#Wikia, the state of its #internationalisation and #localisation

In November I invited Wikia to be even more awesome thanks to its friends. At translatewiki.net we have a great community of localisers who work really hard to do the best for their language and on their platform of choice.

When you look at these statistics, you might get the impression that the support is waning. This however is completely false as there has been a big influx of new extensions, there is just so much more to do.

Wikia's Tim Bartel informed me that implementing the LocalisationUpdate extension is qualified as "high" on the list of priorities. When this functionality finally makes it into production, I predict that even more people will come to make Wikia the awesome experience it can be.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Versailles, a glorious #GLAM project

Louis XIV with a map of Versailles

When Louis XIV commissioned the palace of Versailles, he created a palace that was widely admired and copied by his peers but never equalled in sheer scale and splendour. The palace and its grounds define the art of its day and age.

The French chapter is really happy to announce that Benoit Evellin will be "wikipédien en résidence" for a full six months. The mission of Benoit: 

• Teaching the teams of the Castle and the Centre for Research, including scientists, about how Wikimedia projects work and how valuable they are 
• Increasing the awareness of the Castle audience about Wikimedia projects, their functioning and value
• Identifying existing articles on the Palace of Versailles, its art and its heritage, people and events
• Improve and facilitate a community of editors to improve these articles
• Working with the education department on similar topics

There is already an article about the palace of Versailles in 51 languages. One challenge will be to engage our communities and improve the information about what is surely one of the biggest treasures of French culture.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Do you need #JavaScript support for the #MediaWiki 1.17 release ?

Much JavaScript work has gone on in many of the #Wikimedia projects and with the imminent release of the 1.17 release several JavaScript programs are going to fail. The new ResourceLoader introduces alternatives, improvements and modernised functions.

Many JavaScript applications use deprecated functions which may break with the release of 1.17. Although legacy functions will still work for now, check out the list of deprecated functions and their modern replacements.

There are hints and tips, and when you have questions, its talk page is where you can drop your questions. Alternatively there are the IRC channels #mediawiki and #wikimedia-dev where among others Krinkle will be available to help you out.

As time goes on, issues with MediaWiki 1.17 and its performance are solved so the moment where your project will be upgraded is getting nearer. Please help yourself and prepare yourself. Another resource is the log of the office hours with Roan and Trevor that can be found here.

If there is one lesson to learn, then it probably is that standards evolve.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Getting under your skin

When you use #MediaWiki, chances are that you personalised your wiki by developing a skin. Many wikis rely heavily on the monobook or vector skin. Some have been more adventurous and developed a skin of their own.

When you invested a lot of effort in a skin, it can be tricky to upgrade to a later version of MediaWiki. With work under way on the skin system, there is a call out to give us your skin.

We want to learn if your skins or ideas for skins can be realised in the new skin system. Particularly the skins that define things beyond the current restrictions is what we are looking for to break open the rigid structure of our current skins.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Indian growing pains

#India is of strategic significance for the #Wikimedia Foundation. An office will be opened, a chapter has recently been started, there is a vibrant mailing-list that brings wonderful news of public attention and projects that are doing well and finally there are Wikipedias and other projects in many languages.

On so many levels things are looking up. However, there are issues. As India has such a massive population, spread over what is a sub-continent, people do not know each other well and their priorities are conflicting. The question is very much one of how to give everyone enough room to do well and stay involved.

My advise would be to involve people as widely as possible and be really careful about sensitivities.

The one thing where the chapter can do better is in understanding and sharing power. While a chapter is intended to support the Wikimedia goal in its country, it is to be seen as a power for the good. The recent fracas about who administers the India mailing list is a case in point. It is not relevant that there are enough administrators, it is relevant that there are seen to be enough impartial administrators. Administrating a list is work and when this work can be shared between people of the different communities, the work gets done and people will be reassured.

At this moment most visible activities in India are by the native language communities while power is visibly with those preferring the English language. This does not have to be by design, and if this is so, the best way is to share power and influence as widely as possible. This will help us achieve what we aim to do and our aims are inclusive.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Get the #Wikimedia girls

For the past two months there are several discussions about how to get more girls involved in Wikimedia community. There are several news about that (the New York Times even made a "special" about it with several specialist opinions). Sue Gardner create a mailing list to discuss the problem  and now that is – in my opinion – one of the most productive mailings list out there right now.
 
Today, in the other hand, there is a posting in foundation-I mailing list created when they discuss the possibility of change MediaWiki to allow us to see a female version of “user” in our user pages (and I can be “usuária:Beria” and not anymore “usuário:Beria”) which in fact is a topic very discussed in Gender Gap mailing list, the possibility of be called by female words if we want to.
 
Well, apparently not everyone think that is a good idea. According with the boys – and here a note: Yes, there was no girl discussing that in Foundation mailing list, they are deciding our life for us, like in Middle Ages – girls “don’t” want to be called as girls, because since the female version of words are made by adding someone in the male version, that is “anti-feminist” and that “wouldn't really help to attract more new female users.” 

Well, I can tell what will for sure not attract us: That male centrist culture, that “James Bond” culture that treat girls as accessories and believe we can’t decide what we want, and decided that only because tech world is full of males we just are “used” to be treating as one.

Some of us will not use that option, for sure. But here we are talking about right to choose. And we can’t choose unless we had that option. Not all girls vote today, but when, back in 1920’s, girls fight for that; they fight for have the right to choose.

Maybe boys can imagine that is nothing, but that is very important for girls. And that small step can open the door to girls feel more include in Wikipedia “A place so, so good, who even call me as a girl”.

Thank you Béria Lima for being a guest on my blog.
        GerardM

IRC office hours about upgrading #Wikipedia

Some Wikis have been upgraded to the new MediaWiki release. There are at the moment two kinds of problems;

• problems with the MediaWiki software
• problems with templates and other local issues

The local issues are unpredictable and their effect can be that pages will just not show any content. This is not good. Many of the choices made do break when the MediaWiki software is upgraded. As the releases do not happen that regularly, a lot of problems have had time to grow.

To give you an heads-up, there will be an IRC meeting on Monday at 18:00-19:00 (UTC) (See all timezones). Roan and Trevor will be available to help out by answering questions and informing you about what will break and why.

It is your opportunity to help ensure that the upgrade of your wiki will go smoothly.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Bahman 22nd. 32nd Anniversary of Iranian Revolution

Dear Gerard. Hi.

Today is bahman 22nd. 32nd Anniversary of Iranian Revolution. It's usual. Blogspot is censored The government temporarily blocked all SMS, and Internet access last year after the 2009 Iranian election protests(yup. here, this article is censored too). So the censorship might be temporary.

I'm not interested in politics, but it affects us. I can't read your blog. I was wondering if you could create an alternative means for reading your new blog posts. like a mirror, copy,download, newsletter mail, ... I'm asking this because "blog" is about "news" and if blogfa re-opens late, there is neither time for nor benefit in reading so many posts

Since I  don't know whether this is hard to do or not, I only expect your help if this is "very easy"

thanks, Ruhollah

At Fosdem, the ability of governments to throw the switch on the Internet and to censor was a theme in many presentations. The most prominent presentation was by Eben Moglen who introduced the freedom box and spoke at length about the need for mesh networks and the decentralisation of social software.

Facebook, Twitter, Blogspot and even Wikipedia are easy targets for those regimes who do not abide by the freedom of speech. If my blog was somewhere on a server, Ruhollah would still be reading my blog while he now needs a way to bypass the censor.

The freedom of speech has its value when it is accompanied by an ability to participate. The value of social media to its users is in the ease of reaching out and communicating to friends and "friends". Some legislations have freedom of speech enshrined in law. It is time to enshrine the freedom to communicate in the software itself. Software that is resilient and has no kill switch.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#MediaWiki 1.17 - II

The new MediaWiki release was briefly installed on the Dutch #Wikipedia. There were several things that made it necessary to roll back to the previous release.

The biggest issue was that the Wikipedia that is number 10 in size and typically uses 1% of the performance, needed considerable more performance. There was a visible spike and there is a need for further analysis to learn what is at the heart of this.

Another issue was that all the parser functions broke. This was because the magic words had been given Dutch translations and the original magic words no longer worked. Tim Starling came up with a solution that ensures that the magic words will always work.

More time will be needed to prepare the roll out for this eagerly awaited release.
Thanks,
      GerardM

1500

Thanks,
     GerardM

The female form comes at a cost

#MediaWiki is one of the few applications that is aware that women are addressed in the female form in Slavic languages. When you specify "female" in your preferences, it will provide a user interface that respects the grammatical female form.

For the Russian Wikipedia substantially more people indicated their preference for being addressed as a woman. Given the quality of its localisation the experience must be quite good. At translatewiki.net there is documentation on the implementation of sex based discrimination in the user interface.

We are currently at a stage where it is possible to implement [[gender]] in messages. A next stage could be when all messages with [[gender]] in any language can be selected either for implementing or proof reading the messages with a sex determined message. This will make it easier to improve the quality of our localisation.

For MediaWiki projects it would be a good thing when anonymous users have a way to signal their preferred form of address. When the gender based bugs get appropriate attention, it will be obvious that all this will impact the caches.

As there is a considerable push to attract more women to contribute to the Wikimedia projects, the attention given to gender based differentiation is an objective way to gauge to what extend the WMF is willing to put its money where its mouth is.
Thanks,
      GerardM

ver·bi·age (vûr b - j, -b j). n. 1. An excess of words for the purpose

When a text is written, it is either written with an audience in mind or the audience is assumed to be similar in tastes as the writer. Typically people have limited patience with texts that are too wordy. Newspapers are preferably full of pictures that are big and colourful when articles are to attract attention.

With all the attention on high brow, must have features like citations, and references Wikipedia is becoming more and more intellectual and harder to read. Check out the English main page; words and more words with pictures so small that details are lost. The size of footnotes and references in a featured article is bigger then the size of the illustrations ...

It was a pleasure to leaf through paper encyclopaedias; when a picture caught the attention you read a bit only to move on. Sadly much of the art of illustrating seems lost for now. Is it a victim of our braininess?
Thanks,
      GerardM

The next #Mifos Marie is called Elsie

The Mifos developers are hard at work preparing their next release. As is customary, they dedicate a release to one of the women who are helped with a micro credit. For this release, the honour goes to Elsie Saldivar from the Philippines.

At translatewiki.net we have received new messages that are ready to be translated. They come in new modules and so far three modules have been added and there are more modules to follow.

When you read the product road map, you learn that this release is about business intelligence and analytics. To achieve such intelligence and provide the analytics in many languages there will be many more messages that will come our way.

The best way to deal with this is to regularly check things out and help out by localising messages for your language. At translatewiki.net we prefer a steady trickle to a flood of new messages as this ensures that there is often something to do.

The people who use Mifos or consider using Mifos, can help themselves by working on the localisation in their language. Our volunteers can help their fellow country men and women by doing the same.

Those who have the least are helped by providing them with a micro credit. Helping the organisations who provide micro credits is what this is about. Helping them is like manufacturing nets so that these organisations can provide people with nets to fish.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikimedia monitors with #WatchMouse

When a website goes down, you can no longer inform about the status of your website. When you have as many websites and services as the Wikimedia Foundation and when you have a public spread out all over the world you want to provide and have great information about performance.

WatchMouse offers a network of monitors located all over the world who monitor the availability of services. At status.wikimedia.org it provides an external place where everyone can check on the availability of Wikimedia services.

Seeing the first iteration of this service is wonderful. As it is, it provides great information on the technical infrastructure. What most users will be interested in is in learning the status of their project. This will need some careful thought because checking it for more then 800 projects is easier then presenting it nicely.

Having this ready while we are waiting for the installation of release 1.17 is absolutely wonderful.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Localisation for #Kiwix

Now that the #Wikimedia Foundation has decided to concentrate on openZIM for off line readers, Kiwix has gained a lot of prominence because it is still the only software that uses it.

Functionality to make a selection of articles for off line reading is being developed by PediaPress. This will be done by extending the Collections extension.

The good news is that work is now under way to internationalise Kiwix. This will make it possible for Kiwix to be localised at translatewiki.net.

As the presentation of data in the openZIM format is separate from the data, other off line readers like WikiReader or OkaWix have the option to adopt this format as well. When they do, they will profit from the work by the Wikimedia Foundation as well and when they do there will be a healthy competition for the hearts and minds of our off line readers.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#MediaWiki 1.17 (continued)

Yesterday the installation of the latest version of MediaWiki on the Wikimedia projects failed twice. Performance problems caused the Apache servers to fail. There were several issues recognised and many of these have already been fixed.

The problem has everything to do that the fact that the projects are so big that it is hard to predict in advance how it will work out. The fact that a new release is not regularly implemented does not help either.

The situation is now similar to a Chinese juggling act; when will there be a good moment to try the 1.17 installation for a third time, who will be needed and what procedure will be used. The plan seems to be that a decision will be made tonight and tomorrow there it will be show time again.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The #Ada initiative

The Ada initiative, named after one of the heroins of computing, intends to increase the participation of women in open technology and culture. The goal as specified is to help women to build their careers in this field.

Wikipedia is specifically mentioned as a project where female participation is to be encouraged. I hope that this project will be a roaring success and that the inclusion of Wikipedia will allow this project to quickly become a project with a global reach.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#MediaWiki 1.17

Finally, after a long period of gestation, the Wikimedia Foundation is moving its projects to the next release of MediaWiki. As this process is on its way as I write it, the system may be a bit sluggish, maybe a bit broken for now.

If you care to be a help do not start shouting that the end for Wikipedia is nigh. It is not. Lurk on IRC if you want to know what is going on and watch the work in progress that will get us all many of the improvements we are waiting for.

When you find things that are a problem, wait until you notice that the real issues have died down. That is the moment to check if your problem has gone away and, if it is urgent is the moment to see if your problem can be addressed now or if it is better to write a bug in bugzilla.
Thanks,
     GerardM

PS I learned at FOSDEM what hours some people have been making to get to this far.. Thank you guys !!

#Wikipedia loves #Bangalore and #monuments

In Bangalore twenty eight Wikipedians went out on a photo walk. They visited the historical Basavanagudi area and a lot of pictures will be uploaded to Commons. According to the Wikipedia article there are many prominent landmarks and areas and as the photo shows, there must be many photos of Bangalore monuments.

The Wiki loves Monuments was a great success in the Netherlands; many monuments were photographed and a lot of meta data became available from the organisation that looks after monuments as well. Obviously India is huge and there must be many many more monuments then you will find in the Netherlands.

Think for a moment that a project like Wiki loves Monuments gets an Indian edition with a Dutch result. It would be awesome and, there would be so much more for the world can learn in Wikipedia about India and its cultures.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Usability at #translatewiki.net

Translatewiki.net has so many changes that there is the option for  "translations only" or "filter translations" on the recent changes. When you combine this with "New messages" providing the messages in threads, you will agree that a lot of thought has gone in getting the message you are looking for..

Another thing that is different is the "language selection". Usually the selection of languages is done by providing the ISO code and the name of the language in that language, but here it is a choice to make the selection more precise. For this reason the names of languages are shown in the language of the user interface.

As you can see of this screenshot of the recent changes in Farsi, many of the languages are still in English and, I have been told that some of the names of languages are wrong. So the question is not only how to add the missing names for languages but also how to improve on what is already there. If memory serves me well, we use the information from the CLDR for this. Translatewiki has a long standing policy to use as much as possible information that is contained in standards so we urge our translators to help out where it has the best effect.

You may also have noticed that the box is not properly right to left as is appropriate for Farsi, but I believe that one is not hard to remedy.
Thanks,
      GerardM