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.org<http://www.wikibhasha.org>rg>. 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.com<mailto: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