This is a picture of General Abner Doubleday, U.S.A. This picture is available on Commons. It is available from the Library of Congress (LC-BH82- 150 B). This picture was cropped in order to be able to upload it onto the Wikimedia servers; its current size is 7,87 MB.
The date of this picture is between 1855 and 1865, at the time it was popular to create what are stereoscopic pictures so these are the two pictures needed to create this effect. Durova is doing great work by restoring pictures.This is a partially restored picture and it is very much improved. In a way, this work is similar to the work done in Wikisource. Important old pictures are restored and by their inclusion in Commons they are available in all WMF projects and under a Free license when downloaded for other uses.

There are many other pictures that are really relevant, the SF earthquake, the Warsaw ghetto uprising or Douglas MacArthur landing at Leyte..

I find it awesome that Commons is evolving and doing these great things that we do not hear much about. What else is happening at Commons that we do not know about ??
Thanks,
GerardM

Beta release of the SignWriting Image Server

On the list of requested new languages, American Sign Language has been featuring for a long time. It is still on the discussion stage. The reason is that MediaWiki cannot show the necessary SignWriting script. So when we can use SignWriting in MediaWiki we can really start the process of starting our first Wikipedia in a sign language.

Today I received the announcement that the SignWriting Image Server (SWIS) has been given its beta release. It comes with the International SignWriting Alphabet (ISWA) 2008 set of symbols that currently defines 30 SymbolGroups, 600 BaseSymbols, and 33563 symbols.

One of the absolutely wonderful things to notice is how much the people from the SignWriting foundation picked up on the need of standards and licenses. The software is GPL3, the documentation is CC-by-sa and, the fonts are licensed under the Open Font License. To top it off, the plan is to write an Internet draft for the ISWA 2008 and make it an official character set.

The next phase is to update SignPuddle, the software to create content in SignWriting, for use of the ISWA 2008 and then an open source SignText plugin and finally a MediaWiki extension at the end of the Summer.

I am amazed about the volume of work that Valerie Sutton and Steve Slevinski put in to make their dream come true. Sign languages written for real human beings. I am so happy seeing that it is comming together ..
Thanks,
GerardM

The importance of relevance

The board of the Wikimedia Foundation decided that their composition will be changed. There will be seats for chapters and there will be seats for experts. The number of people that are directly chosen by people of the many communities will decrease as a result. This decision was taken without consultation of either the advisory board or the community. Many people are pissed off. A consequence is that the influence on the board by people from the USA will be much less; there is no US chapter.

In separate mails both Erik Moeller and Anthere indicated that they would welcome it when the projects, the communities organise themselves. When a body of people takes care of the issues that come up in the projects, the organisation and the board do not have to do this. They cannot do it in the first place becaue they do not scale and do not have the skills to deal with multiple projects in over 250 languages.

When the board, the organisation cannot deal with the issues and when the communities take care of these same issues, two important things are established

• The board, the organisation can concentrate on their enabling function
• The relevance of the board is of a lessened relevance to the projects

When Wikipedia was still young, Jimmy was the "god king" and as more projects were started in more languages, it became clear that he could not deal effectively with all the community issues. Now that he is more of an ambasador, he still has a lot of influence, people still listen to what he has to say but it is quite clear that particularly the bigger projects organise themselves.

What is missing is a coordinating body, a council that deals with what the projects have in common. That deal with the conflicts between projects, that helps the smaller projects evolve in fully functional projects with all the trimmings. Such a body will consist of the many people who already do this type of work. In this way we can provide the perfect partner for the board and the organisation to work with. With such a body the composition of the board is a lot less relevant.
Thanks,
GerardM

On the monthly Betawiki info

April has been another good month at Betawiki. This month we started to support two more languages. Eleven more languages now have basic support; as a consequence, a third of the languages MediaWiki supports, are usable when you do not know another language.

When you look at all MediaWiki messages, the increase is not that big. To understand this, you have to appreciate that there were many changed and new messages due to the ongoing MediaWiki development. When you look at the extensions, you find that both the WMF used extensions and the other extensions show a healthy growth.

The major event this month was the first "language pack", it allows people who run the 1.12 stable version of MediaWiki to update the localisations. I only recently realised how different our software development is; typically localisers get into the act once the coding of all the new functionality is done. MediaWiki is different; the WMF projects always run the "bleeding edge" software and consequently there is a constant need to maintain the localisation. This makes localising MediaWiki much more of a challenge. The release of a new version is typically a major event, for MediaWiki it is something that is done as well ...

Some factoids:

• New projects are once again created; sadly a new version of the GFDL has not yet been released
• There are currently 1908 messages in MediaWiki. Release 1.12 has 1768 messages - an 8% increase
  
• Siebrand's insane goals for 2008 are starting to look more realistic, even achievable....

Thanks,
GerardM

Fighting the fight

I care deeply about languages. I want all our projects to do well. Occasionaly I do things to help these projects on their way.

Today I was spreading the word about localisation on the Kikongo Wikipedia. Their main page said BALLZ! and I changed it to its previous and proper state. When you check the history, you find more vandalism. Small projects without much of a community suffer a lot of this kind of nonsense.

I find myself a lot on many projects and I realised that if I had the admin flag I would be able to do more. I could apply for the Steward setting, but I am not eager or willing to do all the things that many stewards do; I want to do the odd job that come along on my way. The only reason why I want it is because it makes it easy when I find something that needs doing.

I do not think that I want to stand in a steward election, for me it is too much hassle, too bureacratic. I am afraid that that I do not have the stomach for all the politicking. Asking for admin for all the small projects is a non-starter. With some exceptions, there are no viable communities in any of the 100 some Wikipedias that have less then 1000 articles.. There is nobody there. I still try to get support / interest in helping out in Betawiki. I am an optimist :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Extension of the week: Global blocking

Global blocking is the extension of the week at Betawiki. According to its technical documentation it has a beta status and according to the info on Meta it is life on all the WMF projects.

According to the Meta documentation, I should be one of the lucky few that can use this tool. However it is not clear to me at all how to use it; I have not yet found any documentation. What I understand is, that it only works for IP-numbers and that is really useful to prevent a lot of vandalisation. I think Werdna has done a fine job by creating "Global blocking".

What I find interesting is that the discussion about who will be able to use this tool and how it affects the autonomy of projects is still ongoing. There have been postings on the Foundation mailing list and there is a lot that can be found on Meta.

Sadly we do not have a project or volunteer council, IMHO it would be the obvious place where these things should be discussed / determined.

Some nice factoids:

• In a conference in Beijing Denny reported that Semantic MediaWiki has been successfully localised in Betawiki.
  
• We are deleting the Babel templates and use the Babel extension in stead

Thanks,
Gerard

How to get the message out?

When I talk about MediaWiki, I typically think of my audience as people who are editing in a wiki. They need to know that localising is good, that you do it at Betawiki, they are the ones that may help push the WMF into using Semantic MediaWiki in its projects or share my interest in things to do with languages.

When you consider who you are doing it for, this localising, I find there are two groups. The people who localise help themselves because by collaborating at Betawiki, they get better tooling and their work will have an effect in all the WMF projects. These are the easy ones to reach. The second group, the people the organisations that have their own MediaWiki Wikis are much harder to reach.

Today I informed Tactical Tech about our "language pack" and how we provide support for the 1.12 stable release. To me it is important that the MediaWiki that is released in the NGO in a box provides the best that we can do. When NGOs use MediaWiki, more people will know our tool and this may stimulate them to write in the Wikipedia in their language too.

By reaching out to Tactical Tech, I hope to reach many more organisations but I do not reach the NGOs that got MediaWiki from the box already. Messaging in this way does not scale either.

What is the best way to inform the MediaWiki users, the people organisations that have their own wiki?
Thanks,
GerardM

Babel templates

I love Babel templates. They are great to express what languages you are familiar with and what level of confidence you have when using a language.

Babel templates are used on many projects. On OmegaWiki, my home wiki, it is required of the people who want to edit. There is one nuisance with Babel templates, there are a lot of them and, it is hard to get all the texts that make up the templates.

MinuteElectron is changing all that. He made it an extension. Given that it is being developed first at Betawiki, adding the messages is easy and obvious. The messages are stable, so while the software is being finetuned, the localisation has already started.

One of the clever things in the code is that data of different standards is used to make up the total number of languages. Both ISO-639-1 and ISO-639-3 codes are used, information from the CLDR is also considered. It is now a matter of finetuning the code and selecting the languages it supports.

All in all, a great new extension is being developed.
Thanks,
GerardM

WALS, The World Atlas of Language Structures

In 2005, Oxford University Press published "The World Atlas of Language Structures" it is a 712 page hard-cover book and is available for £425,00. It comes with a CD that allows you to get a visual grasp where languages are spoken. It is filled to the brim with all kinds of information and it is considered an important work for people studying linguistics.

In a joint project several of the Max Planck Gesellschaft Institutes, published WALS online. It provides a rich resource and uses Google maps to indicate where what languages are spoken. The data is on the Internet and in order to be of value in a world where Open Access is increasingly considered to be essential, the data is available under a Creative Commons license.

For Wikipedians, the license will be disappointing; the CC-by-sa-nc does prevent the use of this data. WALS is considered a standard work and there are many references to the ISO-639-3 standard; check out Finnish for an example. However, many of the languages recognised in this Standard are missing, Stellingwerfs stl, Abau aau to name just two. I hope that this will be resolved as it will increase the value of WALS a lot.

Even when the use of this data is limited, there is a lot to learn from WALS. It integrates many of the facts known about many languages, it presents them in maps, and makes the best use of what Google maps has to offer. With this much information available it is fun to see what languages are spoken where. Wals on line is truly of interest and I heartily recommend it to people who share my interest in languages.
Thanks,
GerardM

Youtube ... but which one?

YouTube is a video sharing website. It is probably the most widely used, it has a wide variety of stuff including pop songs, comedy or TV shows from my youth. There is also a large amount of useful stuff, like a howto do the Rubik cube ... The real cool thing of the YouTube videos is that you can embed them in a website. It is for this reason that many people want to include YouTube into MediaWiki and, it shows. There are currently seven extensions known at MediaWiki and I have been reliably informed that there are more.

So what extension to choose? What makes a YouTube extension the best? It is a bewildering choice; do you want YouTube only, what other video sharing sites are supported, is it localised, is it supported and most importantly will it work for me ???

The answer to these questions take time to answer, and then the apparently best choice may still leave things to be desired. A friend of mine has to answer these questions. How to YouTube is not the only functionality that he has to decide on. He will like many others, have the extensions tested, maybe fixed for documentation and function.

As we are certain that this is an often repeated excercise, we want to do it in a way that provides more benefits; a way that helps people to understand what extension, what version for what MediaWiki release and how to install and use it.

Our current thinking is to test it on a virtual server and publish the results. We have not decided on the precise details. Suggestions are welcome.
Thanks,
GerardM

Word2MediaWikiPlus

Word2MediaWikiPlus is an extension for Microsoft Word. It's function is to convert a Microsoft Word document to MediaWiki. There are many people that are really excited with this new functionality.

What makes this software different from all the other MediaWiki extensions, is that it is not written in PHP, it is written to work with Word. This is why it is rather special that it is now also supported in Betawiki. It required a new approach to exporting the messages.

MediaWiki is not only used within the Wikimedia Foundation but also outside its projects. What interests me is if new people will come to Betawiki to help support this extension. I hope it will help us in getting more people cooperating on functionality that serves our shared needs.
Thanks,
GerardM

Works for me ... the BBC

I am a big fan of the BBC news. I used to listen to it in my car 648 Mhz, the BBC world service, news, no adverts, no nonsense. At the moment it is my primary source of news.

The BBC has a new skin. As always some like it, some hate it. It is functional. It is functional except for the embedded video; when I choose to see one, I get a black screen with a few dots moving in a circle.

As I want to have it work for me, I contacted the BBC, I informed them about my browser and the problem I had. I got as a reply that they had tested Firefox in their Quality Assurance process. I was even informed that "In fact I use it on Firefox every day."

I would love to repeat after this fine person; it works for me...
Thank,
GerardM

From Little Things Big Things Grow

I talked with Brianna, and as always it was fun. One of the things we discussed was "From Little Things Big Things Grow". It is not only a really nice song, it is about Australia busy turning over one of its darkest pages.

I was wondering what Australians could do in Wikipedia to create more awareness of the Aboriginal heritage. I would like to see an article for all the Australian languages. When some of these articles would even be of "featured article" quality, I am sure this would have meaning.
Thanks,
GerardM

Interim MediaWiki releases or MediaWiki language packs

When the latest stable release of MediaWiki was prepared by Brion, Betawiki was going to continue to support MediaWiki by keeping track of the messages that are valid for the new stable release. 13947 new localisations have been added to the 202201 messages, this is an increase of 6,90%.

As the many localisers at Betawiki continue to do their great work, we can provide better support for the new stable release. The first thing that needed doing was identifying the messages involved and then it was necessary to export the messages. This last part was buggy until now.

The improved localisation is currently available here. When Brion finds a need to issue an interim release for 1.12, we expect that the localisation will become part of the package

What we have to figure out is how to inform all the people and organisations that will benefit from this new feature.
Thanks,
GerardM

Semantic MediaWiki update

Yesterday I posted that Semantic MediaWiki is now supported by Betawiki. Today already five languages have been completely localised. They are:

• French
• Dutch
• Norwegian (bokmål)‬
• Occitan
• Slovak

Six other language now have a better then 90% localisation and twelve languages have some localisation. It is funny that German and Croat do not have a complete localisation :)

I will agree that I would LOVE to see an experiment with SMW on a Wikipedia...
Thanks,
GerardM

Car glass

I have a car. It is parked outside of my apartment. Next to the parking place is a building that has been squatted. For whatever reason, people find a need to kick in the windows of this building. This week I rang the police because another window was kicked in. The police came, the boys, age 15 something were gone. Yesterday I came to my car to find that the front window of my car was kicked in, I reported it to the police. Today, another window of the building was kicked in. Again I called the police.

As the building is squatted, nobody seems to care if the windows are whole. Some people want the squatters out and this may be a reason why they throw in the windows.. With a vandalised building, it is easy for people to think that nobody cares. The problem is, that when people think like that, some think nothing of damaging other things as well, like my car.

I know the police had a talk today with the boys. I am grateful that they did. I do not know what has been said, but it may help get the message out that you should not damage other peoples property.
Thanks,
GerardM

Semantic MediaWiki meets Betawiki

The picture says it all; Semantic MediaWiki is now supported by Betawiki. For you who do not know Semantic MediaWiki, it is one of the more brilliant pieces of software to extend MediaWiki. With Semantic MediaWiki enabled, you get one new instruction :: and it is provides really powerful possibilities to your wiki. What Semantic MediaWiki offers is the ability to provide structure to the information in a page. When you write on the Queen Beatrix article somewhere in the text [[mother::Queen Juliana]], it will allow you to query the information on the Queen Juliana page. This is the basis for the many cool things that Semantic MediaWiki can bring to Wikipedia.

The one thing that makes me really happy how quickly all this was done; Markus Krötzsch replied to a message on the Wikitech-l and stated that localisation was indeed something that has a high priority for him. Siebrand provided him with some pointers about Betawiki, and the same evening these two fine gentlemen had made the necessary changes to the SMW software and its messages and had it imported in Betawiki.

With the localisation issue dealt with, I think that Semantic MediaWiki has done most if not all the major work that was needed when it was last presented at Wikimania. Its performance has been dramatically improved, the number of instructions has been reduced to one, it provides loads of extensions of its own and last but not least many of the functionalities of SMW can be turned on or off.

It does not make sense to write new software when software exists that has been developed over a long time that WORKS.. I hope the Wikimedia Foundation will enable Semantic MediaWiki soon in one project to learn that it can be trusted in all its projects.
Thanks,
GerardM

Paypal and safe browsers

According to the BBC, Paypal will restrict the use to its website to safe browsers. When you browse the Paypal website, it is clear, IE7 is the preferred and only choice. It has all these must have safety features blah, blah, blah.

I must say that I am surprised that the "other" browsers are not good enough. Not only would Paypal lose a big share of its customers, I just don't believe it. Their "safer browser faq" gives some information that is missing .. it allows for the fact that Firefox 2 or later and Opera 9.1 or later have anti phishing features.

What Paypal is talking about it a technique called "extended validation secure socket layer certificates". A company called Comodo holds the evsslcertificate website. On its mainpage they provide information about three browsers.. Mozilla, Opera and .... Conqueror. No info about Internet Explorer. When I read what they have to say, I get the distinct impression that these "other" browsers have been part of this project from the start.

I really have the impression that I am being manipulated / misinformed. This makes me feel cross. When Paypal's customers find that 25+% of their customers will not be able to use Paypal, or more correctly are manipulated in this way they will rightly be upset as well.

Really from a public relations point of view it sucks for Paypal.
Thanks,
GerardM

Dogfood

The Finnish Wikipedia is the 14th Wikipedia in size. Its localisation is not as good as we would expect of a Wikipedia with more then 150.000 articles. Nikerabbit, the main developer at Betawiki is Finnish and he was challenged on IRC to eat his own dog food.

Nike has now started to work on the localisation and we hope/expect that in the true spirit of Open Source, he will start to scratch his own itch. When you are translating string after string, a lot of time is wasted clicking on buttons. Ajax is a technology that improves the responsiveness of programs. It would be cool if we would find that fewer clicks are needed to do the work...
Thanks,
Gerard

Now with daily quality checks ..

The word advertise means "call attention to" or "make publicity for". Announce has very much a similar meaning but with an advertisement you want people to DO something.

This is an advertisement...

Betawiki now reports on its daily quality checks. Every day a script checks the messages that are problematic and updates a page with the current issues. This helps our localisers to find what messages are problematic. There are several categories like "variables" - the number of variables used is not the same as in the original English message, "plural" - for these messages the plural is not implemented in the message for the language etcetera.

With this new function we hope that we help our localisers to be more efficient. As their time spend is the most valuable resource that we have, we are mindfull about how we can make this time as fun and well spend as possible. Every day the localised messages are submitted to SVN and once the codebase of the WMF servers is updated, the updates will be life.

Nice factoids

• The localisation for Manx got started recently and is doing nicely (55% of the most used messages)
• Egyptian Arab completed the localisation for the most used messages
  
• The bounty program is still open for more languages ... see Betawiki for details....
• Twenty nine new core messages were added in the last week

Thanks,
GerardM

Beeld en Geluid

Beeld en Geluid is a Dutch organisation tasked with the maintenance, the safe guarding and the exploitation and exploration of the audiovisual heritage of Dutch radio and television. In Hilversum the centre of Dutch radio and television, they have a magnificent building that allows the public to experience this history, a big archive with room for people who want to research and an office with people tasked with opening up their data as much as possible.

Preservation of so much material is a big task, much effort is put into the digitisation of material. Not only the really old material but also much of the digital age needs care in order to preserve it for the future. As Beeld en Geluid is paid by the Dutch taxpayers, one of its tasks is to give this material a wider availability. They provide specialised tools for the broadcasting organisations, the researchers. Much of the material cannot be made available to the public because of copyright issues. It is reassuring to know that this material will still be there when it becomes public domain..

Beeld en Geluid is exploring MediaWiki functionality. Their need is quite different; much of the material that they want to include exists in all kinds of databases and it is a lot of hard work to make it into a Wiki. We discussed MediaWiki and its uses, we talked about technology, extensions like Semantic MediaWiki, the OmegaWiki mark II project..

As happens so often, we found that there are many organisations that use MediaWiki and with more collaboration MediaWiki would gain more utility. We discussed how such a thing could be done. One thing was clear before we can cooperate, we need to know our shared needs.
Thanks,
GerardM

When is a Wikipedia not a Wikipedia ?

When you go from one Wikipedia to the next, you always expect an encyclopaedia. You expect things to be largely the same but in a different language. According to Bugzilla bug 13578, this is something that will change. The Alemannic community have found that having a Wikipedia, a Wikibooks, a Wiktionary and a Wikiquote is more then they can chew off.

What the Alemannic community has decided is to fold all the projects into their Wikipedia and have separate name spaces for the content of their old projects. Their communities seem to have decided on this, they want their name spaces now or they will move all their content into the Wikipedia name space.

What I wonder is if this is something that the wider community is aware off and, if this is considered to be acceptable. When such major changes are going to happen, it makes sense to include the change to the more appropriate gsw language tag.
Thanks,
GerardM

Statistics that get a life of their own ...

One of the metrics I use to explain why there is still so much localisation to do is quote the percentage of languages that have less then 50% of the most used messages localised. For me it demonstrates really well how much work still needs to be done. Currently 42% of the linguistic entities do not even have these messages localised. This is already a big improvement :)

Today I noticed Siebrand inform people working on a new language that only when 50% is done of the most used messages, he will commit a new language to MediaWiki. I love the idea that things can only improve.

Some great factoids

• Kaustubh has been made an honourable member of Betawiki for his work on Marathi and Hindi.
• One of the participants of the bounty program is giving his bounty to the Wikimedia Foundation :)
• The Asian languages are doing REALLY well in Betawiki

Thanks,
GerardM

Getting the message out

The success of Betawiki is in its community; a group of people who maintain the localisation of MediaWiki for their language. There is always work to do at Betawiki because the MediaWiki developers constantly modify the MediaWiki functionality and the functionality of the extensions.

When a localisation is largely done, it is best to regularly return to Betawiki and do some maintenance on the localisation. In this way the amount of work needed is not so bad. Then again, it is easy to forget and time flies...

It is with pleasure that I can announce that Siebrand has written his first extension. An extension that allows us to send an e-mail to the users that have a confirmed e-mail address. When people do not want to receive an e-mail, they can opt out and read the information on the wiki.

We intent to send a message once a month informing about the latest developments at Betawiki. By keeping our community informed about the latest developments, we hope to maintain the interest in Betawiki and the quality of the MediaWiki localisations.
Thanks,
GerardM

Criteria for the closure of projects

For quite some time, we have had people arguing for the closure of projects. I have seen many arguments pro and against closures. What has been missing in all these projects are objective criteria why it makes sense to find fault with a project.

I have come up with three objective arguments.

• A project is not what it is advertised to be. For instance when a language is always written in a particular script, a project in any other script is problematic.
• A project does not have at least 90% of the most relevant messages localised. For your information there are only 498 messages in this category at the moment.
• A project should have at least 1000 articles. When there is nothing to see what is the point ?

The first argument is an absolute, never mind the size.

For the second and third I would argue for closure when both conditions are not met. When there is activity in either it may be reason for giving an ultimatum. The ultimatum would be that both conditions need to be met within three months.

The most important reason why we need viable projects is because it is sad to see so much time wasted by good people on projects that have little or no objective value. No value because nobody actively cares. Yes, people may come along and get an interest and eventually they will, but time of valuable people is wasted now and that is in my opinion a really strong argument.
Thanks,
GerardM

Draft blogger

It is nice when software gets new functionality. Blogger, the software environment that I use to blog has a "Draft" version. This is where new features are exposed to the people who dare to live dangerously.

On this blog you will now find a "blog list" it shows a link to the latest entry of a specific blog. I have them sorted by blog with the most recent blog entry first ...

This blog entry I will post tonight at 11:00 PM. It is really cool that it is now possible to post at a specified date and time. This is particularly good when you have news that is under embargo until a specified moment...

There are more features pending a general release. These are the ones I like best.
Thanks,
GerardM

I want a PC not a VC

Effeietsanders has proposed the setup of a council that is to complement the staff, the advisory board and the board of trustees. The name proposed is the "Volunteer Council" or VC. To make this all happen a PVC or a provisional VC is to be created that is to get a mandate to specify what the VC is going to be. A group of good people are selected for this, people that I trust can do a good job.

I find myself opposing something that I think is sorely needed. The reason for this is very much one of focus. This council will particularly deal with the projects, the issues of the projects and thereby be complementary. The staff and both boards are about the organisation that enables the projects to function. This council will be about the projects and will deal what makes the projects function better.

The council will deal mostly with issues of the projects, not about issues of the volunteers. The fact that this council will consist of volunteers is incidental what is relevant is that this council will be there for the projects and consequently it will represent the projects and not so much the volunteers. When you consider the English Wikipedia for instance, it is well able to do all the things needed; it has the attention of the organisation, the world. There are many capable people beavering away and does within reason its own thing. It does not really need a council.

For most of the other projects things are starkly different. A recurring theme from Wikinews is that it does not get the necessary attention. You can however exchange Wikinews for most other projects including most Wikipedias. With the ever increasing number of wikis, it becomes ever more impossible for projects to be heard.

It is for all these reasons that I propose to name the council the "Project council" PC and for it to represent the interest and needs of the projects. The first thing it should do is ensure that the policies that exist are actually implemented and functioning. Then it should look into what make the projects be better represented within the limits of what is possible. Limits because the WMF functions very much as an ISP and this distinction prevents liability. In this way the projects and by inference the volunteers get a better representation and help the WMF fulfill as an enabler for the projects.

Practically, I would have the same group of people prepare for a Project Council. I would not give them a blank check, I would have them prepare a draft proposal. While working on this paper, I would have them consult with members of the staff particualrly Sue and Mike and consult with members of the board of trustees as well. I am sure that it will be good because there IS a need for a council in any way you slice it.
Thanks,
GerardM

hundred languages have basic support

The Venetian language has the honour of being the 100th language that has better then 98% of the most often used messages localised. There were two languages that reached this state today, the other was Furlan.

At this moment we support in Betawiki 313 distinct linguistic entities. This makes it 31.95% that have basic support. Since December 2007 52 languages have reached this status.

Congratulations to all the people that make Betawiki a do-ocracy. :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Ndonga and Dzongkha

Ndonga and Dzongkha are two languages. One is from Africa the other from Asia. Both still have a Wikipedia, one is officially closed the other is in the process of being closed. The dz.wikipedia is officially closed but has not been closed. The localisation effort is well under way and currently 78.12% of the most used messages have been localised. The ng.wikipedia has eight articles has no localisation and the usual people object to the closure of this project. On the talk page of Drini I found an anonymous coward indicating that something may be done soon ....

When projects are voted to be closed, they are not closed. This means that people like Drini have to continue their fight against spammers. There are two parts to the problem as I see it.

• When the time of stewards like Drini is free and infinite and when they do not object to doing this work there seems to be no problem. We should however value the time of people like him and make sure that it is used sparingly and well
• When policies lead to resolutions and these resolutions have no effect, what is the point of having these policies, these resolutions and all the time spend?

When policies have no effect, when nobody cares either the policies are wrong or we have to do a cost benefit analysis of the policies. When we find that the cost of having dead projects is less then the cost of blocking these projects we should abandon the policy for closing projects.
Thanks,
GerardM

PS I do not think it wise to close the Dzongkha wikipedia at this time.

Egyptian Arab

Egyptian Arab is a language recognised with the arz code in the ISO-639-3. For this language a Wikipedia was requested. A lot of work needs to be done before it is ready to have its own Wikipedia. There is the Incubator project, finding a group of people interested in becoming a community and the localisation of the most used MediaWiki messages.

It would be cool if we could have this project go live in Alexandria.. maybe have a talk or a lightning talk about the experience ?
Thanks,
GerardM

Nikerabbit

Nikerabbit has a blog. As his pearls of wisdom are not heard on aggregators, I find this entry interesting enough to point it out to a wider public.
Thanks,
GerardM

On the monthly Betawiki info

In March we had contributions in 186 languages in Betawiki. This is an increase of 30 languages over last month! The statistics for this month show a continued increase in all the relevant metrics; more languages support the most often used MediaWiki messages, more languages support the extensions.

The number of languages has increased by only one. This is also because for the first time two languages are no longer supported in BetaWiki. Middle Dutch and Old Norse are no longer supported in Betawiki. The decision to withdraw support was done by the Betawiki management :)

When you follow the project on a daily basis, the one thing that stands out is the support for the languages from India. I am impressed with the speed in which these languages have made their mark. With Hindi finally starting to move, we are slowly getting to the stage where we support most of the official languages of India.

The one thing that I will be watching closely is a request from the Greek localisers to have an approval process for new and changed localisations. The argument is that in this way it is possible to ensure consistent terminology and, to prevent dubious localisations to go life. The initial reply has been that Betawiki is a wiki too and that the process is an iterative process. Everyone can do the inital localisation and everyone can proof read and improve. "we are basically a do-ocracy. You do the work, you decide how it works." I read on IRC ...

What was agreed on is that features will be created to allow for an improved proof reading functionality, Nikerabbit has a Summer of Code project (not Google) to improve on the Betawiki functionality so I am sure that we will see loads of interesting changes in the future.
Thanks,
GerardM

Tricycle

Yesterday I brought a friend of mine to the railway station. I brought him by bike as he had come on his tricycle. His bike is a marvel of engineering and as it is a folding bike, he is allowed to bring his bike on the train and this enabled him to come to the party we were at.

In 2004 he came with a rollator, another important gizmo that allows him to extend his mobility. At the time we worked on a Wikipedia article on that subject. I had a look at the article today and I find that it has little to do with the "walking frame" that is supposed to be the equivalent on the English Wikipedia.

When my friend, we were together in secondary school, got in the train, I had asked him to make a photo of him on his bike and one of his bike folded. As these things matter, I asked him to write an article on Wikipedia or send me the photos so that I can write an article about it.

My friend used to ride a racing bike and he toured long distances... Today I am happy that he has a tricycle and was able to be there.
Thanks,
GerardM

Summer time

It is that time of year for me where the clock is advanced one hour... summer time. It is a moment when two songs come to mind, summer time and summer time. Both show my age and the age; both are on youtube and both do not have a film.

The comments on the second are lovely; a 13 year old: "classic jazz song. I am 13 and this is my fav song of all time." with a reply: "I´m 76 and I'm glad someone your age can enjoy this wonderful performance".

Anyway, I woke like always and it is early in the day. So it will just be light an hour longer I guess.
Thanks,
GerardM

Dzongkha

Dzongkha is a language spoken in Bhutan, India and Nepal. It is the official language of Bhutan. The Dzongkha Wikipedia is with currently 71 articles not really a success story.

For projects of this size, every active person makes a real difference. A new person came along today, Tenzin, and he has indicated that he wants to localise the most relevant messages for Dzongkha on Betawiki. He has created a user on the dz.wikipedia.

The Dzhongka Wikipedia predates the Language committee. So one new person has to make all the difference. I hope that this project will soon have several people working on their Wikipedia and with the basic localisation done a growing group of people finding use of their Wikipedia.
Thanks,
GerardM

Ahead of the pack

The Wikimedia Foundation has a beautiful statistics presentation of the growth versus the size of its Wikipedias. Erik Zachte was inspired by the beautiful statistics by Hans Rosling's Gapcasts. This beautiful presentation ia available in two ways:

• an 8Mb Flash presentation
• a javascript-only 'Wikimedia Projects Growth Animated'

The second version requires HTML-5 this is a brand new work in progress and consequently it is only available in the latest browsers. Firefox 3 is in its beta 4 incarnation currently the only browser able to run this.

With the browser wars hotting up, it is great that Firefox can be found ahead of the pack where it really counts; ahead in supporting standards. Standards that are the same for everyone. I am also really happy that the WMF actively in the forefront of stimulating standards.
Thanks,
GerardM

How many languages for the WMF and MediaWiki

In a recent conversation the question was asked, how many languages will we have in the Wikimedia Foundation. A guess can be made how many languages will have an project by the end of the year and how many languages will have a presence on the Incubator.

The only statistics available on the number of languages in time are the ones at Betawiki. As the localisations for most WMF projects have been imported, it gives a fair indication to the WMF growth. The list of Wikipedias informs us of 255 Wikipedias. Many of these have been closed because of inactivity. This has its effect in Betawiki as well; for many of the 275 anguages there is no localisation activity either. However, for some of the requested languages like Hiligaynon there is no localisation activity yet.

Jimmy said at some stage that a Wikipedia starts to become relevant when it has more then 1000 articles. There are currently 152 such projects. The minimum number of articles needed for a project to be viable is for me at 500, we have 216 projects that qualify.

In Februari over 150 languages contributed to Betawiki; my prediction is that we will have some 280 wikipedias by the end of the year and 185 of these will have more then 500 articles. The Incubator may have some 25 new languages. For Betawiki I expect some 320 languages with 210 being actively maintained.

I expect that there is a relation between the quality of the localisation and the relative health of a project. I hope we will have by the end of the year a better understanding on this relation
Thanks,
GerardM

Negative growth in the Betawiki statistics

This weeks extension of the week is Central Auth. The functionality of Central Auth is better known as "Single Logon". As the first experiments with Central Auth are taking place, this extension has been made an "extension used by the Wikimedia Foundation". This means that more messages are part of this group in in Betawiki.

Regurlarly messages appear, change or get deprecated. This has an impact on the statistics of the localisation. With the appearance of Central Auth, several languages do not make the grade any more to be counted in the "group statistics in time".

Given that Single Logon is applicable to ALL WMF projects, it does not make sense at all to localise locally. By localising in Betawiki, the messages will become available on all wikis and the statistics will once more show the improvement in the support for our readers and editors.

Please help your language and localise in Betawiki.
Thanks,
GerardM

What languages ?

Supporting relases; this is what we do it for

Don Osborn wrote on the Afrophone mailing list about the use of MediaWiki by ICANN for its Internationalized Domain Names evaluation. In the IDN evaluation, people are asked to test their application; eg browsers or mail clients with domain names that contain characters other then the Latin script.

Don wrote because among two new languages Amharic was added. Don wrote that they use a wiki for this and indeed they use MediaWiki.. :) . I had a look at the version they are using, they are on 1.10 while the latest release is 1.11 and release candidate 1.12.0rc1 is out.

For Amharic this difference is big. In Betawiki we have had a lot of activity for Amharic; 89.79% of all the MediaWiki messages and 4.69% of the messages used in the extensions used by the WMF are now localised. The most used messages were only finished on the 17th of Januari..

Other languages that ICANN does not support for its script in their IDN evaluation yet are Georgian and Bengali. Both are languages with a lot of recent localisations.

The application by ICANN of MediaWiki for its IDN evaluation demonstrates that our localisation effort is relevant outside the WMF as well. We are happy that with the 1.12 release there will be a continued localisation effort. The details on how later localisations will be made available are not known to me yet, but I have been told that there will not be an issue.
Thanks,
GerardM

Tatar Wikipedia; request for deletion

The Tatar Wikipedia is with 4053 of a respectable size. Getting a request for deletion for a project of this size seems outrageous. So there must be more to it.

The proposer writes that he has been implementing the use of the ISO-8859-9 code page for the Tatar language. According to the proposer, there are 150 articles that are "semi useful" and the rest are bot generated articles.

The reason for the proposal is that Tatar is not written in the Latin script. The Tatars live mainly within the borders of what used to be the USSR and in Russia it is required to write Tatar in Cyrillic.

There are several issues;

• Wikipedia is to bring information to people. When people do not read the Latin script in Tatar, what is the point?
• There has been a battle raging with admins blocking each other
• There is no existing precedent that deals with these issues
• The language committee has explicitly recused itself from all projects that existed before its start

As this is the type of Wikidrama that people do not know about, the type of Wikidrama that does not get press coverage I would like to learn how we as an organisation, a community are going to deal with this.
Thanks,
GerardM

Linguistlist update

On the mailing list of the Linguistlist I read the following....


Dear readers,

This letter is a progress report on LINGUIST's Wikipedia Update Project. You may remember that Fund Drive 2007 donors voted to earmark some funds for a LINGUIST team to look into filling some of the gaps in linguistics and language articles that appear in Wikipedia. Our goal was to make Wikipedia an even better resource for our field and the general public by asking the linguistics community itself to help improve the reliability of information in the "encyclopedia that anyone can edit." Our mandate was to get the word out about which articles needed revision or completion and to issue periodic calls for volunteers to edit such entries and/or add new entries. Our role was to serve as a hub for facilitating such updates and to report back to you on the results of our efforts.

We began our project in earnest in the summer of 2007. LINGUIST's Wikipedia team logged itself in as a user Linguistlist and merged its project with the existing WikiProject Linguistics page. We found that Wikipedia administrators and editors had already identified some 700 articles as "linguistic stubs," flagged as being incomplete or lacking in some respect-needing fuller content, having content that was "contested" by some, lacking proper references or citations, or having missing or empty links. We put these stubs on a "watchlist" to keep track of what got updated and when. From this large list of stubs, we then
created smaller lists by linguistic subfield-these included biographic entries of linguists and specific articles in phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and sociolinguistics.

We then issued calls for volunteers, one per month for a total of six through the end of December 2007. Each call included a report on subscribers who had responded to our calls. Some reported having edited or created new articles while others promised to edit specific entries in the future. Our respondents came from all over, as close to home as Chicago and New York and as far away as Serbia and the West Indies. All LINGUIST activities on the update project, including the full text of each call for action, are logged on our user page.

We are pleased to report the following activities concerning linguistics articles:

• 13 articles were completed or newly created by subscribers
• 12 articles had references added
• 33 links were added to existing articles
• 28 articles were de-stubbed by virtue of being judged self-sufficient

The Wikipedia team was able to devote six months to the project, given a timeframe that was necessarily limited. Because we are also involved in other LINGUIST projects, we are no longer recruiting participants for the update project.

The Wikipedia team is extremely grateful to all of you for your collective interest in the project and especially to those of you who made specific contributions to Wikipedia entries. Overall, we are pleased that we were able to perform a public service by calling attention to the quality of linguistics articles in Wikipedia and inviting you to join in as active Wikipedians for the greater good of our discipline.

In closing, we thank you, as always, for being there for us: we depended crucially on you for this particular project and could not have done it without you! We hope we were able to a small difference with this project. Please remember that when you donate to this year's Fund Drive, you are contributing to similar projects aimed at providing you with the broadest range of resources in the field of linguistics.

With best wishes,

The Wikipedia Update Team
Roxana Ma Newman
Hannah Morales
Luiza Newlin Lukowicz

Betawiki stats for the 25 biggest Wikipedias

Siebrand made a list of the 25 biggest Wikipedias and their localisation. It is an interesting list and, as with all such statistics it shows the moment. The Polish for instance are currently working hard while there is not much activity for Spanish.

What I find amazing is that Esperanto and Volapük do better then Turkish. Danish is doing fine for the MediaWiki messages but messages for extensions need a lot of work.

Being one of the 25 biggest, I think that there should be a sense of "noblesse oblige". All the work done to create the content needed to be a top 25 Wikipedia deserves that the user experience is perfect. The localisation is part of this.
Thanks,
GerardM

Another obvious reason to support SignWriting

The notion of SignWriting is one that I have take a fancy to. For those who do not know, SignWriting is the only script capable of writing sign languages. There are many sign languages.. according to Ethnologue there are 121 sign languages.

The arguments for SignWriting are

• when written, a language a culture is able to write its own history
• it stimulates the native preservation of both the language and the culture
• children who learn to write their native language first do better academically

At the conference in Bamberg I learned that many translators of a sign language learn the language in university. They learn it like you learn a foreign language. The obvious reason why SignWriting can be so relevant is that it is so much easier to learn a language when it has a written component.

This has been staring me in the face ... only now I see it :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Just a comparison

There are two projects that have their origin in the Wikimedia Foundation. Both are associated by people who have a claim to fame. Danny Wool used to work for the WMF and he seriously contributed to projects. Gerard Meijssen never worked for the WMF but he seriously contributed to projects. Danny's project is called Veropedia, Gerard's project is called OmegaWiki, one is a .com the other a .org. The first is based on Wikipedia the other has its origin on Wiktionary.

Danny used to be involved in fund raising for the WMF. Now his vitriolic contributions have a direct negative effect on the ability of the WMF both to function and to raise money.. if only because of all the time wasted to react to his allegations but also because people may find the reputation of the WMF tarnished.

Gerard is raising funds for his projects but these funds have a direct positive effect for the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects. Funding for localising MediaWiki and for improving the development infrastructure of MediaWiki. Funding for localising Commons.

Typically people are not interested in the positive approach; when Gerard urges people to localise at Betawiki because it has so much more impact, he gets told that he is not interested in the WMF projects. When people read Danny's negative comments, they react like "where there is smoke there must be fire".

Both organisations are outside of the WMF. One gets media attention, the other does not. One demostrably hurts the functioning of the WMF, the other does not.

I wish that people look at the bottom line. What is achieved by the actions of people. When the only justification is a right to the freedom of speech, then by all means let Danny have his say. But as what he has to say is about things that may have happened over a year ago, there is a limit to the credibility of the platform he has. As he does not want to see the positive things that are happening now, he effectively makes himself part of the problem and not a part of the solution.

The WMF has a budget outlining what it wants/needs to spend. The ability to get funding from the public is limited.

When a venture fund wants to donate serious money to the WMF, it is important to know if it comes with strings attached. The WMF currently has people with a serious ability to understand contracts and lawyerese. This is a major departure from the past. There are seriously rich people and organisations who appreciate WMF for what it is and what it aims to do. Many of them can easily help the WMF with its finances. The WMF, as an organisation, has its house in order and increasingly has the ability to make use of the rich network that has been build by Jimmy Wales.

Making use of the network Jimmy build can only be done with a positive attitude and appreciation of his accomplishments. It should be obvious but let me spell it out; when connecting to the people and organisations that know and appreciate Jimmy, dissing Jimmy is for the WMF effectively the same as shooting ourselves in the foot.

Thanks,
GerardM

Mediawiki support for the big languages

MediaWiki is used for projects in many languages. Wikipedia is the project best known for its many languages. The WMF Sitematrix gives the distribution of the languages and its projects. When you consider the usability of the MediaWiki software, you would expect that there is a correlation with the size of the project.

When you consider the top 10 Wikipedias, nine need localisation and the localisation for German, French, Swedish, Japanese, Dutch and Portuguese are fine. Italian and Polish need work done on the extenstions as used by the WMF while Spanish needs work done on both the MediaWiki messages and the extensions.

I am really happy how the quality of the Japanese localisation has improved. It is well covered for usage in the Wikimedia Foundation and we are awaiting the creation of a Wikiversity in Japanese.

Italians, Polish and particularly Spanish are the odd ones out. I am amazed that the communities for these languages have not picked up the need for proper localisation. The Japanese example has shown that it takes only a few good men to make a big difference.

When you look at other languages like Hindi that have so many speakers, you really wonder why it is doing so poorly certainly when you compare it with other Indian languages like Bengali, Marathi, Telugu, Malayam, Bengali and Tamil.

When you are part of a language community, check out the statistics for your language. Help us at Betawiki to support your language; there is plenty of room for improvement in most languages.
Thanks,
GerardM

Jimmy Wales is not a saint

Jimmy Wales is not a saint. He does not need to be a saint, his role is not to be a saint. He is the one person who is seen and known as the public face of Wikipedia. Jimmy has given many effective presentations on the subject, for instance at TED. Without Jimmy there would not have been Wikipedia. I have met Jimmy on many occasions and I can testify that he fulfils his role really well.

There are some people who have a beef with Jimmy, who have a beef with Wikipedia and who are invariably negative about this. I find this behaviour nauseating. To me it is clear that these people have put themselves firmly outside of what is acceptable behaviour on Wiki.

Danny Wool was the personal assistant of Jimmy and he was for some time an employee for the Wikimedia Foundation. He is now spouting gossip of what happened during this time. For me, the one person that I find despicable is not Jimmy but Danny. His moral values that allow him to be this "tell all" I find beyond contempt; it is vindictive and it is very POV.

The fine job Jimmy is performing for the Wikimedia Foundation is one of marketing. It may come as a surprise to some but the marketing of Wikipedia is still essential. In all the studies done on the Wikipedias there has not been a comparative study on the shared values of Wikipedia, particularly the NPOV and it is my belief that without communications on many levels the POV differences between the projects will only grow more rapidly

It is imho absolutely essential that the evangelisation for Wikipedia continues and in doing this Jimmy has proven himself a boon.

I have no doubt that people like Danny will continue their selfish destructive behaviour. I am sad that they do this without apparent consideration of the consequences of their actions. As they do not offer any credible alternative either, I find their utterings reprehensible.

As to publications like the "Valley wag", as long as they know how to spell Wikipedia or Jimmy Wales they offer free publicity. This is if you believe in "any publicity is good publicity".

Thanks,
GerardM

On the monthly Betawiki info

In February there have been contributions to Betawiki for 156 languages. Again, this is REALLY good news when you look where we are coming from. The quality of the MediaWiki localisation has improved a lot. Ten more languages support the most relevant messages, four the core messages, seven more support the extensions used by the WMF and 2 more languages support more then 65% of all the extension messages.

I am happy to agree that there is still a long way ahead of us. One big milestone we want to reach is when two hundred languages have posted localisations in one month. This would not make things perfect, it would make things better.

What is important to realise that there is nothing static in the numbers; MediaWiki development is a continuous process, new messages make their appearance, messages change. It takes continuous effort to maintain the quality of MediaWiki.
Thanks,
GerardM

Dump of the English language Wikipedia

After a long wait, a really long wait, it was announced that the dump of the English language Wikipedia has finally finished successfully. It took 58 days to complete and yielded a 17 gigabyte compressed file that will become some 2 terabyte when unpacked.

This news has led to a flurry of activities; Erik Zachte now has the opportunity to run his fantastic statistics again, the dbpedia people now have the opportunity to run their software on something new. Many studies are under way to analyse Wikipedia that have asked where they PLEASE can find the latest data ....

It is important that a dump has successfully finished. It is equally important that this process proves to be repeatable. Many people have said that Wikipedia is not really open content when you cannot get its data. It is great to see that all the effort to create a dump has finally succeeded and proves that Wikipedia IS open content.
Thanks,
GerardM

More things I learned about signing

I noticed that when a signer signs and a interpretor translates in English, the speed of the conversation is as fast.

There was a comparison in the complexity of the use of gestures and signs. It turns out that mother tongue signers use the most of either. In many ways it does not surprise because I understood that sign languages become more complex with a succession of generations of people signing. What I would expect that it is particularly this group that has the biggest influence on the development of sign language.

Gesturing is considered a sign of engagement in the story ie it is done more when this is the case. Particularly for speaking people.

WOW a presentation in ASL.. so I am listening to the interpretor :) So we have a presenter signing in ASL, the ASL interpretor translating in English and a interpretor translating the English into German Sign Language. And it is really funny; the speaker was asked to pause when a specific sign is used as an example as fort the German interpretor the sign is to be identified in order to present it in the translation. One of the Americans started to isolate the signs and it was picked up by the second German interpretor and passed to translating interpretor . The applause was unexpected... everyone started to wave ... WONDERFULL ... in the discussion there is the synchonisity because signers can speak at the same time ... the interpretors cannot do this as well as sounds really clash ... the applause was something else; everyone waving their hands over their head :)

For people that are familiar with SignWriting, I met Mieke van Herreweghe.. I discussed if a Wiki would be of use in educaton is Flemish Sign Language.. It is certainly great to extend the number of available tools :)

For me to be at this conference is truly a privilege, I talked with several people about what my interest is; the realisation of a Wikipedia for American Sign Language. What several people tell me is that it will be primarily relevant for children as it is hard for people that sign to learn to read and write their sign language. So as so often, some see this chicken and egg problem; are there enough people for a Wikipedia ... For a change, I would argue that it is time for an omelette. Have a Wikipedia and allow it to grow slowly and use its momentum also to grow the written expression of sign languages.

One of the reasons why I am so privileged is that many of these presenations will not be generally available... Such a shame, scientists have to publish...
Thanks,
GerardM

The Bamberg conference; sessions about signing and gesturing

I am in Bamberg, there is a meeting of the German society of linguists and I am sitting in on sessions that are themed about signs and gestures. These are scientific presentations. As particularly deaf people have an interest in this subject, there are not one but two people who translate into sign language. One translates in German Sign Language, the other in American Sign Language.

There is a lot of interest for these sessions; all seats are taken and for nine people there is standing room only. The first presenter is not able to speak English and presents in German. Sadly the ASL presenter does not know German ... The German translator does :) When you give a presentation on gestures and signs, I would expect that you want to be seen. I am perplexed that this man does not only does not speak English but also sits on his chair preventing people to see his gestures.

In the first session of the conference, the notion of theorising was considered to be of importance but its relevance is established when these theories are proven by further research. This means that the numbers should not be massaged to prove a point. What I wonder is what numbers, what research underlies what I will hear in the sessions about signs and gestures

Watching a translator into a sign language is really interesting; one big thing is that to be effective, the translator has to be seen. In a full room with many people, this is not a given. I am not small, but another big person is in front of ME. :)

When sign language is to be written down, it seems really relevant to be able to have a video, it goes SO quick from sign to sign. Then again this is also true for spoken language, this is what steno is about. So when you are to give to as diverse a group of people as this, what do you do? What is on your power point, do you use power point. Do you want to organise the people that are in a room based on what you can see where? Having a full view of a signer is of no use to me, being at a fair distance to a screen is nice.

The question if a signer can gesture is something where I think I see an answer in front of me; the expression of one person signing to another is telling to me. The way the angle of the body is used is something that is not part of ASL as far as I know but used to emphasise. This may not be seen as gestures but they are similar to the way I use my hands and my face as part of getting my message out what are considered gestures.

One presenter is really sympathetic to me because she keeps track with how the translators are doing this is to prevent a gap to start between what she is saying and where the translator is left behind. It makes the presentation less fluent ... it is however NICE.

Before I went to these sessions, I thought what to wear .. I decided on my SignWriting T-shirt. Thanks,

GerardM

Asterisk at Fosdem

, fosAt Fosdem, I met some of the Asterisk developers. For those that do not know, Asterisk is the leading edge open source software for telephony. If I understand things well, it is even used in the WMF Office. I had a really wonderful talk with one of the senior Asterisk developers. What I learned that for telephony localisation is very much about the differences in telephony between countries. The dial tone, the exchanged tone is different from country and when a person is ringing in from a different country it helps THEM to understand what the status of their call is.

So where Internationalisation is about how telephone exchanges work for Asterisk and where Internationalisation is about language for what I am used to, it seems to me that a combination of the two is what makes a most compelling package.
Thanks,
GerardM

International Mother Tongue Day

For me, the high point of the International Mother Tongue Day was the request for the fourth and final part for the localisation of MediaWiki in Telugu. I am really impressed with all the hard work that makes such a difference for the usability of our projects.

It is a well established fact that providing information in someone's mother tongue is most effective. With a Wikipedia where both the User Interface and the content are available in the same language we provide the best environment possible. When this is realised it is "just" a matter of maintaining and improving the quantity and quality of the project.
Thanks,
GerardM

Microsoft opening up ??

There is a lot of noise about Microsoft opening up much of its documentation. It is said that Open Source developers are free to use this documentation. It is only for people and organisations that are paid for delivering or supporting the resulting software that a license fee is to be paid.

The way I understand the GPL license, this is not allowed. When software is available under the GPL it is explicitly permitted to sell services for this software. In my understanding this is an other case of smoke and mirrors. When this new documentation is available for people writing software that is licensed under the GPL, Microsoft cannot claim license fees down stream. OR people are not permitted to make software that is encumbered in this way available under a free license.

With more software being used that does not consider Microsoft's software, it will become increasingly problematic for Microsoft to support its customers. I think that Microsoft's objective is to gain free support for its products.

How long will it take for people to come to the same conclusion ? :) PS I am not a lawyer :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Kenyan call for peace, "Wakenya Pamoja"

I had another look at the wonderful Kamusi project. On its main page there is a video of many Kenyan artists singing, imploring their fellow Kenyans for peace. The song, it is in Swahili, can be found in many other places like the djfresh.org, youtube as well.

In translations the title "Wakenya Pamoja" means "Kenyans together". Have a listen, if only to listen how diverse the Kenyan music is. It is a great song.

Thanks,
GerardM

We want more localisations

Betawiki is doing fine. The localisations of more messages are happening all the time, new and changed messages pop up as well. With Brion about to release a new release, this is the best moment to include more messages.

In an e-mail Siebrand included a table that shows that it is not just the small languages that we want to do better. These are the localisations for the languages of our 10 biggest Wikipedias.

| language | mostused | core | WMF
|-------------------------------------|
| English | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| German | 100% | 100% | 99% |
| French | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Polish | 100% | 100% | 80% |
| Japanse | 100% | 100% | 58% |
| Italian | 100% | 100% | 64% |
| Dutch | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Portugese | 100% | 100% | 100% |
| Spanish | 100% | 92% | 24% |
| Swedish | 100% | 100% | 100% |

What I find astonishing is how badly the extensions as used in the WMF for Polish, Japanese, Italian and Spanish are supported. Spanish does not even qualify as a language that is fully localised for MediaWiki !! Four out of ten of these languages do not qualify for a new project!!

I know that the Wikipedias in those languages may provide a better support. You will have to agree with me is that a lot of wasted effort is involved because why should this work be done twice?

When needed, Brion provides updates to the MediaWiki releases; they are the security updates. With the continued maturation of BetaWiki, it has become possible to create localisation updates as well. What is needed is to arrange and agree the mechanism on how to do this. When this is to be done, with what regularity will we do this, how will it be announced and the most important part: how will we inform our users.

We are still offering bonuses for work done on localisations for the languages spoken in Africa, Asia and South America. I even indicated Danny Wool that we are happy to pay for the localisation of MediaWiki in Central Quiché (quc).
Thanks,
GerardM

Spot the loonie

There is no obvious solution to this one.
Thanks,
GerardM

Archive.org and TED.com

In the last week, two great resources were pointed out to me. TED is the one I like best; it is a great resource with some brilliant talks given by some brilliant people. The subjects are all over the place but what struck me most was a talk about how much we get things wrong when our perceived reality about the third world is confronted with numbers. The other one that was as revealing was about how to develop the Ethiopian market for agricultural products. Both speakers changed my thinking. I do thank Millosh for getting my attention sharing TED on Google reader.

Archive.org was pointed out to me on the foundation-l mailing list by Pharos. He pointed out the many movies that can be found tagged as Wikimedia. I have had a look and indeed, I am so happy to see the many Wikimania recordings that I did not know existed. I am happy with was is there, I am sad for what might be there as well. Maybe more recordings can be added to this wonderful collection.
Thanks,
GerardM

Dalecarlian

Dalecarlian is recognised by Ethnologue. And according to the information provided, some 1500 people speak it. It is the first time that I did look up a record in Ethnologue to find that it does not exist in the ISO-639-3.

I looked it up because someone volunteers to localise MediaWiki in Betawiki. The question is, what to do with such a request. The first thing to realise is that the dlc code is unlikely to be ever used as an ISO-639-3 code. The second thing is that it IS a living linguistic entity and, it will be not too hard to argue that if it is not a lanugage, it is at least a dialect.

So allowing for the localisation of Dalecarlian is not problematic. From a standards point of view, there is only one issue to be resolved. What is the correct code that we should use for it?
Thanks,
GerardM

How to deal with improved localisation

In Betawiki, a lot of localisation is done. Much of the work starts with importing the localisation from a Wikipedia. The existing work is expanded upon but also the existing work is improved upon. An obvious example is the inclusion of plural support. When a lot of such work is done, it has been committed and it has gone life on all the Wikimedia Foundation servers .. you want to see it best on your own project.

This will disappoint, and it will disappoint for the best of reasons. There are two types of localisation; there is the language localisation, this is what we do at BetaWiki, and there is the project localisation. In the project localisation there are changes that are specific to the project. You do not want to overwrite these. What a moderator may want to do is delete all the local language localisations. In this way only the project localisations are left. In this way all subsequent improvements to these language localisations will become available when they do.
Thanks,
GerardM

When a language is not a language

Kurdish is not a language, Chinese is not a language. They are both macro languages. Macro languages are a way that allow for one ISO-639 language identifier to refer to multiple other ISO-639 language identifiers. Chinese is in many ways easy to understand; these are many languages that are all using the same script, the same writing system; a script that is not sound based. Given that the Library of Congress was the maintainer of the ISO-639-2, it is perfectly understandable that many languages were considered the same, were considered to be Chinese.

Kurdish is distinctly different. Kurdish is also very much a political story. The Kurdish language and the Kurdish people and culture are seen as problematic in all the countries where the Kurds live. Linguistically, Kurdish is considered to be three languages. Central, Northern and Southern Kurdish. These languages are written in the Arabic and Latin script.

In the localisation of MediaWiki at Betawiki, there is Kurdish in Latin and Arab script. The question is, is it Kurmanji or Sorani because I have been told that transliteration is how you get the Arabic version.. I have been told that it is Sorani.

These questions have implications. Take for instance Persian or Farsi, There are successful WMF projects that start with fa. The language is also a macro language; it is divided in Western- and Eastern Farsi. I am quite positive that the fa.wikipedia.org is in Western Farsi. But the url should be pes.wikipedia.org.

There are people that I know and respect that tell me that the difference between Farsi and Dari is only 2 to 3 % and that consequently this difference is an abomination. Other equally respectable people tell me that the difference between Farsi and Tajik is only 2 to 3%. Nobody has so far insisted on bundling the two together.

The request for the fa.wikiversity.org is in the discussion stage. It does fulfill the requirement for localisation. There is a sufficient group of people interested in making this project a success. It is just that I do not feel comfortable with the designation fa for this project that prevents me from changing it to the "eligible" status.

What I want is to have the "fa.wmfprojects.org" renamed.

Thanks,
GerardM

Wikiversity on UNESCO's CI News

Wikiversity has a course called "Composing free and open online educational resources" that targets teachers and teacher-students without prior knowledge about free and open educational resources. This course will start on March 3rd 2008 and a registration for participation is needed.

The course will be given in English but resources in other languages can be created as part of the course work for this nine week course.

I think it is absolutely splendid that Wikiversity is able to get UNESCO's attention and have it included on the CI News. Getting attention with cool projects makes a difference; in this way Wikiversity creates its own space and relevance.

The students will start creating educational material in many languages as part of the course. It is exactly the MediaWiki environment that is well suited for this. Currently there are projects in over 250 languages and the quality of the localisation of MediaWiki is improving continuously; in Januari alone localisation was done in over 130 languages on Betawiki.

So good news from Wikiversity and I hope that the course will go really well :)
Thanks,
GerardM