In through the front door..

There are several articles about the Tropenmuseum. There is a Breton, a German, an English, a French, a Hebrew and a Dutch article. Every one of them had a picture of the wrong entrance.. The Tropenmuseum is part of the "Koninklijk Instituut van de Tropen" and, it has its own entra
nce to the same building.

With a new picture, all these articles feature the front of the Tropenmuseum, I hope that many of us Wikimedians will find their way in.
Thanks,
     GerardM

On the top of a Wave you see further

Today I was pleasantly surprised with an invitation to the Wave Sandbox. This is where Wave is finding its final form before it is released to the public.

Getting an invitation at this stage is something that I consider a compliment; Wave is still very young and it is still being developed. The reason why I receive this invitation: I worked with Tom to get him his Wave account, I helped him find the funding to go to the Wave hackaton in Cupertino to develop the MediaWiki / Wave interface.

I expressed the importance of the internationalisation and localisation of Wave. It may have all the WYSIWYG attributes that we are looking for in improved usability, but as long as it does not support our languages it cannot be adopted.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The FLICKR effect for GLAMS

Spaarnestad and the Nationaal Archief uploaded some 800 pictures to Flickr. In the newsletter of the DEN there is a link to the evaluation report (PDF in Dutch). This is a summary in English.

The report is interesting because it identifies many of the things that are important to GLAM when they make their material available on the Web.

• having people see their material 
• having them add annotations. 

When they partner with the WMF, they will gain two additional things; we are happy to host their complete annotations and, we will use their material as illustrations in our Wikipedias.Thanks,
      GerardM

What are featured pictures about

Featured pictures exist on many projects and, the process of featuring a picture is different on each project. When a picture is featured, it adds real value to the picture. This value is in the exposure it gets on the main page of the project and when it is featured on Commons, it becomes eligible for the "picture of the year" election.

The featured picture of the English Wikipedia is in some ways the more relevant one. As it is featured on the Main page it is seen by many people. Wikipedia is an encyclopaedia, there is a need for the pictures to have an encyclopaedic relevance as well.

This picture of the Oklahoma bombing is currently a "Featured Picture Candidate" on the English Wikipedia. It is the leading picture on the article on the Oklahoma City bombing and it is unlikely to feature because of the existing quality requirements for a picture. It is likely that we could get a truly high quality picture from the people at DefenseImagery.mil.

It is probably good to have these high requirements for a featured picture. The best arguments  is that a "featured picture" at the English Wikipedia makes a picture relevant.
Thanks,
         GerardM

Motivation for my candidature as a WMF board member

The Wikimedia Foundation, its projects and communities have been dear to me for a long time. As a volunteer I have been deeply involved in many roles. I was often not pleased with how things were and, I have always "put my money where my mouth was". In answer to the inefficiency of Wiktionary, I first developed a templating system and this lead to OmegaWiki. The inability of Commons to serve people who do not speak English had we develop a working proof of concept that allowed for multi lingual search and multi lingual categories. The lack of timely delivery of localisations had me come up with LocalisationUpdate. The need for important historic illustrations had me contact several GLAM.

All these things are in my opinion important and strategic for the WMF but I have been outside of the centre of gravity and as a consequence much of what I did did not get the attention that I would have liked. In what I have done, support for languages and support for our smaller projects has been a constant, this may also be clear from being a member of the language committee from the start.

A recent incident made me decide to stand for the board. It was when I learned that the Special:Preferences on Commons were not properly formatted. I posted a bug on Bugzilla only to be told that "issues with CSS were not admissable; they are for the admins of the projects itself". After some heated conversations, it was agreed that admins are not the people who you can expect to fix complex issues like this. To my amazement bugzilla showed many issues with our RTL support.

My conclusion is that when even languages like Arabic do not get the technical support that is to be expected, there is a need for a more direct approach. It is the board of trustees that is responsible for the strategy of the WMF and for me this is just another indication that language support needs to gain priority.

With Milosh dropping out of the election, there was noone left who I knew to have enough appreciation of this issue. Once I considered standing for election, I realised that I actually had a range of issues that could benefit from a board member championing these issues and it is exactly what should be expected of a board member.

It is my track record that provide you with the arguments why I can bring important value to the board. On the board I will have to deal with all issues and I will but it will give the issues I champion a deserved place as part of the overall WMF strategy.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Darwin at Spaarnestad

Spaarnestad Photo is known for its photos. It has a massive amount of them, they are a foundation and they sell their high resolution images in order to maintain and preserve their collection. Making a profit means for Spaarnestad that they have been able all year to put photos in protective coverings, that they maintained the right atmosphere needed for the preservation of their collection and, that they were able to continue the digitisation effort of their collection.

When I visited Spaarnestad, we talked about our restoration effort and one particular picture peeked their interest; it is this picture of an elderly Charles Darwin digitally restored by Durova from a scan from the Library of Congress. It was of interest because Spaarnestad has it in its archive as well.

As this material is firmly in the public domain, I indicated that it would be fine for Spaarnestad to use this picture as they see fit. This was repeated in a recent conversation and we were told that there should be at least ten lovingly restored pictures of material that is in their collection before this starts to make sense. With at least nine more high resolution scans of pictures that are relevant, that look good and that need some work we can make this happen. With a bit of luck we will get these in a weeks time...

Adam Cuerden who is a restorationist specialising on graphics heard about this, and indicated his willingness to pitch in and restore material for Spaarnestad as well. Spaarnestad started off as the archive of a publication, and a lot of graphic work is part of this.

I relayed Adam's offer to Spaarnestad. There are now two questions on my mind:

• How long will it take us to complete ten restorations
• will we get any graphic material as well...

Thanks,

GerardM

Spaarnestad Photo

I am really pleased to announce that we are talking with Spaarnestad Photo about developing a GLAM partnership relation. Spaarnestad is an important archive; it is also the home of several other collections.

As a start, Spaarnestad will upload to Commons the material that they already made available to Flickr. Spaarnestad is quite happy to improve on this by providing their annotations to us as well.

This is a start. Spaarnestad has much more that it is willing to share. Important will be for us to build a mutually beneficial relationship.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Twitter

At the Open Translation Tools 2007 conference, I got the impression that I was the only one who did not twitter. So I started a Twitter account and, untill today I posted only two tweets. To my amazement I have already eight people following me and, this makes me reconsider Twitter.

So, I will experiment a little bit more with tweeting. My aim will be to mostly tweet about things that I would also blog about.. But I can tweet that I have phoned a GLAM or some such...
Thanks,
     GerardM

One more reason to come to the Wiki meet in New York

Just two screenshots to make you want to come..

 

  

Don't you agree that this is really interesting ? Remember, there are a few more days to make it look even more spiffy.

Thanks,

     GerardM

Arson

I was sleeping and I was called at 05:00. A friend of mine who was on a holiday in France called. There was an alarm at the shop, if I would be so kind to check, "it is probably a false alarm" .. except it wasn't.

The police and the fire brigade were dousing a fire. Some !@#$% had broken a window poured petrol in at the shop next door and put it on fire. Because of a rapid response, the fire did only minor damage. The soot.. The soot is quite something different; soot gets everywhere ad it does not need much to travel.

My friend is now waiting for the expert of the insurance company, for professional cleaners to come.. This is the kind of criminality that deserve imho everything society can throw at these bastards.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Tropenmuseum is blocked

The Tropenmuseum is preparing to upload images to our projects. In anticipation of this we have created a userprofile on the Dutch Wikipedia called "Tropenmuseum". This user is currently blocked.

The Tropenmuseum wants to be able to to upload the images under its own name. It wants to answer any issues. I think this is quite reasonable.
Thanks,
GerardM

An interview at the Tropenmuseum

Wiki loves Art/NL has been a success; many more museums opened their doors then we expected and to top it off, museums joined after the official start. There were several official meetings, there were workshops, excursions and there were passes for the museums that partnered in Wiki loves Art/NL,

Good relations with GLAM, galleries, libraries, archives and museums are important when you want to provide everyone with all encyclopaedic information. In the GLAM the data sources referred to in our citations can be found. Images to illustrate our articles are available with the annotations that help us understand what it is that we see. We need good relations with GLAM from all over the world because our cultural heritage that we describe is distributed globally.

Wiki loves Art /NL was inspired by the first Wikipedia loves Art project and its organisers were grateful to learn what worked and what did not. In Australia a whole conference will be dedicated on how GLAM can partner with the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. They in turn want to learn about the experience of a GLAM in the Netherlands and it is the Tropenmuseum that has been asked for an interview.

I have never been involved in the organisational side of interviews and it is for this reason that I am happy to observe. Obviously the result will be first seen at the conference but with a bit of luck it will become generally available at a later date maybe even with subtitles

Thanks,

      GerardM

Why the NPG is wrong

This is what is left of a very relevant archive that collapsed in Cologne Germany. When the collection of this archive would have been digitised at that time, it would still be a disaster but it would not be the disaster that it is.

One of the fringe benefits of the digitisation of an important resource like an archive, a museum is that it mitigates the effects of a disaster. Disasters, wars do happen.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Pulmonary embolism

The husband of a friend of mine has been taken into hospital with a pulmonary embolism. A pulmonary embolism is a life threatening condition and it manifested itself after a long distance race.

It is quite shocking to be asked if you want to be re-animated when things go wrong. It is quite shocking when you are considered to be REALLY healthy.

One reason we can come up with are the pills used to boost body mass and the oxygen capacity.. Pills bought from the Internet... My friend brought all the pills to the hospital and they are looking into this.

I hope earnestly that it will work out well.
Thanks,
    GerardM

Eating my own dogfood

I am talking often about the restoration of images. It is however not something that I do. The digital restoration of images we do has multiple aims:

• remove stains, specs
• remove tears and folds
  
• adjust the colours to make it look like it used to
• make it ready to illustrate our content

 To better understand what I am so often talking about I asked Durova for an appropriate picture.

This is a picture titled "Isle of Graia Gulf of Akabah Arabia Petraea" it is a drawings made on the spot by David Roberts and the lithographed was made by Louis Haghe. It is exactly right for me; it is a beautiful well preserved picture with some damage at the bottom and a few minor stains and the colour has faded over time. It has a subject and a quality that might even make it a featured picture. All in all, it is the ideal object to motivate a beginner like me.

When I was done, I had it checked by Durova and she sprinkled some additional magic on my work and now I think we have this gobsmacking beautiful picture.

I have learned some basic skills in GIMP, I learned that indeed you can be skyping and work on specs at the same time. All in all, restoring images seems like knitting; you are productive and you can jabber at the same time..

Try it out as well, I am sure Durova has many more images that need some work. If not we have to extend her range of material she can pick from :)
Thanks,
      GerardM

Hacking and security

When people think about security and hacking, they often think that hackers have to do incredible things to get access to systems and data. The truth is typically much more mundane. Many people and organisations do use software that is not secure. Many systems do not have all the latest patches. for all the "industry standard software" there are exploits. Typically hacking is using an exploit.

When software makes it hard to gain access to something, some people would call this a "security feature". But to make something truly secure, the software has to be written in such a way that it is designed to make it hard to get at the something.

The producer of "zoomify" explicitly says that their software should not be considered a security feature. That may make sense on several levels

• the software was not designed with security in mind
  
• the producer does not want to be liable for any exploits of the software
  

This does however not mean that exploiting this weakness is not as much a hack as abusing known exploits in "industry standard software".
Thanks,
      GerardM

Gearing up

The Tropenmuseum is preparing for the upload of a selection of their collection to Commons. The aim is to upload images that relate to Indonesia. This is a huge collection estimated to be some 100.000 images.

This is a huge undertaking with many issues, to get a feel for the issues, the Tropenmuseum has decided to start with a much smaller collection, a collection about Suriname and slavery. There are several thousand images in this collection and, it coincides with a presentation on the subject.

A new issue is one of language; the annotations that go with this material is in Dutch. Some of the annotations have been translated into English and while the Tropenmuseum will welcome more translations, it does not have the capacity to provide these. The problem for Commons is that there are many museums in the world and it cannot expect them to provide all the categories in English.
Thanks,
GerardM

Copyright and licenses are a detraction when building a relation between the WMF and GLAM

A whole lot of bad publicity is the result of the controversy between some in the WMF projects and the London based National Portrait Gallery. Bad publicity because the crowds have been aroused to storm the ivory towers of the NPG with pitchforks, bad publicity because what should be natural partners are forced into opposing entrenched positions.

When you compare the WMF projects on the one hand and GLAM or galleries, libraries, archives and museums on the other they are starkly different. The WMF is first and foremost about providing and preserving digital information while GLAM are about providing and preserving physical objects. Both gain their social relevance by making information as widely as possible to the public.

The average GLAM has such a huge collection of material that they are always fighting to preserve and conserve their collection while at the same time registering, annotating and digitising their collection. The financial demands of such an endeavour are great and every revenue stream is needed to just maintain the status quo.

The information provided by the WMF is based on the work of GLAM. Most Wikipedias require citations and they are from publications that can be found in libraries. The originals of digital illustrations can be found in museums and archives and it is only when there are sufficiently annotated when we can trust them to paint the right thousand words.

The two communities are not far apart. It only takes a little effort and the “Wiki loves art”, Wikimedians are invited into museums and may make pictures, they are given special guided tours and lectures. When you ask politely, GLAM like the Bundesarchiv, the Tropenmuseum are happy to provide much of their collection with annotations in a format that satisfies much of our needs.

The most important thing when you talk to a GLAM is a willingness to listen. What is their aim, what are their issues, how do they get their funding. It is easy to argue that an object that is in the public domain should be available in the highest resolution. It is equally easy to argue that it takes money to preserve the physical objects. The need for preservation is a perpetual one and thereby is the need for money. The need for access to the physical objects will also be a perpetual one because the annotations and the provenance of the digitised material makes the digitised material credible.

When we illustrate our articles, we can do without the distractions of discolouration, folds and tears and because we live in a digital world, we can make all these go away with tools like Gimp of Photoshop. We are lucky in our growing community of restorationists because their work is fantastic. The quality is of the highest standards and several GLAM expressed the wish that they had the time to do as good a job.

In this modern world many of the GLAM have a presence on the Internet but they find it hard to gain the same relevance they have in the physical world for themselves and their collections. When they partner with us both our publics have the same need for annotations, have the same need for quality information about the world they represent. There is a reciprocal need for what the other has to offer. GLAM and the WMF are natural partners in this. A great example of what a fine restoration can do is “Know all men by these presents” by Coles Philps. The original that is held at the Library of Congress had a stain in the right hand side. The restoration by Durova brought this picture back to its original splendour and became a featured picture on Commons. It is now again of a quality where it could be sold as a postcard or a poster.

Yes, there is this thing called copyright but much of what can be found in an archive or a museum is either in the public domain or an orphan. For much of what is nominally copyrighted the GLAM do not know who the current copyright holder is or how to contact them. Many of the collections were donated to a GLAM but it is only recent that copyright is specifically addressed in the papers of transfer of ownership. Several GLAM have indicated that copyright is a cost and not a benefit and at the same time many of GLAM need to sell high-end copies of the material they preserve in order to survive.
Thanks,
GerardM

A case of Haitian voodoo ?

Yesterday I was at the Tropenmuseum, I talked with one of its IT people about uploading material to Commons. We talked about all the usual subjects, size of the image, WMF chapters, pywikipedia, restorations...

We also talked about how to keep people interested in the GLAM that cooperate with the Wikimedia Foundation. (GLAM = galleries libraries archives museums) and one of the initiatives of the Tropenmuseum would fit that bill. Every month they select an object that has something of a mystery about it and they ask the public to comment.

This months object was left by a member of the public at an exhibition about Haitian voodoo. This object has a most prominent place at the entrance to the museum and, the hope is that a member of the public can help out and help with the provenance of the object.

Maybe you can help by identifying it as either a hoax or the real thing... It looks spooky enough either way.
Thanks,
      GerardM

You can see the future

There has been a lot of talk in the last year about the usability of the MediaWiki software. Today, the new functionality created by the Usability Initiative has been rolled out. Have a look at today's English Wikipedia main page..

It not only looks good, it also makes it easier to understand what you can do. Given the large percentage of people who just do not appreciate that they can edit a page, it is a big improvement.

When you want to be part of the future of Wikipedia today, you have to change to the "vector" skin. Another neat feature is the "enhanced editing toolbar" that you can enable on the "editing" tab of the user preferences.

At this stage the usability improvements are available for all the "left to right" languages. Because of incompatibilities in IE-6, some more work is needed before it will become available for languages like Arabic and Hebrewl.

All in all, it is a happy day because you can see the shape of things to come for all of us and you can experience it now. When you find any issues, this is where they are happy to leaarn about it.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5 has become a reality. I have been looking forward to it. I want to use it. I even went for a monment back to Vista just to install it...

As I am running Ubuntu, Firefox is the default browser but the update manager/ does not have the new Firefox available for me. I expected that Firefox would work the same but so far it has not. I would love to see the same usability on Ubuntu.
Thanks,
        GerardM

More thoughts on book sprints

This is my second day that I have been working on a "book sprint". The one thing that I have learned about the process is, that the success is defined by the quality of the people involved. When you combine people like Adam Hyde and Allen Gunn in the mix, there will be something usable at the end.

Having worked for two days with the software used by FLOSS manuals, I am sure that a book sprint can also be done using MediaWiki. The key thing to consider is not so much can you do this, but what is the added value. Writing FLOSS manuals is what FLOSS manuals does and a community has formed around it. Replicating this effort only makes sense when it grows the creation beyond the autonomous growth of FLOSS manuals.

However, when an application is found for writing outside this domain, there might be a point to experiment with MediaWiki.
Thanks,
      GerardM

OTT09 book sprint

When you assemble people for a conference, you bring together all the people clued in on a subject. The Open Translation Tool '09 conference brought together many of the people who are involved in translation, localisation, content and technology.

Floss manuals has this brilliant notion of a "book sprint". In a book sprint a group of people write a book in a short period of time like up to a week. At the end of the week the resulting document is published and available either as a PDF or in a printed form.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Wikimedia messages to reflect our licensing

The "Wikimedia messages" contain messages that are of specific relevance to the Wikimedia Foundation and its projects.

Yesterday new messages were added that will reflect the new reality about the licensing of the WMF. As these messages apply to all Wikipedias, Wiktionaries, Wikibooks, Wikinews, Commons and Wikispecies, it is really important to get this message out.

Please help us translate these messages at translatewiki.net in all our languages.
Thanks,
       GerardM

dotSUB

With the news that Wikipedia is going to provide support for video, I am sure that a wealth of information will become available in this way. As video is created everywhere, much of it will not be understood because of it being in this language that you do not understand.

At the OTT'09, the open translation tools conference, I met Ed Zad of dotSUB. DotSUB is a project where people add subtitles to video. The functionality of dotSUB is quite important and I wonder how we will do this for the content for Wikimedia projects. The cool thing is that at dotSUB they are considering making their cool functionality open source.

Ed was an inspiration at this conference; he has a long career in translation and he brought the perspective of the translation industry to this conference. For me it gave this conference the depth that makes this a wonderful conference.
Thanks,
     GerardM

African localisation

The last three days I have been to OTT'09, the open translation tools 2009. It has been interesting so far. Given that it is about OPEN translation tools, the public is quite amazing. You have people who are about content, people who professionally translate, people who localise software and people who write tools to support all that.

One of the people I am always happy to meet is Dwayne Bailey of translate.org.za. Dwayne was leading a session on translation and localisation in Africa and for me it confirmed many of the things I think I know but it brought also a new opportunity. I learned about ANLOC, the African network for localisation, one of the things I find awesome is that they have defined requirements for a minimal support for African languages.

The requirements can be on many levels and the cool thing is that with these requirements a website can be assessed. I would really welcome Wikipedia or better even MediaWiki to be assessed.
Thanks,
GerardM

A first meeting at the Tropenmuseum

Yesterday I had the priviledge of presenting Commons as a project to the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam. The Tropenmuseum or museum of the Tropics has not only a beautiful collection but also an important collection.

I am really thrilled with the potential the Tropenmuseum has for us. Their collection is of specific importance to the Indonesian language Wikipedias and to the Dutch and Srenang Tongo Wikipedia. It will also help us to offset some of the bias that is currently in Commons.

In the discussion we explored all kinds of subjects, copyright and licensing, photos and objects, original material and digitally restored material... It was quite exciting. The big reason for the Tropenmuseum to consider making their material available to us is because it will make our cultural heritage available to the world. The existence of the Indonesian and Srenang Wikipedias is really important in this. Another factor was that our community has proved to help with checking out and providing additional information on the images that we have.

One really fun fact; one of the curators of the Tropenmuseum is contributing a lot of information on his speciality :) This was something the Tropenmuseum learned only recently.

I did have time to enjoy the exhibition areas of the museum. They are fun, impressive and engaging.
Thanks,
GerardM

Wikiblame is now supported by translatewiki.net

Wikiblame is now supported by translatewiki.net. This is cool, when you check out the project page you find that languages that have localised the software, are not supported in the software yet.

This is quite something because this may be the first project where the localisation may drive what languages are available for this project.
Thanks,
GerardM

Pointing forwards

I have been playing with the software that is used on the usability prototypes.. I love it. The vector skin is clean and a lot easier on people new to MediaWiki. When you look at the EditToolbar, you find that it can replace the current CharInsert mess.

I hope this new stuff will be available soon. It will make Wikipedia a much nicer environment.
Thanks,
GerardM

First Vista then Ubuntu

My old laptop died. The bottom of the screen was black. It died some time ago when I was in New York. That was fortunate because laptops are much cheaper in the US. So I bought a cheap new laptop and was still under the legal limit of what I could import.

The system I bought, a compac presario CQ60 came with Vista. So I started using Vista. After working with it for a few weeks, I found that I had a steep learning curve behind me and came to the conclusion that it did not really work for me. So I decided to give Ubuntu a spin as well.

Now after two weeks of Ubuntu, I have learned that Ubuntu provides me with superior functionality. The version of Vista was "home edition"; when you compare this you find that in a comparison with Ubuntu, it is cripple ware. The things that make Vista professional useful are the same things that are to justify the much higher price.

Given that I do a lot of things on MediaWiki installations, having the same operating system makes it easier. My networking is more stable, the editing of scripts is superior. I think I am going to stick with Ubuntu.
Thanks,
GerardM

Thank you Miya

Thank you Miya for fixing the Picture of the Year results. I hope that this effort will translate in improvements in other languages as well.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The POTY results are flawed, and I can not do anything about it

Every year there is a POTY or picture of the year on Commons. This years results has been published and the winner is a picture with Horses on Bianditz mountain.

Many people were involved in the process, the result page is available in many languages and it is wrong. It is wrong because you would expect that Commons would credit the people who created the pictures and who made the pictures of a featured picture quality.

When you talk about digital photos, there is already a problem because how do I know that these horses looked like they do on the picture? In a way it does not matter because the picture is intended to be beautiful and it is. The story is different for the picture by Jack Delano and the picture by Dorothy Lange. These are historic pictures and it is important that their authenticity is validated. These pictures have been restored by Durova.

The two pictures have been restored with care, the work done has been documented, there is a reference to the origin of the file she worked on. There are versions made during the restoration process. All in all these pictures deserve to be in the final.

Restorations are not appreciated. People care more about another moth or panorama. The point is that while these winning horses make a pretty picture, they do not carry the same weight as an illustration on our projects. Restorations are important because of their relevance. Restoring images takes a lot of effort and this work is at least as important as the images by the people who know how to open and shut the diaphragm of their camera.

That was the first part of this rant, the second part is about adding the missing information, I cannot. It is too complicated for me. They are templates within templates within templates and to top it off, they are in the form of a table. This is MediaWiki usability at its worst

At the Wikimania in Buenos Aires, there will be a presentation about these pictures and our own restorers may not be credited. That is a travesty.
Thanks,
      GerardM

More Waves

Essential to me and many of my friends is the license for Wave. The patent license has already been posted. It is short and it is sweet.

"Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, Google and its affiliates hereby grant to you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this License) patent license for patents necessarily infringed by implementation of this specification. If you institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the implementation of the specification constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses for the specification granted to you under this License shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed."

In addition to the license, a contributor to the protocol has to provide either an individual or an organisational contributor license agreement AND in order to get a patch to the protocol accepted, a production-quality patch for the reference implementation has to be provided.

For Wave technology to succeed, is must be easily adopted and be adopted as widely as possible. Given that Wave is based on peer to peer technology, only by making client or server applications available cooperation can be ensured. By restricting the use of software cooperation in a Wave is prevented and the usefulness of the functionality is reduced
Thanks,
      GerardM.

Google wave

I just watched yesterday's developer presentation of Google Wave. It stole the thunder of bing and deservedly so. It is the difference between a completely proprietary search system and an open source system that integrates many of the paradigms of the modern Internet. It is the difference between a "me too" system and something "new".

I think wave has the potential to make a big difference. The one thing that struck me was how much those aspects that make a Wiki are integrated already. The usability of this still very early product is awesome. When you see this demonstration and you think Wikipedia, you may find like me that much of the functionality is already there.. Sure I have not seen the "flagged revisions" or the "citations" but both will be the kind of functionality that so many people / organisations will need that I am sure that that will happen.

What do you think, is this the kind of open source functionality that would fit Wikipedia?
Thanks,
GerardM

Encoding the Pahawh Hmong script

 Pahawh Hmong is a script. It is used to write the Hmong language(s). Different scripts are quite the norm in Asian languages and it is for this reason that the Hmong take pride in the existence of "their" script. Pahawh Hmong was developed in 1959 and it has evolved in to three variants and this complicates things a lot.

At this time there is the opportunity for this script to be included in Unicode. It is a good time to do this; there is still someone alive who knew Mr Shong Lue Yang, and it takes some plane tickets and salary for the person researching and encoding the script into Unicode.

It is not just Wikipedia that requires Unicode for a script most applications do. Without it, you may write it with a fountain pen but effectively the language is not part of this modern world.

As it is, there is no money for the encoding of the Pahawh Hmong script...
Thanks,
       GerardM

Requests to implement the Babel extension

The Babel extension is one of my favourites. There are several reasons why:

• it is implemented and supported at translatedwiki.net
• there are many localisations for the messages involved
• when you install it, all the localisations are instantly available
  
• it is an extension 
• it is not based on templates

The good news is that many people appreciate Babel for what it is. There are several Wikipedias who have requested for this extension to be implemented.  They are even considering to put this extension to the vote for the German Wikipedia..

There is one problem; the code needs to be assessed. It already has the endorsement of all the developers at translatewiki.net...
Thanks,
      GerardM

Free localisation support for five Wikis

When you install the 1.15 stable version of MediaWiki on your system, you will only get the localisation available at the time of the release. After that you do not get any more regular updates. This is not because no more localisation work is done at translatewiki.net for the many relevant messages, it is just because there is no mechanism to get them to you in a timely manner.

The LocalisationUpdate extension will be a game changer; it will bring you all the latest localisations from Wikimedia Foundation's SVN. It will bring them based on the definition of the English message in SVN being EXACTLY the same as the local message on your wiki. So when you have a MediaWiki Wiki in a language that is in need of improved localisation support, you can choose to become part of the beta testing of LocalisationUpdate.

TheDevilOnLine is willing to support five Wikis in five different languages who want to test out this new functionality. To be eligible you will have to upgrade to release 1.15.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Update on LocalisationUpdate

When you are testing something nice like the LocalisationUpdate extension like I do at the moment, you have the priviledge to follow its development. A lot of changes happened since it first materialised in Subversion; so much in fact that it may be cheaper to rewrite the code with the lessons learned in mind. It is not much code..

So what happened already;

• currently there is an internationalisation file
• the performance has improved a lot
• it just works.

While there is still a need for code clean-up, it also works quite sweetly. The latest test run just reported that it had updated 2296 messages. For comparison the MediaWiki core currently has some 2275 messages..
Our expectation is that with a timely update of the localisation more people will help out with this necessary work. There are some bets going about what its impact will be. I have heard numbers as different as 5% and 40% more messages half a year after the implementation on the MediaWiki projects.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Approaches to mass digitisation in the Netherlands

I found this presentation on SlideShare by Paul Keller about mass digitisation in the Netherlands.  I want us  to cooperate with museums, libraries and archives, I want much of their material to be available on Commons. I love the idea that the cultural heritage of the Netherlands is digitised; it is one of the best ways of insuring that something is left when a disaster strikes.
 
My problem with the project presented by Paul is that it does not state what license will be used for the material that is digitised. This may be on purpose and I expect that it is, but the consequence is that nobody outside a narrow band of people can safely use it as a result. It may be that the CC-by-nc-sa is to be used, but as it does not say so explicitly it would be not safe for use by anyone. Wikipedia would not touch it because of the restriction imposed for the "non commercial" part.
Thanks,
       GerardM

PS it would make sense for all this digitised material to be stored somewhere high and dry ... above sea level :)

Waiting for your localisations to materialise

One of the more frustrating things for the localisers at translatewiki.net is the waiting. The waiting for the localisations to go life.

The work flow for internationalisation and localisation is as follows:

• Messages are importen from SVN into translatewiki.net
• The messages are checked and possibly improved
• The messages are made available for localisation
• The localised message are checked by the translationwiki.net developers
  
• The messages are submitted to SVN
• The messages go into production when MediaWiki is updated

The last bit is a bit of a bottleneck; updates happen when they do and the current 48811 revision has been in production for a few weeks now. This is not good for the motivation of the people that localise. So a mechanism is needed to make sure that the messages become available in a timely manner.

A new extension; "LocalisationUpdate" is being created that will make a difference. In its current incarnation it can be run either from a command line or it can be run a "cron job". This is going to make it possible to move the messages to production sooner. For the technical people, only those localised messages will be updated where the English message in both SVN and in the target MediaWiki installation are exactly the same.

The LocalisationUpdate will be first available for release 1.15 and the 1.16alpha. We hope to make it available for older releases at a later date.

A big thank you to TheDevilOnLine; he is realising this dream..
Thanks,
      GerardM

Djatoka with Open Layers

Some of the pictures at Commons are huge. They take forever to load and they start loading at the top, typically not the most exciting part of a picture. It makes more sense to initially load a low resolution picture and download the higher resolution bits as and when required. This gives the average user a much more responsive experience. In this demonstration of the Djatoka software, you will find many pictures by Ansel Adams of the Japanese-American internment at Manzanar. The scaling of the pictures is done by Djatoka in combination with OpenLayers..

Thanks,

GerardM

Usability improvements for translatewiki.net

The Special:Translate page on translatewiki.net has been revamped. When there is an hierarchy like the one for MediaWiki messages, it will show this in a much improved way.

A relatively small change in the presentation makes it easier to understand what is going on, what the relevance is of particular messages. Not only does it look better, it makes it easier to navigate all the messages and projects that are supported in translatewiki.net.

Thanks,

      GerardM

OpenLayers is now supported in translatewiki.net

OpenLayers is software used by Open StreetMap. The functionality and content of Open StreetMap is going to be used by Wikipedia. One of the MediaWiki Google Summer of Code projects is the "Semantic Layers" extension it will provide an integration layer between OpenLayers and Semantic MediaWiki.

All these facts make for the inescapable conclusion that OpenLayers is relevant or will be relevant for the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation. A big thank you is due to RobertL who wrote the functionality that makes it possible to internationalise and localise in translatewiki.net. Consequently, the whole stack for the support of maps can now be in your language.

Please help us localise OpenLayers in translatewiki.net
Thanks,
GerardM

Inaugural meeting of the Concept Web Alliance

The Concept Web Alliance (CWA) is a new organisation that aims to bring the best science has to offer together and make better science and be more informative about science.

The key to the activities of the CWA is the realisation that there is an overwhelming amount of data around, data that is available in many formats. Data that could be of use in many environments and data that would be of use when there are commonalities for the data between these different environments.

Semantic web, triples, disambiguation, authentication, death switches, multi linguality, community involvement, Wikipedia were just a few of the subjects that had my interest among the many, many subjects that were mentioned / discussed.

What made this meeting so powerful was the presence of so many influential people representing from so many countries, organisations, domains.

I had the pleasure to present a demonstration project that demonstrated how XML data can be imported in an integrated text-data environment with Semantic MediaWiki and how the data can then be exported as triples..

Wikidraft

View more presentations from Gerard Meijssen.

Referata in anything but English

I am in New York and I am meeting Yaron Koren. Yaron is one of the Semantic MediaWiki greats and he is the man behind the referata.com websites. I consider the referata websites "best of breed" and I am a fan of the Food finds wiki. Food finds is about finding restaurants all over the world.

When you are getting information from all over the world, it makes sense to use a "universal language" and as such it can be argued that English qualifies. This does not mean that there is no room for Semantic MediaWikis in other languages. Yaron told me that he was impressed by the large amount of localisations that came his way when all his extensions became supported at translatewiki.net.

My challenge is to have a best of breed Semantic MediaWiki in another language, any other language. But would it not be great when this language was something "exotic" like Arabic, Tagalog or Gujarati. I am not suggesting that Semantic MediaWiki is completely localised in those languages, but they can be.

Would this not be cool ?
Thanks,
       GerardM

Everything can be compared. It still represents 'the known universe'

It is the month of May again and the new "group statistics in time" of translatewiki.net are available again. The numbers do not lie they say. When you compare these current numbers, you will find progress when compared to last year. The progress that impresses me most you will find in the "Extensions 65%"; they grew from 17 to 30 and consequently Siebrand's goal for 2009 has been reached.

These numbers demonstrate that when people get into their localisation, it becomes a habit to come back to do some work. It demonstrates that slowly but surely the extensions that are not used by the WMF are being localised. When you notice that there are only 35 languages that have 90% of the extensions localised that are used by the WMF you may appreciate why I appreciate this dedication that makes MediaWiki such a wonderful platform.
Thanks,
GerardM