More than 1000 images

In February 2011, the possibility to add images to OmegaWiki was implemented. A few months later, we have already more than 1000 images. Images help to understand definitions and are an important feature of (online) dictionaries.

In OmegaWiki, when an image is added, it is attached to a particular concept, and is then displayed for all words representing that concept. Compared to Wiktionary where you would need to add an image of a concept for each page of each synonym, and for each page of each language, there is a lot of redundant work that is avoided.

As of today, there are about 47.000 concepts in OmegaWiki. It means that more than 2% of them have an image. It is not clear what percentage can be reached. Several concepts are abstract (feelings, reasonings), and other are verbs or names of languages and are hard to illustrate.

I find it particularly useful when a word with different meanings has different images, such as vampire, bluebottle, Mars, Venus, etc. Also interesting is to find an illustration for abstract concepts. This is sometimes possible: season, wake up or cheapskate.


P.S.: we have also almost 15.000 links to Wikipedia articles :-)

More than 300 languages

At OmegaWiki, it is now possible to add definitions and translations in more than 300 languages.

Today were added the following languages.
- Assyrian Neo-Aramaic
- Bikol Central
- Central Aymara
- Chamorro
- Filipino
- Jingpho
- Northern Sami

Among all our languages :
- 227 have more than 10 words
- 122 have > 100 words
- 55 have > 1.000 words
- 11 have > 10.000 words
 and English is getting close to 50.000.

We also have definitions in more than 100 languages (though not for all concepts... all help is welcome)

For more statistics, visit the statistics page.

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

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

The ratio between DefinedMeanings and Expressions

#OmegaWiki as a resource provides information in many languages. Currently there are some 245 languages enabled for the inclusion of expressions. I often add words that feature as an Apertium concept and in order for it to be useful for the purpose of Apertium, it is important to add as many translations as possible.

As a consequence we currently have some 9.27 Expressions for every DefinedMeaning. Slowly but surely this ratio is moving upward and this provides some secret motivation :) This does not mean that we have something like 9.27 translations for every concept; an Expression is just a string of characters and when  this string of characters is used in multiple languages or is used for multiple concepts, it is still only one Expression.

I would love to know what the ratio is between the number of concepts and the number of translations; it will be a higher number ..
Thanks,
    GerardM

15,000 #Portuguese expressions in #OmegaWiki

We are happy to have a sufficient number of expressions in the Portuguese language at OmegaWiki. It shows how OmegaWiki provides the functionality that you will not find elsewhere.

The labels are shown in Portuguese when you have selected Portuguese as your default language. Better still, when you edit in OmegaWiki, the same labels can be selected in Portuguese.

We would dearly love to provide the same functionality to languages like Telugu, Kannada, Abchaz, Guarani.. We can help by pointing out how you can quickly provide a localised environment, we can help by adding the expressions for any languages when we find them. In the end we need people interested in supporting their language.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Spanish at 30.000 expressions

Today I am proud to announce that Ascander added the thirty thousandth Spanish expression in OmegaWiki.
Thanks,
GerardM

French has over 20K expressions

I expect that with 20k French starts to become relevant as a resource in OmegaWiki. The good news for our users is the amount of translations a concepts is connected to. Currently the ratio is 9,0402 Expressions per DefinedMeaning.

A big thank you to everyone who contributed to the French success :)
Thanks,
GerardM

Georgian

Georgian is a language that started with no content in OmegaWiki. It is spoken by some 4.4 million people mainly in Georgia, Turkey, Iran and Russia. It is written in the Georgian alphabet.

Statistics are in and off themselves not that relevant but they do allow you to tell a story. OmegaWiki started with the content of GEMET, the GEneral Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, the languages that are part of this resource have a head start in size.

Today thanks to the hard work of Sopho, Georgian is the first language that grew bigger then one of the languages supported by Gemet. The OmegaWiki statistics show that Japanese might be the next language to grow bigger then Slovenian..

Because of the beautiful characters, Georgian is my favourite example of showing the value of the localisation in OmegaWiki. It is really special to see the same content optimised in such a way. :)
Thanks,
GerardM

30.000 Expressions for English in the Community Database

The word "Southern Sierra Miwok" is a language particular to California. In 1994 there were still 7 people that spoke this language. According to the UMLS, the name of the language is Meewoc and as Ethnologue provides it as one of the alternate names, it was possible to link this DefinedMeaning in the Community Database with the concept in the UMLS.

With 30.000 Expressions, there are many that also exist in the UMLS Authoritative Database. The UMLS has some 1.93 million Expression at the moment, and the first 200+ DefinedMeanings have already been linked. They are mainly US-American languages and chemical elements with an occasional animal like guinea pig thrown in for good measure.

It is relevant to have the concept linked. It means that the information in one database can be seen as supplementary to what is available in another database. Currently we have three databases, but when you consider how they are structured, there are implicit connections known as many of the concepts known in the UMLS are also known in the Swiss-Prot database. The only thing left doing is making them explicit. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Assorted statistics

OmegaWiki has reached 30.000 DefinedMeanings, we have some 258.000 Expressions. And as some people do not stop telling me there are about 28.000 Expressions in the largest language and this means that there is a close relation between the number of Expressions in a language and the number of concepts. This is said to indicate that OmegaWiki should be able to scale. :)

The Webaliser statistics have given me a surprise; there is now more info to be found. What is nice to see is that there is now a breakdown in where the traffic comes from. As we have a lot of traffic from crawlers, it would be good to exclude crawlders in order to see where interested PEOPLE come from. Erik told me that the new features are probably due to the upgrade of this week.

Malafaya is now the fourth person who has taken an interest in our statistics. He has worked on the reliability of the statistics of collections. His first effort improved the numbers, his second stab at it improved the performance of the queries a lot.

Finally the Alexa statistics have improved a lot for no apparent reason. We have had times when we were not ranked at all or we could be found above the 800.000 range.. Now we are for a few days hovering around the 368.500 mark. Still not impressive but it looks much better. When you compare the Alexa numbers with our Webaliser numbers, the only thing that can be said is that for Alexa the numbers are statistically not really valid.. This will improve as our community grows.

Thanks,
GerardM

250.000 expressions

Today we reached the milestone of 250.000 Expressions at OmegaWiki. It is special because most of this data has been entered by hand. We find that when people get enthused by the concept of OmegaWiki, they do make a difference for the language that they champion.

We have people who have a particular interest in Georgian, Khmer and Spanish, it shows in the statistics as these languages grow much faster than the others.

Aveyron is the 250.000th entry in OmegaWiki and, it is only fitting that Ascánder was the person adding it. Ascander is one of the most valuable contributors to OmegaWiki. Aveyron is part of a project to include information from the ISO-3166-2. In this standard it is detailed in what way countries are subdivided. It does not state that Italy has provinces, the USA has states or that Germany has Bundeslander. It does give the names of these entities.

So, OmegaWiki is evolving nicely. We hope that in line with how Wikis evolve, we will have an easier time to get 250.000 more Expressions.

Thanks,
GerardM

New functionality

OmegaWiki has collections. These collections serve to indicate that certain DefinedMeanings are related. Collections can serve a purpose; the GEMET collection for instance is a resource that was the data that started our project. The OLPC collection is a list of the first words that we want in all language to start a multilingual dictionary for the OLPC project.

In these statistics, we have a tool to tell people what projects we have within OmegaWiki. This allows people to work on things that are of interest to them. The really sweet thing is that it shows like a work in progress, it shows what needs doing and, what has already been done.

There are several projects that are dear to me and can use more attention:

• The OLPC collection aims to give kids a dictionary in their language
• The ISO-639-3 collection is used for the localisation of our user interface
• The Swadesh collection is for linguists one of the more relevant collections when they compare languages
• The Destinazione Italia collection is a project that will be used for students of advanced Italian. This is a project by the University of Bamberg.
• Yes, the GEMET collection is very dear to me, it is an important resource of environmental terminology. It is used in many places and it was a boon when we were given permission to use it in our project.

When you do not see your language in a collection, just add one word to any of the DefinedMeanings that are part of the collection and the next time it will be there. When your language is not supported in OmegaWiki, let me know and I will see how to remedy this.

Thanks,
GerardM

• 
  

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

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

More new functionality & some stats

Lies, damned lies and statistics.. I always thought that OmegaWiki had more English words than German words. This turns out not to be the case, then I thought it may be because we make something English (United Kingdom) or English (United States) when the word is not shared between the two.. There are only 326 UK words; that does not fill the 441 gap.

These and more pondering are possible because of our new statistics functionality we have courtesy of Zdenek Broz. It shows you the actual numbers of Expressions in OmegaWiki.

Some more factoids, we now support 130 languages, 28 of these have less than 10 words.. When you compare us to Wiktionary, we would be the fourth in size when an article is considered the equivalent of an Expression or we would we the twenty-fifth in size when a DefinedMeaning is considered in this way. When you consider that all of our growth so far has been autonomously, I think we are doing well.

In the mean time, Alexa considers us the 480,601 website without statistics for the week.. I do not know what goes on there. I do like their T-shirts though.

To quote the Alexa T-shirts: "Will dance for better Alexa rank " :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Alexa and statistics again

As you may know, Alexa is a company that tries to divine the relative ranking of one website when it comes to traffic. It uses some functionality that is associated with the Internet Explorer browser. This is a browser that comes standard with the Windows operating system and it used to be absolutely dominate the global market. This market was eroded by the Firefox browser, Firefox has carved out a niche for itself and has a worldwide use of more than 15 percent.

The distribution of the use is different from country to country; in Germany Firefox is much more popular. The distribution is also different from website to website; for OmegaWiki a big percentage of people use Firefox; in November the traffic from both browsers was evenly split. This means that the reporting of Alexa has a bias that severely affects its accuracy.

For OmegaWiki Alexa provides the best statistics we currently can provide you with. We have a technical issue that limits the usefulness of our webaliser statistics. Because of the name change from WiktionaryZ, you do find that there are separate OmegaWiki and WiktionaryZ statistics at Alexa.. I wrote them about it, and Alexa will merge the data in one to two weeks.

Any way, better statistics in two weeks, both from Alexa and from our webaliser. It will be interesting to see more realistically if and to what extend our traffic is evolving.

Thanks,
GerardM