#Conceptwiki

The ConceptWiki environment is an umbrella for several categories of professional data. It is hosted by NBIC / the Concept Web Alliance and it provides a rich environment with many types of data that have a bio-medical background.

The software it uses is very similar to the one used by OmegaWiki. This is due to the long association between people behind OmegaWiki and the ConceptWiki. It used to be that there was no room for multi-lingual content in the ConceptWiki but that is changing.

The hosting of OmegaWiki and the ConceptWiki used to be on the same server. this made it easy to connect OmegaWiki translations to ConceptWiki ontological content. For a concept like yaws you find many translations at OmegaWiki, you also find a link to the Wikipedia article and a mapping to the UMLS part of its database.

Indonesian dance mask

There is no Commons category yet on the subject, otherwise you might find this mask depicting the face of a sufferer of this disease.

The plan is to bring OmegaWiki and the ConceptWiki closer together again. I hope that the ConceptWiki will become a multilingual resource and we are going to start by sharing resources.
Thanks,
      GerardM

So we like #Commons

Yesterday Kipcool surprised us with a more visible link to Wikipedia, today he added Commons to it as well. Commons is essentially different in that there is only one link to Commons per concept.

When you look for pictures of a horse at Google or Bing, it makes a big difference in what language you are looking for that animal. If you look for instance for an "សេះ" you will find far fewer horses.

This is what it looks like in Arabic. As there is an annotation referring to the Arabic Wikipedia article, the Arabic article is selected.
Thanks,
      GerardM

So we like #Wikipedia ...

Every now and then, I am happily surprised with new functionality for OmegaWiki. This time Kipcool made our existing Wikipedia visible. When there are references to a Wikipedia article, he will point you to the article in your language.

The expression dólar shows the Dutch Wikipedia article for me. It will show the Spanish article for Ascander and the English article for Kipcool (the French and German article are not linked yet).

The link is added to the page with Javascript. This prevents additional load on our server. I hope you like it, it is an other excellent reason to dig into our annotions.
Thanks,
      GerardM

#Wikipedia interlanguage links

On a mailing list of the WMF there is a big discussion about interlanguage links; should they be shown by default or not. This discussion is the result of a choice made by the Usability team to hide them. Many people have strong opinions, one of the best contributions is one by Gregory Maxwell.

That thread is not the place to improve the approaches to interlanguage links. The goal of these alternate approaches is to increase the number of people that are informed by a Wikipedia.

Alternative one
Allow for interlanguage pages when there is not even a stub. We aim to inform, but when there is no article, not even a stub, we currently do not inform. The page may include a definition, but what it should show is articles on this subject can be found in these languages. Followed by a list of languages and the names of the articles.

This is easy to implement. The links are still maintained by bots and these referral pages do not need to show elsewhere. 

Alternative two
The technology behind OmegaWiki supports links to Wikipedia articles for quite some time. It even refers to Commons categories filled with data files on a subject.

This alternative is a bit more involved, but it allows for more functionality. It may need to need some fiddling in order to get it ready for WMF usage, but hey it is great functionality with many links to Wikipedia in there already.
Thanks,
     GerardM

#Wikipedia article

At #OmegaWiki we have twenty translations of the phrase "Wikipedia article". This phrase is one of the Community class attributes, these are used to indicate a relation. 

The relation indicated by the "Wikipedia article" is an article in the Wikipedia of that language. Currently many articles are referred to in the English and the Spanish Wikipedia.

We would appreciate it when you help us with translations for this phrase in your language.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Bounties for the localisation of MediaWiki

Hoi,
The "Stichting Open Progress" is happy to announce that it has received a grant from Hivos, to improve the localisation of MediaWiki. Open Progress is going to offer a bounty of up to 200 EURO for the full localisation for a language. Given the activity of Hivos, a Dutch NGO, a bounty will only be available for languages in Asia, Africa and Latin America that have a sizable number of speakers.

With this project we hope to achieve that MediaWiki can indeed claim to be one of the best Open Source projects that provides great localisation for many many languages out of the box. It will improve the usability not only for the WMF projects in that language but also for projects like Wikimedia Commons, Wikieducator, Wikihow, OmegaWiki .. the list goes on ..

The budget we have is substantial but limited. We will be sadly happy when we have to announce that we have ran out of money. Sad because we want to localise more languages, happy because so many languages will have been improved.

For the precise details of the project I refer to the details on Betawiki.

NB The amounts are inclusive of the money transfer costs and as these can be substantial, we offer some alternatives. In the past I have proposed a scheme called "Donations, putting your money where your mouth is". In this scheme you choose to get paid or donate the money for one of the projects that we advertise under this scheme. Another way of getting the money paid is when people in a country agree to work together and have us pay the money together as well. This could for instance work in the case of Wikimedia India...

Thanks,
GerardM

Numbers in a translation dictionary

In the Wikimedia Foundation, there are the inclusionists and the exclusionists. Some are of the opinion that certain topics should not be included in Wikipedia while others do. The most brilliant example is the inclusion of all the busstops in Japan. Someone took the effort to describe them and people find them actually useful.

Some people are enamoured by constructed languages and spend a lot of time making such languages their own. I personally have had dealings with at least three people that speak Volapük, and I know people that go to congresses because they meet people who speak Esperanto. Many constructed languages have more speakers than many natural languages (that are not yet extinct).

For exclusionists it is not palatable when constructed languages do well. There are always "good" reasons why those others need to be excluded. Hidden in the discussion about the "radical cleanup of the Volapük Wikipedia" is a discussion about the inclusion of numerals like 588 in the Limburgian Wiktionary and as you can imagine "it is not good".

In a translation dictionary there are reasons to include numbers. The point is that they are not written the same in all scripts. OmegaWiki has its fair share of numbers, and it did not address this issue.

By adding a new class, we now allow the representation of Arab and Roman numbers, and hundred has now as an annotation both 100 and C. In this way we do not have a separate page for each numerical representation.

Thanks,
GerardM

Zimbabwe was formerly known as Rhodesia

Many countries have over time changed their nature. What they typically do is stay more or less in the same shape. As a consequence of war, the shapes do change. The change is often reflected in the name. The country that is now called Zimbabwe was once called Rhodesia. It is relevant information and can be expressed using relations.

In OmegaWiki the relation type "was formerly known as" has been introduced to express this relation for countries. It demonstrates that OmegaWiki is not strictly a dictionary, it also serves the functions of a dictionary. By including different types of attributes to classes, we provide more worthwhile information.

Most concepts are related to other concepts and when these relations become visible, a net develops of related information. This does not make OmegaWiki an encyclopaedia, it is what an ontology does. An encyclopaedia we are not; we refer to Wikipedia.. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Linking to Wikipedia

OmegaWiki may be a lot, but it is not encyclopaedic. We do not want to be; Wikipedia does a great job at it and when it needs competition there are plenty of pretenders to its throne. So we do not compete.

When people need information, OmegaWiki will not provide all information. What it can do is link to other sources of information and Wikipedia is the obvious and the only choice for encyclopaedic information. It is the only choice because it aims to be multi-lingual and it is an obvious choice because of the shared values.

At this stage, linking to the Wikipedia articles is done by hand so initially there will be few links. We hope to harvest these links from Wikipedia and insert them with a bot. In this way we will provide an encyclopaedic service without being encyclopaedic :)

Thanks,
GerardM