હાથકડી is the word of the day

Everyday at #OmegaWiki another word of the day. There are several people who divine what it should be. Sometimes the word is in the news, sometimes like today it is a word that was added the previous day.

OmegaWiki currently supports 247 languages and when you look at the distribution of the words over the languages you find that it tails off quite sharply. This does not mean that expressions in languages like Gujarati are not welcome. For from it and, to show our wish for collaborators for for instance Gujarati, હાથકડી is today's word of the day.
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

Word not found

When an expression is not found at #OmegaWiki, a link will be proposed for you to create either a new article or a new expression..

Kipcool informed me about this on IRC, he also expressed his amazement at the speed in which localisations become available at translatewiki.net. There are already localisations for 10 languages for the new message.
Thanks,
      GerardM

What to do when a word is not part of your vocabulary

Every now and then, I find a word that I do not know. For a normal person, it is a trip to the dictionary, for me it is a trip to OmegaWiki and often I find that the word is not yet in there.

Today it was the word cohort that I did not know. I knew it as something to do with Roman military, but it has also something to do with statistics..

I like pictures in my blogs, people playing soldiers is more fun to look at then some bar charts.
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

Working on the #Apertium M list

When you want to add content to #OmegaWiki, it helps when you have a goal. As you can see from the abundance of "red links", there is plenty left to do to add to the Apertium words that start with an "M".

Apertium as you may recall is a free/open-source machine translation platform. Working on the Apertium lists in OmegaWiki makes sense because its content is freely licensed as well and, the Apertium people are welcome to use it for their purposes.
Thanks,
     GerardM

OmegaWiki is back on line

When a technician does not know that a live application is running on a server, he will just turn the server off. That is what happened to OmegaWiki two weeks ago.

What happened next was an amazing group of people getting together, they found someone in the USA willing to go to the office where the server was, take it home and in a multi-continent operation get the data from that system.

OmegaWiki is now operational again; it runs on a server of Erik Moeller, Siebrand, Kim and Marc worked on the issue from the Netherlands and Cyde in the USA. Once the server was up and running, it was Kipcool who got everything working again.

I am really grateful for the hosting we received in the past from Knewco, I am really grateful and happy for the support of so many fine men who brought this project that has so much passion, love, work in it back from the brink.

I have added some translations for the concept Wikipedia, I enjoyed the fact that I could add all the different expressions all in one go. I needed them for some work at translatewiki.net
Thanks,
      GerardM

Off line (progress report II)

The OmegaWiki server is now connected to the Internet. The data is being moved so happily a positive progress report :)
Thanks,
    GerardM

Off line (progress report)

Sadly things have not progressed as quickly as we would have hoped. I understand that today the server will be picked up to transfer the data from the server and prepare for a relaunch.

More info when I have it ..
Thanks,
    GerardM

Off line

OmegaWiki is for the moment off line. Our host forgot that OmegaWiki was on their server. It will be available again soon I have been promissed.

It does however mean that we are looking for hosting elsewhere.
Thanks,
     GerardM

400.000 expressions

Today at OmegaWiki we have reached the milestone of 400.000 expressions for more than 43.000 concepts in 242 languages.

It was longer to reach than expected, because the statistics where first too optimistic by showing 20.000 more expressions than we actually had. This is now fixed.

The statistics reveals that, among these 242 languages, 49 have more than 1.000 expressions, and 10 have more than 10.000, namely English, Castilian, German, Dutch, French, Italian, Portuguese, Swedish, Finnish and Polish. The first seven of these languages correspond to the languages in which the regular contributors are native (or fluent).

What is not known is how many definitions we have in these languages. An improvement of the statistics page is needed.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

Adding multiple translations at once

At Omegawiki, it used to be that if you want to add 10 translations or synonyms to a word, you have to add them one by one. This implies that the page is reloaded 10 times. It takes time for the contributor, and load for the server.

But now, with a bit of java, there is the possibility to add multiple translations without reloading the page.

For this, you just have to click on the green "+" and a new row appears.

I give translations as an example, but it works also for definitions, classes, annotations, etc.

I am glad, it is my first steps in the AJAX world, and it will allow us to reach faster the 400k milestone.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

Language specific annotations

In order to allow for transcriptions (see previous post), I implemented the possibility to have language specific annotations.

Up to now, it was already possible to have language specific annotations only when that annotation is a list of options. For example, gender shows "masculine" and "feminine" in French, and "masculine", "feminine" and "neutrum" in German (and nothing in English). However, the other annotations (texts and link) were always available for all languages.

Language specific annotations allow for example that the annotation "pinyin" shows up only for words in Mandarin. This is now possible, and configurable by adding the corresponding annotations to the language definedMeaning (e.g. Mandarin (simplified) , Japanese ).

At the moment, the following transcriptions are available:
- pinyin for simplified Mandarin and traditional Mandarin
- revised Hepburn romanization for Japanese
- Hiragana and Katakana for Japanese (as a way of reading a word in kanji)

More transcriptions can be easily added, as soon as a contributor shows interest in it.

It is possible to do more than just transcriptions with language specific annotations. For example, we could imagine to have links to some public domain (for example Webster) or authoritative English dictionaries (Oxford dictionary online), as a way of providing an attestation for a given syntrans (spelling + definition). Such a link would be available only for English words.

Other ideas and thoughts are welcome.

Kipcool.

Romanizations in Omegawiki

Romanizations are important to learn a language since it allows us, Latin alphabet readers, to read a word in a non-Latin script.

We are going to implement romanizations in OmegaWiki as text attributes. However, there are several concurring romanization systems for each non-Latin script, and it has to be decided which systems we are going to use.

First of all, there are several ISO norms for romanizations: (Wikipedia link). There are also many other romanization systems which are not ISO norms.

Among the languages and scripts listed in Wikipedia, I have knowledge and interest in Mandarin and Japanese. So, I'll discuss them below. For the rest, help is welcome.

For Mandarin Chinese, it is clear that the ISO norm, i.e. pinyin, is to be used. It is what is in the books when we learn the language, and what appears in almost all dictionaries, it is the most used system to write Chinese on a computer, and it is even taught to Chinese people at school.

For Japanese, the situation is not easy. The ISO norm is the Kunrei-shiki romanization . However, the most widely used seems to be the Hepburn romanization . It is the one that is used in my books at home. So we have the choice between several possibilities:
- should we use the Kunrei-shiki only, because it is ISO,
- should we use the Hepburn only, because it is the most widely used,
- or should we implement both?

For the other non-Latin scripts and languages , if you have knowledge or interest in Cyrillic, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Georgian, Armenian, Thai, Korean, Indic scripts or any other script that is not in the list, you are welcome to give your thoughts about the following question (here or at the International Beer Parlour):

"Should we use the ISO norm, or another system?"

Thanks,
Kipcool.

P.S.: there is also the cyrillization of Japanese. Is it a desired feature as well?

Etymologies

Thanks to Dh, it is now possible to add etymologies in Omegawiki (in fact, since about a month).

It has been implemented as a translatable text attribute. It means that the etymologies for any word can be explained in all languages.

This may seem like an overkill, and actually, the initial idea was to have only one text field, and to enter the etymology of a word in the language of that word, since we expected that only people who know a language would be interested in etymologies of words of that language.

However, while I might be interested in the etymology of a Latin word, I am not able to write it in Latin, and there is also no particular reason to write it only in English in that case.

What is missing now is the possibility to have etymons as links to the corresponding DefinedMeanings. This is also a desired feature for having the words of a definition linking to the corresponding DM to avoid ambiguity, and will need further development.

Have fun adding etymologies,
Kipcool.

Linking to external ontologies

At Omegawiki, it is already possible to add links to Wikipedia and Commons.

In order to be part of the Web 2.0 , we are now considering adding links to external ontologies as well. There are many ontologies out there. For example, there is a small list on Wikipedia. From the discussions we had, there are several ways of linking to them:

1. We only link to Wikipedia and Commons (this is the current situation).
2. We link to as many ontologies as we like, as soon as there is a contributor willing to add links to it.
3. We link to a few ontologies that we consider authoritative or relevant.
   
4. We link to only one (or two?) super-ontologies, where we expect that this ontology will link back to other ontologies (and ideally to Omegaiki).
   

There are problems with each proposition.

1. Why only Wikipedia and Commons?
2. If we link to too many ontologies, we cannot keep track of what they are for, and then it is expected that we will be lost in too many links. We also have the risk that some user will come with their favorite ontology that do not bring any information to Omegawiki users, and are therefore useless links.
3. What is an authoritative ontology? What is relevant? and for what purpose (OmegaWiki users, or automatic processing by programs)? In this case, each ontology of possible interested has to be discussed by the Omegawiki community, and it has to be clear what information it brings.
4. What is this super-ontology? The name of Opencyc has been proposed. Opencyc links for example to Wikipedia, Umbel, Wordnet and Dbpedia. However, Opencyc does not link for example to geonames.
   

For more details, you can read and give your opinion on the discussions taking place in the omegawiki beer parlour: here and there.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

Colors in the interface

In order to make OmegaWiki less austere, colors have been added in the interface:
- light red for each language entry
- light blue for each definition or concept
For an example, have a look at Expression:wild

Note that these colors have been chosen to match, more or less, the colors of the OmegaWiki logo ;-)

These changes involve only a modification of the Monobook.css, so each user can also re-configure it to his own taste.

We are looking for more ideas to make the interface more appealing. Please do not hesitate to make any suggestion, should it involve only a css change or even a change in the php.

Thanks,
Kipcool.

Thank you Brion

Brion has added Kipcool to the illustrious roster of MediaWiki developers. His first contribution to OmegaWiki is a nice one; when you translate from one language to the the next, the definitions will be shown in the source language when available.

This is a much more friendly approach when translating from one language to the next ... Thank you Brion for making it possible to have cause to thank Kipcool :)
Thanks,
       Gerard

Two improvements

Kipcool has written two nice improvements:

"patch-needstranslation" changes the SpecialNeedsTranslation in that :
instead of link to "Expression:", we have a link to the actual "DefinedMeaning:"
that needs to be translated.

"patch-classes" changes the way the classes are displayed when you want to
add a class to an element.
The current way displays in the first column the name of the classes
and in the second column, the collection to which the class belongs
(which is almost always "Omegawiki Community database")
I have changed it so that the second column now displays a definition of the class.

Note: "patch-classes" also includes additional documentation in the code,
that I am trying to add when I understand what a function does.

Thanks,
       GerardM