How to create content for small Wikpedias?
The fastest way is "translation".
Premisses:
*Most people need a starting point to "create" so we must give them to
all these potential editors.
*People have different interests so also that content must be different.
*We have loads of, for example, African languages that need "help".
*People do not have a stable internet access.
*People in, for example, African countries could work offline on Linux
systems and things could be uploaded.
*Many would like translations to be proof read and have "reference
material" to look up sentence structures and terminology immediately.
Well ... actually translations are mostly done by copying the contents
from one wikipedia to the other and then start translating. People use
paper dictionaries or workarounds - search for terminology over and over
again.
Now there's that neat software allowing for Computer Assited
Translation: OmegaT (http://www.omegat.org/omegat/omegat.html)
Example
*You save the contents of one Wikipedia in OpenOffice.org (.odt) format.
*You have a terminology list from English to Bambara
*You have .tmx files (translation memories) from former Translations
from English to Bambara
*You create a new OmegaT project and select the files to be translated -
well then you should close the project again (this will be better in one
of the future versions)
*Copy your glossary + old translation memories in their place
*Open the project and start to translate
*While translating you will see similar sentences that were already
translated before in the translation memory match window (the so-called
partial matches - these can also be inserted automatically in the target
sentence so that you only need to modify what is different)
*While translating you will see the words of the sentence that are
present in the glossary in the glossary match window and this helps you
with your translation since you will not need to look them up in a
dictionary
In future the glossary function will be connected to Ultimate
Wiktionary, or WiktionaryZ, through a reference implementation - and
this means that all terminology that is in WiktionaryZ is also at
disposal for translations.
Well there are always thoughts about machine translation around: well
this is the way translators work - we are "helped" by the computer to do
our jobs ... now if we take these techniques and show them to many
people who can work offline as well and if these people exchange
translation memories and then their glossaries with WiktionaryZ this
means that "small" Wikipedias can have a lot of general contents quite
fast.
The next step is then: any translation can be proofread before uploading
it to the wikipedia - so the article can be worked on offline quite easily.
Upload can be done with the help of the bot (pywikipediabot) - and this
can be done by anyone - even by people who don't know the language. In
this way online and offline communities, for example of African
languages, where people cannot always access the Internet, can work out
really well.
Of course an offline-readable wikipedia would then make a lot of sense
in these languages and also some particular way to organise the project
(pages need to be marked as "being translated by" etc.) that can then be
organised also by a non native speaker.
Well so who would like to try out OmegaT for the translation of
articles? (btw. I am doing that to translate from Italian and other
languages to Neapolitan - and of course for my "ordinary work" into
German :-)
Best, Sabine
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Anthere schreef:
> > Next time, I suggest to put a new rule (positive discrimination I know),
> > a requirement of 50% of female stewards... a real challenge
>
That would probably mean that there would be no new stewards at all ;)
Greetz,
Fruggo
Why is the world press attacking Microsoft censorship in China?
http://news.google.com/news?as_q=Microsoft+China+blog&svnum=10&as_scoring=r…
If they wanted, they could find an equally good target in the usually atruistic Wikipedia's barring the creation of Chinese Wikinews. Microsoft giving into Chinese censorship for business reasons is no worse than Wikipedia's barring a Chinese project in deference to Beijing's censors. When you act frightened you get stepped on, and that is exactly what happended to all of us: We prevented a Wikinews out of fear for Wikipedia, but they block the Wikipedia anyways.
With all due respect for Jimbo, if he continues to use "no Chinese Wikinews" as a carrot to get Wikipedia back into China, he will ultimate fail at both despite his good intentions.
Let's set up Chinese Wikinews before this story hits the world press!!
Alan
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Got holiday prints? See all the ways to get quality prints in your hands ASAP.
hello
Looking at the checkuser log this morning, I thought that the current
information provided was unsufficient for proper follow up by other
editors with checkuser.
It had
Date of check --- name of checkuser --- ip or user checked
Brion very nicely added a new column...
So, now, it has
Date of check --- name of checkuser --- ip or user checked --- local
project concerned.
For example
08:54, 12 January 2006 Brion VIBBER got IPs for Brion VIBBER on metawiki
Thanks Brion
Here are the final results:
Ausir (100%)
Walter (100%)
Jon Harald Søby (100%)
Suisui (100%)
Ascánder (100%)
Rdsmith4 (97,78%)
Romihaitza (97,67%)
villy (96,25%)
Paginazero (90%)
The other candidates didn't get 80% of support.
Seeing as the Wikimedia projects need new stewards ("and a lot of
'em!"), I'd be really happy to see the Board supporting all of the
mentioned candidates.
--
Best regards,
Dariusz "Datrio" Siedlecki
I wanted to notify foundation-l that the Steward elections of 2006 are
closing tonight, UTC time. From 16 candidates only 9 are making it
through by this time:
* Jean-Christophe Chazalette (villy)
* Ausir
* Romihaitza
* Walter
* Paginazero
* Jon Harald Søby
* Suisui
* Rdsmith4
* Ascánder
Also, Arno Lagrange failed his re-nomination and, if no one is against
this move, his steward rights will be taken away.
--
Pozdrawiam,
Dariusz "Datrio" Siedlecki
Last day to vote on stewards
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Stewards/elections_2006
The votes have not been updated today, but there are roughly 10
candidates supported over 80%, which is pretty good :-)
The vote will be closed tonight and the board will make the final pickup
in the group supported by the community, to nominate between 1 to 10 new
stewards.
---------
<SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE TO DEVELOPERS>
Several stewards and non stewards wish that BOTS flags are set up by
bureaucrats locally.
Benefits :
* reduce strain on stewards
---> makes stewards happy
* reduce waiting time
---> makes bot managers happy
* increase quality as bureaucrats are aware of local rules
----> makes local communities happy
</SUBLIMINAL MESSAGE TO DEVELOPERS>
Hoi,
On Meta the request for a Wikistandards wiki has been revived. The
request was voiced at a conference of language standards in Berlin (Dec
12-13, 2005). A significant number of people from the language standards
community have indicated on Meta that they are interested to actively
support this effort. See:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Proposals_for_new_projects#Wikistandards
Just a few of the people who have expressed interest in working on a
Wikistandards project run by Wikimedia:
* Professor Alan K. Melby, Brigham Young University, member of the Board
of Directors and chair of the Translation and Computers committee,
American Translators Association and many other affiliations, see
http://www.ttt.org/akm-cv.html
* Donald A. DePalma, President and CRO: Common Sense Advisory, Inc.;
author: Business Without Borders, member of the Board of Directors of
the Globalization and Localization Association (GALA), chair of the
Language Standards for Global Business Summit, more:
http://www.commonsenseadvisory.com/about_us/management.php?id=1
* Keiran Dunne, Assistant Professor of French, Pennsylvania State
University * Dr. Jennifer DeCamp, principal engineer at MITRE
Corporation, a
federally funded Research and Development Center, where she provides
software testing and advice on foreign language technology. She has
worked with localization issues since the 1970s.
* Peter Reynolds, Lionbridge Technologies, involved with the XLIFF and
Translation Web Services standards.
* Tex Texin, Internationalization Architect, Yahoo, Inc. Tex Texin has
been providing globalization services including training, strategy, and
implementation to the software industry for many years. See
http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/biosabstracts/b058.html
<http://www.global-conference.com/iuc27/biosabstracts/b058.html> for
details.
The purpose of Wikistandards will be to discuss standards and to
formulate drafts on the wiki. Informative encyclopaedic texts would be
written on Wikipedia. As it is of importance for a standard to be known
and thereby to be a Standard, many people at the conference indicated
their willingness to translate these articles to other languages for
other Wikipedias as well. The terminology involved with standards would
get its place in WiktionaryZ (the name suggested to replace "Ultimate
Wiktionary").
Wikistandards itself will be a new project in its own right. It does not
fit into Wikibooks since the discussions and drafts will be original
works developed by the standards communities. There will be a portal
dedicated to language standards, but hopefully, we will get other
standards communities interested as well. Wikistandards will also make
use of content in our other projects.
One reason why a wiki like this makes sense is because the Wikimedia
Foundation is known for its NPOV, it is not part of academia or the
business world and, as importantly, we have a great track record in
managing large amounts of content. We can hope for great synergies
between the standards community and the Wikimedia community.
On the most basic level, Wikimedians will help the standards experts to
learn the ropes, and to structure the wiki in a way that makes sense.
But we also have a very real need for being involved in or close to
standardization processes, particularly language standards, as we will
make increased use of them in our projects.
On the Unicode website, Wikipedia is already the only website that is
singled out for its use of UTF-8. With the WiktionaryZ project,
supporting standards will become even more important as we will have ALL
languages and people from ALL locales using one database. We have
discussed using standards like CLDR (Common Locale Data Repository) for
localization and TBX (TermBase eXchange) for exporting terminology. In
the future we may even make use of TMX (Translation Memory eXchange) to
integrate WiktionaryZ with industry standard computer-aided translation
(CAT) tools. Other standards will be relevant for relation types and
other meta data.
In the process of standardization, Wikimedia will only set one standard
of its own: a standard of freedom. Any standard we use in our projects
must be fully documented, free to use and free to implement, or we do
not consider it a standard in the first place. What better way to ensure
that than by being involved, as a neutral party, in the standard
process?
Given that we have a lot of enthusiasm for this project and given that
it provides us with a win win situation, I do ask for your permission to
set up this project in the very near future.
Thanks,
GerardM
Hi, I wondered if someone might be able to tell me where I could find
the archives of Nupedia-l. 8media.org uses to have them, but is down.
Best,
Marshall Poe, Ph.D.
The Atlantic Monthly
600 New Hampshire Ave. NW
Washington, DC 20037
202-266-6511
mpoe(a)theatlantic.com
-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces(a)wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces@wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Angela
Sent: Sunday, January 08, 2006 7:41 AM
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Re: Wikimedia logo policy
On 1/8/06, Sam Korn <smoddy(a)gmail.com> wrote:
> Does the Board want projects to engage in some kind of cleanup
> operation? If so, should the images be speedily deleted? Or should
> we wait for another announcement?
I'd suggest waiting. There's no need to be too hasty to irreversibly
delete images. Let's work out the policy on derivatives first.
Angela
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