Among the Wikimedia projects, Wikipedia has the highest number of individual language projects — 285. The Language Engineering team focuses on building language tools and assets that improve the ability to interact with any article on Wikipedia. Language assets like fonts and input methods are integrated into MediaWiki and its extensions, and our wikis are localized using collaborative translation with translation tools to ensure a decent user experience.

Collaboration in Language Projects and the Language Maven Program

Language Engineering community meetup during GNUnify 2013 at Pune, India

Language tools are constantly evolving to ensure support for our users. It is a slow if not impossible task to scale our small engineering team to support hundreds of languages without close collaboration with our language communities, which have many capable and technically-savvy editors and administrators.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team has compiled a proposal for the formation of a special interest group named the Language Mavens. With members from various language communities from around the globe, we hope to learn from our users, seek advice, guidance and validation on language features. We hope that the Language Mavens will pull in participation from community members and experts who care about language support features and their adoption in the wikis they read and contribute to.

Getting started with the Maven Program

The Language Maven pilot was rolled out earlier this month on April 13 with a meeting that was well attended. Program scope and activities were discussed. One of the recommendations was to ensure that documents and handy checklists be prepared for easy reference to the language tools available to each language community. Activities that the Mavens can participate in include usability tests, bug triages, testing days and even blogging to share valuable insights about the internationalization tools in their favorite language wiki projects.

The Mavens program is aimed to focus on collecting feedback and providing support for language tools and assets being deployed by the team. This will help develop a long-term user group that will be instrumental in helping other language community members learn more about the latest language features and tools being rolled out. The Maven team expects to meet once every month and communicate through the mediawiki-i18n mailing list. To participate as a Language Maven, please fill up this form to let us know about your interest or ping me (runa at wikimedia dot org) for any questions!

Help us make your language experience better — join the Mavens!

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team continued to develop additional features for Translate UX (TUX) and to fix bugs, including a number of critical bugs that affected Microsoft Internet Explorer. TUX has now been deployed on Wikimedia sites and on translatewiki.net. The team also launched the new outreach program, called Language Mavens, and conducted an office hour.

The view after the user logs in to the new home page of translatewiki.net. This is currently in development.

Redesigning the main page of translatewiki.net

As part of the original specifications for TUX, the translatewiki.net main page is being redesigned. The layout will now include a set of tiles for the project groups that will contain the projects’ logo and statistics. The links conveniently placed on the tiles can be used to access the project messages for translation and proofreading. Once logged in, users will be presented with summarized statistics of their recent activities.

Significant changes are also planned for the account sign-up form. Along with features that will allow newly signed-up users to familiarize themselves with the translation workflow, it’ll make the process of getting the translation permissions smoother. The page will also include artwork to depict cultural diversity from around the world. The main page is currently under preparation, but the special page can already be accessed on translatewiki.net.

Language Mavens: The new outreach program

Language Mavens, the new outreach program for the Language Engineering team, was launched to provide better support to the various language communities within Wikimedia projects. The program was announced during the monthly office-hour (read the logs). After a meeting with the initial group of participants, the pilot phase is now underway. The program aims to regularly connect with the language communities across the Wikimedia projects to get feedback about the user experience and any improvements needed in the language support features. To optimize the internationalization tools and workflows, the program will also facilitate participation in activities such as bug triages and testing days. The team will hold regular meetings with the Maven team members. The program is open for participation, and new members can sign up online. To get more details about the program, you can read the program’s description and write to runa at wikimedia dot org.

Up next

For the next development sprints, the team will continue to work on the projects mentioned above, and also devote significant efforts on redesigning the Universal Language Selector (ULS) interface based on the design review document. The Language Engineering team will host a community bug triage session on April 24th, 2013 at 17:00 UTC. The team also invites students participating in Google’s Summer of Code 2013, to work with them on several internationalization projects.

To know more about our projects and ways to participate, please find us on the IRC channel #mediawiki-i18n (Freenode) or write to runa at wikimedia dot org.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

'You can also write on Wikipedia' - Facebook group for newbies

Social media is part of our reality. It is estimated that in India alone, the current number of 2 million Indians on social networking sites will grow by a factor of 36 in the next three years. Social media outreach can be a powerful tool, if used prudently, and we decided apply it to the task of encouraging Wikipedia participation in India.

The India Program started a pilot in March to using social media for outreach – and the initial indicators are encouraging. The seed for this was sown when we tried to stay in touch with the hundreds of people who had attended various outreach sessions across the country since January 2012. We sent them email or talk page messages offering help, but got only a handful of responses. But when we asked them if they’d like to join a Facebook group, the response was tremendous – and the “You Can Edit Wikipedia” page on Facebook now has 400 members.

Historically, “physical” outreach has been the primary mode of Wikipedia outreach, but it requires more time and effort on the part of existing editors, such as when they go to colleges or meetups and tell interested people about Wikipedia.  Social media outreach requires significantly lower volunteer time and effort, and offers much more flexibility.

Screenshot of conversation with a new editor making his first edit

After talking to existing editors who were active in outreach or on social media as well as observing community Facebook groups, we identified tips on how this initiative could be best conducted. This was fleshed out into a 20 point guide, intended to provide structure in what can be a chaotic environment.

It suggests to get new editors to complete 5 basic tasks: create a user page, correct a spelling mistake, add a reference, improve content and leave a talk page message. All this is done using articles about a “fun” topic, based on existing policies but explaining them in simple terms.

So, what are the learnings reflected in this guide? Earlier, for most community Facebook groups, members would post links to articles they edited or images they added without an explanation or a call to action. Members were informing things but weren’t asking questions. Similarly, there was very little interaction between experienced and new editors. The activity on the group was irregular.
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Netha Hussain

User:Netha Hussain‘s inspiring story is a wonderful way of celebrating Women’s History Month. Netha is a woman editor of the Malayalam language Wikipedia from the state of Kerala in India.

Netha is both a medical student and a Wikipedian. She mostly edits articles related to medicine/biology, literature and women’s biographies. She used to maintain a portal for biology on the Malayalam Wikipedia and is presently working to create and improve its most important health articles.

Netha recalls how she landed up on Wikipedia searching for a kind of chutney made in Malayali cuisine, ‘Chammandi‘, and after realizing there was no article on it, started it herself. Initially reluctant to edit in Malayalam, it is actually through Wikipedia that she brushed up her language skills well enough to write a Featured Article in Malayalam within a year! On the English Wikpedia, she started by editing the article about her college.

As it is so often the case, until Netha landed up at a WikiAcademy in Kozhikode, not many knew she was a female editor! She has taken up the challenge to bridge this gender gap and now runs mailing list discussions for women Wikimedians in Malayalam to share their experiences and build offline relationships. “Most of my friends online are Wikipedians”, she quips.

About welcoming women editors on Wikipedia, especially its Indic language versions, she says, “The community is very receptive to women editors. I was not privileged or discriminated just because I was a woman. I was encouraged to work on women’s biographies which were mostly stubs. With my help, many good quality articles on famous women were created on Malayalam Wikipedia.”

As in Netha’s case, in most Indic language Wikipedias it is easier to make substantial contributions than in other projects. Netha believes that the role of women is not different from the role from men in their contribution to free knowledge movements.

Netha believes her medical dreams and her Wikipedia editing reflect aligned missions “to empower people with knowledge and fulfill our duties towards the society.” (To reach out to her, the best place is her talk page.)

Noopur Raval, Consultant (Communications), India Program, Wikimedia Foundation

Students are widely using Wikipedia as a source for their school projects and as a learning tool. However, what happens if we change this procedure of just “using Wikipedia” and also engage students in writing Wikipedia? This is the main idea behind the worldwide spreading of Ambassador programs on Wikipedia projects all over the world. One promising method for an Ambassador program was tested by students who participated in cooperation with Czech WikiProject Protected areas.

The Czech WikiProject Protected areas represented by Chmee2 ran in winter semester 2011/2012 in cooperation with Jiří Reif, university teacher at Institute for Environmental Studies, Faculty of Science at the Charles University in Prague. For the project, 30 bachelor’s students participated in writing articles on the Czech Wikipedia. Students had to visit one protected area of their choice, take several pictures of the area, write an article for the Czech Wikipedia and give a public presentation for other students in the class. The presented task was comprehensive, varied and focused on individual work of participating students. We did not just want to attempt to enrich Wikipedia projects with new articles and images, but we also wanted to prepare students for future scientific work and give them the opportunity to try creative writing and critical work with references. This knowledge will soon come in handy when they start writing their bachelor’s work and prepare the defense of their bachelor’s academic degree.

Natural monument Břestecká skála, one of chosen protected areas. Students documented damage by growing tourism at this location.

The project enjoyed high popularity among students, according to the results of a survey. A full report with results from this cooperation is available on Czech Wikipedia in English. Here we present only a short summary of this cooperation and main lessons that we learned.

Unlike other ambassador projects where ambassador is supporting students mainly virtually in the Wikipedia environment, our ambassador was personally present at each class. This gave us the opportunity to directly interact with students, easily giving feedback about articles and answering their questions about Wikipedia. And of course, the ambassador was active also on Czech Wikipedia, correcting student’s edits. We realized that this in-person approach is more time-consuming for an ambassador than virtual assistance is. But it is better for the community on Wikipedia and for students. The ambassadors are able to help students understand all standards and rules of Czech Wikipedia without relying on the greater Wikipedia community. As a result, Wikipedia was enriched with high-quality articles containing references with only minor effort from the community. And students were able to directly and easily ask questions and get their answers.

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A photo of the Panská skála used in the WikiProject Protected Areas memory game. Photo: Miloslav Rejha, Wikimedia Commons

Wikipedians around the world are looking for ways to convert readers into new editors and encourage new people to join our common effort to produce a freely accessible encyclopedia for everybody to use. Wikimedia Chapters and the Wikimedia Foundation continually search for ways to increase the base of active editors, which is now consistently around 80,000-90,000.

As part of our programs, Wikimedia Czech Republic has recently created a memory game showcasing free images from Wikimedia Commons as a simple and enjoyable way to reach out to families, educational institutions and photographers. After all, we asked ourselves, is there a better way to make people excited to join than seeing the happy faces of both children and their parents?

Many Wikipedians who have similar hobbies or fields of interest have organized around their area of focus, which gave birth to WikiProjects. The Czech Wikipedia’s WikiProject Protected Areas tries to coordinate editors who are interested in protected areas, nature habitats, traveling and photography.

For the creation of the WikiProject Protected Areas game, we chose colorful and wonderful images, which were taken by dozens of authors and are freely available on Wikimedia Commons. We sorted them and included information about our WikiProject. That gave us an opportunity to tell the story to recipients and made a small advertisement, which hopefully will attract their interest to Wikipedia, too. Our idea was that adults will read the story while cutting out the game pieces for their children. At a minimum, we can share knowledge in an entertaining way!

After uploading the WikiProject Protected Areas memory game [available as a pdf] on Commons, we printed 1000 editions of it with support from Wikimedia Czech Republic. We distributed the game for free to interested parties, including schools and other institutions. We also delivered copies to administration of Czech Krkonoše National Park (KRNAP), to the Czech Union for Nature Conservation, to several elementary and high schools and to the wide range of Wikimedia Czech Republic’s fans on Facebook.

In addition to printing the memory game, we have coordinated activities with Charles University, where students contributed articles for about 30 protected areas in the Czech Republic. Through our Facebook and Google+ pages, we’ve worked with photographers to photograph 40 protected area localities and upload their images to Commons. We are coordinating a photo walkabout with wiki-photographers to improve our photo skills and capture images of protected areas in the process. And finally, we have even made the national news, where we highlighted the coordination with Charles University and brought more attention to the project.

We are happy to say that, through this game, we have connected with groups of people who support the conservation of nature and who like to travel a lot. They represent potentially good editors for our WikiProject about protected areas because they have both a wide range of knowledge and photos from their trips. We deeply believe this small gift together with our other activities can bring new editors to Wikipedia projects. And, in the process we brought a lot of smiles to children’s faces and we strengthened the good name of Wikipedia in lots of families and public circles.

Thank you,

Petr Brož
Wikimedia Czech Republic

Wikimedia Foundation staff play the WikiProject Protected Areas memory game. Photo: Matthew Roth, Wikimedia Commons

When you look at the “sprint backlog” in mingle (guest, guest), you may notice that even though we have been slowed down because of the slush, the feature freeze because of the imminent MediaWiki release, we are not sitting on our hands. Documentation, testing, code review and outreach is on our agenda.

Because of the way we are planning, it is apparent how much code review actually gets done. This sprint we added a review of the ArticleFeedback extension for its internationalization and localization aspects. This is a logical development considering that, with 280+ languages, we are not developing for one language. Our objective for this job is: “As a user I can use the functionality of the ArticleFeedbackv5 so that nothing looks odd in my language from an internationalization and localization perspective”. Reviews like this have been performed informally in the past by translatewiki.net staff. This review, however, will be done during Wikimedia hours and reported through Wikimedia channels.

One old open bug is about EasyTimeline.  It started its life in 2005 and it is finally getting the attention it deserves. The bug explains the lack of support for languages like Arabic, Hebrew and Farsi that are written from right to left. The software has Ploticus as a dependency and for a long time the waiting was for a version of this software that does support RtL languages. We are not waiting any longer and you can read in our story 230 about the complexities involved.

You could say that implementing a translation memory for page translation is a bit more adventurous; it is however debatable if that functionality is new; a translation memory has for a long time been functional at translatewiki.net. It is also very much a feature that makes people more productive. Our team has always had the goal of making life easy and productive for our editors and translators.

The “grammar” functionality for JavaScript is part and parcel of the i18n tooling for our developers. It was not ready before the “slush” and it does make our lives difficult not having it available in the code. When you are building tests for “gender” and “plural”, it is so obvious to create them for “grammar” as well. In this sprint, “grammar” will be included in the code for all these good reasons.

This is the first time that there is a story for outreach. We are reaching out to all the Wikipedia language communities to have their own language support team. It will make a difference when all our language communities have been asked to provide their expertise to us. We already have found that many people show an interest and issues do get raised as a result.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant