Great news from the #ngadc, they dig the public domain!

" With the launch of NGA Images, the National Gallery of Art implements an open access policy for digital images of works of art that the Gallery believes to be in the public domain. Images of these works are now available free of charge for any use, commercial or non-commercial. Users do not need to contact the Gallery for authorization to use these images. They are available for download at the NGA Images website (images.nga.gov). See Policy Details below for specific instructions and notes for users."

This is the kind of news that makes for happy reading. It provides a basis for happy collaboration that starts with the GLAM people in our Wikimedia movement. When you read the terms of use for the images that are in the public domain, they make sense.

The realisation that public domain is best expressed by providing the public with access to this important resource. Once the GLAM people have a working relation, there are so many more things that can be done. This is a great step forward and the world is a better place because of it.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Illustrated #Wikispecies Tree

Wikispecies is one #Wikimedia project that is probably the least well known. It exists only in one language; English. It aims to include all the species and all the other levels of the nomenclature of plants and animals.

The nomenclature is a system that relates many different levels together. As the information is available in Wikispecies and, it is possible to present this in a different way. The resulting "tree of life" is really interesting and it deserves attention. Read the announcement on the Wikispecies village pump below and check out the illustration of all apes at the bottom.
Thanks,
       GerardM

I've created an interactive illustrated tree of life based on the Wikispecies data. You can check it out here. (See Village_Pump#Taxon_Tree, especially EncycloPetey's comments, for discussion of what such a tree can and cannot be.)
Apart from being fun to play with, one purpose this can serve is to help spot erroneous links on Wikispecies. For example, the plant family Melastomataceae is currently listed as containing Dionycha, which is a group of spiders. I've already corrected a bunch of these errors locally, so they're no longer visible in the tree linked above. However I wasn't sure how to go about correcting them on Wikispecies. Presumably what the person who entered "Dionycha" intended was something like "Dionycha_(Plantae)", so I shouldn't just delete the link, right? In any case, here is a list of erroneous links I noticed.
If you're interested in using this as a tool for verification, here is an uncorrected version based on the most recent dump (2013.01.05). Some further issues are also discussed there.
-- Lifetree (talk) 03:41, 9 January 2013 (UTC)

The #Wikimedia #Commons featured pictures

I have counted to ten .... waited some more, and more ... and am not happy with the Featured Pictures practices of Commons. They are only about technical considerations and an absolutely stunning picture, a spectacular picture good enough to win the Wiki loves Monuments 2012 world wide competition fails to qualify.

On one level, I do not need to care; it is for that in-crowd to play their game. On the other hand they expect us to cherish their best in the picture of the year. In a world that is not black and white, most of their pictures are nice. Most pictures however do not impress me as much as the winning picture of Wiki loves Monuments 2012.

Multiple languages, multiple scripts in a #Wikipedia article

Many Wikipedia articles describe something "foreign". For instance Moscow is known in the Russian language as Москва. It is a best practice to mention the native name of a subject and include the pronounciation expressed in IPA as well.

When an article includes text in multiple languages, it is important to be able to identify what text is in what language. Several purposes are served in this way. 

• provide support for language technology like web fonts and input methods
• enable data mining for the building of spell checkers.
• create frequency lists for words

The standard for identifying text as being in a specific language in a web page is well defined. At the start of a text the language should be identified and the end of text in that language needs to be identified as well. 

When a Wikipedia article is parsed, such tags make it possible to enable relevant technology for that language. This is of particular relevance for the "smaller" languages because a Wikipedia in that language is quite often the biggest corpus. Research of such a corpus is a lot easier when all words that are explicitly in another language are marked as such. 

Adding such tags is relatively easy. To a large extend bots can be used to add them. Making use of these tags in how MediaWiki works is something else. Tagging is however the first step that needs to be taken and, there is no reason I know of why this can not be done at this time.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikidata needs #localisation

A lot of hard work has gone in developing Wikidata. It is getting at a stage where the localisation of the "Wikibase - client" extension (only fourteen messages) needs to be done.

Of particular interest is the localisation in Hungarian; they are likely to get the Wikidata functionality implemented as one of the first.

As always, localisation of software is done at translatewiki.net. As always there is more that you can do for your language.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The growth in traffic of #Wikipedia from #mobile phones

A growth of 44% compared with the previous month and a growth of 142% compared to the previous year is exceptional. The traffic of 3,709 M in December 2012 is up from 372 M in July 2010 in other words there has been a tenfold growth in less than 2 years.

It does vindicate the effort that goes in making MediaWiki look good on mobile phones.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#MediaWiki for dyslexic people

#Wikipedia states: "It is believed that #dyslexia can affect between 5 and 10 percent of a given population". There are some 315,113,038 USAmericans and therefore there are something like 23,633,478 people in the USA who have a problem with Wikipedia; they find Wikipedia hard if not impossible to read. 

The Website of Dyslexia USA has on its information pages a very simple drop down box. It offers 8 different background colours. Each background colour helps a different group of people with dyslexia. 

It is a cheap and easy way of growing the numbers of readers of Wikipedia in the USA. Add to this the Open-Dyslexic font we are waiting for and we help them to the resource that has been there for all the rest of us.

PS It will work for people in other countries or who speak other languages too.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Dutch #government loves #WikiLovesMonuments

When a small country like the Netherlands runs the Wiki loves Monuments competition for three years in a row, you would think everything has been photographed. You would think that every monument has been described. Because of  the great cooperation with the governmenmental organisation for Cultural Heritage (RCE), it has been quite clear how many monuments there are; from the start there were lists compiled from its databases.

Obviously the RCE has its own photos of most of the monuments; they are used to do whatever is needed to maintain the necessary information. The RCE has been taking pictures for many years. Currently there are some 555.000 images in its collection. All of them are now available under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 NL license. All of them will be uploaded to Commons. 

With all these images available on Commons, this collection is available to people from all over the world who want to learn about the Dutch cultural heritage and its monuments. As this is a cooperation with the RCE, it comes with references to the RCE database where much more information can be found.

Some images like the one to the right show exceptional moments like the three pictures showing the hoisting of the church tower of the church in Bodegraven in April 1973 ( 1 2 3)

Add to the over half a million pictures from the RCE the pictures of Wiki loves Monuments and there is an obvious challenge; how to find the pictures of the same object. The good news is that the RCE numbers were available on the list.. A Commons picture of the tower in Bodegraven standing tall can be found here.

Combining all the related information is relatively easy to do in a database.. Maybe, one day Wikidata will be the platform making all these connections for us.

The RCE has given us a great gift, it is for us to use it and make it available in a usable way.
Thanks,
        GerardM

Fixing a lamp with #3Dprinting

The next #copyright battle ground is likely to be all about 3D-printing. Consider the story of the IKEA lamp in Wired; the shade was broken and a designer created a dozen new shades. New shades were printed at a cost of $5,- and the availability of a 3D-printer for several hours.

When a design can be exactly replicated at will there is no need for the factories or shops of IKEA. Consider the impact on retail shops; there is no need for a lot of storage room; all that is needed is a powerful 3D-printer to provide customers what they want.

Obviously factory produced goods are cheap. The cost of a product is very much in things like transport, distribution, overhead and breakage. At this time 3D-printed goods are more expensive to produce. This will change and a new cottage industry will come to exist.

Designs owned by global players can be easily copied and changed and there is little to prevent this from happening. Obviously there will be a lot of copyright posturing and industries expecting royalties because 3D printers are there just to rip off the rights holders...

Ah well, it is the likely way of progress. I however like the notion of more local production.
Thanks,
    GerardM

A #font for people with #dyslexia III

Yesterday I met a teacher. I also met someone who was a counselor in Mali. She was really enthusiastic about the news that there is a freely licensed font that works especially well for people who suffer from dyslexia.

Today I received a mail where I was told that the availability of the Open-Dyslexic font will be the basis of a possible project in Mali.
Thanks,
      GerardM

A #font for people with #dyslexia II

The good news is: the Open-Dyslexic font will be part of the initial roll out of the "universal language selector". The font is already available for some 25 languages on Wikidata and translatewiki.net where the "universal language selector" is already deployed. These languages are listed below.

• en - English,
• af - Afrikaans
• ca - Catalan
• cy - Welsh
• da - Danish
• de - German
• es - Spanish
• et - Estonian
• fi - Finnish
• fo - Faerours
• fr - French
• ga - Irish
• gd - Scottish Gaelic
• hu - Hungarian
• is - Icelandic
• it - Italian
• lb - Luxembourgisch
• mi - Maori
• ms - Malay
• oc - Occitan
• pt - Portuguese
• sq - Albanian
• sv - Swedish
• sw - Swahili
• tr - Turkish
• wa - Walonian

Many languages are missing in the list. For me the lack of nl - Dutch is obvious. But I do not have to break a sweat to come up with languages like sr-Latn id tl li gl fy sl. Languages like Indonesian or Tagalog are spoken by hundreds of millions of people. 

When you consider that languages with special characters like Icelandic and French are in this list it is obvious that many more languages are already supported by this font. When you consider that the WMF has good relations with the creator of the font it is more than likely that missing characters for your language can be added  to the font.

So check out first if all the characters used in your language are supported by the Open-Dyslexic font. If it is, ask for it to be enabled either by making the request on the support page of translatewiki.net or by requesting them on bugzilla. You can also send a mail with this happy news to all the teachers you know. When it is not, identify the missing characters and, ask nicely for them to be added.

Open Source is such a wonderful enabler. Consider; not only is this font available to all the teachers and the sufferers of dyslexia, it is also available for use on websites like Wikipedia. Given that our aim is to share in the sum of all knowledge this is an important step in the right direction.

Thanks,

       GerardM

A #font for people with #dyslexia

Today I was able to make some difference. I met a teacher who is specialised in children with "special needs". The conversation got onto the subject of language technology and I mentioned the existence of the Open-Dyslexic font.

She was so happy to learn about the existence of this font. She asked me to send details today so that she can install the font on her pc tomorrow. This week she is going to meet some thirty persons who will be happy to learn about the existence of this freely licensed font as well. A lot of children are going to benefit.

I cannot wait for the Wikimedia Foundation to make the Open-Dyslexic font available for use on its wikis. It will affect so many more people. It is likely to be mentioned in the international press; it is that relevant.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Tagging #British paintings in public ownership

Another great British initiative: adding tags to the entire national collection of oil paintings in public ownership in the United Kingdom. What makes this project relevant is the huge number of volunteers collaborating on this.

The Public Catalogue Foundation has something to say about copyright. Sadly they are wrong. They say:

Is there copyright in the photographic image as well as copyright in the actual painting?
Yes, there is. The photographer uses training and skill to photograph a painting and he or she holds copyright in that photographic image. However, as part of its agreement with collections, the PCF agrees that its photographers will hand over copyright in all their photographic images for collections’ own use.

There is a word for this point of view: copyfraud. When this point of view is typically British, it is just that.

The PCF may claim copyright on the tags added to the paintings. There is no mention about this.
Thanks,
       GerardM

#Wikivoyage pictures; the fun of being there

The coin dropped for me. Once Wikivoyage is a running Wikimedia project, it is about travelling, going on a holiday, seeing the sites. All these articles need their illustrations. I think that this is to be expected. It is obvious to me what kind of pictures they can be.

Many of them will be holiday pictures and, there is nothing wrong with that. These pictures will have a use, they illustrate Wikivoyage.

What I like about it is that they broaden the horizon of Commons and hopefully inject Commons with many more fun images.

The Commons challenge will only become more relevant; what will it take to make it the wiki where everyone can easily find a great and appropriate media file.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Depressed because of a #photo #competition

In many a #Wikipedia there is an article for almost every subject. All these articles need illustrations and  Commons is where these illustrations are stored. Some subjects are hard to illustrate. Subjects like depression or schyzophrenia for instance.

In my home town there was a competition to create something that expresses depression. There were prizes to be won and the jury included a professional photographer. There were many great entries to the competition. Having a professional photographer in the jury however was a mistake.

When you run a competition, there is a point to it. This contest had the intention to bring attention to the subject of depression. This means that the winning picture has to be published. Obviously it should be part of the conditions of entering the competition. It wasn't.

The professional photographer told the winner that the picture was of professional quality and that it is worth money. The result is that the picture is only available on the Intranet of the organisation running the competition.

The picture you see did not win.. It does show the Almere skyline. The weather was a bit depressed as well. Thanks Tamar for sharing your picture that "also ran". For me this picture is much more the winner because it is available.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Celebrating the Dead, Wiki Style!

In Mexico, the dead are celebrated once a year during an event called “Día de Muertos”or Day of the Dead. It is a syncretism of indigenous beliefs with Catholicism. While it is observed in almost all of Mexico (and now parts of the United States), how it is celebrated varies from one place to the next. For example, local observance can last from one to three days. The “day” is 2 November, but those who observe three days begin on 31 October. Preparations for the event begin well before this and usually include the creation of an altar called an “ofrenda” (offering) which includes traditional Mexican foods, fruits and other produce in season and if at the home, photos of the deceased being honored along with offerings of things in life that they enjoyed. At my home, my mother’s photo is accompanied by Milky Way candy, Pepsi, a cup of tea and even a pack of cigarettes. In addition to ofrendas, it is traditional to clean and decorate family graves on this day and even spend a day or night there. During the month of October, many schools and cultural institutions sponsor events as well.

The library at my school, ITESM-Campus Ciudad de México in Mexico City, wanted to participate in some way with Wiki Loves Libraries which occurs in October and November. We decided one of the best ways we could introduce working with Wikipedia to students was to sponsor a photo contest, similar to Wiki LovesMonuments, themed for this holiday. While there are a number of photographsalready in Wikimedia Commons, they do not really begin to tell the story of this very rich tradition. The contest has three categories with prizes: 1) the best photo (which I call the “Wow” category) 2) the most original photograph (of something no one else thought to take a picture of) and 3) the student that uploads the most photographs of different things to Commons between the contest period which is 5 October to 5 November 2012. The three categories are there to encourage different kinds of photography, not only good pictures with good cameras and techniques, but photos of local traditions, preparations and more as well as increasing the breadth of photographic coverage. It not only allows students who don’t have access to expensive cameras and training a chance to win, it also aims to capture images and themes which are not already in Commons.

The wiki page for the event is at http://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Education_Portal/Projects_and_Programs/ITESM-Campus_Ciudad_de_M%C3%A9xico/Wiki_Loves_D%C3%ADa_de_los_Muertos

Open #Wikipedia for people who are #Dyslexic II

Great ideas are not uncommon. I am really happy to learn that Reedy had the idea to support the Open-Dyslexic font in MediaWiki before me. As you can see in the screen shot, progress has been made.

It is now just a question of dotting the i and crossing the t and pushing it out.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Open #Wikipedia for people who are #Dyslexic

We have the technology to make an important improvement for the usability of Wikipedia. The technology exists in the ability to provide web fonts from within MediaWiki. The opportunity is to improve the readability for people who are dyslexic.

What it takes is to enable web fonts functionality on for instance the English Wikipedia and allow the use of the Open-Dyslexic font. The license is a bit weird for a font but it is within what the WMF is comfortable with; the CC-by license.

It should not take long to appreciate why this is a good idea.. it should not take too much after that to help people with dyslexia.
Thanks,
    GerardM

About the #quality of #Wikipedia

Sometimes a new item is too good to be true... and then again..

I have no comment about the relative quality of Wikipedia compared to Congress's $100M research service. What I find of interest is the implied value that is put on the quality of Wikipedia. Eh, I assume the value is $100M a year.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Use Europeana's TimeMash for #WikiLovesMonuments

#Europeana has a rich repository of images of many, many monuments. They show what monuments looked like once upon a time.

Wiki loves monuments is a photo competition where people are take pictures of monuments what they look like at this day and age.

The TimeMash application adds a dimension to the pictures that can be taken; it helps photographers make pictures from the same angle. The combination is powerful; pictures taken in this way are more interesting.

It is possible to have both images on Commons and even used in the projects. The challenge is to register and link such pictures and to have a tool to switch between such images.
Thanks,
     GerardM

The need for both #OpenID and #OAuth

Many words have been used on the merits of OpenID and OAuth. There are many misconceptions and many of those have everything to do with perspective. In order to get a better understanding I asked on the Wikitech mailinglist a use case for OAuth. The answer I received helps.

OpenID is an identity management system. It allows users to authenticate to one site using another site as their identity. A use case for this is, for example, using your Facebook account to log in to Wikipedia. This may be useful, as it would allow users to more easily register for Wikipedia

OAuth is a third-party authentication and authorization system that allows outside applications to do stuff on behalf of a user. The reason for this is because currently toolserver applications, etc. authenticate to Wikipedia using a plaintext username and password, which is extremely insecure for a number of reasons I will not elaborate on here.

When you read the answer, there are some observations to make. The most obvious is how do you assure that the software that is to use OAuth will be secure. Given the power of many Toolserver tools how do you make sure that only trusted people make use of the Toolserver functionality.

Enter OpenID, it does provide identity management. OpenID is able to provide more information than just "this is indeed the indicated identity" as part of the "OpenID Attribute Exchange". When the Wikimedia Foundation implements OpenID as a service, it will be possible to identify the users that have a "bot flag" on the user profile. 

As it is, the Toolserver tools are not necessarily secure. With OAuth it will become even less secure to run the software because it will be the software itself that includes the authorisation to run, never mind its configuration, never mind how it is used or by whom. When OpenID authenticates users, it becomes possible to ensure that only people with a bot flag can run Toolserver software on the production Wikimedia projects.

To make the use of the Toolserver tools secure, it is necessary to complement OAuth with OpenID. Oauth in isolation will make the Toolserver tools easier to use but it does not make them more secure to run.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikimedia Commons, a relevant history

A long long time ago when Commons the wiki was created, it was only a dream. The dream was to have one place where all the images could be shared freely among all the Wikimedia Foundation projects.

It was a dream with really practical implications. At that time sharing a picture meant uploading the same picture to another wiki. At that time removing a picture because of a copyright violation was removing it on one wiki and perhaps on one or more wikis as well. This was an inexact process with inadequate results. The dream of Commons was to store a file once and use it on any wiki. The dream of Commons was that administrative procedures would be significantly enhanced because everything could be done once and everything could be done right.

Commons was created and it took several months before pictures on Commons were available on the WMF projects.

Today Commons fulfils much of this promise. Media files are shared on all the WMF projects, you can even enable this functionality on external MediaWiki wikis. Most of the duplicate files have been deleted and a single copy only exist on Commons. Nowadays the administrative procedures are much more effective. Everybody involved in Commons will agree it is not perfect, far from it but, Commons is thriving nonetheless.

This notion of adventure that existed in the Wikimedia Foundation seems dead. I am convinced it should be revived. There are some signs that it is possible ... in things like moving towards agile development ...

More later
Thanks,
     GerardM

a #threat assessment for #Wikipedia

The people who take care of mail send to Wikipedia are often informed that Wikipedia is not secure; "everybody can edit Wikipedia". This is actually intentional because Wikipedia is the encyclopaedia that everybody can edit. The real risk is when people do not recognise they are invited to edit. This is a genuine issue and it is something that receives a lot of attention.

When you consider security for Wikipedia, the people most at risk are its editors. There are several threats they are exposed to. Several of these are issues computer security can deal with.

• threat to the anonymity of a registered user
• threat to user credentials

When the potential threats are evaluated, it is important to realise that the severity of these threats is not obvious. It matters considerably where you reside, what your ethnicity is or what your belief system is. It is important to minimise any threats because once people no longer feel free to contribute it will damage the "neutral point of view" that gives Wikipedia much of its relevance.

With the implementation of SSH it has become considerably more difficult to learn what a person is doing when working on Wikipedia. This has been a real improvement. However, user credentials and particularly passwords are considered not really secure. Read for instance what Wired had to say about them. It is explained that improvements can only be expected when changing the infrastructure of online security. This will probably do a whole lot more good than lecturing people about how they should change their behaviour.

The question is if the WMF is open for such considerations. So far the talk is about "Nascar" ?!?! to me this sounds remarkably like bikeshedding and is very much beside the point.

Thanks,

     GerardM

#OpenID for the USERS of #Wikipedia, PLEASE

Again a discussion about the use of OpenID for the Wikimedia projects flared up. From my perspective the one perspective missing is the one of a computer user who is fed up with the failed security that is provided by passwords.

The problem is that systemmanagers only consider security in isolation. It is the solution that is to be adopted for their system or systems. Obviously in a perfect world, a user will have a separate password for each website or program. The world is not perfect and most people use one or a few passwords for everything. The world is not perfect and passwords of many big websites have been uncovered by hackers. Consequently many passwords used by Wikimedia contributors can easily be guessed by the bad guy who are in the know.

The problem with passwords for a user is that they are unmanageable. Too many systems and websites, too many interfaces seriously impact the security wherever passwords are implemented to provide security. It is theatre and the fool is the part you have to play.

OpenID provides a serious alternative. It allows for a single place with a single password that authenticates to any and all websites and services that accept security in this way.  It is a serious alternative as long as any and all accept other OpenID. It will be really welcome when the WMF considers security for its 456 M users. It is obvious that a large percentage also frequent websites like LinkedIn and solidify the argument to implement OpenID.
Thanks,
     Gerard

#Font support by #Google and #Wikimedia

The quality of the Amiri font has been recognised by the Wikimedia Foundation for some time; it has been provided in the Web Fonts extensionn for some time and recently in an other bit of "read the whole article to get to the good news" it became part of a Wikimedia supported jQuery library for web fonts.

Google has also recognised the Amiri font; they make Amiri available through their "early access" program. Google supports multiple (freely licensed) Arabic fonts as web fonts. The biggest difference for me between the two programs is that the WMF library has your server provide the fonts while the Google offering has the fonts provided through the Google infrastructure.

Both Google and WMF support fonts for many scripts. The question is what they will do when the font has technical requirements that are more than usual.

Recently the Tuladha Jejeg font for the Javanese script was given a free license and the Wikimedia Foundation will assess if they will include it in their Web fontd extension. There may be a technical problem; it makes use of the SIL Graphite technology. The question is to what extend do browsers support this technology.

When Google is serious in supporting the rare scripts, the opportunity to support the Javanese script through the Tuladha Jejeg font may be reason enough to put some extra effort in enabling support for SIL Graphite.

<grin> One may hope for Google to do more good, we know they can</grin> <seriously> For the WMF there is hardly another option when they are to support Javanese </seriously>
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Internationalisation is more than conversion of numbers

A friend read my last blogpost and pointed me to a recent presentation about the current best of breed internationalisation for JavaScript. He had been testing the new jQuery internationalisation library published by the Wikimedia Foundation and was astonished that the one thing "everybody" does was missing.

His question was: "where is the conversion of numbers and dates?". Obviously MediaWiki "does" the conversion of numbers and dates, it is just not part of the library that enables what is most crucial for us in Internationalisation; the translation of the messages in more than 280+ languages.

My friend Andrew was thinking of extending the library with the conversion of numbers and dates. It makes sense to have them included however, forking this really new library at this early time is "evilish". Talking to Santhosh, the developer of this library is the thing to do. It is, because in this way any future improvements in the existing 280+ languages or the missing 6000+ languages will be shared by anyone who updates to this library.

YES, I know jQuery is Java and not JavaScript. But I also know that my friends at the Wikimedia Foundation support the localisation of their JavaScript.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#jQuery and #Internationalisation of YOUR application

There has been a lot of good news about jQuery this week.

• The Khan academy announced that they are providing training for computer science and they started with jQuery
• A Webmonkey report states that jQuery is installed on half the internet websites
• Hidden in a Wikimedia blogpost is the news of a library to provide a full i18n framework that supports parameter replacements and grammar-, plural-, and gender-dependent translations.

The news of this jquery.i18n library is wonderful news. As it is the same software as used for the internationalisation of MediaWiki, it represents the current knowledge of the 280+ languages that have their Wikipedia.

When your software is open source and when you adopt this library to implement internationalisation, you are that much closer to make use of that wonderful community at translatewiki.net. They are already doing a great job for many applications, why not yours?

Thanks,

      GerardM

Learning to type #Arabic; #Wikisource exercises

The one skill that makes it easy to use a computer is typing with ten fingers. Particularly when you learn a new script, you need to learn to type again. Learning this skill well means exercises.

I remember when I learned to type on a typing machine that I hated the futility of these exercises. Now that I need the skills to learn Arabic, I can think of exercises that are of use to everyone.

The WIKISOURCE for the Arabic language.

All Wikisources have the ProofreadPage extension installed. So all that is needed to tap in the vast pool of people that are learning to type Arabic is having pages ready using this tool.

My skill in Arabic is such that I can not easily find these. When I have, the Arabic Wikisource has its first volunteer that will exercise and do good at the same time.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Learning a new #script .. #Arabic

As I am learning a new language with a script that is new to me, I find the Internet not yet the resource it is in languages for the Latin script.

There are several obstacles; I have to configure my computing devices for the Arabic script and keyboard. I have to find the characters on my keyboard and only when I do will I get the facility that I need.

The one thing that would make my day is to have a typing tutor that is ready for an international public. This means that the instructions are available in multiple languages for the same input method for the same language. When these parts are separated from the code, there are three specific parts.

• the user interface
• the exercises
• the input method or keyboard layout itself

This allows the same software to be used for multiple input methods and scripts / languages. The software can be localised at translatewiki.net and the typing tutor can be distributed with the input methods themselves. 

Thanks,

      GerardM

Multilingual cluefull bots

The #BBC writes that #Wikipedia without its bots is doomed. It is a good story, a happy story and well worth a read. Wikipedia as you know is not only the English language Wikipedia, there are over 280 Wikipedias in different languages. They are not all created equal; most of the smaller Wikipedias have less than 100.000 articles, a small community of editors and their own issues with people who think it funny to write penis wherever they can.

The BBC article writes about "Cluebot NG" and is said to reside on a computer somewhere. It would be a great project to move Cluebot NG to a Wikimedia server and make instances for all the other languages. First for the 40 something languages with more than 100.000 articles and when its lessons are learned there may be scope to expand.

There is a committee supervising the bot activities, it will be wonderful when it has the potential to expand its expertise as widely as possible.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Levels of competence for #Arabic in #Wikipedia III

Tools like #Google #Chrome use an engine to do the rendering for them. For Chrome it is Webkit. It is responsible to connect two items that are in separate HTML elements and make sure that the rules for the Arabic script are addressed.

What started as an observation in MediaWiki became a Chrome bug and is now a Webkit bug.

Webkit is used in multiple browsers.. This makes a fix relevant for Apple's Safari browser as well. The one question left is what will it take to bring a fix in production within those browsers in the near future.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Levels of competence for #Arabic in #Wikipedia II

It does matter what browser you use. Google's Chrome browser is the reason why the Arabic Babel templates.

If you use Chrome to browse Arabic websites, you want to add your vote to fix this bug. You vote by marking the star that is at the bottom of the page.

I am really pleased how quickly this issue was analysed. It is now for Google to support its users who use languages in the Arabic script.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Levels of competence for #Arabic in #Wikipedia

As my competence in the Arabic language is growing, I added Arabic in my Babel information. To my amazement what I read is wrong. The "ba" is written on its own while it should be connected with the following "aliph". It is one of those peculiarities of the Arabic script that a character like the "ba" is expressed depending on its position in a word.

I had a look at translatewiki.net to understand why it is wrong; as you can see the "ba" or ب is 

connected to a wiki link and the word is not formatted after what is in the variable.

It is fun to learn other languages. What is really amazing is that I can find glaring issues like this one.
Thanks,
     GerardM

European cranes want to be free

  

This wonderful video of European crane courtship is currently copyrighted and not freely licensed. The video comes with a button that allows you to embed it in a website and its article has a button where you can order the video.

The video is on the website of Stichting Natuurbeelden and they made a nice offer; 50 of their videos will become available under the CC-by-sa license. There are many great videos to choose from and for all kinds of reasons, the initial offering is to choose at most 50 of them. 

Organising this selection will not be easy and the relevance of some videos is very much in the context of nature in the Netherlands. European cranes are breeding again in the last few years. When the fifty videos are selected and when they are used in our projects, these videos will be seen quite often. At the moment when I write this, the number of views for this video is only 136.

Thanks,

     GerardM

Can everybody read #Wikipedia?

A lot of effort goes into making "Wikipedia the encyclopaedia everybody can edit". The result is wonderful; there are Wikipedias in over 280 languages, a big effort is under way to make editing even easier and as so many people do edit, it became a rich almost authoritative resource. When Wikipedia goes off-line, students despair.

People do read Wikipedia, it is very popular but the notion that Wikipedia is hard to read is not really considered. Take for instance today's featured article.There are too many words on a line. For many people this makes it hard to read, some give up on an article or on Wikipedia.

Yes, you can change the way content is displayed on a computer screen. The problem is that people who have problems read websites in the default format.

The Wikimedia Foundation does have the expertise to consider these issues. The people who do have already too much on their plate to support the current software development. However, the proof of the pudding that is Wikipedia is in people READING its content and that makes this a key concern.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Something positive to say about #Apple

Apple is innovative, it routinely adds new functionality and quality to its products. Many people love Apple products and pay a healthy premium for the latest and greatest.

One of the recent innovations goes by the name of "retina display". It is a high resolution screen of such quality that the human eye does no longer see individual pixels. Innovations like the retina display add demand for high quality images and, it does stimulate the use of high quality images and the use of SVG or scalable vector graphics in WMF projects like Commons and Wikipedia.

The improved technology used in Apple hardware stimulates quality improvements at content providers. In this way Apple stimulates a healthy and innovating content ecosystem. As other hardware suppliers are continuously catching up with the leader of the pack, there is real value in buying Apple.

I did  it, nothing negative to read in this post about Apple.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#GLAM - About recognition

 Left Hand Bear, Oglala chief

This years #Commons picture of the year contest was different from last years. The many old images that were so lovingly restored and featured the Commons main page were not there any more.

A thread on the mailing list reminded me about all the hard work that gives images of the past a new lease of life. The image of Left Hand Bear, the Oglala chief is used a lot. As you can see below it is even used to make ties, mugs and buttons.

The image of Left Hand Bear has been lovingly restored by Adam Cuerden. The original of this image is at the Library of Congress and I owe a debt of gratitude to both Adam and the LoC.

Adam restored an image preserved at the Library of Congress. Knowing this, I am sure that this is indeed an image of Left Hand Bear. The image is obviously in the public domain and as such I am not required to acknowledge either the LoC or Adam. I may put the image on mugs, ties and buttons and sell them.

For both Commons and Wikipedia, acknowledging the LoC and Adam bring important benefits. Acknowledging the LoC provides provenance of the image, this is the equivalent of providing a source to a fact. Acknowledging Adam links the much improved image to the original. It recognises Adam for his work.

Acknowledging the LoC and Adam IS a best practice. It is a best practice promoted by organisations like Europeana. It is a best practice that is not a requirement, it is however something that we should aspire to.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Kiwix - the interview

#Kiwix is the tool that allows you to read the content of a Wiki offline. It has been developed with Wikipedia in mind but is equally usable for Wikisource or Wikibooks. I am really happy to have interviewed Emmanuel who knows all the ins and outs of this wonderful piece of software.
Thanks,
     GerardM


What is Kiwix and what is it used for
Kiwix is a software that wants to enable people to read Web contents without internet connection. It's a reader which works with ZIM files containing all the content. It's used to access Wikipedia offline, by reading pre-packaged Wikipedia ZIM files. It's mainly used by people who want to have an encyclopedia, but are too poor to have access to the internet. It's also used,for example, by travelling people (plane, ship, train), prisoners and students at school. 

Can you tell us something about its popularity
We have users all over the world and the audience is increasing quickly: we have had 25.000 downloads of Kiwix in May. 

In how many languages is Kiwix supported 
Thank to the Translatewiki Web site andits community, Kiwix is localised in more than 80 languages. We also provide content (ZIM files), mainly Wikipedia, in around 25 languages. But we want to do more: thanks to a grant of WMCH soon we will offer ZIM files of Wikipedia in all languages. 

How do you support languages written in scripts like Malayalam, or Tibetan
Contents are Web contents and Kiwix itself is a sort of browser getting the Web pages from the ZIM file instead of the Web. So, we do not have special handling in Kiwix itself to render the contents. Everything should be well organised in the ZIM file, for example by using Web fonts. But, from the Kiwix fulltext search engine point of view, this is challenging. Natural languages have a lot of particularities. Kiwix uses the Xapian search engine and tries to integrate CLucene. We do our best with them to offer the smoothest user experience possible. 

Do you provide fonts with Kiwix for the languages that use these scripts
The Wikipedia ZIM files we are preparing still do not provide the Web fonts. Already for a few months, the integration of Web fonts has been a part of the Wikimedia projects, so we have to fix that ASAP, this is not a big challenge.

For some languages like Chinese and Serbian, we show the content in two scripts ... Can Kiwix do this as well ?
Kiwix does not provide any transliteration tool for now, but all the technology is already there in the soft. We use a powerful unicode library called ICU (http://site.icu-project.org/) which can do that. We
want to use it to allow users to do custom transliterations. C++ developer wanted there!

Kiwix uses the OpenZIM format ... can you tell us more about this format
The format is called ZIM. There is a volunteer driven project called openZIM  created a few years ago to specify the format and develop a standard library. The ZIM format allows to put millions of contents together, to compress a part of them, and add Metadata. In the end, you get only one file, which is, at the same time, extremely compressed and allows a constant and quick random access.

Nowadays, many publications are in the EPUB standard ... can Kiwix handle this as well
Kiwix is not able to deal with EPUB, but in the future it will. We think EPUB & ZIM format are complementary and we want Kiwix being able to perfectly deal with EPUB. Our plan is to integrate "Monocle" to do that. Also there, developers are wanted.

How do people find content available for Kiwix
Kiwix has its own content manager, so you can download content from Kiwix itself. But you may also download the ZIM file from the Kiwix Web site (http://www.kiwix.org) or using the Mediawiki Collection extension.

In the future, we want to have a platform (something like Itunes) to offer  really easy to find and download contents (both ZIM and EPUB files). We have started a project in that perspective. We need your support! 

What is your biggest challenge at this moment in time with Kiwix
Building Kiwix-mobile for Android. We will have a first release in autumn. But we have many other projects running at the same time and others for which we still need volunteers.

Thank you
Emmanuel