A #Wikipedia club at a #University in #Mexico

Leigh Thelmadatter
Sometimes the stars align and one can combine something one loves with what pays the bills. This is what is happening to me this fall semester with Wikipedia and the teaching of English.
I’ve worked to promote Wikipedia as a way to improve language skills, but it hadn´t received much traction. This semester, I proposed a Wikipedia Club at my university, ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México, and it has been a hit! Thirty five students have signed up, at least three departments (languages, communications and journalism) have pledged support, we had our first event, a “translate a thon” last 20 August, and I now mentor about ten students who are working with Wikipedia either for partial credit or, in the case of four students, independent study for their last English class.

The network of organizations behind Wikipedia is what draws interest to the Club and working with Wikipedia as a school project. Grade inflation and other factors have made getting the degree only the most basic requirement for getting work after graduation. Students need ways to enhance their résumés and create contacts before leaving school in order to stand out from the multitude that also have a sheepskin in their hand. Wish I had learned this a long time ago!

Working with Wikipedia and Wikimedia offers opportunity for students in many different majors, from technical fields, law, business and straight up humanities as the “wiki-world” not only needs people to do research and writing, but also to promote, sort out disputes and improve the dang wiki-code!

In countries such as Mexico, where learning a second language is extremely important but hard to “sell” to students, the international nature of Wikimedia is a great way to demonstrate the opportunities that speaking English, French, German, etc. offers to them. Most don´t even realize the interest the world has in Mexico!

#Hindi #Wikipedia has 100K or 10.00.00 or one lakh articles

News on the mailing lists has it that the Hindi Wikipedia has one lakh articles. A lakh is 10⁵ and it is one of those numbers we happily recognise as a cause for celebration. So, congratulations to the Hindi community and lets hope that this auspicious occasion will translate in a project that will be increasingly popular.

A lakh is a unit in the Indian numbering system. These numbers are written differently from what most of us are used to. It just happens to be the same as 100.000. Numbering systems are defined in standards and, the appropriate standard is the CLDR.

Given that we do support languages and consequently peculiarities like different numbering systems, there is a Bugzilla bug asking for the support of the Indian numbering system. It has been scheduled for proper attention and, that is a sign of the Wikimedia Foundation doing good for all the cultures it supports with its projects.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Eid Mubarak

It would be good when our Wikimedia communities can be happy and cheerful. The amount of e-mails we get nowadays seems to me much less then it used to be in the past.

A happy tone allows us to wish each other well and give the best wishes whenever it is opportune. It helps us feel good and really, truly and honestly it makes me happy whenever people wish me/us well.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Making an app out of keyboard mappings

When a #Wikipedia title like ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟ cannot be typed on your keyboard, what do you do? One way of coping with a bad situation is using the Gyanpad app created by Arjuna Rao Chavala.

What it does is using several layers of the Google Virtual keyboard API. Sadly this API has been deprecated but, it still works. It is one way of finding articles in Indic languages, using an app that makes use of interwiki links is another.

This is the keyboard layout for the Hindi Inscript keyboard. Google does provide you with the option to try the keyboard out.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#MediaWiki is used by the visually impaired

#Wikipedia edited by the blind? How do they do it and, particularly what tools do they use?

The first thing that comes to mind is the use of systems based on Braille. Braille was originally developed for the Latin script but there are implementations for other scripts.

There are Braille implementations for Indic scripts, they are using a common system called Bharati Braille. A transliteration where Roman letters with specific diacritic marks i.e., symbols written above or below a letter, is used to write text in Indian languages. This Roman transliteration had been in use for many years and the idea behind Bharati Braille is to use 63 cells as a special script to represent text uniformly in all the Indian languages.

Bharati Braille Reference : Oriya

Braille systems for computers are expensive so there is a need for alternative technologies. Enter eSpeak, a compact open source software speech synthesizer that works for many languages including Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam and Tamil.

The quality of the system varies per language; there is often a lot more that can be done to improve the quality and make it more understandable. It does however provide a tool that works and is freely available as it is open source.

The video below is a presentation that explains how eSpeak is used to edit the Malayalam Wikipedia.

Spreading awareness of tools like eSpeak is important as it enables people to use computers, it opens the Internet to them and as you can see it allows them to use MediaWiki to the fullest.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The #MediaWiki advanced toolbar

Not all the #Arabic characters are available on the advanced toolbar. In order to scratch the itch of missing characters, Amir added "Arabic extended" characters. As you can see, even for him there are characters missing from the fonts he is using.

At the WMF we are working on implementing WebFonts; this will allow us to provide everyone with fonts that do include all the Arabic characters. When a widely used script like the Arabic one is incomplete, you can deduce how relevant it is to provide fonts for scripts that are not as popular.

Clearly, supporting scripts is necessary when we are to share the sum of all knowledge with all the people on this planet.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Think globally, act locally

Dedalus or Ad Huikeshoven is a Dutch Wikimedian and accountant. He has been a member of the audit committee for quite some time. It is therefore of interest what he has to say of the annual fundraiser.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The Wikimedia Foundation is a global organisation with a global mission and a global vision. Every year a lot of money is collected to financially support its organizational and technical infrastructure. The foundation and the chapters maintain a track record of raising funds on time and on budget, and every year for bigger dollar amounts. Changes in the design and banner and donation landing pages follow evidence based research findings for best effect.

A dozen local chapters of the Wikimedia Foundation participate in the online fundraiser. Chapter participation is part of the success of the last fund-raisers. Growth in dollar amount collected was partly a result of an increase in chapter participation.

All Wikimedians should be thankful to the many volunteers around the globe who have devoted time and energy to get a chapter organized. Institutionalizing a legal entity requires a lot of tough work. I am very glad fellow Wikimedians are willing to go through these motions. Eventually it pays of.

At Wikimania this year quite a lot of people were heavily upset by a letter and resolution from the board of the Wikimedia Foundation about the fundraiser. I happen to serve as a community member on a board committee, that is, the Audit Committee. The scope of its audits is the Wikimedia Foundation itself, not the chapters per se. My position is that I would love to see all local chapters participating in the annual online fundraiser or working towards participating in the future.

The Wikimedia movement as a whole has a responsibility to ensure accountability to donors about money received through the online fundraiser and the way that money is spent. Providing a link to the latest financial statement on [[m:Reports]] is a transparent way for a chapter to show they have fulfilled their accountability responsibilities toward donors. A September 1 deadline has been set for chapters to show financial reporting compliance for this year.

You can find links to recent financial statements for ten chapters that participated in the last fundraiser on [[m:Reports]]. The score so far is eleven out of twelve. Eleven down, one to go. Ok, have I mentioned Wikimania yet? Let me tell you this: I really enjoyed Wikimania this year (my first Wikimania ever). And I really would like to thank the local team from WMIL for organizing such a great event for the global movement as a whole. So, they have been very busy. In my humble opinion they should be forgiven that this year their financial report is late.
---Ad

PS just after I submitted this blog post there was this. Keeping my fingers crossed for the last financial report...

#Mifos #localisation; scratching your own itch

The #translatewiki.net community is quite diverse and everyone has their own sweet reason to contribute. Mifos is an open source application for organisations who are working in the microcredit business.

When you want to learn why microcredit is important for so many people, watch the video.

When a microcredit business wants to use Mifos, it really helps when the software has been localised in the language of the people administering these loans. At this time Mifos is being localised in Telugu because it will be implemented in Andhra Pradesh.

Mifos is open source, it is localised at translatewiki.net. We appreciate it when the software is implemented as widely as possible. It will professionalise a business and this will provide its customers with an improved and more consistent service.
Thanks,
       GerardM 

The #Dutch in #Bangladesh

When you study the history of Bangladesh, sources can be found as far afield as the Netherlands. With source texts in Dutch, handwritten and in old Dutch at that it is hard to piece together the background of historical artefacts as the old silk factory in Boro Kuthi.

Historical Boro Kuthi, former Dutch Silk Factory

Boro Kuthi will become a heritage site and the Rajshahi City Cooperation asked its people to provide information documents of the sites historic importance. As many of the documents can be found it the Netherlands, there is a call for volunteers to transcribe and translate the original documents.

It is quite an interesting project: Dutch archivists are volunteering their time and they seek people to transcribe the old Dutch and modernise it, translate it into English and even Bangla. This is the kind of project that would make sense as a Wikimedia GLAM project as well.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Arabic characters to display the #Qur'an

Readers of #Wikipedia are still expected to have all the fonts on their system necessary to display the texts they are about to read. The Arabic fonts on Ubuntu for instance are not enough to show all the characters used in printing the Qu'ran.

The technology used in printing is not necessarily the same as the technology used in displaying on a computer screen. The result is that several characters used when printing the Qu'ran are missing in Unicode. The King Fahd Glorious Quran Printing Complex has as one of its ambitions to bring the Qu'ran to the Internet and consequently brought several proposals to the Unicode standard and the ISO/IEC10646.

As you can see, quite a number of characters are missing for me. As reading the Qu'ran, requires a high quality font, it would be a gift to the world when the font as used and developed for displaying the Qu'ran becomes available under a Free license. This will ensure that everyone can see and read the Qu'ran as it has been handed down.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikimedia #Incubator improvements

The URL may be a bit cryptic: http://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wn/aa but it will show you the screen below.

The last two parts of the URL together indicate if a project exists in a particular language either as a full project or as a project on the Incubator. As you can imagine, a little tool that helps establish the status for a (potential) wiki would be nice.

As some ideas are obvious, it is good to know that SPQRobin is already working on just that. Robin is continually tweaking the Incubator and the result has been that it is easier to start new projects.

When you have ideas to improve the incubator even more, please let him know.
Thanks,
       GerardM

When USA #copyright rules are too restrictive

The moment when when sources lose their copyright restrictions is not universal. Three countries with rules that are not as restrictive as required by the WMF are Australia, Canada and India. Their Wikimedia chapters and communities have to abide by the American rules when they are to use Wikimedia's Wikisource, Wikibooks or Commons.

Wikilivres is a personal project by Yann where sources can be found that are suffering under the more restrictive USAmerican rules. When you visit Wikilivres, you find more than 3,000 books and documents, and 1,000 images in 16,028 pages from more than 750 authors. There are "main pages"  in fifteen languages; it is big for a site run by one person.

Yann is a long time Wikimedian and, when a credible organisation wants to take over this project, it is more then likely that he can be persuaded to hand over the reigns. As a request has been made for an Indian project for publications out of Indian copyright, this is a great opportunity for chapters to collaborate on.

It will serve as a full project in our Wikimedia movement and it will give us the opportunity to celebrate when books, sources or images can be moved to the WMF projects.

Copyright is restrictive, it harms the dissemination of culture and knowledge. Adopting Wikilivres is a great signal to countries with overly restrictive copyright rules.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#translatewiki.net is done with #Wikimedia #Mobile

The work to make a #MediaWiki extension to support mobile devices is entering its final testing. Every developer with an interest in mobile support is asked to have a go at the new PHP code. These are the open issues.

Thomasz plans to switch over from the Ruby platform around the fifth of September. As a consequence the continued localisation support for Wikimedia Mobile is no longer needed.

It is the time to thank all the people who worked on Wikimedia Mobile and ask their continued support for "Mobile Frontend". Currently there are 44 messages and these are what it takes to get ready for the next generation of MediaWiki mobile support.

Commons "Mobile Frontend" main page

The one feature that stands out for me is that it is no longer only Wikipedia that is supported. It is time for the other projects to see how they want to take advantage of the new mobile possibilities.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Why #Wikibooks or #Wikisource

When classic literary works  like Khosrow and Shirin (Persian: خسرو و شیرین) are read from a library, when they are bought in a book store, you expect a faithful copy of the original. Sadly there are always people who insist for their own good reasons that the original classic is not appropriate.

The notion of a woman observed while bathing is timeless, there are many stories from many cultures. When people are intent to rewrite history, they cut of parts of classical statues, they blow up statues, they remove parts of a book.

Including classical works like Khosrow and Shirin in Wikibooks is an appropriate answer to the cultural destruction preached by some. Referring to the original text in our projects and including illustrations in the text should be our answer to a censor.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Making an app out of interwiki links

When a #Wikipedia title like ଇଣ୍ଟରନେଟ cannot be typed on your mobile phone, what do you do? You type it the way you can type the title and rely on interwiki links to display the article to your mobile phone.

The idea is simple and elegant and, it has been implemented with the Oriya Wikipedia in mind. It looks like this:

interwikiredir.appspot.com/or/Internet

 

and it will send you to the Oriya Internet article.  The application is created for Oriya however, it does allow for other languages as well. Just replace the or with the language code of another Wikipedia.

There are all kinds of possibilities with such an application. When it is integrated with the Babel extension, it could provide an article when the article does not exist in the requested language. 

Srikanth Lakshmanan created a really nice program that deserves a much wider application.

Thanks,

      GerardM

There are few messages to localise for #Kiwix

Kiwix can be localised at #translatewiki.net. and it started with 14 languages already localised. Two days later, 18 languages are completely localised and for 6 languages the localisation is underway.

With only 79 messages to localise, there is not much effort needed to localise Kiwix. Given that it is the client that does support the openZIM format, it helps support the Wikimedia Foundation in its effort to have a credible off-line strategy.

Check out the status, and help us to create the best off-line experience for your language.
Thanks,
       GerardM

The big missing #Wikimedia chapter

The Wikimedia movement consists of many parts, in no particular order there are communities, projects, associated projects, wikis, chapters and a foundation. This movement is growing rapidly in all its aspects. There is enough talent and cash to ensure that the parts of the movement operate efficiently and achieve their goals.

As there are many parts, it is important to be clear about who, what and where.

• a community is a group of people working towards a mutual goal
• a project aims to achieve a generic goal e.g. Wikipedia, MediaWiki, Wikisource 
• a wiki is a website where a community works on a project
• an associated project is a project outside of the WMF involved with the aims of the movement
• a chapter is an independent organisation promoting the goals of the Wikimedia movement in general and the Wikimedia projects in particular. a chapter is typically based along national borders
• the Wikimedia Foundation is the organisation that keeps the servers running, develops the MediaWiki code and coordinates the world wide activities particularly where chapters do not reach

Understanding this becomes complicated once you start appreciating the one big anomaly in all this, the special status of the USA. It is the country where a significant part of both our editors and readers are US American. It is where most of our donations are coming from. It is also a country without its own national chapter.

When the activities of the WMF office are separated from the activities in  the USA, a global organisation is left that is more obviously there for any and all chapters and a national organisation is left who will be better able to support any and all activities that take place in the US of A.

A separation like this will make it much easier to consider extra or alternate organisational models. It is one of the more popular threads on the mailing lists. The current complexity is what makes many fine suggestions unrealistic.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The #Dutch in #Kerala

A little known fact is that the Netherlands had a presence in Kerala, India. People in Kerala can learn about the Dutch episode in their history on DutchInKerala.com.

The website was restrictive in its license, they had selected a license that is quite popular on other websites. The author of the website and the Dutch embassy intended the information to be widely available.

When they were asked about the reason for their license, it became clear to them that re-licensing should seriously be considered. They did and, they have.

The website is in Malayalam and it does provide rich information.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Dear #Wikimedia chapters; a request for funding

#ttfautohint is a tool that helps people who design fonts. It removes a part of the design process that is a mystery to many font designers, it is boring and it is one part of what makes designing fonts expensive. This software provides functionality to Windows, Apple and Linux. It works well for the Latin script and it will provide prototype support for Arabic, Chinese, Japanese and Korean. It will provide hooks to other font design tools.

When you look at the Arabic example, you will notice that the characters do go from top right to bottom left. This is how I am told Arabic looks like when a "proper" font is used.

Santhosh is enthusiastic about ttfautohint; he pointed it out to me. When you watch the video, you will learn that a sum of $ 30K is needed to improve the system. They are looking for the full funding by October first.

This is the kind of investment that will lift the look and feel of all of the Internet. It is open source. It plays nice with the development of the MediaWiki WebFonts extension. It is something that any chapter flush with cash can support. When a chapter like the English chapter has given their excess cash to the WMF, it is likely that they may consider such a request from the English chapter positively.
Thanks,
       GerardM

What makes a #language a living language

The #Wikimedia Foundation provides hosting to any and all languages that are able to comply with the minimal requirements that have been defined in the language policy. For languages that have sufficient vitality and infrastructure this is a godsend; a Wikipedia is seen as recognition for a language.

Wikipedia is well positioned for this because of one early design decision for MediaWiki; the exclusive use of Unicode fonts. All languages that are supported with fonts are in luck. Recent work on for instance right to left languages will percolate into production in the near future, we are working on WebFonts and input methods and all this will be a game changer for many of the existing Wikimedia languages.

The Wikimedia Foundation has always been clear that its primary interest is not in the preservation of languages but in providing information to the people of the world. It has taken its time before the WMF is getting involved in increasing its support for languages. This is driven largely by the lack of growth in the "global north" and an astounding room for growth in the "global south".

When a language is a living language, it will at some stage have a presence on the Internet. Failure to do so will mean it will be increasingly marginalised. There may be mitigating circumstances like the use by a locked in community like the deaf and their many sign languages.

In the WMF language committee there is a big discussion about what to do with the languages that do not have a WMF project. Should we go out and stimulate people to start a WMF project in their language. Should we technically enable languages for the Internet and stimulate its use in the hope of a living WMF project at some later date...

Projects like indigenoustweets.com are very much the kind of projects we can support to further the use of more languages on the Internet. Even the use of Facebook or Google+ is a net gain when people use their language on the Internet. I am all for it, I am even for providing social software at the WMF. When we can help people use the Internet in any way, it will stimulate a language, a culture. First you give them their voice and then we may find a request for a new Wikimedia project. At the same time the chance of finding content about such a culture and language in for instance the English Wikipedia will increase. Now that, the sum of all knowledge, is what the WMF is about.
Thanks,
      GerardM