and I do not think it is the right thing to do. I think the Vietnamese are wrong not to correct the wrong data that they have. I am less sure about the Russian approach; in essence it is a stub. However, creating a Wiktionary in this way is like stamp collecting; you can look at it but there is not information about it.

Given how the process works, I am not sure that I can exclude either the Russian or the Vietnamese Wiktionary. The way it works is that I run explicitly on all Wiktionaries. When I exclude Russian or Vietnamese, I will probably end up removing all references to these projects. They are the third and fourth Wiktionary is size.

When I do not exclude the Russian and the Vietnamese Wiktionary, the bot may end up being blocked on the Polish Wiktionary. This will also kill off the interwiki process.

From my point of view, using bots to generate content in a Wiktionary only makes sense when there is at least a link to the word in the base language. When the initial creation of stubs is followed by the enrichment of these stubs it is acceptable. For having information that is completely wrong, there is no excuse.

The question is, will there be a discussion about acceptable practices in Wiktionary. The question are:

• Can the Polish demand what they do?
• Is having a project that consists mainly of stubs acceptable?
• Is having incorrect data acceptable?

Thanks,
GerardM

The Uyghur‎ user interface

Uyghur‎ is a Turkic language spoken by the Uyghur people in Xinjiang. According to the English Wikipedia, the language is written in the Arabic, Roman and again the Arabic script. Cyrillic is actively used as well.

The officials script in China for this language is Arabic and has been since 1983. The ug.wikipedia has a Latin script user interface. The ug.wiktionary however is right to left. This means that there is at least a need for a user interface that is either in Arab and one in the Latin script. Given that Cyrillic is another actively used script, we need three message files for Uyghur.

When a language is expressed in so many ways, the current MediaWiki software does not allow for supporting Uyghur in a meaningful way. It will be good when Multilingual MediaWiki becomes a reality. The good news is that the prospects for this are really good. The last status report I heard was that some install routines have to be written and then people can start experimenting with this new functionality.

PS Check out what MLMW offers :)

Thanks,
GerardM

SignWriting

SignWriting is one way of expressing signed languages. There are several ways of doing this, signwriting is the one favoured by most people who actually write down the signed languages. There is a request for a Wikipedia for the American Sign Language or ASL expressed in SignWriting.

I am in favour of such a project. There are however a few relevant issues

• SignWriting is currently not supported in UTF-8 and MediaWiki expects UTF-8.
• There is software specific to SignWriting, it can be used for a Wikipedia
• Due to the technical issues, there is no way it can use the Incubator.

Given the objective of the Wikimedia Foundation, supporting this project is very much something that we should support. ASL is a very different language. Given that the organisation behind SignWriting is very much in favour of the creation of a Wikipedia, there is ample scope for the Wikimedia Foundation and the SignWriting organisation to work together and overcome all the relevant issues.

For me it is important that with this Wikipedia project the culture of the deaf will get a boost. When SignWriting becomes even more mainstream, it has the potential to become the script for many of the other sign languages as well.

Practically, I would like to start with this project on WMF servers using the wiki like software that already exists. I would look for programmers and or funding to enable MediaWiki to support SignWriting. I would look for funding to create a full implementation of the SignWriting glyphs in UNICODE.

Thanks,
GerardM

Braille

When you cannot see, resources like Wikipedia are not available to you. When you cannot see, you need something like braille to make such resources available to you. You still have the issue who is going to convert text to braille.

RoboBraille is an organization that converts to several different formats that can be used by braille readers that work with computers. The software works by receiving an e-mail with the text that needs conversion.

I can imagine that this engine could work for a website as well.. Consider what a difference it would make when Wikipedia would be available in this way.. The converted pages can be cached like any other page. When there is an issue with doing this realtime or near realtime, it would be possible to do this for articles that are featured articles or that are part of a "final version".

I would love to see a solution like this to become part of the service that we provide.. We aim to bring all information to all people.. blind people qualify :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Linguists go Wikipedia

In a previous post I mentioned that as part of the funding drive for the Linguist list, the subscribers of the list were asked to vote with their wallet. They did, and an intern will be paid to organise an editorial update of the Wikipedia pages on linguistics. The idea is that the many thousands of linguist that are subscribed to the linguist list will ensure that notable linguists like Eve Clark and Tanya Reinhart will get a mention.

Consider, this is a leading list of some 14,649 linguists that will be urged to help us improve both the quality and the quantity of the coverage of the field of linguistics.

I am really exited about this.

Thanks,
GerardM

A board of trustees or an executive board

In a post on his blog Tawker suggests that it was "widely reported why" Mr Wool left his job. This is not true. Mr Wool explicitly refrained from explaining why he left his job and in this way prevented a discussion both about the organisation and his role in it.

The organisational consequences in the statements made in this blog are also very much wrong. The Wikimedia Foundation is in the process of setting up an organisation. This effort is hindered by a lack of funding and an unlucky choice in staff. As the staff becomes more professional, the board will be able to distance itself from the day to day affairs.

Thanks,
GerardM

Vietnamese

In OmegaWiki you can have many of the labels used in the data part in your language as well. For this to function, you have to select a language in the "user preferences" and there have to be translations of the words involved. Words like Estonian, Georgian or noun, verb, adjective will be shown in the selected language.

As the user interface is one of the most critical aspects for getting buy-in, it is something I often spend time on. Given that I do not speak languages like tiếng Việt, it is not always easy to find the right translations. For this language I was not able to find Gujarati. More bewildering was that I could not initially find the word Korean, it was there as korean with "tiếng Triều tiên" as its translation.

All in all I have added more than 10 translations in this latest session. I am sure that people who speak this language will have an easier time doing the same job.

Thanks,
GerardM

{{WOTD|petition}}

At OmegaWiki we have a word of the day. This word of the day is hopefully created before a new day starts. It is something that I find myself doing almost everyday. Most often I just pick a word at random. Today I picked the word petition.

Today I signed a petition, the Alan Johnston Petition, at the BBC News website. I think it is really sad when journalists are the victims of political violence. It prevents news coming from corners of the world. In this way you can prevent news going our or coming in. By stopping the flow of information, the risk increases that the "other" will be seen as the enemy.

I am afraid the Palestinians are shooting themselves in the foot. You can also sign the petition.. or think some positive thoughts about this.

Thanks,
Gerard

Linguist List's Wikipedia Update Vote

Linguist list is the premier mailing list that aims to provide a forum where academic linguists can discuss linguistic issues and exchange linguistic information. It is more than just a mailing list; it also provides fellowships to graduate students who serve in return as editors on the list.

Yesterday there was a message that following an initiative on the Russian Wikipedia, they would pay for a graduate assistant to work half time for one semester to coordinate the improvement of the field of linguistics in the English language Wikipedia.

When their community thinks it important, they have to spend $2000,- extra and this will pay for this initiative.

There is nothing that stops people not yet associated with the Linguist list to contribute to this funding drive as well. :)

Thanks,
GerardM