WikimediaZA September 2010

wikimediaza@lists.wikimedia.org

15 participants
14 discussions

Possible school project
by David Richfield 29 Sep '10

29 Sep '10

Hi all, At Software Freedom Day I got some schoolkids from Mamelodi interested in the project, and they tried their hands at translating some English text into the Sepedi wikipedia incubator. They were very eager, and were intensely debating which word to use for which concept. We didn't get much done: only a paragraph or two, but I spoke to their computer studies teacher, and they have a computer lab with internet access, and she's willing to open it up for us on a Saturday, and the kids said they'd be happy to come in on a Saturday for the project. I still have to hear from her again, and I'll keep you all in the loop as things develop. I'm happy to go there and facilitate, but if you have experience of this kind of thing, or know Sepedi, or have a clear idea of what the most urgent, achievable or useful articles would be, please help! I've got a picture or two that I'll post later. Regards, -- David Richfield e^(πi)+1=0

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[Fwd: Announcing the Wikimedia India Community Newsletter - Edition 1]
by Achal Prabhala 28 Sep '10

28 Sep '10

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Possible school project
by Achal Prabhala 25 Sep '10

25 Sep '10

To support and add to Kerryn's message, my understanding of the way grants from the Wikimedia Foundation work is that community members can apply for them at any time; i.e. you don't have to wait for a chapter to form. Especially with the support of allied organisations (The African Commons Project, Wits, UCT, etc.) a project like this could happen any time you want it to.

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Interview at Software Freedom Day
by David Richfield 21 Sep '10

21 Sep '10

Hi all, I did an interview for Let's Talk Geek at Software Freedom day: http://www.letstalkgeek.net/2010/09/sfd-inteview-wikimedia/ Unfortunately I wasn't as well prepared as I should have been, and left out many important people and some important concepts. Notably, I didn't mention the work that the Commons folk did to get it off the ground, or anything about Delphine and Bence's part in the project. Please don't shoot me on sight! Remember, I'm used to re-reading my work to eliminate NPOV, undue weight, etc. etc. and I'm not used to giving interviews. Oh well, at least our website is linked to the interview, so whoever's interested will be able to get the inside scoop. Regards, David -- David Richfield e^(πi)+1=0

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Wikimedia Israel's project in Cameroon and Benin
by Bence Damokos 16 Sep '10

16 Sep '10

Hi guys, I hope you are all doing well. I am forwarding you a copy of a press release of Wikimedia Israel about their activities with offline Wikipedia in Cameroon and Benin - I think it is very interesting and if you ever want to do something similar, you will know who to contact for advice. Best regards, Bence Damokos ---------------------------------------------------------------- BEGIN FORWARDED MESSAGE -------------------------------------------------- Here's a rough translation of a press release Wikimedia Israel has issued yesterday, about the "Africa Center" project I had mentioned in an e-mail to this list on June 30th 2010 (see that e-mail for more background on the Africa Center at Ben Gurion University). === START OF PRESS RELEASE === TITLE: Wikipedia Goes To Africa -- Israeli Students to Leave for Humanitarian Work in Africa, Equipped With Portable Static Wikipedia SUBTITLE: Ben-Gurion University's "Africa Center", Wikimedia Israel, and Hamakor cooperate in making free knowledge accessible in Africa The Africa Center at BGU, headed by Dr. Tamar Golan, annually sends a group of students on a three-month humanitarian expedition to developing countries in Africa. This year's group is going to the Repbulic of Benin and the Republic of Cameroon. Learning about this while approaching the Africa Center for help with developing Africa-related entries on the Hebrew Wikipedia, Wikimedia Israel decided to equip the students with computers running free software and containing an offline (static) version of the French Wikipedia, so that the students can bring free knowledge to Africans without access to the Internet. Wikimedia Israel reached out to Hamakor, the Israeli Free and Open Source Software NGO, and Hamakor helped obtain computer donations, refurbished them and installed the Linux operating system on them. Wikimedia Israel collaborated with members of Wikimedia Switzerland and Wikimedia France to produce an up-to-date static version of the French Wikipedia (numbering about 1 million entries, and including images), French being a major language of reading and writing in Cameroon and Benin. "The students also have portable installations of the offline Wikipedia, so that they may install it on any other computers they may run across in Africa," explained Asaf Bartov, who coordinated the project in Wikimedia Israel, "and they have received training on using Linux and Kiwix, the offline Wikipedia reader (free) software, so they may train others to use the computers". Incidentally, the Linux version installed on those computers is called Ubuntu Linux, 'Ubuntu' being an African word (in the Zulu language) roughly translatable as "unity of mankind" or "mutual reliance". Supporting and promoting the distribution of free knowledge in developing countries is one of the five major goals identified by the Wikimedia Foundation as central to its five-year strategy plan, developed by thousands of members of the Wikimedia Movement.

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Translation of content into South African languages
by Achal Prabhala 14 Sep '10

14 Sep '10

I think that a healthy way to think about languages in South Africa is that outside of English and Afrikaans, which both have a robust publishing market, other South African languages present excellent opportunities for growth on the internet. Since 1994, South African languages are being taken seriously in all kinds of media, including publishing - and to the extent that the costs/barriers on the internet are lower, I would be (personally) very interested in supporting any efforts to grow what are currently fledgeling Wikipedias. To that extent, translation is something that editors from these communities could use - but it's up to them. To motivate Indians to contribute to Indian language Wikipedias is also a major opportunity here, and there's no competition - English is one of our official languages too - and it's not an either/or situation. To the extent that it would be wonderful to have Pedi Wikipedia move out of incubation, it's probably wiser to think of this from the perspective of Pedi users rather than it's peripheral benefit to, say, Afrikaans users. Though, to the extent that that relatively under-represented languages (in media at least) get to be big on Wikipedia, it's obvious that there are benefits to the South African Wikipedian community as a whole. (After all, articles in different languages from the same place, or country, can speak to each other too: there are ways in which different language Wikipedias can help each other for a more complete picture). Speaking of Pedi: Ian, in reference to your earlier post: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaza/2010-August/000055.html - is it possible that Mohau Monaledi (are you on this list?) would be interested in talking to Dwayne?

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Translation of content into South African languages
by Achal Prabhala 12 Sep '10

12 Sep '10

Dear Dwayne, I've followed the work of translate.org.za and congrats on everything accomplished so far. Since you raised the issue of translation, I wanted to point you to a robust discussion that happened recently in India around Google's translation project. You can see archives of the conversation at: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimediaindia-l/2010-April/thread.htm… (Subj: Philosophical view on Google translated articles). Reactions around google's translation have been mixed. The upsides are clear, and the downsides (as expressed in that conversation) were: - a dissonance between volunteer editors' contributions and the translations - a lack of necessity or specificity to some of the translated articles (marginal western figures who are unknown in, say, Tamil Nadu, etc.) - some suspicion as to the motives behind the project (given google's involvement) - some broader questions, in terms of volunteer vs 'paid' editing and what the spirit of editing Wikipedia is In general, I think that translation, if cleverly applied in a customised way, could be useful, and when applied badly could be terrible - but, regardless, it's for the community to decide. Obviously, given the mission of translate.org.za, you would come with a degree of trust and acceptability that a corporation like google doesn't always necessarily bring (which is not to imply that their project is necessarily not helpful - at the moment, I believe various groups of Indian wikipedians are going ahead with talks and discussions on the trial). And when you talk about translation, have you had experience with written material that goes beyond interfaces and templates? (if you have, that experience might be useful to share). Also wondering if your goal is to build a tool (like google) that is constantly improved through human interaction and input, or to run the translation exercise as a collaborative, human-input-based exercise? Perhaps a good way to think about this is to ask if a particular language community within the various South African wikipedias is interested in taking you up on this. And then run some kind of identification exercise - perhaps an ongoing project - where community members deposit articles they'd like to have translated from X language to Y language in a box. Articles from translation don't necessarily have to come from a strong Wikipedia (like English) or even an emerging Wikipedia like Afrikaans - they could well be within several smaller Wikipedias, eg Sotho to Zulu, etc. Finally, in terms of how things are translated, their quality, and style, I think this is where it is key to get community members involved to minimise conflicts and maximise usefulness of the end result. Cheers, Achal

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Translation of content into South African languages
by Dwayne Bailey 10 Sep '10

10 Sep '10

Hi Guys, I've enjoyed following the discussion around WMZA. I wanted to throw my 2c into the mix and talk about translation of content, as opposed to creation. Last time I raised this with Wikimedia (years ago actually) there was a real push back. Since then South African languages have... not happened. And Google + WM do translation of WP pages, go figure. I saw some mention of translation from the notes about the first meeting. I'd really like to see translation as an angle of attack to help catalyse WP pages on ZA languages and get them to a critical mass. We also host Pootle a translation platform that I'd like to see being used to do Wikipedia page translations. Especially if we are able to select a set of pages that we want all ZA wikipedia's to contain, this might be driven my the needs within the South African curriculum or simply to ensure that the pages about our history are well covered. What do you guys think about this? -- Dwayne Bailey Associate Research Director +27 12 460 1095 (w) Translate.org.za ANLoc +27 83 443 7114 (c) Recent blog posts: * Localizing Mac OS X strings files using open source PO editors http://www.translate.org.za/blogs/dwayne/en/content/localizing-mac-os-x-str… * What's new in Virtaal 0.6.1 * Localisation: How we guess the target translation language in Virtaal Firefox web browser in Afrikaans - http://af.www.mozilla.com/af/ African Network for Localisation (ANLoc) - http://africanlocalisation.net/

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Wikipedia: statistics analysis
by Achal Prabhala 10 Sep '10

10 Sep '10

This is a message on the Wikimedia India list from a Wikipedian who pulled out facts relevant to India from Wikimedia's public statistics (http://infodisiac.com/blog/2010/09/wikipedia-page-edits-a-global-perspectiv…) - very usefully compiled by Erik Zachte, who is the czar of all things statistical in our universe - and I thought it may be useful to share. I found it tremendously interesting to understand what works in India and how. The statistics for South Africa are slightly less deep (on account of lower volume) but still, someone might be able to extrapolate and share useful information from it? Alternately, if one of you is really interested in getting deeper statistics for within South Africa, perhaps you could write to Erik and see if he has anything interesting to share. (Scroll down to the bottom of the main page of www.infodisiac.com for his email address). There is just a whole lot of interesting statistical information on his site and on his blog, in general. -------- Original Message -------- Subject: Wikimediaindia-l Digest, Vol 27, Issue 7 Date: Wed, 08 Sep 2010 04:14:25 +0000 From: wikimediaindia-l-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org Reply-To: wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org To: wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Message: 4 Date: Wed, 8 Sep 2010 03:20:54 +0530 From: theo10011 <de10011(a)gmail.com> Subject: [Wikimediaindia-l] New Stats- Global perspective about Wikipedia Page edits To: wikimediaindia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org, wikimedia-in-del(a)lists.wikimedia.org Message-ID: <AANLkTikptWFBKxPhbaumt-ojd0yqx8z+5GwrBzMjRvsd(a)mail.gmail.com> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" Hey everyone Just wanted to inform everyone that there are some new statistics available about global Wikipedia usage for Q3 of this year. http://infodisiac.com/blog/2010/09/wikipedia-page-edits-a-global-perspectiv… I just saw some surprising trends if you look at a language and country-wise breakdown of page views and edits. 1.India is No. 15 globally in terms of Wikipedia page views and edits which is expected for having only 7% internet usage, one of the lowest in the first 50 countries on the list. 2. India is still the fifth largest viewer of the English Wikipedia. 3. 94% of Indian Wikimedians view the English Wikipedia, the second largest language group for India after English is Hindi with 0.6% of total views. http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportVisitsPerCountryTren… 4. 70% of edits from India are on the English Wikipedia (this marks a gradual fall in edits from 81% in Q4 2009) followed by 6.6% for Telugu (this quarter also marks a large increase in edits in Telugu and Tamil languages, while Hindi and Malayalam both registered a drop) http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportEditsPerCountryTrend… The most surprising information is in the language-wise breakdown of edits per country: http://stats.wikimedia.org/wikimedia/squids/SquidReportVisitsPerLanguageBre… The first Indian language on the list by 0.03% of global share is Hindi, followed by Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi, all at 0.02% of global Usage. the most surprising statistics is that the largest Page views to these languages is not from India but the US sometimes more than several times the number of views from India. Tamil is the only language where this disparity as its lowest. The number of views from India is highest at 94% to the English Wikipedia but the number of edits has been steadily dropping at a very sharp rate (almost 10% in the last year). Regards Salmaan

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Articles of association update
by Kerryn McKay 10 Sep '10

10 Sep '10

Hi everyone Just to let you know that I am still working on pulling together a draft document; which I am doing by looking at other local org's Memoranda to see what they have included. I'm not a lawyer so we will need the Tobiases of this world to check it out :) There will be some sections like MEMBERS where the group will need to decide what to do here. So here I am going to outline headings and put down some examples but not flesh this out fully as yet until people have agreed membership rules. Anyway, hope to get the draft to you soon. Cheers Kerryn * * * * KERRYN MCKAY director, The African Commons Project email me at: kerryn(a)africancommons.org phone me: +2711 486 0211, cell: +27 82 334 6165, skype me: kerrynmac

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WikimediaZA September 2010