Dear Wikipedians,
This is to remind all about the next Bangalore Wikipedian meetup (Meetup #
18) on *Sunday 12th September. *
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore/Bangalore18
We have some interesting content for this meetup. We have been experimenting
with various forms of participation in the meetups including *remote
presentations* at Bangalore meetups.
.
We had Liam Wyatt speak earlier from Sydney regarding the GLAM project.
Happy to announce another speaker, this time from Israel - Wikimedian Asaf
Bartov. He will be speaking on Wikimedia in Israel, Projects, growth,
challenges and best practices.
We have a few other interesting sessions lined up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore/Bangalore18#Agenda
- A discussion on Wikimedia
Chapters<http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_chapters> and
other forms of affiliation (Achal Prabhala)
- India newsletter
And *many more*.
Please do mark your calendars and make it to the monthly meetup.
This meeting is open to all interested in Wikimedia (all projects and
languages) , please do make it if you are thereabouts in Bangalore.
If are considering attending the meeting, please sign up here -
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Meetup/Bangalore/Bangalore18#Attendi…
Regards
Arun
Bangalore, India
Hi everyone
I wanted to announce the creation of a Wikimedia mailing list for Delhi,
anyone in the Delhi and NCR region is welcomed to join the list.
It will be used to organize local meetups in future and keep Delhi
Wikimedians updated about any developments in the Wikimedia movement. We
will also be using the list to recruit new members through outside
activities in coming months.
I would like to acknowledge the support of Ms. Bishakha Dutta and Mr. Gautam
John for all their help and guidance in our efforts so far. Thanks you.
Regards
Salmaan Haroon
Hi Folks,
In the last wikimedia meetup, I heard stories of how govt. libraries'
digitization efforts were failing because of a lack of technology direction
and infrastructure (Someone said, one of the library was simply scanning up
all its books into TIFF).
Good news is that problems such as these may become a thing of past when the
government adopts FOSS technology as the way to go for all its needs. This
could also stir the FOSS movement in India.
Longer story here: http://www.outlookindia.com/article.aspx?266988
Excerpt:
The policy has been cleared by the Department of Information Technology and
the National Informatics Centre and is likely to be made official soon. This
effectively means the technology used in all government departments and
offices would have to shift to an open standard. With rough estimates
putting the e-governance market at around $10 billion, the new system—at the
interface and data-archival levels—will shake up big companies hitherto
operating in these segments through their proprietary (read paid-for)
standards.
Thanks,
Varun.
Shiju had mailed me requesting to contribute a little piece covering the
activities surrounding Kannada on Wikipedia and related projects. I have
stuff to refer here written by volunteers from Malayalam and Tamil
Wikipedia.
However, I'm not clear about how this should be shaped. Is this going to be
an official Wikimedia newsletter? (seeing that it is titled "Wikimedia India
Newsletter"). Given that Wikimedia official newsletters are brought in a
slightly different manner (
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_newsletter), can you share the
ideas and objective behind the planned newsletter so that it brings more
clarity to the contributors?
Also observed that the draft of the newsletter I've received is crashing
though on evince viewer (on debian lenny). It could be useful if you could
share details about the software used to create the PDF. Probably Inkscape
pros from the community could help? :)
Also, is the newsletter being released in CC-by-SA?
--
Hari Prasad Nadig
http://hpnadig.net | http://twitter.com/hpnadighttp://flickr.com/hpnadig
A great news to share with people from Indian Wikipedia community:
The Kannada Wikipedia has crossed the 9000 articles mark recently. What is
more encouraging though is the voluntary and increasing participation by
some well known writers, scientists on Wikipedia as editors.
Kannada Wiktionary has also improved extensively now counting at about
70,771 dictionary entries.
All credits go to the passionate Kannada speaking population active on the
Internet constantly striving to see more Kannada in the digital world.
--
Hari Prasad Nadig
http://hpnadig.net | http://twitter.com/hpnadighttp://flickr.com/hpnadig
Hello All,
Almost all the Indian language wiki projects use a transliteration program
(a javacript) for typing text in the respective language/script. For
Monobook, many wikis placed a check box near the search box to switch ON/OFF
the transliteration script. For example, see this image,
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/usability/6/62/Monobook.png
Recently when wikis switched over to Vector skin,* this control box/check
box is disappeared. *
*NOTE:* The default skin of all the wiki projects (including all the Indian
Language wiki projects) moved from the *Monobook* skin to the new
*Vector*skin on
* 2010 September 1*. Few Indian language wikipedias (Malayalam, Telugu, and
Bengali) moved to Vector interface little earlier (*2010 June 30*).
After Malayalam Wikipedia switched over to new interface (vector), many
Indian language wikipedians (especially Hindi, Bhojpuri, Marathi) have asked
us about fixing this issue so that check box will appear in Vector skin
also. But till today we were unable to find a solution.
Finally today, one Malayalam Wikipedian, Sadik Khaid
<http://ml.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Sadik_Khalid>is able to fix this issue
and the *check box problem is solved for the Vector skin.* The code to add
check box (to control the transliteration script) near the Search box is
available in Sadik's test wiki at *
http://lab.dhudhu.com/index.php?title=Mediawiki:TranslitPatch.js *
Copy the code displayed there and paste it inside *Mediawiki:Common.js* page
of your wiki. You need to place inside the *addTextEvent()* function code.
Following customization need to be done before placing it inside
Mediawiki:Common.js
*Part One*
*linktohelp.title= "To Enable or Disable xx language, Shrotcut: add shortcut
here";*
You need to change the message according to your requirement. In Malayalam
wiki we changed this line to *linktohelp.title= "മലയാളത്തിലെഴുതുവാൻ ഈ ഉപധി
സ്വീകരിക്കുക, കുറുക്കുവഴി: Ctrl + M";*
Ctrl + M is the shortcut key that we use in malayalam wiki to control the
tranlieration script. In some wikis it is Ctrl + G and in some others it is
ESC key.
*Part Two*
*linktohelp.appendChild( document.createTextNode('Translit xx language') );*
In Malayalam wiki, we changed this line to *linktohelp.appendChild(
document.createTextNode('മലയാളത്തിലെഴുതുക') );*
This is the message that will appear near the search box. In Malayalam Wiki
it is *മലയാളത്തിലെഴുതുക* In wikis that use Devanagri it might be *देवनागरी*.
Please let *Sadik *know in case you are facing some issue to fix this. His
email id is *sadik.khalid(a)gmail.com*
Thanks
Shiju Alex
.
Hi Shiju, others - congrats on this newsletter idea...it is high time
the community had something like this to go to when trying to figure out
what is happening across a whole bunch of Indian language Wikipedias,
incl. English.
Look forward to seeing it!
Warm wishes,
Achal
Hoi,
DYK, there are only three pictures that I can find in Commons about the
Janmashtami festival. The BBC has great pictures about it. I am sure that
many of you took pictures either today, tomorrow or last year... maybe you
have really old pictures of the festival...
It would be good to have featured pictures for all the Indian festivities..
PS the best picture uploaded I am happy to post on my blog this weekend :)
Thanks,
GerardM
Tamil Wikipedians seems to have worked on this , Whether this is experimented by any other Indian Wikipedia ?
July 15th, 2010
Earlier today the folks over at Google provided an update on their progress using Translation Toolkit
with volunteers and translators to improve the article count in smaller
language versions of Wikipedia, including Arabic, Gujarati, Hindi,
Kannada, Swahili, Tamil and Telugu. Google is a passionate believer in
the need to translate and bring more high quality works of text to
less-represented languages on the web.
Michael Galvez, a Product Manager from Google, presented the recent findings of these efforts at this year’s Wikimania in Gdańsk – which wrapped up on Sunday, July 11 of this year.
From Michael’s post:
We believe that translation is key to our mission of making information useful to everyone. For example, Wikipedia
is a phenomenal source of knowledge, especially for speakers of common
languages such as English, German and French where there are hundreds of
thousands—or millions—of articles available. For many smaller
languages, however, Wikipedia doesn’t yet have anywhere near the same
amount of content available.
Google is reporting an increase of about 16 million words so far due
to the efforts of local volunteers and translators using the Translation
Toolkit. In Hindi Wikipedia these efforts have resulted in an increase
in size of about 20 per cent. They continue their work directly with
volunteers from these language projects, and continue to expand the
capabilities of the translation toolkit in new languages.
A big thanks for the ongoing efforts of the volunteers and
translators, and to Google for continuing to invest time and resources
in this great translation system.
Jay Walsh, Communications
This entry was posted
on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 00:11 and is filed under Friends, Wikimania.
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4 Responses to “Update on Translation Toolkit”
contractors tax Says:
July 15th, 2010 at 06:25
Google’s translation work is amazing, world changing to a degree. I
have friends in Hungary and Russia who write to me entire emails in
their own language. I can use the google translate and their letters
appear in highly readable english. And I can reply. And in chrome it is
possible to translate webpages on the fly. Amazing. Game changing.
Thanks to google, wikipedia etc for bringing me closer to my friends!
Nathan C., UK
Tobias (User:Church of emacs) Says:
July 15th, 2010 at 17:46
Great project!
I don’t know much about this tool, so please forgive me if my
question is stupid: Most “big” Wikipedia language versions are quite
strict in copyright issues, e.g. respecting the license and attributing
authors properly. Large efforts, like transwikiimport or importupload
are taken to ensure that translated articles contain the history of the
original page. So my question is: how does author attribution work with
the google toolkit? Are the authors of the original article properly
attributed? Is the history imported?
Seeing that this is a medium/large software project, one would expect
that license issues are considered as well. On the other hand,
Wikipedia versions evolve as they grow, and usually they develop an
understanding for copyright issues in late parts of the project – so
“write articles first, care about copyright later” is a valid argument.
Additionally, GFDL was much stricter than CC-BY-SA, so the strictness of
policies (which sometimes require a copy of the page history) might not
be needed anymore; I’m not sure about that.
A. Ravishankar Says:
July 20th, 2010 at 00:26
Please also see
What happened on the Google Challenge @ the Swahili Wikipedia
A Review on Google Translation project in Tamil Wikipedia
Mayooresan Says:
July 21st, 2010 at 11:16
Google’s Tool Kit is a amazing tool but is it acceptable to allow
Google to use Wikipedia as a testing platform for their project???.
Obviously they encourage people to translate using Toolkit because they
want more “Translation Memory” in many languages. I personally believe
we should not encourage such efforts where GNU project and its
volunteers should not be used for a proprietary reserved product.
The problem denoted by the Swahili language Wikipedia is so scary… Too much of anything is not good!!
