Wikipedia IGNITE
From Open Progress
Wikipedia IGNITE is a project that Open Progress does with funding from Hivos. The project has several distinct parts.
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[edit] Localisation of MediaWiki
MediaWiki is the software that is essential to many projects. It is the software that runs Wikipedia it provides the fundamentals for OmegaWiki, it is part of the NGO in a box, a project by the Tactical Technology Collective and consequently it is easy to state that MediaWiki is used by many organisations in many languages. There are currently some 250+ Wikipedias in as many languages and people are preparing a new project in more languages the Wikimedia Incubator.
The quality of the localisation of the MediaWiki software has an impact that is much bigger then the projects of the Wikimedia Foundations. It is however in the WMF projects where the biggest need is for good localisation. In a project, there is a need for both language localisation and project localisation. To help with the language localisation "BetaWiki" was started. In this Wiki people collaborate to create the language specific localisation for their language and this is used in all WMF projects and will be shipped with the quarterly releases of MediaWiki.
[edit] Missing MediaWiki localisations
In the past new projects were started without a requirement for a localisation. As a result readers were not provided with a native user interface and consequently the new project was less usable. Some fifty languages were started without any support in MediaWiki, their localisation existed only in their project. It is the aim of Wikipedia IGNITE to export and clean up of the localisation so that it is usable for MediaWiki. Our aim is to half the number of projects without any localisation in MediaWiki.
[edit] Localisation of extensions
The MediaWiki software knows many extensions, they provide functionality but are not part of the core MediaWiki. Many of these extensions have been developed outside of the Wikimedia Foundation but are available from the WMF SVN. Many of these extension have their localisation included in Betawiki, several are still missing. With good localisation support for both the core MediaWiki software and the extensions, MediaWiki becomes more usable.
[edit] Content creation
Once MediaWiki is installed, you are left with an empty canvas. You may have ideas on what the new website is there for. You may have material that can be reused but how to do this. What can be done to make the process of a project as easy as possible. We aim to start to write an how to for the issues, the methodologies.
[edit] Bots
There are several bots that can be used for uploading and changing information on a wiki. A lot of work can be prevented with the judicious use of such tools. It does not mean that there will be no work left; quite often the structure of a Wiki is such that a lot of descriptive text can be replaced with a "wiki-link". As there is also a need to get other people involved, there is a fine line between doing enough and doing too much.
[edit] Machine translation
Machine translation is one way of creating content in another language. Apertium is one tool that is known to do good work, the English language Wikipedia has been translated to Cherokee to good effect. The issue is that once a text is translated in this way, it still needs work and, it is a text of another language essentially another culture that is translated; it still needs to be assessed if it makes sense for the language, the culture, the people involved.
[edit] Wikipedia BOOST
Localisation and content creation are two of the essential parts of the start of a new MediaWiki project. You have your plan, installed the software and extensions and then you find all kinds of things that are new, different and just not right. Many organisations have spend considerable time and money to customise MediaWiki. It is great when they do however, often similar functionality has been developed before and, once you have finished your extension there is an upgrade to the MediaWiki code with all kinds of new cool features that make you reapply the changes to the new MediaWiki code.
