Saturday, May 29, 2010

Support for Telugu in #OmegaWiki II

When Veeven added పీడ్మోంటీ for Piedmontese, it was the last language with no translation in Telugu that had a translation for Telugu.

As a consequence almost all the labels used on the concept Telugu are now available in Telugu. Because of the hard work done at translatewiki.net, the experience is great even though there are just 805 expressions in Telugu at this time.

What you do have is for instance a translations from English to Spanish in great numbers. Having this with a Telugu interface is one reason why the investment in time is worth it.

At this time there are 249 languages supported in OmegaWiki. Your language may be among them. You can make the same difference for the people that read and write your language.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Tuesday, May 18, 2010

Support for Telugu in #OmegaWiki

When Veeven added the Telugu numeral, I was really pleased as I had been trying for some time to elevate the number of Telugu expressions over the 500.

I was really surprised when the labels did not change to Telugu. Happily Kipcool found that the "Wikimedia key" was missing and now everything works as designed for Telugu.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Community class attributes

In #OmegaWiki the community class attributes are a collection of words or phrases that are used as labels for attributes of a class. In the last few days a few attributes were added to the "number" class. This was to allow the expression of numbers in Thai, Laotian and Telugu.


These 65 words are with the names of languages the most relevant concepts. They are effectively what localises the data for the people who selected a language in their interface.

It is really appreciated when they are completed with some urgency; this is what makes OmegaWiki functional for our readers.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Sunday, May 09, 2010

#Ambaradan release 0.6.0


The first release of Ambaradan has hit the Internet. It hit the Internet and, it intends to stay there. So congratulations to the ream that has been working so hard to get to this stage, it is an awesome development.

The software as you can find it, is a first alpha release and it does not have all its functionality yet. As I have observed Ambaradan for a few days, I can testify that several bug fixes and improvements have gone in. So it is very much something to be watched.

One of the really cool features is that Ambaradan provides web font support; this means that as long as they can find a freely licensed Unicode font you will not need to install a font on your system.

It will be interesting to follow the development of Ambaradan, I hope that the ambitious specifications will slowly but surely make it into reality. The potential is there to become awesome.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Wednesday, May 05, 2010

Polyglot functionality on #OmegaWiki

#Multilingual #MediaWiki is really helped by the Polyglot extension. What it does is show for instance the main page in your language if there is a translation. This helps the usability of OmegaWiki and any other installation a lot when multilinguality is important.

There are a few cotchas, the first is that it prefers the ISO 630-1 code when one is available. This means en in stead of eng, fr / fra, nl / nld .. This is the same for the Babel extension. However, this extension that the change to the short version for you.

Given that the ISO 639-6 will restore the primacy of existing two character codes, it makes sense for OmegaWiki to use this algorithm.

When Kipcool had a look at the code, he found that for OmegaWiki only a few lines were really needed... If you want to see the default or English text, you can always add "&redirect=no" to the URL.

Tuesday, May 04, 2010

Statistics, because we love them

I could not even say that we were looking at the statistics again, considering that we might want multiple statistics, or less then a day later we have multiple new statistics. Kipcool outdid himself..

Not only does it show the statistics in "your" language, when "your" language shows from right to left, so will the statistics.

Syntrans statistics in the Arabic script
As you can see, it shows nicely with Arabic characters, you will believe that it does the Latin script (boring), it also does Cyrillic, Devanagari and ..

Definitions in Georgian
These two statistics are new, the first ie the "Syntrans statistics" show all the words used for a language and as such it includes homonyms and synonyms. The second shows the number of definitions that exist for a language.

We are really happy with the result so far, now we have to phase out the old statistics and see if we want to do some caching of results.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Sunday, May 02, 2010

Statistics ... a work in progress

At #OmegaWiki we have nice statistics, nice bar graphs that show the number of expressions for each language. The numbers are nice except.. except for the language of the labels.. they are in English. This is not really how we want to present them because we pride ourselves on our multilingual support.


Now that we are looking again at our numbers, we are considering what numbers to show. The DefinedMeanings, the Expressions or the Syntrans records. The first shows the number of concepts, the second the number of expressions that are used for a language and the last will include the homonyms as well. What do you think?

Obviously these numbers show the current status and you can help us improve these numbers.
Thanks,
       GerardM