Earlier this month, Wikimedia staff and volunteers got together in Mumbai, India to work on mobile, offline, and internationalisation/localisation.
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011
Photos are up:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Victorgrigas#Hackathon_Mumbai_2011
Some notes on our outcomes, which included many new localisations for Kiwix and new input methods for MediaWiki, readying Narayam for Wikimedia Incubator, a prototype onscreen keyboard built in Narayam, Wikimedia Mobile ready for translation, new UI prototypes for language selection, and more:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/India_Hackathon_2011/Schedule_notes#Day_1_out...
And I haven't even touched on mobile! An update specifically on mobile progress at the hackathon: http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/mobile-l/2011-November/005200.html -- Summary from Phil Chang:
In summary, over one weekend more than 50 volunteers from many parts of India added their hard work and insights to the technical foundation of Wikipedia. In the mobile area alone, volunteers contributed to 17 features, as listed here (features that were worked on are marked with an "H"):
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mobile_Projects/features#India_Hackathon
We also got support and input from most of the major mobile operators in India about how to make our user experience better. Free access to Wikipedia is moving forward on a number of fronts, as we identified several forms of collaboration, not just in the form of Wikipedia Zero. For example, there seems to be widespread interest in using an RSS feed of the Article of the Day, and the top 5 languages in India are important.
I'm asking Emmanuel to send an offline-related summary to https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l . And I'm predicting the localization folks will have a summary in their next showcase; watch https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n .
This was the largest Wikimedia tech outreach event I've been a part of, with 80 or so new folks learning and becoming contributors. Thanks to the Wikimedia staffers who came, for -- as Alolita put it -- "leading project teams to do some nice development, UI design, testing and accomplishing a lot in a short blip of time." Thanks to the local community and chapter for putting on Wiki Conference India, which happened at the same time: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiConference_India_2011
Sorry to be brief; more details are at the links provided. I know that the i18n team also led a translation sprint and an intro to MediaWiki hacking in Pune after the Mumbai hackathon, but I'll leave it to them in case they want to report about that.
I'm quite intrigued by the on-screen keyboard for the Narayam input method. I haven't seen it in action, but the screenshots look nice -- it's showing what chars would get typed and you can click on them directly or use it as a guide for the physical keyboard. Sweet!
This could be really awesome if well-integrated on mobile and tablet form-factors as well, though I'm a bit unsure if we can cleanly 'replace' the stock systems' on-screen touch keyboards (say by somehow skipping actual input focus and simulating it?)
-- brion
Thanks for the feedback, Brion.
Focus during the hackathon was primarily on desktop, but in the nearest possible future, mobile would of course be the next target. Current limitation is that the on-screen prototype only works for InScript mappings, and not for for example transliteration or Esperanto x-encoding.
We're currently completing and improving Narayam wrt to mappings for Indic languages as well as getting ready for a first wave of WebFonts deployment on December 12. We got loads of feedback from the Indic speakers during the hackathon in Mumbai an the translation sprint and introduction to MediaWiki sessions in Pune.
After that, the on-screen keyboard, as well as a new user interface language picker, for which I hope Brandon will be making the first sketches available soon. We hope to have those ready by mid-January.
-- Siebrand Mazeland
M: +31 6 50 69 1239 Skype: siebrand
Op 30 nov. 2011 om 17:03 heeft Brion Vibber brion@pobox.com het volgende geschreven:
I'm quite intrigued by the on-screen keyboard for the Narayam input method. I haven't seen it in action, but the screenshots look nice -- it's showing what chars would get typed and you can click on them directly or use it as a guide for the physical keyboard. Sweet!
This could be really awesome if well-integrated on mobile and tablet form-factors as well, though I'm a bit unsure if we can cleanly 'replace' the stock systems' on-screen touch keyboards (say by somehow skipping actual input focus and simulating it?)
-- brion _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
On 11/30/2011 05:03 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
I'm quite intrigued by the on-screen keyboard for the Narayam input method. I haven't seen it in action, but the screenshots look nice -- it's showing what chars would get typed and you can click on them directly or use it as a guide for the physical keyboard. Sweet!
When editing Wikipedia articles or proofreading in Wikisource, the number of possible character sets that you can want to pick characters from makes it hard to design a nice user interface. I think it could help if the characters in the existing article were used.
For example, when editing an article on Moscow, if Cyrillic names of suburbs are mentioned in the article, the Cyrillic characters would appear in the editing interface (but not Greek, Arabic or Japanese).
On Wed, Nov 30, 2011 at 11:22 AM, Lars Aronsson lars@aronsson.se wrote:
On 11/30/2011 05:03 PM, Brion Vibber wrote:
I'm quite intrigued by the on-screen keyboard for the Narayam input
method.
I haven't seen it in action, but the screenshots look nice -- it's
showing
what chars would get typed and you can click on them directly or use it
as
a guide for the physical keyboard. Sweet!
When editing Wikipedia articles or proofreading in Wikisource, the number of possible character sets that you can want to pick characters from makes it hard to design a nice user interface. I think it could help if the characters in the existing article were used.
For example, when editing an article on Moscow, if Cyrillic names of suburbs are mentioned in the article, the Cyrillic characters would appear in the editing interface (but not Greek, Arabic or Japanese).
+1 context-sensitivity can be a big help in these things.
Detecting presence of certain languages on the page and making sure their special keyboards or symbols are available (but not in your way until you need them) would be a big assistance for working on some pages!
-- brion
On 30/11/2011 04:28, Sumana Harihareswara wrote:
I'm asking Emmanuel to send an offline-related summary to https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/offline-l .
The Hackathon was this time more open than for example in Berlin, so we had the visit of many people which mostly were at the same time really interested in technical details but without mostly knowing so much about the current technological context.
During two days a small team was in a separate room to speak, work and exchange about offline, in particular Kiwix: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Offline_room_-_Hackathon_Mumbai_2011...
Our focus was mainly on two things:
* Having achievements. After introducing Translatewiki and explaining how it works, each attendee started to translate (or improve the translation) of Kiwix in his Indian languages and we achieved consequently to get Kiwix localised in 4 additional Indian languages.
* Trying to get more hackers involved in offline stuff. A big part of Sunday was used to explain how works Kiwix, what are the technologies behind and how to setup a compilation environment. This was not so easy to have a really interactive session as many of the audience did not have a GNU/Linux (Windows domination), and the bandwidth was to limited to start downloading ISOs & VMs (and I had not that stuff by me).
Hope to see one or two members of this team joining the Kiwix dev. team and starting hacking the code in the next weeks. Many of them already joined the Kiwix dev. Mailing list: https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/kiwix-developer
Emmanuel
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org