Friday, April 27, 2007

A similar milestone of a different kind

The last post of the OmegaWiki blog was about statistics. Kipcool indicated that there was an issue with the numbers, in the query the deleted Expressions were not considered.

Today we have the opportunity to celebrate anew one of the milestones that went before. Today we have a cool 10.000 expressions in Italian. :)

I want to thank Kipcool, Kim Bruning and Zdenek Broz.
GerardM

Monday, April 16, 2007

Milestone

The nice thing of statistics is that when there is a milestone, it can be celebrated. It is with pleasure that I can announce that OmegaWiki now has one language with 15.000 words. It is German that has currently the most expressions. There are currently 213.550 Expressions in 133 languages.

For OmegaWiki it demonstrates that we have a nice autonomous growth. Of the languages that we started after the import of the GEMET data, Japanese currently has the highest number with almost 4.000 words. Esperanto is with some 1.500 the biggest artificial language.

You can help us with translations for the language names that we have translations in. This will improve the usability of our data when the user interface is selected in the language of people's mother tongue.

OmegaWiki is still in need of more functionality. This is something that we try to achieve in any way possible. It is however rewarding to notice what difference the existing functionality makes.

I am very happy with what we have achieved so far. It bodes well for the future :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Monday, April 09, 2007

Fall back languages

OmegaWiki has a relevant bug fix; it is now obvious what option you add a part of speech you will see "part of speech" in your own language and when we do not have it, you will get it English as the fall back language. This is a huge improvement from having the same text in some 24 other languages.

The next improvement will become possible when the Multilingual MediaWiki is finished; this will allow you to select the languages you are interested in. These languages are more personal than just falling back to English.

Another option would be to identify a fall back language for a language itself. This makes sense for languages that exist in a space where another language is well known and better supported in MediaWiki. Languages like French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Mandarin come to mind.. I am sure there are more..

For the Incubator we want to define fall back languages to make it easier to localise the MediaWiki messages.. We hope to get answers what the best choice is.. otherwise we will have to guess..

Thanks,
GerardM