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

Hi all,

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

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

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

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

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

#Wikipedia statistics are not good but not that bad

Improving the reach of Wikipedia is considered to be a strategic goal for the Wikimedia Foundation. When the traffic numbers fall to their lowest since August 2008, things are seriously wrong.

The good news is, the traffic numbers are seriously wrong; the page view aggregators were broken for a few days and this explains a lot.

When you look at the statistics, you will find that the last two months were not as good as the same months in 2009. This is however not the steep decline that is expected by the current trend in the monthly statistics. I hope and expect that the numbers will be corrected so that the anomaly of malfunctioning aggregators will not affect future comparisons.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Reintroduce what became extinct

Every year the Summer news brings the message about the Oak Processionary. Every year a lot of money is spend on flaming, sucking many caterpillars to provide local relief.

The Forest Caterpillar Hunter is extinct in the Netherlands, it is widely used in the USA to keep the Gypsy Moth under control. It would be cheap and natural to bring this little beastie home.

Every year I try to get people to appreciate the notion that natural predation is to be preferred. This time I called the Dutch Ministery and Staatsbosbeheer. I send e-mails to both and I will report when I get a reply that is more meaningful then "we will study your suggestion".
Thanks,
      GerardM

#iPhone iOS 4 has superior #Unicode support

There are many publications singing the praises of the latest version of the iPhone operating system. Buried in all the attention for stuff like multi tasking, folders and other improvements for the iPhone is the first aspect of what makes the iPhone a preferred phone in India.

Its support for the Malayalam script is much improved. The Unicode characters show perfectly, it is only the old chillu characters that are an issue.

Life would be perfect when there was a way to actually enter the Malayalam characters.. Please Apple, what about an input method ?
Thanks,
     GerardM

Formal and informal #localisation support for #MediaWiki

Both the German and the Dutch language allow you to address people in a formal and in an informal way.

When you localise software like we do at translatewiki.net, it is important to be consistent; either formal or informal for the default. For MediaWiki the default is informal for German and formal for Dutch. This does not fit always well; we have supported formal German for quite some time and as we now support the Wikia extensions, we learned that its default for Dutch used to be informal.

Given that the formal Dutch localisation is complete, it is what informal Dutch falls back to. This has the added advantage that only those messages where there is a difference needs to be localised.

With Wikia localising at translatewiki.net, we gained many localisers and consequently the quality and quantity improved. As the same is true for Wikia, it becomes clear that translatewiki's policy to grow the number of applications it supports is a winner.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Congratulations on your weddingday

When two people marry, it is an occasion celebrated by family and friends. Many people will come to congratulate and others not able to come congratulate by sending a card.

When this blog post is published, my nephew Jan will marry his wife Marion. I am grateful to Stefan, Valerie and Charles with these beautiful marriage cards.

These cards are in American and in German Sign Language, for me they show that SignWriting is indeed a script that is used for normal and special occasions. There might have been a card in Vulcan Sign Language, with a text like "Live long and prosper".
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Soccer madness; the case for the #Bavaria dress II

Thanks to #Fifa and the SA government, the Dutchy dress is a success. Their ham fisted response shows them to be the money grubbers that they are. With a little bit of ingenuity they could have responded like Grolsch did.

By throwing some of Netherlands finest in jail, they demonstrate that soccer is  not the party it is supposed to be. It became sadly serious.

ANP Olaf Kraak

There is one misconception about the Dutch dress though; there is an English dress, an Italian, a Spanish and a French dress. There is no German dress; they do not drink Bavaria :)

It will be interested to learn what FIFA does when Dutch WAGs will be wearing the Dutchy Dress..
Thanks,
      GerardM

Objects from the #Tropenmuseum for #Wikipedia

A CD is on its way with 6056 photos of objects for uploading to #Commons. These photos complete the Indonesian collection of material that is shared with us by the Tropenmuseum.

So far we have had many scans from photos. This is the first collection of pictures of objects with the relevant meta data from a GLAM.

Multichill hopes that he will find the time to upload this material the coming weekend. This and finishing the work on Indonesian geography would make it two mile stones that are completed.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Bug 23258 - Enable PagedTiffHandler on all wikis, to allow display of TIFF files

Some bugs are happy bugs.. Bug 23258 is one such. It is the news that the software is ready to support TIFF files in MediaWiki.

This is a happy announcement, and it will be a happy day when the software has gone live.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Soccer madness; the case for the #Bavaria dress

The prize for the best advert goes to Bavaria. They have created a nice sexy orange dress for the world champions. To make these dresses even more exciting, the news is that South African police picked up some of Netherlands finest.

The advert that introduced the "Dutch dress" is one of the best soccer adverts ever. When you know that these dresses do not sport a logo it is clear that the heavy handed attitude of the official sponsors only results in ridicule.



I hope we will see a sea of "Dutch dresses" in the final and for your information, Budweiser, the original, is an European beer.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Part II

Improve communication

On the Malayalam #Wikipedia there is the idea to write articles based on what people want to read. Shiju Alex posted the idea on Foundation-l.

The idea is to have a list of searches that failed to provide a result. Sprinkle some statistical magic on it, and it will be a tool that makes a difference in generating traffic for our projects.

The thread is positive about the idea. It is considered not hard to implement and this thread provides a fine moment for the Wikimedia organisation to reward positive ideas.

It has been said all too often that communication between the community and the organisation has broken down. It has broken down because it is only announcements that reach the mailing lists from the organisation. As a consequence the function of the WMF mailing lists has deteriorated.

When the WMF is to consist of two separate unconnected parts; an organisation and a community this would be acceptable but in my opinion that is not what any of us want. It would be good when positive threads, contributions are at least acknowledged. It would be good when every now and then positive threads, contributions are rewarded.

This is an idea that deserves rewarding.
Thanks,
     GerardM

If you would go to Wikimania, you'd have one task :)

I received an e-mail from Milos Rancic.. The title is this title and, this is the body of his message

To convince Sue and members of the Board to find a way how to pay
Michael Everson. We should talk about it these days via Skype.

As I have made that point on this blog before, on the strategy wiki on IRC and to everybody who wants to hear; Michael can help us give languages a more level playing field. He is the acknowledged world expert on this.

What else to say.. that he is Irish, that he is cuddly, that he spends too much of his time on charitable causes as it is?

The best and only reason that counts is that this level playing field will make many of our Wikipedias take off. It will grow our appeal not only in countries like India, it will gain us a lot of positive attention..
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikia functionality wanted for #Wikipedia

As the Wikimedia Foundation worked on its usability project (UX), Wikia did not stop improving its offering of MediaWiki as well. The illustration shows a MediaWiki blog by Avatar announcing slide shows.

My blogging is hosted at Blogger. I am happy with and used to its functionality, but I would consider blogging on a blog at Meta for instance. As the WMF in its strategy wants to improve participation, it is something to consider.

Avatar announces slide show functionality.. When you consider the many, many wonderful illustrations we have at Commons for so many subjects, it seems an obvious and welcome addition to our functionality. It is things like this what makes editing at Wikia so appealing.

When it is considered, remember that the Wikia software is open source, that it is localised at translatewiki.net and, it has been tested on a website with a lot of traffic.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Open Standards and the European Union

When Neelie Kroes was the commissioner for competition of the EU, it was an expensive experience for Microsoft. Now that she is the commissioner for digital agenda of the EU it may even become a devastating experience. When you read this speech of her, it is clear that the days of the dominance of proprietary standards in the EU government are coming to an end.

When businesses are to communicate with the EU they will have to conform to open standards. When Microsoft products do not provide such compliance, businesses will have no choice but to look for software that does.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Whether #twitter or #identi.ca

I learned that #Twitterfeed allows me to post to indenti.ca. I  post all the tweets that I type in on my identi.ca account and have them forward to Twitter. As the status.net software is localised at translatewiki.net, it is easy to understand why status.net is my first choice.

Both Twitter and even more so Facebook want to determine what privacy and freedom I have and want to bombard me with things I have no interest in.

If everything works out well, Twitterfeed will generate a message to identi.ca. This will be forwarded to Twitter so in a way it is business as usual. When Twitter makes this impossible they will lose custom.
Thanks,
      GerardM

New in #GMAIL

Some companies require big conferences that dominate the news to announce what is hardly news for their fanboys while others quietly roll out new functionality as and when it becomes available.

Given that Google is Internet centred, it is obvious for them to roll out in an incremental way. Then again their conference Google-i/o is still as easily filled of relevant news that is new.

Today I found that I can add other people to the GMAIL chat function. It is intuitive so what more needs to be said?
Thanks,
     GerardM

Ideatorrent for #MediaWiki ideas

Early on in the #strategy project, there was the idea to make use of an ideatorrent. There were all kinds of reasons why this did not happen at the time including the fact that it did not make use of our SUL. It still does not but it does make use of OpenID a very welcome idea.

I have tried it, I have submitted an idea that is now waiting for moderator approval.

Maybe you want to give it a spin as well. It would be cool because there must be so many ideas that are worth considering.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Shapado supported at #transaltewiki.net

Shapado, is new as an application that is supported at translatewiki.net. When you want to ask or answer questions, Shapado is there for you. It even allows you to host your own Q&A site.

The Shapado software is available under the GNU Affero General Public License and the content under CC-by. The messages of Shapado are already available for localisation but the project page is still under construction.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Ordnance Survey data for #Wikimedia Commons III

With Multichill progress can be rapid. Earlier today I posted a template, this is the same template. It starts to come together :)

Thanks,
     GerardM

Ordnance Survey data for #Wikimedia Commons II

The Ordnance Survey 1:250 000 Scale Colour Raster map is being prepared. The skeleton for all the good stuff is being build. It looks like this and as it is, it is good for nothing..

Thanks,
    GerardM