[Foundation-l] Request for approval for a wiki for standards

[Gerard Meijssen]

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