We are back online!

http://www.omegawiki.org is back online.

I was able to repair whatever I did wrong, so that a fresh install was not necessary. No data was lost.

Thanks to Erik for helping :)

OmegaWiki is down

The server update (new Debian version) didn't go as planned and the server is down.

Sorry...


PS: I did a database dump just before it went down, so nothing is lost.

Give us your support for merging with Wikimedia

So... regarding having OmegaWiki become one of the Wikimedia projects...

The following pages have been redrafted:

• meta:OmegaWiki - presents the proposal, and how it would be beneficial to both Wikimedia and to OmegaWiki
• meta:Requests_for_comment/Adopt_OmegaWiki is where you can discuss this proposal. There is a section where you can indicate your support for the idea, please do :-)

Only with a sufficient number of support will the idea actually be considered by the Wikimedia Foundation.

As you might know, OmegaWiki is currently privately hosted. There are two problems with this:
- the server is slow, because faster servers cost more money which we don't have
- and without an organization supporting us, we cannot receive donations.

The WMF would be a perfect choice to host us.

However, if you know about another non-profit organization which shares the noble ideal of free-knowledge-for-all and which might be interested in supporting OmegaWiki (which means basically hosting the website and providing a structure for receiving donations), please mention it.

Thanks,
Kipcool

Using Wikidata to display links to Wikipedia

Wikidata is a new wiki with a structured database (a bit like OmegaWiki), which is used, among other things, as a central repository for maintaining the interwiki links between the various Wikipedias.

In Wikidata, concepts are identified with a unique ID, like "Q41055". This ID gives you the links to the various Wikipedia articles (see: http://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q208440 ). In OmegaWiki, concepts are called "DefinedMeaning", and also have a unique ID, like "159079" (see: http://www.omegawiki.org/DefinedMeaning:Schachfigur_(159079) ). They can be linked one-to-one with Wikidata IDs. Using the Wikidata ID, a link to Wikipedia is automatically retrieved and displayed on the side.

As usual, the user language is used to redirect the user to the Wikipedia that is in his language. See for example how the link changes when you view the same page in English , in French , in German or in Persian .

Before that, we already had links to Wikipedia, however one link had to be added for each language. The advantage of the new system over the previous one are:

• we don't have to add a link for each language, as we did before, but just put one Wikidata ID.
• the links are automatically updated when they are changed on Wikidata.
• it works even when we don't have a translation in that language. For example, if we have a species, like Spalerosophis diadema that has no translation in French ("Spalerosophis diadema" is language "international") we can still have a link to a Wikipedia article.
• it is an annotation at the DefinedMeaning level. This is more consistent with the other annotations, because it is about a concept (DM), whereas it was previously classified with the lexical annotations (like part of speech, gender, phonetics, etc.)

With the old system, we already created more than 15.000 links to Wikipedia. They will be converted automatically to Wikidata IDs.

Note that the link can work in the other direction too. When we have one-to-one correspondances between concepts in Wikidata and OmegaWiki, it can be used in Wikidata to get for example multilingual definitions for their concepts.

See only the languages you want to see

OmegaWiki supports more than 400 languages. While we are happy that some words, such as "head" and "apple" have more than 100 translations, we can imagine that not everybody is interested in seeing all translations. Many people only want to see the few languages that they actually speak, and do not care about the rest.

And this is now possible :-)

There is an option in the user preferences (see image below) where the user can select the languages he is interested in, so that all the other languages are hidden.

This is done by:

- selecting the languages from the list of all languages available at omegaWiki

- checking the checkbox on top, in bold "Show only the selected languages".

This second checkbox acts as a switch, allowing to quickly enable/disable language filtering without each time going through the list of languages and selecting/unselecting each language.

Also, if you restrict the number of languages, the pages will load faster (in particular when editing).

To avoid blank pages, and since many words are at least translated in English, it is best to always have English selected. You could also try with Spanish instead of English, it is the second best candidate in terms of number of translations.

Wikidata extension renamed to WikiLexicalData

OmegaWiki used to be based on the "Wikidata" extension of MediaWiki.

However, recently, a new project called the Wikidata project, which is based not on the Wikidata extension, but the Wikibase extension, was started. This confused a lot of people.

At the same time, extensions are being moved from Subversion to Git. Therefore, during that moved I have asked that the Wikidata extension be renamed to WikiLexicalData extension.

Why lexical? The Wikidata extension was initially developed for OmegaWiki, storing words, definitions and translations. It was believed however that the extension could be easily adapted for something else, with little code changes, and that the lexical part of Wikidata would be only one of the possible uses. After several years, there was obviously no interest in using that extension for something else. After having played with the code myself, I now believe that the languages are too central to that extension and that a major rewrite would be needed to code for something else, and probably starting from scratch would be as fast as a major rewrite. This is also why the Wikidata project started from scratch instead of starting from the Wikidata extension.

It is even now considered that in the future, the OmegaWiki database will be kept as is, but the extension code will be rewritten (completely?) to depend on the Wikibase extension (Wikidata project). This, of course, depends on the outcome of the Wikidata project, but it seems to give promising results at the moment :-)

For the user of OmegaWiki, all of this changes nothing.
For the developers, update you Svn to Git, and change the extension name.

Thanks,
Kipcool

jQuery, MediaWiki 1.20, tabs and other news

About a year ago, Expression pages were modified to show only one language at a time. This was explained in this blog post. Some feedback I had was that the little arrow indicating a dropdown list (when hovering over it) was not obvious for new people. So I have changed the dropdown list to a tab system, that is visible without any hovering. This can be seen in http://www.omegawiki.org/Expression:India .

Apart from that, the "identical meaning" checkbox has been changed to "=" or "≈" that is selected with a combobox. The main advantage is to solve a bug that we had with the checkbox. Also, it is believed that "=/≈" is easier to understand.
Basically, the idea behind "identical meaning" is that when an exact translation ("=") for a concept does not exist in a given language, the contributors can suggest approximate translations ("≈") that are the closest to the concept in that language.

From the technical side,
OmegaWiki has just been updated to MediaWiki 1.20. Also, a month ago, several javascript functions of OmegaWiki were changed to use jQuery. We don't have enough programmers to implement many wonderful new features (any volunteer?) but at least we try to keep up-to-date with the latest versions of MediaWiki.

From the lexical side,
we now have about 46.000 concepts translated with 470.000 words in 419 languages.
The main language is still English with 48.000 words. I would be happy to reach the 50.000 milestone. We are constantly adding new words but at the same time, we delete "sum of parts" definitions like "ecosystem preservation" = "the preservation of ecosystem" (coming from the GEMET data), and other dummy entries about languages that were created during an other import of data.

Other languages above 10.000 words are Spanish (35610), French (29919), German (29872), Dutch(27402), Italian (17117), Portuguese (15163), Finnish (12694), Swedish (12439), Polish (11776) and Russian (10236).

We also have about 1800 images illustrating our 46.000 concepts, and more than 15.000 links to Wikipedia articles.

Thank you to all contributors.