What to do on the Wikimedia board; imho first things first

It is a stated objective of the Wikimedia Foundation to have "knowledge equity". When you care to know the practicalities, just search Wikimedia in one of the 200 languages with the least Wikipedia content and compare it with a search in English. English provides you with vastly more of everything.

Nowadays, "knowledge equity" is accepted and strategic at the Wikimedia Foundation. This acceptance is a recent development; gone are the days when a most senior WMF executive stated that one Wikipedia, at most five, should be enough. 

Given that we now support some 300 languages, it is the translatewiki.net community has always been the cornerstone to the knowledge equity we provide in our projects. Without its high quality internationalisation and localisation efforts the knowledge equity we provide would not have been possible. It follows that any and all knowledge equity for a culture, a language has as its precondition that the tooling, the environment has been properly localised.

It becomes really strategic when the tooling is provided by outside parties. A key role in ensuring that our references remain available is performed by the Internet Archive. For me it has been on my wish list for a long time that the software of its WayBack Machine, Open Library and FatCat are localised at translatewiki.net. Any and all of our language communities that find the resources will benefit our projects and strengthen us in the shared aim of "sharing in the sum of all knowledge". 

When we are to achieve "knowledge equity", the first thing we should provide is a level playing field. With all tools critical for the maintenance of our projects properly internationalised and available for localisation as a movement we achieve the most basic objective; we enable all our communities to be their best.

Thanks,

       GerardM

How to find pictures of a თახვი (it means beaver) or a Wisent? Please help!!

Wikimedia Commons is the biggest repository of freely licensed media files. It serves a global multi lingual community editing Wikipedia and it has the ambition to serve students as well. When you live in Georgia and you don't speak English, you search for a "თახვი" and this picture is all that you find.

There is a tool for that. Hay's sdsearch does a good job when its interface is localised. Sadly, no such luck for Georgian. Wikimedia produced a tool as well; Special:MediaSearch does a good job. You have to know that the tool exists and when you do, you find that for Dutch it does not work at all. 

It is suggested that you can change the preferences for best result. I fail at getting the results that Special:MediaSearch used to provide. There is no documentation.. Please Help!!

Thanks, GerardM

#Translatewiki.net the @Wikimedia movement infrastructure most people even do not know

Just consider this, there are more than 200 functioning Wikipedias and this is only possible because people localise the MediaWiki software in over 280 languages. It makes translatewiki.net, the website where all this work happens a strategic resource to the Wikimedia movement.

Internationalisation (i18n) and localisation (l10n) are an integral part of software development. It is an integral part of a continuous process and it requires constant attention. The day to day jobs are well in hand. The localisation itself is a community effort and with developers continually expanding the software base a continuous effort is needed of the translators to keep up with their language. This is hard and for many languages it is a struggle to keep up with even the "most used messages".

Managing this effort is a continuous effort, it is essential to maintain the i10n and the localisation optimally. It follows that it should be obvious what messages have the biggest impact first on the readers and then the editors of a Wikipedia. What should be in the "most used messages" changes over time and when it is considered strategic, such maintenance is to be considered a Wikimedia/MediaWiki undertaking. 

Translatewiki has always been an independent partner of the Wikimedia Foundation and it has always been firmly part of the Wikimedia movement. Given that partnerships are a key part of the strategic plans of the WMF, the proof of the partnership pudding is very much in how it interacts with a translatewiki.net. TWN does not need to be part of the WMF organisation for it to fund TWN, it is clearly a quid pro quo. The WMF should even encourage TWN and other partners to collaborate for their i18n and l10n and enable this for strategic purposes, strengthening these partners globally. 

Thanks,

     GerardM

#Wikidata - Tir 1386 is a #month

A month is a part of a year and, a year is part of a calendar. Tir 1386 is a month in the Solar Hijri calendar.

As you know, both a month and a year are imprecise in any calendar. For this reason it makes sense to qualify a month by indicating the calendar it belongs to. For the overly precise among us, other qualifications or statements could be added.

Tir 1386 is the month Tir in the year 1386. Some months have a variable number of days; the number of days could be another qualifier. The months referred could include predecessors and successors and so could all the individual months. They could include the range of days that make up such a month (think February)..

The fa.wikipedia makes use of the Solar Hijiri calendar; some call it the Persian calendar even though it is not only used in Iran. As a consequence, the years and months have a Wikidata item. When something happened in a specific month, it is not possible to include this fact in Wikidata without losing precision. Months of different calendars do not map.
Thanks,
        GerardM

#Wikidata #serendipity - Valerie Aurora

In a demonstration, searching for a "Valerie" I just picked one. It was Valerie Aurora and as I met her in Berlin, it was nice to add some extra additional information. Above is her "Reasonator" page shown in Russian. As you can see, her father has a label in Russian and the labels for "computer scientist" and "activist" need to be added.

What would be useful is for the Reasonator functionality itself to be internationalised and localised.
Thanks,
      GerardM

The distribution of page views for #Wikipedia

More people are reading Wikipedia than ever before. The year on year growth for all Wikipedias is 35% and the prognosis for October is that this will at least continue.

At the bottom of the page view statistics you will find the distribution of the page views grouped by the size of the Wikipedia.

What is really interesting is that this last year the Wikipedias that are not in the top ten by size are growing faster than the 10 biggest Wikipedias. This change is around 2%.

So far the most attention has been going to the English Wikipedia. It has grown 28% YoY. When you compare this to the growth of all Wikipedias combined (35% YoY), it is obvious that the numbers suggest to put more effort in the other projects for best effect.

The most obvious and cheapest effort the WMF could take is by making sure the developers take their responsibility for the internationalisation of the software they write. The backlog of support requests is here.
Thanks,
     GerardM

The battle of Verdun in #Wikidata

In a previous blog post I wrote about dates and my wish for entering and displaying dates in the Islamic calendar. As a result there were several interesting reactions.

For some people it was news that Wikidata supports dates. The question put to me was: "This Q130847 has geo coordinates but no date". As this refers to the battle of Verdun, I replied by adding the start and end date to the Wikidata item for the battle of Verdun.

One bit of good news is that MediaWiki does support the Islamic calendar, as a consequence the issue of using the calendar got a new dimension. I was also asked if other calendars like the Balinese calendar could be supported. In principle MediaWiki should support any calendar however, I would prefer to start with the support of calendars that MediaWiki supports in Wikidata.

The bug for support for the Islamic calendar in Wikidata was given the I18N label in Bugzilla. I hope that our language team will take an interest in supporting calendars in Wikidata

As it is fairly obvious that the battle of Verdun is a battle, I added "Instance of" "battle". When you look where battle links in Wikidata you will find many more battles that are linked to the concept of battle. I added a few more battles that I just happened to know.

When you look at the info-box for the battle of Verdun, you find many bits of information that we should be able to support in Wikidata. It would be cool when we can.
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

#MathJax is looking for #money

#Mathematics is said to be a language of its own. When you look at a formula, all the logic is in the formula and any text only aids in the understanding. Who cares for text..

This must have been what the developers of MathJax had in mind when they wrote their application. It is all about mathematics and all the rest is obvious eh, English.

MathJax CDN is what the people behind MathJax are asking money for. It provides a service that gives you beautifully presented mathematical formulae in your browser. Because MathJax knows YOUR browser, it does the best for the web page that is provided.

To finance the CDN service, they are asking for donations. I do understand English so I can inform you that at the time of publishing this blog post they had $370.00 in pledges.

Sadly both the MathJax software and the MathJax website are not internationalised. As you can read in this mail, the software will need to be adapted to allow for localisations. When the MathJax developers work together with the fine people at translatewiki.net, they will find people who can advise them on how to internationalise. Recently the JavaScript used by MediaWiki has been adapted to use grammatical gender and plural. Possibly the code or the expertise can be used for MathJax as well.

Once MathJax is internationalised it will be localised in many languages .. There are many proud mathematical cultures and traditions outside of the English speaking world. Given that MathJax is already more or less usable in the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, translatewiki.net is the obvious choice for the MathJax localisation.

When everything is said and done, the request for donations will be made in other languages as well. It surely helps when you address people in their own language.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#multilingweb - #i18N and #l10n testing framework

A subject for the conference about the Multilingual Web is what gaps exist in supporting a multilingual web. Obviously people who are living the multilingual web like my colleagues in the WMF localisation team suffer these gaps. Our team has been asked what to do next and one idea of Amir I love to put forward.

A testing framework for localization
I searched and I couldn't find any testing framework that is focused on localization. Many localization-specific issues must be tested, for example, grammatical correctness of generated messages, text readability in different scripts, support for encodings and fonts, etc. You can find a fuller list in Wikipedia (i wrote most of that section myself). It is possible to test all these things using the current frameworks, but much of it would be manual.

For example, i'm not familiar with any tool that would automatically or semi-automatically create screenshots of all the possible translated strings with their complete context. This would be useful for the translator, to see how to translate a message; for the developer, to see whether any message runs out of the screen or hides a button that must remain visible; and for the tester who speaks the language and wants to see whether all the generated messages are grammatically correct. Currently, a developer must do this manually;
it is time-consuming, inefficient, hard to plan and to maintain, and the fact is that the developers are hardly ever doing this.

Such a testing framework would be really great for so many organisations. At translatewiki.net we support many organisations with their internationalisation and localisation. A framework will make it easy to repeat the testing often. This will improve consistency and quality and makes for a great multi lingual experience.
Thanks,
     GerardM

The #Wikia translation jam

Wikia has projects in more then 100 languages and they have many people working on the localisation of their software at translatewiki.net. In order to make this possible, it is vitally important that the developer write code that is both translatable and well documented.

To make this point to their developers, the developers at the Polish office were all invited to join in a "translation jam". This resulted in 253 translations in just an hour. The comments by the developers were really interesting:

• "Wow, the interface is nice!"
• "This is fast..."
• "Oh, so that's the qqq documentation?"
• "We should give people links to trac in docs."

Translations, documentation and awareness of the internationalisation process; this is indeed the kind of activity that makes Wikia more effective and responsive.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#WCN11 - #MediaWiki gadgets

At the #Wikimedia Conference 2011, one of the best bits of news was in the presentation of Roan and Timo. They have been working on the rejuvenation of our JavaScript support, this brought us a lot of improvements in the past and now they have their sites firmly on the MediaWiki gadgets.

In summary, the syntax to support gadgets is worse then wikisyntax on steroids, the same gadget may exist in a gazillion manifestations on any of the 800 Wikis, internationalisation is a joke, gadgets as they are are awful. Awful because its infrastructure sucks not because of a lack of hard work by a community of people fulfilling a need.

Consequenrly the syntax has to be cleaned up, gadgets are to be shared among the many wikis, it should be able to use all the JavaScript improvements and as gadgets are to be shared, internationalisation is necessary in order for it to work well on all those Wikis.

The best news; Roan and Timo are already testing gadgets with many of the improvements in place. The gadgets are able to use MediaWiki messages and Siebrand and Roan are talking about implementing gender and plural support for JavaScript.
Thanks,
       GerardM

A log fit for reading by its public

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

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

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

Sniffing at #translatewiki.net II

Having a #Tiki developer check us out is exciting. What is even more exciting is that it did not stop there. A few Tiki localisers came along, signed up and are doing some work.

It is testament to the maturity of translatewiki.net that we can be excited by this interest. Excited and happy. It is also very much in the spirit of open source to have many flowers bloom.

Never mind what will be the outcome, we are keen to learn how the Tiki community appreciates what we have to offer.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Sniffing at #translatewiki.net

#Tiki as a project is quite different from #MediaWiki. Its strength is that it combines a Wiki, a CMS, a Blog, a Forum, groupware and more all together in one package. All that and a granular permission system make for a powerful package. Unlike MediaWiki it is not centred around a group of content projects.

As Tiki has its own internationalisation and localisation platform, it was quite surprising to find one of their developers experience translatewiki.net and look into what it will take to have its localisation done by the twn community.

The biggest advantage of Tiki as its own localisation platform is that you translate the string where it appears and you find it is localised on that installation. The biggest advantages of translatewiki.net is its community and the wish for the efficient use of time spend by localisers.

What may be attractive to the Tiki community is

• the use of the translation memory
• they can concentrate their developer efforts on the core Tiki functionality
• a community happy to work on many software projects
• the opportunity to localise projects like StatusNet or OpenStreetMap
• a knowledgeable community happy to help with i18n issues
• twn can coexist with other translation methods .. we prefer not to

We are quite happy that a Tiki developer checks us out, it will be interesting to learn what will come of it.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Toolserver - Magnus Manske

Of all the #MediaWiki developers, Magnus has a special place; not many people can claim their day, for Magnus it is January 25 when his achievements are celebrated.

After initiating next generation MediaWiki, he very much remained involved and he became the king of the proof of concept on the Toolserver. That is to say, he develops working bare boned functionality that scratch an itch.

Once the itch is scratched, he happily leaves his tools for others to embellish and perfect. Revisiting code to implement internationalisation is not his thing, having internationalisation as part of a new project is different. When I blogged about CommonsHelper2, I did not know that Magnus conceived the original version of this tool and to be honest, I did not really care. I care about good open source working methods and the internationalisation of code.

It was pointed out to me that Jan Luca had taken over the maintenance of some of the tools of Magnus. Speaking to Krinkle, I learned quite a bit about how Toolserver is changing, actually improving.

One recent novelty are the "multi-user repositories". They allow multiple people to work on the same tool. This allows Jan Luca for instance to implement internationalisation in CommonsHelper2.

Another thing that is quite relevant is that the barrier to entrance is relatively low. You can have a developer account in a matter of days and publish tools in days. Compare this with the process of getting a MediaWiki developer account...

Even though Toolserver provides important functionality, what it offers is not that well known. It is very much a geek / hacker haven. Promoting tools that are ready for localisation is something that has its place on this blog. Calling out for developers who may be interested in bringing existing tools to a next level, tools by people like Magnus or Daniel are also of interest.
Thanks,
        GerardM

CommonsHelper2 by Jan Luca

The #Toolserver tools most desperately in need of internationalisation and localisation are the ones that serve language communities to bring the best out of what they have locally.

CommonsHelper2 is a tool that helps move media files from a project to Commons. Once media files are on Commons, they can be shared not only among all the Wikimedia projects but also by those MediaWiki wikis who have enabled the use of files available on Commons.

The current version is already available in two languages; English and Hebrew. Having it available in Hebrew enabled a much easier transfer of media files from the Hebrew projects. Once the localisations for this tool get under way illustrations that were so far reserved to a local wiki will get a much bigger audience.

Today the first messages became available in SVN. Jan Luca and Krinkle will have to work on the final touches to make yet another relevant tool ready to attract users from all over the world.
Thanks,
      GerardM

What #Toolserver tool will be next?

At #translatewiki.net the localisation of Toolserver is quite popular; it is not even 24 hours yet and the localisation for several languages is complete. There have been fourteen people active for their language and there are many more languages to choose from when selecting a language on the Toolserver.

When you follow the "MediaWiki CVS" changes, you may have noticed that there has been a steady trickle of improvements to the functionality. Krinkle is doing a great job for us.

The one particularly pleasing thing is the amount of effort that went into the documentation. The intention is to have a quality of such a standard that any Toolserver developer can implement internationalisation for a tool.

Krinkle is quite happy to give a helping hand to the early adopters because that will test the quality of both the software and the documentation. The question is how many tools will be ahead of his "recent Anonymous Activity" tool.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Maybe an #eol and #translatewiki.net collaboration?

The Encyclopedia of Live has long been an English only project. As it became more prominent, the call for multi-lingual support became louder and louder. The Library of Alexandria became involved and its task is to make the EOL available in Arabic.

The trouble with the current software is that it is not only big, the idea of internationalisation has never been considered. Internationalisation is an architecture and consequently there will be a need for a continuous effort to slowly but surely enable more and more of the software for localisation.

Chromis abyssus Pyle, Earle & Greene, 2008

In a big project like this, there will be a steady stream of new messages and changed messages and while the primary interest of the Library of Alexandria is Arabic, the process of internationalisation done right will enable localisation for all languages.

At translatewiki.net we are used to dynamic projects like this and our community is adept at asking for clarification of messages. When developers are eager to get the internationalisation right, they will find in translatewiki an effective partner.

When localisations find their way quickly into production, the Library of Alexandria will find that they bring the Encyclopedia of Life not only to the Arab world.
Thanks,
      GerardM