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

2008, International Year of Languages

The new year, 2008 has been designated the International Year of Languages by UNESCO. Countries and organisations are invited to participate, and I think that what we do in our projects qualifies us as participants. Our projects are relevant for many languages, we welcome new languages and we provide help and infrastructure to make it a success. Our communities are knowledge societies in which everyone can participate and benefit. We promote universal access to information and ensure in this way the use of an increasing number of languages.

Siebrand wrote an overview of the localisation of MediaWiki. Real support is provided to some 170 languages but only 47 have a minimal localisation. In a way it mirrors our projects; our projects do great in some languages while at the other end language versions are closed because there is not enough of a community that supports them.

The Wikimedia Foundation is becoming more mature; we aim to ensure that all our projects do well. Barriers to entry have been in place for new languages and it has led to improved localisation of MediaWiki. When new projects are finally approved, they are already of a size both in articles and participants that there is less need for anxiety for their future.

When we are to participate in the Year of Languages and continue to do what we do well and improve where we are weak, our projects will prove to be credible participants in this Year of Languages. Participating will give our Wiki way more credibility and it will give us access to people and organisations that can help us in fulfilling our goal; sharing the sum of all knowledge with every single human being.

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

Languages ...

Given a fixed point and you can move the world. In many ways, your language provides you with the tools to wrap your mind around the world, express its essence in a way that may be understood by the people you communicate with and help you to shape the world as you know it.

Language is both individual and shared. My English has been shaped by my schooling in the Netherlands, my stay in the United Kingdom and the many times I expressed myself in e-mail, articles, presentations and when skyping. Typically I get it right but a text can be understood by some and misunderstood by others. It is my English but to function it has to be expressed in a way that is shared with others.

For some subjects I prefer my native language, for others I prefer English. To communicate, the language used must be sufficiently shared by everyone involved. The language must be received; when I am surrounded by a vacuum, nobody will hear me talk. To read this blog, you either have access to a computer or someone must print it out for you.

A language lives when people use it, when it is part of a distinct community, a distinct culture. When the boundaries around such a community or culture disappear 0r change, the language either morphs or it dies. To understand history, you have to understand its artefacts and its language. Many languages die and died and with it we lose the history, the culture of the people that spoke that language. They may leave their literature, inscriptions and when enough is left, we may understand what is says. The trick will be to understand it as it was meant when the language, the culture was alive.
Thanks,
GerardM

Whe needs birthPlace

With some regularity I try to better understand Semantic Web and associated subjects. I find it hard going but also a compulsive subject. When you express the relation "Johan Cruijff" "birthPlace" "Amsterdam", it is understandable to you as a reader but for humans it should read like "Johan Cruijf was born in Amsterdam" or "Johan Cruijf werd geboren in Amsterdam" .. This magical statement "birthPlace" can be interpreted when you know your English otherwise it is truly for machines only.

OmegaWiki does express relations, you will find for instance that Amsterdam is the capital of the Netherlands. In essence it is expressed as a triple, but it is expressed in natural language and depending on the existence of a translation, you will read the relation in the language selected as your user preference.

How to combine what we do and what happens elsewhere, my latest idea is based in the RDF tag; "birthPlace". It is a construct that obviously needs a natural language equivalent and this is what OmegaWiki can provide. A method is needed to connect the two. In order to function, birthPlace has a very precise definition and this definition must be part of a collection of such definitions. These labels need to be linked to OmegaWiki DefinedMeanings as the identifier for an OmegaWiki collection.

To make this useful, an external application needs to call a function that provides the translation to a specified language. How to combine this with the notion of an URN I have not figured out yet.

Thanks,
GerardM

Eastern Yiddish

Eastern Yiddish, is one of the two varieties of Yiddish that have been recognised as languages in their own right in the ISO-639-3 (ydd). in OmegaWiki, we now have our first 213 Expressions in this language and I am impressed with the amount of work that has gone into it; most have annotations indicating hyphenation and the pronunciation using IPA notation.

Eastern Yiddish is not one of the languages supported by MediaWiki, and the mechanism for showing localised content is connected to the language selected in the "User Preferences". I have been given some help from Siebrand what files need to be changed and added. Kim helped me with doing it for the first time and now the first localisation is visible for Eastern Yiddish.

The MediaWiki localisation itself uses Yiddish as the fall back language so the experience is pretty good for now. What Siebrand indicated is that is is possible to include languages like Eastern Yiddish in the BetaWiki. This would create stubs that are of benefit to OmegaWiki. It would prepare for the moment when people start localising in earnest.

I think it would be a good thing, but I am interested to learn what other people think.

Thanks,
GerardM

Supporting American English

American- or British English are two variations of the English language. They have substantial differences. They are sufficiently the same and are unlikely be mistaken to be separate languages.

In OmegaWiki, it has been possible to add entries for English; this meant there is no difference between written the different versions of English or you had to specify both versions. Issues like this exist for other languages like Serbian and Mandarin as well.

In the OmegaWiki user interface, languages are considered ISO-639 entities. When a DefinedMeaning for a language is part of the appropriate collection, we use the translations in our user interface. The problem is that all these linguistic entities are needed now and that they are created to make OmegaWiki work.

For the ISO-639-6 there will be issues as the codes we make, using the RFC 4646 methodology, will be replaced. It will also be interesting to learn how in the end everything will be merged together.

In the mean time we now support localisation for these linguistic entities.

Thanks,
GerardM

Sinterklaas present

In the Netherlands we traditionally do not get presents with Christmas. For us Sinterklaas is celebrated on the fifth or sixth of December. In my family everyone no longer believes in Sinterklaas and consequently we can celebrate it on a more convenient moment like in a weekend.

I have had a wonderful Sinterklaas, and I do want to tell you about the present that Kipcool and Kim gave me. Kipcool wrote this wonderful functionality that show you what classes we have in OmegaWiki and, how many translations we have in your language.

With the new functionality you will see the concepts that are translated in your language. When you check out a concept, you will even find what attributes are available in your language. I have found it to be really addictive. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

New upload functionality

OmegaWiki is really happy to announce that we have, with thanks to the Otto-Friedrich University of Bamberg, for the first time used new upload functionality. The University of Bamberg has a need for a repository for its Destinazione Italia terminology and has found this in OmegaWiki.

We have uploaded translation in Persian and we have it nicely attributed to the person who did the work. We will upload for several more languages. What is of relevance is that we can make an export for any language, for any collection. So if you are interested to help on our OLPC collection.. just drop me a line..

Thanks,
GerardM

Money

All projects need money to operate. OmegaWiki does need money to operate. We now have made it possible for you to support what we do in a practical way; we now have a link in our sidebar so that you can use Pay Pall to donate money. You can just give us money, you can help us fund a project that we want to do.. Check out our Donations, putting your money where your mouth is ..

Stiching Open Progress is a Dutch "not for profit" organisation and we can use all the money we can get to do all the cool development work we would like to do..

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

Antonym

An antonym is the complete opposite of something.. black and white are probably the best known examples. The great thing is that antonym is the first global relation type and in the way it is set up, the antonym is true on a concept level. This means that it does not allow for cultural differences in the appreciation of such a relation.

I wonder how many antonyms will prove to be problematic because of cultural differences. The good news is that we are now able to have global relation types in OmegaWiki. We will have to be REALLY careful what relation types we will include. The "is a" relation is not going to be part of it because that is what makes something a class member.

With the global and the class based relation types we only need the collection based relation types to get our full functionality :)

Thanks,
GerardM

More localisation

OmegaWiki had a lot of new functionality go live, today I spend time on one aspect that is really dear to me; localisation. Much of the OmegaWiki content is localised by adding translations. With the latest software release much of the more programmatic parts are in the system messages.

I started to translate the Dutch messages and, Tosca caught on and started on the German messages, Malafaya did the Portuguese. We hope that in this way our data becomes even more accessible to our users :)

One issue remains, with our messages translated in OmegaWiki, how do we get them in MediaWiki proper ...

Thanks,
GerardM

Getting to grips with the new functionality

At OmegaWiki, a lot of new functionality has gone on line. This functionality is a mix of functionality that was needed for Wikiproteins and things we have been working towards for a long time. With the changes some functionality does not work as it used to. This is a good thing.

Our first content was the GEMET thesaurus, in this collection particular relation types were used. These relation types were available everywhere and consequently we have been reluctant to add more relation types. Now relation types are associated with "classes" and we can make a DefinedMeaning a member of a class. Nederland now has a capital, a motto, a nation anthem and entities bordering the country. For Nederlands it is now known what script it is written in, and in what countries it is spoken. And with the "incoming relations" we know where there is a reference to the DefinedMeaning.

Many of the existing relations will be changed from the GEMET relation types to the new relation types. The work that what is done in the past is a huge benefit as it helps a lot in identifying what needs doing. With the new functionality it makes sense to add the annotations straight away; we now know that they can be done properly.

Thanks,
GerardM

Major update for OmegaWiki

OmegaWiki has had some major update; the version of MySQL that is installed has been updated, several files have been changed to InnoDB and a lot of functionality has changed behind the scenes.

One of the effects is that the performance has improved noticeable; that was really needed. The difference in performance is a relief. It is fun again to work on the data.

One difference is that the way the relations work; relations are currently associated with a "class" and this class defines what relation types are possible. We have added a few classes so far; "linguistic entity" is one. The associated relation types allow us to indicate where the linguistic entity fits in and, where it is spoken. There will be many more classes and relation types, the quality of the classes and relation types will make a difference to the quality and the usefulness of our data.

Thanks,
GerardM

Demo Semantic Support on a new URL

At Wikimania I presented what we are doing to bring real time Semantic Support to Wikipedia. The URL in my presentation is no longer valid, the new location is at: wikipedia.wikitestsite.org.

You will find a dump of the English Wikipedia and you many of the expressions that we already now are in green. We are working towards a situation where new concepts defined in OmegaWiki will be recognised in the future data mining of the same article.

What we are discussing at the moment is adding functionality to the concepts found. Some are obvious like giving the definition, giving an option to go to OmegaWiki when the definition does not fit, showing translations for the expression in the language that is of interest to the reader.

We can imagine that there is more functionality that you would consider useful. Please let us know .. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

Connecting data from different databases

In OmegaWiki there are different datasets. These represent different origins and have a different emphasis. What we are working on is to connecting the data in these different datasets. Currently over four percent of our Community data is connected to data of the UMLS.

These connections are not without problems. The UMLS does not have the same (lexical) outlook; it is quite happy to have a singular and a plural to be part of the same concept. In OmegaWiki we do not support the notion of plurals yet. For the UMLS it is not a problem to include Geologists as it is included as a subject heading. We have it connected to geologist.

Lyme disease has several synonyms that are problematic from a lexical point of view; only "Lyme borreliosis" is what I expect to find in a dictionary. This does not necessarily mean that "Borreliosis, Lyme" is not useful to have. The Community database knows some 15 translations and thereby adds value to the English only content for Lyme disease.

With four percent of the Community Database connected, in reality we haven't scratched the surface of the UMLS. The UMLS is a well explored resource and I am sure that there are many resources that have made connections already. I hope we will find the people, the organisations willing to share the work that they have already done.

Thanks,
GerardM

Some more on Wolof

OmegaWiki wants to support all words of all languages and, it does not want to go into the issue of does this language exist or not. We make use of the ISO 639 standards and, when we feel like being adventurous, we look at what is recognised in the IANA language tags.

Deferring to standard organisations means that you take what they say as the "truth". It does not mean that we necessarily agree, but it saves us from a lot of mayhem. Yesterday I wrote about the first native Wolof speaker for OmegaWiki. Today Ibou changed the definition for Wolof and included Gambia as a country where Wolof is spoken. According to the description by Ethnologue of the Wolof language this is not the case. They do refer to another language, Gambian Wolof, this description makes it clear that Wolof is spoken in the Gambia as well.

The article on Wikipedia on Wolof is in my opinion wrong; it gives the impression that the ISO-639-1 and the ISO-639-2 codes are split into two. This is contrary to how standards work. When a language is split into two, the original meaning will stand as it is, it will get a new description to indicate that it has been split and two new codes will be created.

So Ethnologue is inconsistent. Ibou is probably right. I have send an e-mail to Ethnologue and I hope that they will amend their fine resource so that we will know for sure that he is right. :)

Thanks,
GerardM

One new user

Sometimes a new user is special. To me Ibou is special. He is the first Wolof native speaker on OmegaWiki. He is the first person where I have been told for whom communicating in English will be difficult.

I could not be more happy with what he has done so far; he created the Babel templates for Wolof. He has translated the first part of the main menu. Really, he makes the next Wolof speakers feel welcome..

Thanks,
GerardM