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.

Santhosh Thottingal presenting his talk on jquery.ime

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

A growing number of visitors access the mobile site of Wikipedia and it is an area the engineering team is keen to improve. To do this, we are offering a more functional and polished experience adapted for mobile users, who operate in a much more confined world compared to those on the desktop.

This week we pushed several new and updated design changes to our beta. We hope these changes will provide a more professional look and a better experience for you. These include changes to the footer, a cleaner design for revealing and hiding sections, and a revamped full-screen search experience. The mechanism for toggling between desktop and mobile has also moved from the footer to the top navigation menu to the left of search to allow users to switch more effortlessly.

In addition to this we have also pushed an experimental feature which makes it easier to refer to references on articles without having to plunge to the bottom of the page. Now clicking on a reference will load an overlay which readers can consult without losing their place in the article.

We are keen to gather feedback to stabilise these additions and make these changes available by default to a much larger audience. In particular and as always, we are interested in any device-specific issues being brought to our attention as well as feedback on the new design. Let us know how you find the experience – good and bad and also the quirks that you discover.

We are also experimenting with animations when revealing references and would appreciate thoughts from the community on which is felt to work best. By default, references are revealed by a fade in/out effect but we would appreciate thoughts on whether a slide animation or no animation would be preferable.

Opt in to our beta and try them out today. We look forward to your feedback which can be provided either here or by your involvement in the design process.

– Jon Robson, Software Developer Mobile

Kul Wadhwa, Wikimedia Foundation Head of Mobile, and Jon Fredrik Baksaas, Telenor CEO, at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain.

Logging on to Wikimedia projects seems routine for many of us, but we can forget that for much of the world accessing the free information on Wikipedia is a financial burden. For the billions of people whose primary opportunity to access the Internet is via a mobile device, data charges for sites like Wikipedia are too prohibitive and prevent them from enjoying the educational benefits of the largest repository of knowledge in history.

So we are proud to announce a new partnership today between the Wikimedia Foundation and Telenor Group to provide access to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia sites free of traffic charges on mobile devices to Telenor customers in Asia and Southeastern Europe. The partnership, an important piece of the Wikimedia Foundation’s mobile strategy and the first deal like this in Asia, will potentially reach 135 million mobile users through Telenor affiliates in Thailand, Malaysia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, India, Montenegro, and Serbia.

Telenor is the second mobile carrier to join with the Wikimedia Foundation to increase access to the free and open knowledge available on Wikipedia, following an announcement with Orange in January. The 3-year partnership with Telenor will be implemented throughout 2012, with the first markets launching in the spring. Each local Telenor affiliate will establish technical solutions together with the Wikimedia Foundation. Customers with a Telenor SIM will be able to access a version of the encyclopedia for as many times as they like in a given period, at no charge, as long as they stay within Wikipedia’s pages.

Our mobile team has been working tirelessly to forge new partnerships with mobile carriers throughout the world. I would like to offer my thanks to all the Foundation staff members who have dedicated their time to this endeavor. We’d also like to thank the dozens of volunteers from around the world who have contributed to making this partnership successful.

Please join me in thanking Telenor for demonstrating their shared commitment to making access to Wikipedia available to their customers for free. We’re happy to support this partnership and we look forward to similar announcements in the future.

Kul Takanao Wadhwa
Head of Mobile Development

For more information, please read our Q&A here.

The mobile web is growing at a phenomenal pace. According to research, it will outpace the desktop internet web in 2014, when approximately 1.7 billion users will access the net on their mobile phone, many of them from the Global South, compared to 1.65 billion desktop web users. As part of our mission to provide free knowledge to everyone, we are committed to enhancing our mobile platform, and have made several improvements to the reading user experience. But most importantly, we recently launched a partnership with Orange to provide Wikipedia at no data cost to mobile readers in Africa and the Middle East.

To understand our current Wikipedia mobile users across different geographies and prioritize product features, we conducted a survey of Wikipedia mobile readers. You can read more about its methodology on Meta wiki.

Looking at the data from the survey, there is a strong case to be made for making Wikipedia accessible without data charges on mobile devices.  Over half of Wikipedia mobile readers (52 percent) said that having Wikipedia free for their mobile data plans would increase their Wikipedia usage. Moreover, 28 percent indicated that it would increase their likelihood to buy from that mobile provider.  Another 16 percent said that they would be willing to switch their mobile providers to have free Wikipedia access.

Q. If certain mobile phone service providers provided Wikipedia for free on their data plans, how might that affect your actions? Base: 6700 (Those currently pay for a data plan)

Looking globally, we found that Wikipedia readers in the Global South, specifically in Brazil, Latin America and MENA, indicated that they would use Wikipedia more often if no data costs were accrued, and even suggested this as a key motivating factor for switching to or considering alternative service providers.

Q: If certain mobile phone service providers provided Wikipedia for free on their data plans, how might that affect your actions? Base: 6700 (Those currently pay for a data plan)

We found high interest in Wikipedia access without data charges despite a majority of readers (54 percent) stating that their mobile data plan is not a significant monthly expense for their household.  But it should be noted that the data is based on current mobile readers, and doesn’t survey those who don’t have current mobile Wikipedia access, some of whom might not have access to the mobile web due to high cost.  Only 14 percent of respondents stated that their data plan was either a significant expense with their household actively managing usage, or too expensive leading to issues of affordability. In addition, about 32 percent stated that it was a significant expense, but that they were not concerned about it.

Q: Which of the following statements best describes how expensive your data plan is relative to other expenses that you have? Base: 6700 (Those currently pay for a data plan)

If you are interested in more data from the mobile survey, please check out the toplines or read our summary report or read key findings.

Mani Pande, Head of Global Development Research

Ayush Khanna, Data Analyst, Global Development

When good people get together in a friendly, well organised setting like this weekend in Pune, many great things happen. Several MediaWiki developers had come to provide the many people new to MediaWiki with their expertise and guide people into its inner workings.

Many people worked on Wikimedia mobile and the SmartPhone software, others worked on MediaWiki and its extensions. Bugs got fixed and functionality got extended.

One of the surprises was two people working on the localisation for the Mongolian language. The inclusion of a web font that will support the Dzonka language is another.

Dzongkha is the official language of Bhutan and according to Ethnologue, the script used is either Tibetan script, Uchen style or the Tibetan script, Umed style. These scripts and styles are also used for the Tibetan language, it is not only Dzongkha that stands to benefit.

One of the highlights of the work on the SmartPhone app is support for scripts that are written from right to left, this is now “beta” functionality. The result of more people looking at the code was that several bugs received the attention needed to make them go away. Scrolling was one area that got attention; this results in a smoother user experience.

New input methods have been created for Punjabi transliteration and for an Gujarati input method to be included in Narayam. The continued collaboration with RedHat engineers ensures that our work benefits both MediaWiki and RedHat/Fedora. We do realise that there is still a lot to do and it is not only documentation. Additional work was done on the “visual on-screen keyboard” that was started at the previous hackathon in Pune, it still needs more testing and design work.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

When a hackathon is organised, it is wonderful when the reality of the results exceeds expectations. The reality was that some of India’s best and brightest attended the hackathon. They represented many of the languages  of India, and it showed.

Seven Indians and a German created an input method for their language. A Russian keyboard method is promised for the next day. There was a jQuery wizard who created a wonderful and necessary addition to the Narayam extension: a visual cue to where the characters are on the keyboard. This information comes directly from the Narayam definitions and the best part is that the visual cue actually works as well.

The WebFonts extension got its reality check. WebFonts provides default fonts in order to ensure that nobody sees the infamous Unicode squares and numbers instead of the desired characters. The MediaWiki software is exclusively open source, and consequently the fonts we deliver through the WebFonts extension need to be freely licensed, too.  The default font we use for the Indic languages is the Lohit font produced by Red Hat. It was quite astonishing to learn that some of the characters are not what the character should look like. Bugs have been filed for this at Red Hat and more work will be done.

We are going to roll out the WebFonts extension on December 12th. Our aim is to install it on the Indic projects. When we have freely licensed fonts that show languages correctly, we will finally be able to provide readable content to everyone. We will be working towards resolving the issues identified at the hackathon.

The Mumbai hackathon has also been good for the Kiwix off-line reader; not only was the software localised into several languages, new developers also familiarized themselves with the software itself to implement further improvements. This is quite important because many Indian people have no or intermittent access to the Internet. In addition to Wikipedia content, there are many projects in India to transcribe books that are in the public domain; as the Kiwix software gets ready to support this content, it will help more and more people get access to India’s rich cultural heritage.

Mobile support was the third centre of gravity; many first-time Wikimedia hackers teamed up with seasoned Wikimedia developers and this produced great results. This included work on a mobile landing page for India, as well as a gateway that allows users to receive Wikipedia articles over SMS and the carrier-specific USSD technology. To appreciate this, many people do not have access to the Internet and consequently to our content. Work also continued on the “Wikipedia Zero” project, which aims to bring Wikipedia and other Wikimedia content to millions of users without data charges.

We also saw an interesting connection with the October 2011 Coding Challenge. Developer Yuvipanda implemented Android 2.2 support for one of the coding challenge submissions, the “Share with Wikimedia Commons” Android app (as well as for the official Wikipedia Android app).

All this will get some review, maybe some polishing but we are quite eager to bring this functionality to you.

Many of the hackers were new to MediaWiki. With an introduction by Erik and private tutoring by Sumana, Tomasz, Patrick, and others, several people really got into the swing of things to the extent that some bugs were smashed.  The hackathon proved as always that when you bring great people together special things can and do happen.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

When Wikipedia began in 2001, desktop PCs were the dominant device for web access. However, a lot has changed in the last 10 years with the growth of the mobile web and the introduction of a new class of devices like digital music players, smartphones and tablets. As we are ready to step into 2012, we find that readers are consuming Wikipedia across a gamut of devices – desktops, laptops, smartphones, tablets, gaming devices and so on. In this blog post, we share insights about the devices on which readers consume Wikipedia content.

a. Only 21% of our readers have read Wikipedia on their mobile phone

b. Smartphones are a significant opportunity for Wikipedia growth

c. Most of our readers have a positive opinion of mobile Wikipedia

d. Wikipedia Mobile is the most popular smartphone app

e. Desktops remain most widely used device for reading Wikipedia

f. 21% of US Wikipedia readers have read Wikipedia on a tablet

Search and Wikipedia

Search is central to the Wikipedia experience – both as a way of reaching the website as well as discovering content on Wikipedia.  Several questions on the Readers Survey 2011 were aimed at understanding the search experiences across nations, languages, and devices. Here are some of the key insights about search from the study:

Contents

• a. About half of our readers specifically look for Wikipedia in search engine results
• b. Search is the most desired improvement to Wikipedia
• c. Readers speaking Portuguese and Arabic are much more desiring of better search
• d. Search on mobile platforms does not perform as well as desktops

(more…)

As an increasing number of people access the internet from their mobile phones Wikipedia needs to become increasingly mobile. Recently we wrote about the new mobile frontend but how do you get to a Wikipedia article in the first place, especially if you don’t know what you’re looking for or don’t speak the local language?

Introducing QRpedia.
QR codes – barcodes for the internet – have been around for decades and the technology is increasingly being used in everything from street advertising to museum object labels. QRpedia takes the concept one step further to allow a single QR code to send you seamlessly to the mobile-friendly version of any Wikipedia article in your own language. This system is unique to Wikipedia because no other website has manually created links between languages across such an incredible breadth of topics.

A QRpedia code for the Wikipedia article about the artist Joan Miró. 1 code, 40 languages. Try this one for yourself!

When you scan the code the language setting of your phone is also transmitted. QRpedia uses Wikipedia’s API to determine whether there is a version of the chosen Wikipedia article in the language your phone is using, and if so, displays the mobile-friendly version. If there is no article (yet!) in your preferred language it will show you the most relevant article instead.

Launched in April this year, the open source QRpedia was developed out of the partnership between the Derby Museum and Gallery, England and local Wikimedia contributors Roger Bamkin, chair of Wikimedia UK, and Terence Eden, a mobile web consultant. As “Wikipedian in Residence” at the Derby Museum, Roger capitalised on this system by hosting the hugely successful Multilingual Challenge (map of participants) to ensure that content of key importance to the museum was translated into as many languages as possible. Terence built the system and the museum was kind enough to install object labels incorporating the codes.

In an era when cultural funding is very constrained, the combination of QRpedia and the global Wikipedia community enabled the Derby museum to produce a multilingual visitor experience at virtually no cost. Easy mobile access to Wikipedia articles allows visitors to the museum to access unprecedented detail about the objects and their context – information that didn’t make it onto the exhibit label.

Jimmy Wales scanning the QRpedia code at the working antique carousel in the Children’s Museum of Indianapolis.

This system is now in use in other museums around the world. These include exhibitions at the on-site museum of the the National Archives of the UK, in the permanent signage of key objects at The Children’s Museum of Indianapolis and in a major traveling exhibition of Miró’s work in association with the Fundació Joan Miró of Barcelona.

To generate your own QRpedia codes visit http://qrpedia.org/
and simply paste the URL of any Wikipedia article into the box.
The freely licensed sourcecode can be viewed at http://code.google.com/p/qrwp/

—-

Liam Wyatt
Cultural Partnerships Fellow