Fortuna i forti aiuta, e i timidi rifiuta — an Italian proverb

The Wikimedia Foundation and Red Hat jointly organized the Second Open Source Language Summit on February 12th and 13th, 2013. The summit was held at the Red Hat engineering center in Pune, India. Similar to the previous summit, this face-to-face work session was focused on internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) features, font support, input method tools, language search, i18n testing methods and standards. The sessions were work sprints, each with special focus on a key area. Participants included core contributors from the Wikimedia Foundation, Red Hat (including Fedora SIG members), KDE, FUEL, Google and C-DAC. Below is a summary of what was accomplished during these two days.

Input Methods

Parag Nemade and Santhosh Thottingal worked on making additional input methods available for the jQuery.IME library. 60 input methods, covering languages like Assamese, Esperanto, Russian, Greek, Hebrew were added bringing the total to 144. Also IMEs from the m17n library missing from the jQuery.IME library were identified.

Translation tools, translatewiki.net & FUEL Sprint

Siebrand Mazeland and Niklas Laxström, together with Ankit Patel, Rajesh Ranjan and Red Hat language maintainers, worked to identify more tools that could be used as Translation aids in a translation system. The FUEL project aims to standardize translations for frequently used terms, translation style and assessment methodology. Until now it has focused mostly on languages of India. The FUEL project can now be translated in translatewiki.net. Pau Giner demonstrated new designs for the translation editor and terminology usage, remotely from Spain.

Language Coverage Matrix

To better evaluate the needs for enabling support for languages, a matrix detailing the requirements and availability of basic and extended features is being drawn up. With 285 languages currently supported in Wikimedia and more than 100 in Fedora, this document will be instrumental in bridging the gaps and porting features across projects and platforms. Key areas of evaluation include input methods, fonts, translation aids like glossaries and spell-checkers, testing and validation methods, etc. A preliminary draft was created during the summit by Alolita Sharma, Runa Bhattacharjee and Amir E. Aharoni.

Fonts, WebFonts

An initiative to document the technical aspects of fonts for scripts for languages spoken in India started during the language summit. For each of the scripts, a reference font will be chosen and each font will be explained in detail to intersect with the Open Type font specification as a standard. It will aim to act as a reference document for any typographer working on Indian language fonts. Initial draft and outline of this document was prepared during the second day of the language summit, mainly by Santhosh Thottingal and Pravin Satpute.

Testing Internationalization Tools

Finding suitable methods for testing internationalized components and contents was the major focus of this sprint, with the Fedora Localization Testing Group (FLTG) and Wikimedia’s Language Engineering team sharing details of their testing methods. The FLTG conducts Test Days prior to Fedora beta releases with a test matrix targeted at specific core components, and Wikimedia uses unit tests for frequent testing of their development features. The FLTG showed its plans to integrate the screenshot comparison method for testing localized interfaces. This method will be useful for Wikimedia too. Extending the method for web-based applications and Wikimedia’s language requirements (e.g. right-to-left) were identified as areas for collaboration.

More news from the Language Summit can be found in the tweets, the session notes and the full report.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

(This guest post by Aditi Vashisht and Netha Hussain is part of the series on the WikiWomen’s Collaborative)

On Sunday, 4 November 2012, Wikimedians from Mumbai, India, conducted a Wikipedia workshop for women at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology,Wadala. The event was aimed at introducing women who are not yet editing Wikipedia to the website and teaching them how to edit.

“Lots of women are interested in editing Wikipedia, but sometimes they need to be specially invited to join in,” said Bishakha Datta, one of the primary organizers of the workshop. ”Doing this workshop was a chance to strategically get women to participate by creating an event meant for them, where they could freely ask questions, including basic ones, without feeling silly or stupid.”

Wikipedia editors Krutikaa Jawanjal and Pradeep Mohandas, who facilitated the event, were motivated to conduct a women’s workshop for bridging the gender gap that exists in Wikipedia. A lot of preparations were done ahead of time. Vidyalankar Institute of Technology was found to be the best place to conduct the workshop among all venues investigated by the team of organizers. The volunteers got together to discuss the agenda and the schedule of the event and planned their respective sessions.

Over one hundred participants signed up for to attend on the workshop’s Wikipedia page. A Facebook page was created for the event, where approximately 50 participants registered. Interested participants also emailed Wikipedia’s volunteer customer service group, OTRS. The enthusiasm was so high among the participants that registration had to be closed down a couple of days before the workshop. Some of the interested attendees had experimented with editing Wikipedia, and they had started asking questions to the organizers even before the event was launched! All participants who created an account were sent welcome messages by the organizers.

“The pre-meetup preparations involved more than 50 days of work. Two meetups were conducted for planning the workshop. The whole process involved a lot of hard work, yet it was fun,” said Karthik Nadar, the Secretary of Wikimedia India Chapter.

The workshop was a full day event with a lot of fun activities. More than 70 participants attended. After an introduction by the organizers, the participants were divided into groups and one facilitator was allotted to each group. The facilitator helped their group to create and expand a Wikipedia article by themselves. During the lunch break, the participants were served pav bhaji, an Indian delicacy. The participants moved around and made friends with each other and the organizers during the lunch break.

During the afternoon session, the participants asked to clarify their doubts about editing. Organizers gave a brief introduction about the Wikimedia India Chapter, and they conducted sessions sessions on How to add references to a Wikipedia article and How to upload pictures to Commons. The much awaited results of Wiki Loves Monuments India were declared after the sessions. Organizers also conducted a Wiki-Quiz and the winners were given t-shirts and other Wikimedia goodies!

Conducting the workshop was a memorable experience to the team of organizers. Krutikaa said her best memories included the ones where she had to resolve doubts and answer questions about editing Wikipedia. Wikimedian Rohini Lakshane said that it was thrilling to see the joy on the faces of the participants when their edits went live. She said she is planning to organize more workshops in the future because she thinks that workshops of this kind can make the community grow. For Karthik, the workshop was not about the number of participants, but about the number of people who are excited to edit Wikipedia.

The event was covered by various newspapers and websites. Videos on various aspects of Wikipedia were created during and after the event by a team of journalists. Techgross, an online daily for news-related to technology, reported: “Here is wishing that many more such workshops are held across India, Techgoss is sure there are many takers.”

(The Mumbai community is planning to conduct similar events in various parts of the city in the coming months and we’ll provide further updates soon.)

– Aditi Vashisht and Netha Hussain

The Wikimedia Foundation and Red Hat co-organized an Open Source Language Summit in Pune, India on November 6-7, 2012. The summit focused on language tools and technology development to support languages on Wikipedia, the Web, Linux and other Open Source platforms.

In total, 45 core language technology developers, open source contributors, typographers and technology evangelists from the Wikimedia Language Engineering and Mobile teams, Red Hat, Mozilla Foundation, KDE, GNOME, translatewiki.net and other open source projects participated in sessions and work sprints on internationalization and localization features supporting various open source projects on the web and Linux. After brief introductory talks, we focused our work on font support, input method tools, language search, and web and localisation standards.

Highlights: 

The event had short talks on the following topics:

The following people won prizes for their code contributions during the event:

• Anish Patil ported Universal Language Selector’s cross-language search algorithm to gnome language search
• Aravinda VK wrote a set of font-forge python wrappers to make changes to fonts programmatically. Aravinda fixed a few bugs in Kannada Gubbi font for Harfbuzz rendering engine and also wrote Kannada KGP keymap for jquery.ime
• G Karunakar added Hindi inscript keyboard layout to Firefox OS GAIA

Other accomplishments included:

• Kushal Das added patches to deploy Universal Language Selector on http://www.mozilla.org and also a patch for a bug on Mozilla localization platform.
• Alolita, Sankarshan, Runa, Satish worked on discussing APIs for various translation workflows and putting together an initial specification.
• Rajeesh Nambiar, Hussain KH, Ani Peter, Praveen A and Pravin Satpute fixed and filed upstream bugs for Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati and Punjabi fonts with Harfbuzz.
• Parag Nemade added InScript2 keyboards for Sanskrit, Nepali, Marathi and Konkani to jquery.ime.
• Ankit Gadgil wrote over 200 unit tests for Marathi and Hindi input methods in jquery.ime.
• Yuvaraj Pandian, Pau Giner, Arun Ganesh and Siebrand Mazeland developed an initial version of an Android-native app for Translatewiki.net for translation reviews.
• Pau Giner conducted user testing with new translation prototypes with translators. Arun Ganesh created an icon for gnome-transliteration.

You can browse through tweets and more notes from the event. Happy reading!

Srikanth Lakshmanan
Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer

Sunday, 28th October 2012, was “WikiWomen Day” in Pune, India. The day brought together women from a variety of educational backgrounds, castes, creeds, religions, and age groups. The purpose of the gathering was to both educate women about the huge gender gap that exists within Wikipedia and to encourage women to contribute.

The workshop was held by “Wikipedia Club Pune” in PAI International Learning Solutions, Azam Campus, Pune, India. The workshop began at 10:00am with approximately 25 attendees. The first session explained the issues surrounding the lack of women editors. This session was an eye-opener for attendees about the huge gender gap within Wikipedia. Next, we offered a “How to get Hands-on on Wikipedia” program. The majority of attendees didn’t know how to edit Wikipedia, therefore, they had to start from scratch with tasks such as creating a username, and learning about Wikipedia policies and guidelines, and its principles, such as the Five Pillars. After a thorough review, we presented the basics of editing.

Later in the afternoon, there was a breakout session where everyone got an opportunity to interact with one another while enjoying a lunch of burgers and soft drinks. Following that, there was Indic language session where attendees were introduced to the multi-lingual aspects of Wikipedia. After that was the “Collaborative Contribution” session where we put our newly acquired skills to work. In this session, we expanded the “Helen Keller” article in Marathi. This page was originally started by an anonymous editor with a single line of text. Within a half hour, the entire page was developed, telling a comprehensive story of her life. This collaborative experience was marvelous and my favorite session of the day. After this session, we distributed participation certificates to everyone and encouraged our motivated attendees to continue editing Wikipedia.

Last but not the least, the workshop ended with the cake-cutting ceremony, which was also the launch for “Wikipedia Summit India 2013,” to be held in January. The Summit will focus on Wikipedia’s gender gap and provide action-oriented workshops focused on closing the gap.

-Ketaki Pole (User:Ketaki Pole)

The Assamese Wikipedia community is still relatively small, but they have seen a significant increase of new editors recently. Over the past six months, the community of active editors has grown by 45 percent, and although Assamese Wikipedia has just 1,600 articles, the numbers are sure to increase following the start of the Assamese Wikipedia Education Program.

The program was launched on on 14 October, 2012, with 15 master’s students—90 percent are women—under the tutelage of the Head of the Department of Education at Guwahati University, Professor Dulumoni Goswami. The students will first learn how to type in Assamese using Rudali. After that, students will learn how to edit Wikipedia, including more advanced editing techniques, such as adding references, headers, and various other intricacies in Wiki markup.

The Centre for Internet and Society (CIS), a grantee of the Wikimedia Foundation, is supporting the project and guiding the growth of Wikimedia-related activities in India. Nitika Tandon at CIS has written a more detailed report, which you can read here.

We’re  happy to see the progress, and we hope the Assamese Wikipedia continues to flourish!

Matthew Roth, Global Communications Manager

Imagine talking about the world’s largest free encyclopedia on a rainy weekend with a bunch of weavers, artists, potters and curators – all experts and practitioners of Indian craft traditions. Imagine hearing them talk about intricate silk embroidery, metal casting, sari motifs, Internet and their edit counts – all in one breath! This is India’s first GLAM initiative running in collaboration between the staff members at the National Handicrafts and Handlooms Museum in New Delhi, India (also known as the Crafts Museum) and the Hindi Wikipedia community. (Hindi is the language of choice for most of the staff members.)  We now have five new editors editing Hindi articles related to crafts like Bidriware, Madhubani paintings and Brocade.

It was particularly moving to see people from all walks of life, who have computer and internet access only at work, navigate the Indic keyboard layout to collaboratively improve these articles. As Krishan, a young stenographer at the museum said: “It’s not that beautiful craft traditions and objects don’t exist in India. In fact, they can be found in every house and village, but it is time to show the whole world what a rich culture we have. And, I am ready to contribute to Wikipedia so that millions of Hindi speakers are able read about them.”

(more…)

Editors on Wikipedia are constantly working to improve content related to their countries, cultures, cuisines and everything else that makes their identity. This post is about the latest and perhaps the biggest ever on-wiki collaboration by members of Wikiproject India – “Tag and Assess 2012,” which ran for three months.  68 editors from every corner of India and from all over the world participated!  Here is what a (very) few of them had to say.

Why Tag and Assess?

The drive is all about “comprehensive housekeeping”, says the project page. Basically, it was geared towards reassessing the importance (high, middle or low) and quality of articles (stub, start, C…) on all articles related to India. It started out with a massive pool of 93,800 stub and start class articles, with an aim to expand the scope of Wikiproject India to more India related articles, and to take stock of the quality of the present articles. (more…)

All Indic Wikimedia communities (and indeed all small communities across the world) need to invite, welcome, introduce, support and encourage new editors.  Students – including school children – are wonderful additions to our communities. They have energy and talent and the right attitude. They are the ones to take forward Wikimedia projects.

The Malayalam Wikipedia community has a long tradition of working with school children and with the education system through its partnership with the Kerala Government’s IT@School Project. On 3rd July 2012, this relationship was further strengthened with the inauguration of  the Malayalam Wikipedia Education Programme.   The objective is to promote Wikipedia editing with school children and teachers at the Government Higher Secondary School at Anchal West, Kollam. This has only just started, but there are some pointers even at this early stage which are useful to small communities exploring similar initiatives and partnerships – within and beyond education. (more…)

I made a short visit to India last week in order to attend the Malayalam community conference “Wikisangamotsavam 2012“ in Kollam, Kerala. The trip was my sixth visit to India since I joined Wikimedia in 2010, and was particularly special because it highlighted the importance and the huge potential of our projects in Indic languages.

While many people around the world experience India as an English-speaking country, close to 90 percent of Indians do not speak English at all. This is easy to miss, since it is quite common for the rest of the world to interact with one of the 125-150 million or so Indians (twice the population of the United Kingdom) who do speak English.

India is home to several hundred languages, 11 of which are the primary language of more than 30 million people worldwide (the approximate population of my home country, Canada). For Wikimedia to realize its vision, we need to have projects that serve the 90 percent in India, or more than a billion people.

What was encouraging about my visit was that I saw that this isn’t some naive dream. We are really seeing some communities emerge and there is no reason why we can’t attract large communities of contributors to build high quality Wikipedias in many Indic languages…and we can get these in the hands of every Indian on their mobile phone (more soon on mobile partnerships in India).

The Malayalam community served as a real inspiration. Over the past 4 years, they have built a passionate community that has expanded their Wikipedia from 5,700 to 23,000 articles. The community is a diverse mix of teachers, university students, computer engineers, photographers, business people, doctors and others. They have been highly industrious in working through the myriad technical issues posed by the lack of Malayalam keyboards and the limited localization of software into the language. They developed an input tool that now allows users to enter information in various Indic languages on a latin script keyboard. They have built innovative partnerships with the Kerala government to introduce Wikipedia to students and to conduct Wikipedia Academies across the state. One middle school teacher even had his typing class contribute Malayalam epic poems to Wikisource, a useful way to get their typing practice done. They recently held a photography program called Malayalam loves Wikimedia, adding over 11,000 local images to Wikimedia Commons.

The Malayalam community is only at the end of the first verse of their epic poem. I challenged them to think about ways to grow their community. They have 80 active editors and are doing great work. Imagine if they were 1,500 editors like we have in the Polish community (a similar language by number of speakers): a community of that size would enable massive access to knowledge for any Malayalam speaker.

During the rest of my visit, I had the opportunity to hear about promising steps in Kannada, Gujarati, Assamese, Oriya, Telugu, Sanskrit and Hindi (we also recently blogged about the Tamil Wiki Media contest). Most of these projects are small at this time with fewer than 50 active contributors, some less than 10. What is promising is that there are a few passionate people ready to provide leadership, reach out in their communities and help build Wikimedia projects in their languages. It is also promising that groups are piloting different strategies in partnership with the India Program’s Indic initiative led by Shiju Alex. If we can have 5-10 small pilots operational at any given time, with frequent exchanges of the experiences gained in each, then we can quickly figure out effective strategies and spread them across the many Indic language projects and to other smaller projects around the world.

Imagine a world in which every single Indian with access to a computer or a mobile phone can freely access and contribute to the sum of all knowledge in their own language. Wouldn’t that be something special?

Barry Newstead is Chief Global Development Officer of the Wikimedia Foundation. He does not speak an Indic language, but is committed to supporting these projects.

The Tamil Wikimedia community recently conducted the Tamil Wiki Media Contest (TWMC), generating 15,000 files from a total of 307 contributors. 

This hugely successful effort was organized by user Sodabottle along with Logicwiki, Natkeeran, Kalaiarasy, Sanjeevi Sivakumar and a dozen other community members. The story of TWMC began when Sodabottle attended the Wikimania 2011 conference, having been requested by a long-standing Tamil Wikipedian, Natkeeran, to scout for ideas and resources to support Tamil projects. Sodabottle suggested a media contest supported through a Wikimedia Foundation grant, as an article writing contest had already been done in the previous year. He recollects, with a wry smile, that he initially thought a photo/media contest would take less time and effort!

Sodabottle discussed the idea with Natkeeran and after brainstorming with two other community members, Logicwiki and Kalaiarasy, they initiated an RfC (request for comment) on the Tamil Wikipedia village pump.  There was unanimous backing from the community. In these two weeks, what started out as a simple proposal – “Shall we have a Media contest this year?” – was fleshed out with the suggestions of over a dozen contributors. Subsequent discussions focused on prize money, type of prizes, outreach strategy and a host of other operational details, after which the grant application was made.
Volunteers were going to be required and this presented both a unique challenge and a great opportunity for Tamil Wikimedians.  The Tamil Wiki community is spread across continents and timezones, and to reach out to everyone, coordinators with specific skill sets were chosen across diverse geographical locations. Although the number of coordinators was limited to 5 to keep the project manageable, more volunteers pitched in at every stage. Logicwiki provided extensive technical support throughout the event.

Indeed, Tamil Wikipedians from countries as far off as Malaysia and Australia spread the word in their respective countries!
TWMC has been an avenue for many MediaWiki software enthusiasts to chip in as well. T. Shrinivasan, an open source enthusiast and convener of the Chennai Linux Users Group, developed a brand new open source tool for easier uploading of images.

What was TWMC’s biggest feat then? Sure, it generated a lot of participation, new content and some new tools. But it was also important for community mobilization – the brilliant way in which a community took every step, small and big together, overcame hurdles through team solutions and managed to connect with people across the planet. Incredibly, this was done over 3 long months!
Further, two long time editors returned from their wikibreaks to help, and four new regular editors are now contributing to Tamil Wikipedia.  TWMC is also an excellent example of sustained outreach, since newbies were given an opportunity to contribute easily and from there explore other facets of Wikimedia projects. It was also a wonderful opportunity to get professional photographers to use Commons and upload their work to it. The community (Tamil and others) now uses almost 8000 of the contest images on different projects.  A Norwegian user has used images from this contest in Norsk Wikipedia.

On prizes, Sodabottle adds, “A contest and prizes are just the right attraction to stop people from leaving after a [quick] look over [a project], and goad them into doing something concrete.” He cites his own example: He started contributing to Tamil Wikipedia only because of an article writing contest. Although he didn’t win a prize there, it lured him in and he has been a regular editor since then. Sodabottle also has a few tips specifically about Commons: “Commons, like any of our projects”, says he, “is undermanned.” So, it is crucial to have your own maintenance workforce for any media contest. Massive effort is require to copyvio check, tag, template, move and categorize  in such volumes. He also suggests a MediaWiki extension to help similar initiatives.

(You can view the the other prize winners or read the detailed Tamil Wikimedians Grant report)

Noopur Raval, Consultant (Communications), India Program