The localisation of MediaWiki extensions

Like many applications, MediaWiki has both core and extended functionality. There are a growing number of extensions and most are localised at Betawiki. For the developers who develop MediaWiki, Betawiki has proven itself a precious resource. Many of the MediaWiki extensions have been adapted in order to get proper internationalisation. Recently, an extension developed by the UNICEF was worked on for more then a day and necessary feedback was provided about the code.. It just did not work for people wanting to implement it.

As time goes on, extensions are localised in more languages. Siebrand has a list that every so often is updated with the extensions with localised messages in at least 50 languages. It is a list that is growing.

As can be expected it is the extensions used by the Wikimedia Foundation that are doing particularly well, the support for FlaggedRevs is something that amazes me because it is only used on two projects as far as I know. I am happy to see the Babel extension localised in 122 languages. This makes it a really useful tool, it is sad that the WMF does not use it because many of its projects would benefit from the big support it provides. The Meta discussion is pretty much in favour and it can benefit all our projects.

With Siebrand in a statistics mode, he also provided me with some more numbers.. Currently Betawiki supports 128 extensions with localisations in over 50 languages, in mid May there were only 64. In January, the extensions used by the WMF had 570 messages, currently there are over 1300... In January MediaWiki contained 1732 messages, now there are 2122, a growth of 23%... In January we supported 2077 extension messages, by now there are 5111, a growth of 246%.

It is all the more amazing that the MediaWiki localisation community does this well.
Thanks,
GerardM

Supporting Khmer in Chrome

Today I read that the performance of Chrome has been improved for Javascript. As I am in favour of a reliable faster browser, I gave Chrome another try.

One of the problems with Chrome is its support for Khmer. As you can see, Khmer does not show up as expected. Compare this with Firefox...

This screenshot is from the same machine, you will notice that Khmer shows up properly and the URL is much cleaner. Google has some more work to do to get Chrome right for me.
Thanks,
GerardM

Slideshare, has some of the functionality we need II

Wikimania 2007 Gm Wf P Omega Wiki

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own.

I just learned that I can embed presentations in my blog... WOW... It is possible for you to download what I uploaded... WOW ...
Thanks,
GerardM

Slideshare, has some of the functionality we need

Slideshare is a great resource when you have some presentations or slide shows to share. Do you have a .pdf a .ppt or an .odp, upload it share it and all the people that were not at the conference can have some impression of what was presented.

Slideshare relies very much on community effort; I was told by pfctdayelise about Slideshare. I had a look and I like it for what it does. I have shared some presentations in the Wikimedia community.

There is one problem left. How do we share all our presentations? Where are all the other interesting presentations of relevance to the whole of the WMF community?

Currently there is talk about including social networking functionality to the WMF on the foundation-l. I would welcome it because currently many of us use such functionality and our community is fractured over the many different networks.
Thanks,
GerardM

More on the stability of the localisation

Yesterday, in my "On the monthly BetaWiki information" I suggested to have those wikis with inadequate localisation use the stable version of the MediaWiki software. This idea was because of my observation that a lot of "FYZZYING" is going on and, I associated this with the developement process.

I have had a talk with Siebrand about this and he informed me that indeed it is part of the development process. It is however also part of a process whereby existing messages are proofread and internationalised.

This changes the situation radically because this is exactly what benefits every localisation effort. It is for this reason that certainly at this stage all WMF wikis should stay on bleeding edge.
Thanks,
GerardM

On the monthly Betawiki information

The Betawiki statistics for October are in again. With the request for Western Panjabi we now support 321 linguistic entities. Of these only 102 provide the most basic support, 61 languages cover 90% of the core messages and 24 provide a 90% coverage for the extensions used in Wikimedia Foundation projects. The good news is that compared with last month, the numbers are essentially up except for the WMF used extensions.

When you compare this with a year ago, you will find that we have come a long way. I was told at the Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland, that with the move to Betawiki by the German localisation effort more people had become involved and that the quality had gone up. At the same conference i learned that many people are just not aware of its existence and significance; I hope that we may expect some Frisians at Betawiki.

Because of the continuous development of MediaWiki it is really hard almost impossible to maintain the localisation for a language. We have an increasing number of developers resulting in daily updates to the MediaWiki messaging and for the majority of our languages, it is impossible to keep up.

After such a realisation, the question is how to support these languages better. It is arguably best for them NOT to run on the bleeding edge of MediaWiki software. Running on bleeding edge should be reserved to those languages who are able to maintain their localisation.

With this discrimination in the support of languages, we give added weight to our stable software. This will improve the usability of MediaWiki for our end users.

When we make such a division, the only argument should be the quality of the localisation effort. This would provide a powerful incentive for language communities to maintain their localisation in order to have the latest and greatest of what MediaWiki has to offer. It is crucial to keep in mind what this is to achieve; to provide our readers, our editors with the best support in our projects and localisation is essential.
Thanks,
GerardM

Presentation at WCN 2008

In Utrecht at the Wikimedia Conferentie Nederland, we had another really well organised and nice conference. Many speakers with relevant and interesting topics in three tracks, there were some really nerdy topics like 3-d printing and repairing doa OLPC systems, topics that were really well received given by people who lived their subject.

I was invited to talk about "A Commons that supports languages" and together with Andre Engels, I was the first to speak in room C. Sadly a video projector was missing, so you see this presentation first.. Obviously there was a video projector for the next speaker.

My presentation went well anyway. People in the Netherlands do appreciate why Commons should support other languages, they were happy to learn that we have demonstrated that this is something that we can do and they share my hope to see Wikimedia Commons content available for the other people of this world.

People that have been at my presentation may know my last slide, so I have included it for those who do not know what it refers to ..


Thanks,
GerardM

Proof of concept for an ASL wikipedia.

I just received the wonderful news that Steve Slevinski has created a proof of concept for a MediaWiki that supports SignWriting. This is great news. It means that a Wikipedia in American Sign Language is that much closer..

This demonstration is not only relevant for American Sign Language. SignWriting is a script and given that SignWriting enables the writing of any sign languages, many more languages now have a real prospect of a Wikipedia in their own language.
Thanks,
GerardM

Radio history, digitised and on-line

The Radionieuwsdienst ANP has been broadcasting radio news bulletins from 1937. In 1993, when the ANP moved house, many of the texts were found in the cellar. This treasure trove for the Dutch language was preserved and stored at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek. The 1,8 milion sheets of papers have now been digitised and made available on the website of the KB.

Material like this is invaluable to understand how a language evolves. It is also the perfect indicator for learning when certain topics became in the general interest. I hope that there are many resources like this available to the public. For the Dutch Wikipedia it is a great resource to serve as a source.
Thanks,
GerardM

Bishnupriya on a cutting edge

Bishnupriya is a language of the Indian subcontinent. There is a Wikipedia in this language and it currently has 23k articles and is the number 52 in size. This makes it surprisingly bigger then the Hindi Wikipedia at number54. It is a language that only recently registered on me and I added it as a language to OmegaWiki.I am currently adding loads of translations to the collection of countries and territories and Bishnupriya is on the edge of getting its own status bar in this collection. This means that there will be 10% countries known to OmegaWiki in Bishnupriya.

Currently 23 of the 26 words in Bishnupriya are countries and it is therefore arguably not that big an occasion. It is however part of me raising awareness for "other" languages, how to give languages like Bishnupriya or Maldivian some presence. In my opinion, celebrating little events like this seems appropriate.

It is great for me to enjoy the little things because many little things slowly add up. Sharing these good things may get a smile on your face ... :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Building a tower of Babel

MediaWiki is a big undertaking. It is ever growing in functionality, it is increasing its pull of developers coming to the platform. There are an increasing number of websites outside of the Wikimedia Foundation using it for the many qualities of the software and consequently there is an increased need for supporting this great platform.

When Wikipedia started, like at the start of the building of the tower of Babel, everybody spoke the same language and there was one God. Now there are many languages and many people decry a lack of faith and a lack of community. At the same time, the English language Wikipedia alone has grown to a staggering 2.6 million articles, there are many sister projects in other languages and sister projects with other aims and, the WMF has grown into a multi million dollar organisation.

All projects have their own momentum and each project has its own issues but when new functionality is added to MediaWiki, it is immediately there for all to use. The people localising at Betawiki have an increasingly hard time to keep up because of the size of the software and the increase in development.

The problem is that when the user interface is too hard to use, people will not use it. There are several issues that are a factor.

• insufficient localisaton
• inconsistent terminology

When the localisation is not sufficient, when people do not know this other language, they cannot edit. When the words used for a specific action differ from application to application, people will be confused and will not edit. There are solutions but they require a lot of attention and investment.

The first thing we could do is reduce what needs to be localised. This may mean that MediaWiki becomes more modular and that these modules can be turned on when needed. A good example is the "Flagged Revisions". Another strategy would be to first localise the messages that have proven to be stable; those would be messages that have not changed since the previous release.

We need localisation, any localisation and inconsistent terminology is only a problem when there is such initial localisation. The problem is that even with consistency within MediaWiki there is still a problem when it is not the same terminology as used in the other software people use.

So what can we do to make things better. The WMF should invest in the tooling at Betawiki. There are several plans already that will improve the Betawiki functionality, they will improve efficiency and this is likely to increase the throughput of translators. For me the biggest advantage of such an investment is that the WMF will become more aware of what it is to support software and projects for 297 languages.
Thanks,
GerardM

Localising for the fundraiser of the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation uses MediaWiki for its software. The localisation of this software is done at Betawiki. At Betawiki we support several other applications for their localisation. The benefit for these other applications is that Betawiki has a great community of translators.

Every year, the WMF has its fund raiser. Every year the message needs to be tuned and consequently the software is spruced up. You would expect that the WMF would use Betawiki for the localisation of their message. They do not. When you look at their translation request you will find only 30 languages, you have to work an Meta, so as a translator you will not find help that explains what the message is about.

I think it silly that the WMF thinks that a Wiki is the universal tool appropriate to translate text. These messages are to be used in software; these wiki pages have to be converted... For me it is demonstrates that the WMF does not have a strategy on how to deal with multiple languages. It is also gives the impression that all the "other" languages and their communities are not considered to be relevant.
Thanks.
      GerardM

Science of the past is still science, is still relevant

Wired has a most interesting article "Forgotten Experiment May Explain Origins of Life". It is worth a read, please do. 

For me the most interesting part of the story is that this science still exists because its material has been handed down after the death by the original scientist to one of his former graduate students. Using modern tools on the original material provided information that was not available at the time. 

A lot of scientific work has been done in the past. Good science is repeatable, but as this example shows, the results are dependent on the tooling available. As the results of experiments were still available it was cheap and easy to analyse again and it led to new insights.

This is a lucky break that resulted from the understanding of competent scientists. It is a lucky break because much scientific fact is no longer available to us. Many papers were published and are not really available because they have not been digitised. Some material may still be available on diskettes but, who can find this material in the Internet age?

Scientific endeavour has been compared to "standing on the shoulders of giants". The works of these giants often exist only in a paper trail and in order to have their work available, it needs to be digitised. I am convinced that many results as profound as the work of Stanley Miller is there for the finding.

Thanks,

      GerardM

Obstacles to participating in WMF projects

Sue wrote in her "Report to the board August 2008" about an initiative about an article on Meta called "New contributor objections".  It is a great initiative and it took me little time to find that this article addresses the objections for people who have a problem contributing to the BIG Wikipedias. I have added some big hurdles that people have to overcome who might be active on the smaller projects:

• People are not aware of the existence of Wikipedia / the existence of a Wikipedia in their language
  
• An insufficient localisation of the software for their language
• A Commons that is essentially English only

Most people that are engrossed in their Wikipedia forget that other Wikipedias exist. It makes sense because the creation of an encyclopaedia is an immense task and it takes a lot of dedication. The problem I find is that the WMF activities make the biggest projects bigger while hardly any attention is given to the smaller projects.

When you want to extend the reach of what we do, you have to make sure that people know about us. You have to reach out to where we are weak. The key focus should be on the people that can strenghten the projects that we already have.

When you look at localisation, you will find that Betawiki is a best effort project where volunteers localise MediaWiki. But it is already hard to maintain the existing localisation. With more and more programmers working on MediaWiki, it will be become increasingly difficult to maintain the support for all our languages.

While Commons is a great project, it is hardly useable for people who do not read English. Consequently Commons is not used as a resource by many projects to upload the images that reflect their world. This means that Commons is biased to a western point of view.

What I would love to learn from the WMF is how they want to address these issues because these issues is what prevents us from being what we aim to be.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Blog action day: Poverty

Today, October 15th is "blog action day". The aim is to talk about poverty and raise awareness, initiate action and shake the web.

Yesterday, I read on my Google reader feed that UNESCO promotes a publication called "Why languages matter". This publication gives a great concise run-down, with plenty of examples, the power of approaching people in their own language. The subtitle of the publication is: "Meeting Millennium Development Goals through local languages".

When you read this document, you get the feeling that local languages provide an essential tool in the fight against poverty, hunger, lack of education, child mortality, gender equality ... The text is full of success stories. It clearly states the obvious message that when you state your message in the language that people understand, you may be heard.

The Wikimedia Foundation provides the opportunity to write in many languages. Regularly projects in new languages are approved. As the support for the mother tongue of people provides such clear benefits, we can be proud with our continued support for so many languages. The trick is how to reach out to all the people for whom a Wikipedia is not yet available in their language.

An encyclopaedia provides a lot of basic information. When this basic information is available in the languages we support, it is not unlikely that it is the first encyclopaedic resource for many languages. When you look realistically at our resources, you will find that most Wikipedias are just not of a quality where they can make a difference.

Our challenge is to overcome the problems that exist. Our challenge is to find the resources so that we can enable language communities to create their content.
Thanks,
GerardM

ASCII

ASCII or the "American Standard Code for Information Interchange" is a limited set of characters and it is used for all kinds of applications. Yesterday I talked about support for multiple languages on the Internet and mentioned that .org domains can be named in multiple scripts.

I was told this was pretty useless because e-mail addresses are one of the uses of the domain name and they are firmly ASCII. Pretty useless because e-mail applications do not allow for e-mail addresses in anything but ASCII. I just checked and my e-mail application does indeed not allow for it.

So my question is, what e-mail applications DO allow for e-mail addresses in multiple scripts and, is it only a problem of the client applications or are there also problems in the infrastructure of the Internet...
Thanks,
GerardM

On the monthly Betawiki info

After the release of MediaWiki 1.13 many of the most used messages were altered. The effect of this is obvious in the monthly Betawiki statistics. Last month 112 languages supported 98% of these messages, this month there are 92. This means that we have had people fixing the FUZZIED messages for 92 languages or 28,75 of the languages we support in Betawiki. When you look at the list of Wikipedias, you will find that number 92 has 7488 articles...

The localisation of the extensions is doing well, it continues to improve both for the extensions used by the WMF and for all the other extensions. The numbers for these are small, but it is heartening to see them improve.

Personally I am happy when I was told that the languages that were added recently are doing fine. These are the languages with projects in the Incubator or who have their project started in the last year.

NB Today the Egyptian Arab Wikipedia has been waiting for 77 days for their project to be created. I have asked developers, I have asked Sue and Erik. If there is one thing where the language policy of the Wikimedia Foundation breaks down, it is in a timely implementation of its end result. Given that this is an official policy, there is no excuse.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Holland Open 2008

This years Holland Open has come and gone. As always conferences are about people. The people that present are obviously in the picture, their message is getting the lime light. The people that present their company are also very much willing to present their products and services.

Simon Brouwer from Open Taal and the Dutch Open Office project promoted the availability of language tools for everyone. Simon discussed the need for Open Source tools to be as good in its support as any other tool. For the Dutch language this has proven to be problematic because of the proprietary nature of contracts for the support of the official Dutch orthography. The "Nederlandse Taalunie" has started to provide certification of a spell checker and this certification has now been issued to spell checkers for Dutch, including the one used by Open Office and Firefox. There is more to this story and, I hope to inform about this in a future post.

Talking with people I have worked with in the past is always nice. I met with the people of Edia, they have a great little tool for people learning the Dutch language. Terminology that is current and of interest is the terminology learned best. In their news reader "Alane", people read small articles about things that are currently in the news. They are combined with excercises that help improve language skills. This is great software. This approach would work with any language. We discussed how we could help each other.

At the conference there was a prominent education track. I was really happy to meet Bob Hofmans from iEARN. When you are in education, and you do not know iEARN, you should! It is an international organisation that helps students become citizens of this world. This conference was great for them because it brought people together and it kicked off new projects and experiments. I will be interested what Second Life will do for them.

With people of companies like SUN and IBM present, it proved an excellent opportunity to pitch some of the issues that I deal with. We talked about standards, the ISO-639-6, localisation and the role of communities, the changed role of companies in the face of Open Source.

Yes I showed what we did for Commons as well. People love the idea of being able to find pictures in multiple languages. The next step is to make the demonstration project a reality in Commons itself.
Thanks,
GerardM

Arab calligraphy restored part II

Durova was informed that her restoration became a featured picture. Thanks for helping out determining the exact text.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Brewster Kahle on TED

I love TED, short presentations that inform about the essence of things by people who live their subject. Brewster Kahle gave his presentation and I loved it. Brewster is a librarian, his approach to this modern age is one that you might expect of librarians. His approach is one of bringing things together, preserving them to make them available for all people.

Bringing things together needs doing for many different materials. Books, music, movies are all different and they all have their own issues. I love it that books that are either in the public domain or out of print are digitised and, at $10,- a book it is a bargain. I love it when he promotes the OLPC laptop as a book reader. I love it when storage is made available for movies and albums. When you hear Brewster talk, it can be done, it should be done we will give us the next generation we deserve.

When you listen or read about the Internet Archive, the way it works, it is interesting to compare it with another organisation; the Wikimedia Foundation. Both aim to bring knowledge to the people of this world. Both are not limited to one language and both give an exemplary example of how things can be done. The Internet Archive is much more structured, organised, relatively few people are involved but they are involved in a professional capacity. The Wikimedia Foundation involves people, communities to make new information available, as people volunteer their effort there is less structure, things get done when they get done.

When the Internet Archive provides the library, the Wikimedia projects provide the books and the people to read stories in the library. All people are welcome but like in a real life library not all the books are there. As both organisations provide a work in progress, it is exciting to know that such brilliant projects exist and that we are part of the world that makes this happen.
Thanks,
        GerardM