#Unicode language names found by search engines

#Statistics are a wonderful thing. These numbers compiled by "Kaśyap కశ్యప్" show how often the name of a language can be found when they are written in Unicode characters. This gives a clue about how well a search engine serves a language.

Such numbers also provide an indication how much a language is actually used on the Internet. What is does not say is how much demand there is to use a language on the web.

The Wikimedia Foundation's Localisation team is working hard to make it easier to use MediaWiki wikis. For us it is interesting to compare these numbers with the number of speakers for a language because this may indicate how hard it will be to make a particular Wikipedia more popular on the Internet.
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      GerardM

One language, two scripts

#Tamaziɣt is one of the #Berber languages of North Africa. It is written in two scripts; the Latin script and the Tifinagh script.

As there is a project in the Incubator for a Tamazight Wikipedia, it is relevant to consider if and how the two scripts can be transcribed from one into the other. This is what SPQRobin has done; he has written a program that converts a text between these two scripts.

Transcription is not new to MediaWiki; Serbian and Chinese are two languages where articles can be available in two scripts. It is awesome when we can transcribe in both directions as this allows people to read and write in their preferred script. When a language is also written in for instance the Arabic script, this is impossible because vowels are often not indicated.

With both scripts supported, we hope that the converter will be soon available in the Incubator. This may stimulate more people to learn to write their language and contribute to the dissemination of all knowledge to all people.
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       GerardM

A tale of two cities

I met Fahraan, she is Kurdish, she speaks #Sorani and #Dutch. Fahraan is a refugee and has too much time on her hands.

Sulaymaniyah and Almere are two cities important to her; in Sulaymaniyah she was born and raised and she is now living in Almere. As a consequence, there are people in both cities that know Fahraan.

Fahraan often tells the story of her two cities. About Almere in Sorani and about Sulaymaniyah in Dutch. The suggestion for her to write proper articles about these cities intrigues her. The existence of a Wikipedia in Sorani was a revelation to her.

Teaching someone like Fahraan to edit Wikipedia is cool. She will improve her Dutch and she will write in Sorani. Teaching a group of people like Fahraan is even better; even when only one person writes the occasional article the smaller projects will be happy to welcome her.
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      GerardM

#Wikipedia usage data is more complete

When you compile #statistics about the usage of Wikipedia, you need raw data to base your statistics on. The data was not complete and consequently the resulting statistics can be a little bit off.

Ariel Glenn on Wikitech-l "I think we finally have a complete copy from December 2007 through August 2011 of the pageview stats scrounged from various sources, now available on our dumps server."

Having more complete data will probably not change the understanding of the Wikipedia history that much. As Wikipedia celebrated its 10th anniversary, there is obviously more data that is missing. We do welcome any and all data that gives us even more of an insight.
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       GerardM

MobileFrontend is #MediaWiki release 1.17

The  #mobile gateway has been replaced and it is running live. What is relevant is, that Wikipedia runs MediaWiki release 1.17. This is a patched version of the official release but it is release 1.17.

This factoid is relevant for people running their own MediaWiki project. It is more then likely that they can benefit from native support for mobile phones as well. When you consider how fast mobile traffic of Wikipedia is growing, it is a potential boon for any and all MediaWiki projects. It starts with installing the MobileFrontend extension and there may be some configuration issues to tackle as well.

We may all have wish lists for improved support for mobile phones. What I would like to see is something like the Djatoka software . I blogged about Djatoka in March 2010 however there are other similar solutions. It only sends images sized to fit on a screen. Given the cost of mobile bandwidth, it would be a money saver for our readers.
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       GerardM

The name is Bon, James Bon II

Santhosh started work on an #Unicode UAX31 implementation.. Good for us because we support all the scripts for all the languages we have projects in. Our best practice has it that people can have a user in their own language.

The UAX31 standard defines the standard rules for our best practice. Writing a reference implementation that will actually be used is a bit different; the Wikimedia Foundation implemented a black list of names for instance.

Once you start writing an implementation, you encounter all the ambiguities, all the issues that are still open. How for instance do you cope with the Arabic script, what to do with a "." or a full stop in the middle of a user?

It makes sense to allow for the characters that are used in a language. This implies that knowing what language to expect is crucial. There are two obvious approaches; you expect a new user in the default language or the languages is defined in the preferences.

When you are interested in this subject have a read of the current version of the code.
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       GerardM

Too long; didn't read

I recently dumped #Techcrunch from my #reader. Techcrunch features too many long articles, articles with video, articles with long references to companies. It took me too long to scroll past them so I finally got rid of all of them.

Many of the blog posts I get presented in my reader are "information dense" and too long. Typically they pass me by. Some have gems of information hidden among pebbles of data. Those posts I trawl for information and you know what, they tend to provide me with popular topics for on my blog.

A blog post needs to be sweet and short; preferably with only one point. An illustration needs to support the story or hint at more to come. In the end, a successful blog tells stories by frequently returning to the same subject.
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       GerardM

Professional #localisation at #translatewiki.net

When you are going to implement an Open Source application, there are no warranties. When the usability needs improvement, you can pay for improvements or, you can scratch your own itch.

Mifos is going to be implemented in Andhra Pradesh. The easiest and most obvious usability improvement is localisation and as you can see from the graphic for Telugu localisations, a lot of work was done in an extremely short period of time by Avshyd.

When so much work is done, it is always of interest to how this was done.Was it a one-man show or were multiple people involved. Was there any quality control and finally what do the users think. As Mifos is implemented in Telugu, there will be people working with the software and they can complain when the localisation needs improvement.

At translatewiki.net we are happy when our localisations are used. We are happy when people come to us and do the work for their own reasons. In the case of Mifos, it will mean that many more people will have access to credit, microcredit at that but it is a huge step up.
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      GerardM

The roads of #India

One of the projects on the English #Wikipedia describes the roads of India. Given the size of India, the end result is something that can easily be called a book. As such it is not that strange when the book becomes a book that is available from PediaPress.

A book like this is not without its issues. How do you for instance make a NPOV map of India when the borders of  India are in dispute or what to do when the generation of the book creates errors.

Making maps of India that are acceptable to all is problematic. India has border disputes with several of its neighbours and as a consequence Indian maps show where India expects its borders to be. The same is true for its neighbours and consequently the maps Google presents are different from where in the world you view them.

The law is often used to ensure the "right" presentation of borders and therefore a book like this will never be commercially available in India.

Getting attention from the right people is (relatively) easy to do; you create a bug in bugzilla and / or you talk to people involved in the off line functionality on IRC and / or you scratch your own itch and dive into the code.
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      GerardM

#MediaWiki Babel scheduled to go live

Translatewiki.net has supported the Babel extension for a long time now. Practically everyone who contributes has this information on their user page and the projects someone contributed to is added as well.

The big advantage of the Babel extension is that it works without templates and that new messages are available every day with the LocalisationUpdate.

Several projects have requested the implementation and, when Babel becomes generally available, it will be easy to add relevant information on the user page without the painful copying of a zillion templates.

With the implementation scheduled for September 21th, this is surely happy news.
Thanks,
        GerardM

What to do to fix #MediaWiki #language bugs

When we know what issues need to be addressed, we analyse them, we categorise them and then we ask who wants to fix them. It sounds simple and actually, it is a great way to get more people involved.

A bug triage has been held for the second time and this time two new people demonstrated their interest in working on language issues.

The process is quite cool; Siebrand really explained the issues in a bug, he indicated what skill level is needed and, what benefits there are to solving a bug. Bug 16175 for instance has to do with the EditPage.php class, something Roan qualified as nasty and Bawolff as something that scares him late at night.. Fixing it may result in a need for many new messages that need urgent localisation. The upside is that it is a great introduction to some of the hard parts of the MediaWiki code.

Not everything was hard; some people indicated that they wanted to get involved without working on code. For them there were changes to the language of messages, the documentation of messages. The bug triage truly provided quite diverse opportunities.

As the people participating was quite diverse, the hour reserved for the triage ended with a discussion on a schema change. This high level discussion was nice because of the pragmatic way the consequences were discussed. A log of this triage has been published. Read it, it may whet your appetite to get involved in MediaWiki and language support.
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        GerardM

What is New at #Wikipedia

Wikimedia Foundation is no stranger to #GoogleTechTalk. The latest instalment is a presentation by Erik Moeller, Rob Lanphier and Alolita Sharma gave a presentation that just became available on YouTube.

It gives advance information on the technology that is being developed and if you are interested in what MediaWiki may provide us with in the near future, it is a must see. It also provides you with some of the latest thinking on Wikipedia.

Have a look and, enjoy.
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       GerardM
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#Localisation rally for #MediaWiki and #Kiwix

The #translatewiki.net localisation rally is finished. The results particularly for Kiwix are great. Thanks to the addition of 2,672 messages Kiwix is now fully localised in 53 languages. This makes it much easier for people to use our content off-line.

When you read the announcement of the results, it is particularly smaller languages that have benefited with the exception of traditional Chinese. When you look at the statistics, there are more languages that could have benefited from the rally and/or from more localisations.

This time the benefit to translators is EUR 37.50. The benefit to the users of the 20 languages however is where this rally makes a real difference.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Agile the process works !!

The "stand-up meetings" of the Wikimedia L10N team are great. Every day in the European morning we learn briefly about the latest developments, the work done, the work planned for the day. .

Stand-up meetings are part of the agile / scrum software development. They are great because you learn about what the current issues are.

What you are looking for is how things like stand-up meetings are worth their time. We wrestled with support for Narayam in the Chrome browser. Amir was fixing an issue with searching strings and was struggling with Chrome as well. Thanks to the stand-up meeting we learned early on that both Narayam and WikiEditor Search are likely to suffer from the same underlying issue.

The amount of time saved is a benefit. The real benefit is that it helps us to become more of a team. A team that understands that everyone in the team is a resource that can be drawn upon.
Thanks,
       GerardM

nine-eleven revisited

This day ten years ago, I was in a shop that had a TV turned on. I saw a plane crash into a skyscraper. The consequences have been horrible. Nearly 3000 people died in this abomination, many many more died as a consequence of the wars that followed.

Today, ten years on, I met a local imam here in Almere. The date of the appointment was quite accidental but we did talk briefly about the September 11th attacks. It is horrible when you consider how a small group of fanatics were allowed to bring so much misery on all Muslims.

Wikipedia was another subject; the need for free and neutral information was considered very important. I may even quote my imam as he said: "the biggest challenge of mankind is ignorance and then illiteracy". We had a look at Wikipedia, both the Arabic and the Dutch Wikipedia, and found that articles that explain Morocco and Islam can do with a lot more tender loving care.

Bringing Muslims to Wikipedia does not need to be more then just reaching out. I indicated that I am happy to give some instructions in Almere. I truly do not care in what language they write, where they come from, their culture. What I care about is that we will grow the sum of available knowledge and share it widely.
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      GerardM

#Translatewiki.net best practices

When a user gets new rights, there is always a hiatus between the moment of requesting such rights and giving such rights. Localisers are valuable to us; we do not want to lose any and particularly we have high hopes for any and all new people willing to do the work.

Some of the bureaucrats at translatewiki.net send e-mails to those new users who they grant user rights to, welcoming them and occasionally providing some extra information. In recognition of this practice it is now possible to send e-mail directly from the User rights management special page.

As a bureaucrat you do not really know who you send a mail to. The logging system that is being revamped however will have more of a clue. The User rights log is only one of the logs that will be modernised and support plural and gender. The first four associated messages are now available at translatewiki.
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     GerardM

The name is Bon, James Bon

Santhosh is one of the special agents in the fight to bring language support to the Internet. Identifying him in English is easy; all the characters used to transliterate സന്തോഷ് തോട്ടിങ്ങല്‍ are available to identify Santhosh for who he is.

The last character in his name is the "zwj". According to some, this character is not available for identification purposes. Without the "zwj", the name looks different:

• സന്തോഷ് തോട്ടിങ്ങല്‍
• സന്തോഷ് തോട്ടിങ്ങല്

Santhosh is a Malayalam name and for Malayalam there is an alternative way of writing Unicode. So technically it is possible to transliterate the "zwj" out of his name for Malayalam.

It becomes more interesting when you write Sri Lankha in Singhala. this cannot be done without a "zwj". From a Wikimedia Foundation point of view, the Unicode report "Unicode Identifier and Pattern Syntax" assumes for many languages that they are "aspirational" or "limited" use, is not really workable. Our aim is to have support for all scripts and identifying people by their name; their real name.

As we do identify people, an implementation of this Unicode specification is important to us. Having people like Mr തോട്ടിങ്ങല്‍ in the drivers seat will surely get us a best result. It may even get us a reference implementation.
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       GerardM

#Localisation for your language on one map

At #translatewiki.net we are experimenting with Semantic MediaWiki. One of the features is the use of maps. We have implemented this for the language portals; in this way people can see where the localisers for a language can be found like in the example below for Hindi.

As you can see, only two of the localisers for Hindi entered their location on their user page. It shows how we change things, we include a new mechanism or thingie and, as it gains appreciation the data shown becomes more inclusive.

One challenge I am now facing is how to have a map with the people who completed their 500 localisations for the rally.
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      GerardM

A log fit for reading by its public

Auspicious occasions on #Wikipedia are logged; a new user or moving or deleting an article for instance. The log entries are human readable and consequently they are a combination of unique data and fixed texts.

That is in and off itself a problem; the fixed texts can be replaced by different fixed texts to function as a translation but this does not necessarily make the resulting string a proper sentence. A sentence can be different when Jane does it in stead of Joe and, when she does it twice it can be different again.

It is best practice to address Jane as a female and, acknowledge how much gets done. This means that the logging system, needs to be aware of the gender of the actors and the number of actions. Implementing the necessary changes for this is under way. First the required mechanisms will be build into the logging system. Once this is done, each and every log will be internationalised. This will result in new messages in translatewiki.net and once they are localised, there will be a log fit for reading by its public.
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      GerardM

#Localisation rally for #MediaWiki and #Kiwix

The Dutch #Wikimedia chapter sponsors #translatewiki.net regularly to run a translation rally. Such a rally serves multiple purposes;

• to bring the necessity of localisation to the front
• to support the localisation of MediaWiki and Kiwix
• to make the MediaWiki projects more usable

Internationalisation and localisation together make it possible for software to be used by people who do not understand the default language used for the User Interface of software. When these two factors are an integral part of software development like they are for MediaWiki, it becomes possible to support Wikipedia in over 270 languages.

The translatewiki rallies give an additional incentive to our localisers to do a little bit more. Many languages, including big ones like Spanish or Hindi can do with more effort. Both languages are used as "fall back" languages when the localisation of a language is not adequate but they need to be complete to do their job.

MediaWiki does gain relevant functionality over time; off line support with Kiwix and mobile telephone support now integral to MediaWiki are recent examples. This support is not restricted to Wikipedia, it is available to Wikimedia and non-Wikimedia projects alike.

You can join in the fun of the rally, you can make the user interface in your language more usable. The info can be found here but all your contributions are welcome for any and all the projects we support at translatewiki.
Thanks,
        GerardM