Hello Everyone
You may be aware of the tool - WikiBhasha Beta - that Microsoft Research has made available for Wikipedia. WikiBhasha is a multilingual content creation tool that has been contributed as open-source extension to MediaWiki, as well as a bookmarklet and a user script in Wikipedia. WikiBhasha focuses the user on creation of content in target language Wikipedia, either with content that is created fresh, or content sourced from the large English Wikipedia. I belong to Microsoft Research India - where WikiBhasha was conceptualized and most of the development took place.
WikiBhasha was announced on Wikimedia Foundation blog (http://blog.wikimedia.org/blog/2010/10/18/wikibhasha/) in October 2010, and the installable bookmarklet is available from the WikiBhasha home page www.wikibhasha.orghttp://www.wikibhasha.org. We welcome you to install it (it just involves adding a bookmark in your browser), and take it for a test drive. The user documents and a quick video tour are provided in the WikiBhasha home, with a set of discussion forums to discuss your experience. The link to the open sourced WikiBhasha code in MediaWiki is also available on this website.
We hope that you will find WikiBhasha useful in creating content on Arabic Wikipedia and in this respect we invite you for a workshop planned in 2 weeks. This will be a couple of hours of interaction between Wikipedians, Researchers, Developers and other people interested in growing content on Arabic Wikipedia. We will demo WikiBhasha to you and you are welcome to try it right there and give us feedback. Here are the workshop details:
Venue - Microsoft Innovation Center, Cairo (http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/labs/cmic/visit.aspx) Date - Wednesday, 29-Dec-2010 Time - 7pm to 9pm RSVP - Mohamed Nar (Microsoft Egypt), mnar@microsoft.commailto:mnar@microsoft.com
We will be happy to host you at the workshop and your feedback and comments will help in improving the tool. Please do let Mohamed know if you would like to attend the program.
Sincerely, Ashwani Sharma