words & more

Moving my blog ...

2008-10-18T18:21:00.005+02:00

Well, since places are getting too many for me, I decided to not go ahead writing my blog here. All new posts in English will be posted on eng.i-iter.org, German will be on deu.i-iter.org, Neapolitan on nap.i-iter.org, and as for Italian I will write on Positanonews. I am on all these websites anyway, so this blog was just one more to care about.

Cu there then :-)

Luna and the broom ...

2008-09-28T11:49:00.003+02:00

Luna has been sick for some days and still is not a 100% back to normal, but she cannot stay still for a moment. So the broom was still not put away and she started to play with it. With the feet on the lower large part she had it move forth and back ... until the moment when she found it too fun ... well at a certain stage the stick of the broom hit her on her front ... it did not hurt all too much ... but her face ... don't know if you can imagine that ... I started to laugh like mad when I saw her face ... and she got veeeeeeery angry with me :-D

Valentin ... or when a tumor grows for the second time ...

2008-09-25T17:05:00.001+02:00

There's not much on the blog. Our main article is published in an online newspaper and it makes more sense to link to it.

So if you are interested to know what we are doing these days, just go to Positanonews:
http://positanonews.it/dettaglio.php?sez=Valentin+%C3%82%E2%80%93+or+when+a+tumor+grows+for+the+second+time+...&id=16920

Computer sciences and elementary school

2008-09-18T19:02:00.003+02:00

Today my two had another computer sciences lesson and had to "learn by heart" how a computer is built ... but: in their schoolbook only a normal computer (tower) is considered, no laptop. Only Windows is explained in there, no Linux. Now they started to read that stuff where it says that "the mouse moves the cursor" Marco comes up with "well, but we don't have a mouse, we use a touchpad" and when the book talks about "floppy disk, CD-ROM and DVD" she comes up with: but we don't have any floppy disks ... and so I had to explain they whys and whats. The fun thing was when they started, looking ahead in the pages, well, we had Windows some years ago (they started very soon with computers - Marco broke the first keyboard veeery sooon, he was not even one year old and they had their first working play laptop with 2 years) but today we have Edubuntu which is Linux, so that stuff in the book is old :-D

We started to talk a bit about the differences between Windows and Linux, proprietary vs. free software ... well it's fun ... I suppose their teacher will have a nice talk with them next Wendesday about desktops, towers and laptops, Windows and Linux and why quite a bunch of Windows software runs also on Linux (using Wine) but Linux software normally does not work with Windows ... and therefore it is clear enough what is more interesting for them :-)

Quando una stella non c'è più ...

2008-09-12T13:21:00.002+02:00

Quando una stella non c'è più ...

Una storia dedicata a tutti i bambini nel mondo.

Ho pensato a lungo come raccontare gli ultimi giorni e ho scelto la forma di una storia nella quale non usero nomi, eccetto quello del bambino: Ilya. Molti particolari non li posso purtroppo pubblicare qui. Quindi leggerete solo la punta del iceberg, tutto il resto della montagna rimarrà nascosto.

11 settembre 2008

La settimana scorsa arriva un messaggio di un amico nel chat nel quale mi dice che c'è un bambino che ha urgentemente bisogno di un trapianto di una parte dell'intestino. Il bambino ha appena due mesi ed gli estato esportato una parte dell'intestino. Il nome non l'abbiamo usato allora. La situazione era grave e non c'era tempo da perdere. Quindi abbiamo attivato dei contatti e vorrei ringraziare in modo molto particolare la persona che ha creato il contatto con un'ospedale ben noto a Roma. È andato tutto molto veloce, davvero. I medici a Roma si sono dimostrati molto disponibili, altro che quello che sempre si sente nelle notizie: ricordatevi, i medici qui sono in gamba e fanno quel che possono per salvare le vite e ricordatevi anche che sono in primo luogo esseri umani che hanno un'enorme responsabilità ogni giorno, ogni minuto, ogni secondo.

Abbiamo anche contattato un ospedale in Germania che ha risposto qualche giorno dopo quando il contatto con Roma già c'era. Ambedue i medici, in Italia e in Germania, hanno detto la stessa cosa: il bambino era in una condizione molto grave e in pericolo di vita. Il prossimo passo quindi era creare la communicazione tra i due ospedali. Non sapevamo se fosse stato possibile avere la communicazione in inglese o meno e quindi ho chiesto alcuni colleghi se conoscevano interpreti per medicina che lavorano con la combinazione russo o ucraino e italiano. Molti hanno aiutato dandoci contatti e abbiamo conservato tutti, perché serviranno anche in futuro e quindi: grazie ai colleghi traduttori che ci hanno aiutato.

Lunedì mattina, l'8 settembre 2008, c'era poi il primo colloquio tra vari dottori e abbiamo capito che cosa ci voleva per il trasporto. Dall'incubatrice con respiratore, all'aereo militare ... insomma: era una montagna da scalare. Di nuovo abbiamo avuto aiuto da molte persone e mancava solo il colloquio con il primario dell'ospedale mercoledì mattina alle ore 9:30 ore italiane e il procedimento per il trasporto che andava avviato tramite l'ambasciata italiana. Cioè davvero poco ... eravamo molto vicino e speravamo tanto che il primario dava l'ok per il trasporto che per noi significava il via per concludere tutto.

In questi giorni abbiamo imparato tanto, davvero tanto. Non solo su livello "tecnico", ma anche su livello umano.

Era arrivato mercoledì mattina e per la prima volta quel bambino ha avuto un nome per me: Ilya. In pochi giorni anche non conoscendo personalmente molte delle persone coinvolte nasce qualcosa come una relazione personale. Eravamo un po' nervosi perché il colloquio doveva decidere su molte cose.

Alle nove ca. arriva la notizia: Ilya ci ha lasciato alle 8:30 ore italiane.

Ilya non è l'unico bambino in queste condizioni, ce ne sono altri che hanno bisogno di cure ed attenzione. Una cosa per noi è chiaro: la morte di lui non deve essere stata invana. Deve servire per dare un futuro migliore ad altri bambini.

Ancora grazie a tutti quelli che ci hanno aiutato, anche a quelli che come segretari/e o ai centralini hanno accolto le nostre telefonate: avete aiutato a tentare l'impossibile. Quando vedo questo con tutto il mondo che ci viene sempre è soltanto presentato come negativo posso dire: c'è tanta forza positiva negli uomini, basta tirarla fuori.

Grazie!

City, Am Fenster

2008-09-03T22:53:00.003+02:00

Well the following song shall be the last one for today.

Einmal wissen dies bleibt für immer
Ist nicht Rausch der schon die Nacht verklagt
Ist nicht Farbenschmelz noch Kerzenschimmer
Von dem Grau des Morgens längst verjagt

Einmal fassen tief im Blute fühlen
Dies ist mein und es ist nur durch dich
Nicht die Stirne mehr am Fenster kühlen
Dran ein Nebel schwer vorüber strich

Einmal fassen tief im Blute fühlen
Dies ist mein und es ist nur durch dich
Klagt ein Vogel, ach auch mein Gefieder
Näßt der Regen flieg ich durch die Welt

Flieg ich durch die Welt

Ludwig Hirsch, 1928

2008-09-03T22:43:00.001+02:00

Jetzt bist du weg, Nena + Udo Lindenberg

2008-09-03T22:40:00.001+02:00

Yes, you are right :-) I am listening to quite some music today :-)

Ganz unten, Saitenwynd

2008-09-03T19:12:00.000+02:00

A person I would have liked to meet ...

2008-08-27T00:29:00.002+02:00

There are days when you realize that history repeats ... that the way people do things repeat.

Some weeks ago Anneliese Hübner mentioned a book to me "Die Coburger Mundart" (The Dialect of Coburg) by Eduard Hermann. The history of that book is as unique as its author ... something I did not expect in a first place. I mean Eduard Hermann is well known as a linguist and what I expected from this book is just a study of the dialect of the region I come from, but then I found it by chance in a shop which sells antique books in Coburg and so I ordered it. It arrived this morning and up to now I had a short overview and I read some 40 pages of it.

There are quite some very particular parts in it. The writer of the book died in 1950 and his book was published with the help of a protestant priest in 1957. A good part of the author's life is in that book. Like me Eduard Hermann wanted to do something for his language, but was not able to speak and write it himself, so he did what his job was, he studied his own language. With one difference: while in his job he did great work, in this very particular one you read his feelings between the lines. I tried to translate a paragraph to Italian today, and I had to note that all the feelings drop away, because those fine differences you have in sentence construction are not possible in Italian, at least not the same way, not without completely re-writing the paragraph.

There is one sentence I will never forget: "Und darum darf die MA (Mundart) auch nicht aussterben: nicht die Schriftsprache ist der lebendige Quell der Sprache, sondern die dem Volke fest verbundene Mundart, der noch der kräftige Erdgeruch enströmt."

I am trying to translate: "And therefore the dialect may not dye for it is not the high language which is the living source of the language, but the dialect which is closely attached to the people and which still exhales the strong aroma of the earth."

I could go on and on with quotes and translations ... Eduard Hermann did a really great job and I would have very much liked to meet him, talk to him and learn from him. Well: now there's only the written word left ...

Having a really old resource at hand ... DIWA and Itzgründisch

2008-08-24T21:08:00.004+02:00

Well yes, I am working on a Windows computer right now and it feels really strange. But there is that project called DIWA at the university of Marburg. That is the digitalization of the Wenker sentences which were translated into all German local dialects/languages/variations. Now the sentences are from over 100 years ago. The latest and definitive version of the 40 sentences is from 1880. The firefox plugin does not work properly (well all is Windows based on the website as it seems) and so I pulled out this veeery (well relatively) old computer and I am on Windows. Above is a screenshot of a first part of the Wenker sentences in one variation of Itzgründisch. As you might note the script used to write in these days is very different, but well: like so often coincidence (?) helps me. I learnt to read that script when I was a little girl, because my grandma wrote that way and just some weeks ago I took it up again trying to write some short notes. Now the good news is: I can read that stuff. It is for now quite tiring, because it is a different handwriting than the one I am used to and it is written in Itzgründisch, that is one very local variety. But getting all those 40 sentences in all its variations of Itzgründisch will help to find proper terminology. For who is interested in that stuff: I am going to publish it bit by bit on the I-iter for Mainfränkisch in the books section.

Neapolitan and Itzgründisch ... what a difference ...

2008-08-20T09:38:00.000+02:00

I am known for my working with Neapolitan, writing articles, even newspaper articles, translating stories ... something I would have never expected when I came to the region where I live approximately 20 years ago (actually in April 1988). I then was somewhat forced to learn to talk in Neapolitan, because I lived up in the mountains in a very, very small place – so small that there was not even a shop and the next bus station was quite some walk. I learnt that language and at a certain point it happened to me that I got translations from "Italian to German" where the text turned out to be Neapolitan (Pulcinella and various songs and theatre plays). From that moment on Neapolitan became part of my job and I found it fun that I was one of the very few to be able to translate from Neapolitan to German being a German mother tongue. During the last four years I started to write, from articles about Maiori, music groups to actual news like Batman who was on holiday in Ravello and about the Italian parliament complaining that they could not get any ice cream after lunch to news about computer games which were localised into less resourced languages. Neapolitan is a language, it has no real standard, because there is no law that defines it, but there is somewhat a standard with some variations and once you know that, in most part of Southern Italy you will be able to write what you say using exactly these words.

Growing up (no, I am still not grown up even if I should be :-) several quite strong changes happened to my life and I started to become interested in my own language around the beginning of this year, just having had some look at it. I found a writer in Sonneberg, Karl-Heinz Großman who writes Itzgründisch, the variation of Sonneberg and when I read it, it is very familiar to me, because my grandparents were from Sonneberg, so that is what I heard from then when I was at home. After some time I found other texts written by people from Coburg and surroundings and Neustadt, one text from Rodach. All of them, except Neustadt which has stronger vowel differences, are familiar and all of them are written in a different spelling ... uhmmmmm ...

When I was a little girl I was not allowed to speak my mother tongue and my grandparents and parents only spoke German with me, but among themselves they spoke their language. This means that Itzgründisch is well present in my head, but I am not able to express me in that language, that is that door is still closed. It is starting to open a bit, but still not enough, I feel.

In June I was in Bamberg and came back home with quite some literature in regional languages – from Itzgründisch (Coburg) to the Mainfränkisch of Bamberg to some Bavarian. So I started to read and create terminology lists ... and hell ... I found that the same words are written in a different way by writes which are even of the same town.

That made me come into mind my first talk with Karl-Heinz Grossman, who then told me that the writers in their association decided to write everybody as he/she likes, just like they perceive the language. No spelling rules. Well the same seems to be true for the region around Coburg.

Now: how can one learn to write if there is no real standard? My father sent me a dictionary which includes terminology from Rodach – and yes, you imagine correctly ... comparing it with the books I bought in Bamberg: it is different again.

I asked Anneliese Hübner, one of the writers I seem to read easily, because it is a kind of the language that is near to what I heard when I was a little girl. She told me about a dictionary by Eduard Hermann which strictly deals with the version of Coburg. I ordered it through a shop which sells old books and it should arrive during the next days. But anyway ... just these are so many variations ...

The next thought of mine was: hell, I need some means to learn the language and something that can correct my grammar and spelling, and so I contacted Kevin Scannell, passed him all the texts I have in an electronic format and gave him some links. After some days he sent me his files with word lists which now need cleaning. All these texts refer to the centres of Itzgründisch only, so no border regions, no small villages ... only the bigger ones. When I received these files it was like Christmas and birthday in one for me ... I could start to work on my own language and get things done and hopefully help to have the whole culture of that region survive. I mean: language is only part of the culture and culture cannot be kept alive without language.

During the last days I was also working each day a bit on my own word list, extracting terminology from the books I bought in Bamberg ... then I opened the file and then ... there was one word "bloß" it had 4 variations

blos
bloß
blouß
bluoß

I looked at my list and there I had further variations:

bluuß
blueß
bluueß

Uhmmmmm 7 ... that was a real shock, I mean 7 variations out of 4 places which are all along a line of 40 kms. (btw. this is just one example of many)

Then I went and looked at the texts ... when I see all these variations in their position in the sentence, I don't note the difference, but I note it when I have that list there ... so why don't they try to use one way of writing one word at least in that restricted area so that at least one who wants to learn the language can REALLY learn how to read and maybe write?

Even if young people wanted to create for example some fun theatre play for the party you normally have around Christmas or at the end of the school year, how can they ever try to write a text, even just a few lines?

I spoke to some linguists ... the funny situation with Itzgründisch is that it seems nobody has studied the whole region of it "as one", because after World War II it was split – one part went to East Germany and one to West Germany. I remember one remark by Karl-Heinz Großmann, who, after the opening of East Germany in 1989 went to Neustadt with his pupils which were really astonished to find that people in that city in West Germany talked "like them". So the part speaking Itzgründisch in Turinga was studied in Turinga and the part speaking Itzgründisch in Bavaria was studied in Bavaria ... now you have different studies, but nobody is connecting them (as it seems, well I will go ahead searching, maybe someone did it or is doing it right now). Why do political borders have to influence on a language? In such a strong way? I mean: all want to maintain the culture, the beauty of the region, the way to do things like once upon a time: well that is ONLY possible when you also care about the language.

When you talk to authors (various) some work with universities, others completely refuse them, each one writes like he/she finds best ... but if they want to maintain their culture and by writing in their language, they show me that they want to do exactly that, why don't they put all misunderstandings apart, sit at a table and start to find a way on how to unify the way of writing? That is standardise it as much as possible? Not all will be possible, some specific expressions are of some very specific places, but 95% of what is written could be standardised.

You believe not? Well whatever language you speak: look at it and the various places where people speak it. Have them read the same text and then compare: the big languages do that all the time.

Now the next question is: but how to do it without giving too much weight to one variation, well we have examples about that: one of it is Occitan – they use an old way of writing which is pronounced in each part of the region a bit different. But now anyone, even a foreigner, can learn that language, can learn how to read it and the culture which is connected to it can survive. Piedmontese underwent a similar process in the 1920s already: today it is alive and people use it every day. Even I am able to learn it (yes, some sentences I can write).

Now when I compare this to my culture and mother tongue it makes me really sad. The more you cut a language down in pieces the easier you can delete it from the landscape of cultures and languages ... and that is happening with Itzgründisch.

When I started to work with Neapolitan and there were all those stupid political fights among people from the actual regions of the South of Italy if they wanted to belong to Neapolitan or not (sic) I thought I was standing in front of some of the highest mountains of the Alps and I knew that in one or the other way I could get up there.

But this ... Itzgründisch ... takes me to a very different place ... in the deepest valley, just before you can start to go up the Kilimanjaro ... and if I look at myself I understand in so many ways that MANY things have to change to make it possible to reach the top.

Like I so often say: it is only a matter of time to reach things if you really want ... and this here will take loads of time and patience.

If you are from the region where Itzgründisch is spoken, if you love your culture and want to maintain it for the future, please consider very much every pace you make ... and then choose the one that goes into the right direction: doing things together, finding ways together ... not everybody as he/she wishes ...

If you are a linguist and you are interested in this very particular language which has been divided by a war and still remained the same, even if people could not talk to each other, then you can help by doing the "inventory" from where we all together can help to get it done.

I am really sad about this situation ... no, more than sad, but as long as there are people left who write and speak the language, as long as the recipes and the food remains the same, as long as you want the beauty of the landscape to survive: there is a chance ... because having all that is closely connected to "language".

Let me close with a quote by David Crystal, Florence Devouard used in her speech for our conference in Cherasco:

"The world is a mosaic of visions and each vision is encapsulated by a language. Every time a language is lost one vision of the world disappears."

p.s I will translate this into Itzgründisch just in the way I perceive my language, Itzgründisch ... just to show that it will be different again and anyway: who cares, right? It's just another version ... it will take some time ...

Streets in Venice ...

2008-08-16T12:51:00.004+02:00

I was just talking with my son Marco about Venice ... tanks to St. Marcus, the patron of Venice, and so we looked a many pictures and I explained about about gondolas, ships etc. and that there are no streets with cars. For him who loves cars, motor sports, formula 1, 2 etc. and whatever deals with that, having a city without streets and cars ... well no ... so he asked "But why don't they build roads" and for simplicity reasons "I said they cannot do this because of the sea". The he: "No mommy, that's not true, they can put these long colums in the sea and then simply build the streets on it and then they would have streets - and cars - ". Well ... what could I say to that logic? :-D

Btw. the picture is public domain and taken from Wikimedia Commons.

We could not deliver your mail because it contains a Virus

2008-08-16T12:44:00.002+02:00

... that was the answer when I tried to send a message to napulitano@yahoogroups.com - I was really wondering ... I work with Ubuntu, use a antivirus ... well ... it meant I had to scan my computer, so I did - no result, everything fine.

Then I tried to send the message with the yahoo.it web interface: same result, I was told I had a virus. That sounded really weird ...

Then I looked at my message, the subject was "Photos" because I wanted to thank people for sending me photos. And I thought ... let me send a test message. So I sent a message to the group using "Test" as subject. That one went through without any complaints.

Therefore the yahoo server considered my first e-mail(s) to have a virus because in the subject line I only used the word "Photo". Weird, right? ... So don't do what I did :-D

When google docs crashes and you loose your data

2008-08-10T15:16:00.003+02:00

Well, most people probably think: this will not happen ... it happened to me today. Over 300 terms in Itzgründisch together with their German translation ... all of a sudden I got:

Wir bitten um Verzeihung.

Ein Serverfehler ist aufgetreten. Warten Sie einen Moment und versuchen Sie es dann erneut.

Weitere Informationen finden Sie in der Hilfe zu Google Text & Tabellen.

That is: they are sorry, there is a server error and please wait a moment and then retry. You will find further info under Goolge Text & Tables ...

Well that moment now has been some hours ago. The funny thing is, just a few moments before I thought: well let me download the file. Like so often I feel things before they happen, but if I had not done that ... what then?

So this is to tell you: keep copies of your google documents somewhere ... data loss is always just around the corner.

U96 - Das Boot

2008-07-31T17:03:00.000+02:00

Music ....

2008-07-31T16:55:00.001+02:00

I am just listening to some "old" music together with Outi - so this is one I remember from when I went to work in the morning ... it was on each day.

Be prepared for some more today :-)

A new inhabitant ...

2008-07-21T14:38:00.005+02:00

Such a nice little friend is living behind the clock in the kitchen ... I remember a story from over 10 years ago. At that time there was another family living downstairs and one evening I heard someone shouting "Sabine" - a kind of a call that sounded like an emergency ... so I went out on the balcony to see what was going on and Patrizia who lived downstairs was gesticulating heavily indicating me such a nice animal and telling me "close your window in the kitchen or it will enter". Something I never understood is why so many people here are afraid of lizzards ... I have them around on the roof, the balcony and now one in the kitchen ... they are just fun to see and in the worst case they eat some insects that are around ... considering that I don't like mosquitos ... I love lizzards :-)

My coast ... yes, it's mine :-)

2008-07-21T00:08:00.001+02:00

Itzgründisch ... or German?

2008-07-20T23:55:00.002+02:00

It is a strange feeling when you start to realize that you actually "translate" when you write your so-called mother tongue. The other day I wrote a personal message for a friend and I noted something really strange: the way what I wanted to say formed in my head was different from the way I wrote - this means that subconsciously I was translating from what I had in mind to what I actually wrote. The funny thing is that when you consider some terms to be translated from German to Italian you cannot do it because these don't exist in Italian ... and this seems to be quite normal, but that you cannot express what you have in mind in the language you grew up with, that is really weird ... yes, I am trying to get my language back ... that is my real mother tongue which is Itzgründisch which is considered to be a dialect of Mainfränkisch. A language I know from my gand parents listening to it, but which I was not allowed to speak and learn ... time to learn it I would say.

Meeting a jelly fish ... not much fun ...

2008-07-04T07:28:00.003+02:00

So this is what it looks like when a jelly fish touches you ... when? At around 7 'o clock in the morning (strange time for this region ... at least I was told so) after almost one hour of swimming ... it was the other day that I saw one for the first time here in the sea. This is a link to commons where you can see how it looked like. Then yesterday morning, while swimming I thought it might be a good idea not to get with my face under water like I so often do and so I decided to swim my approx. 2400 meters almost only on the back. I still had that image of the jelly fish in mind. Well: it was a good idea - at approx. 1600 meters, the distance I used to swim last year, something got my leg ... and it burnt ... so I had my first meeting with one of these not so nice creatures .... well they look nice, but actually meeting one personally ... that's not so much of a good idea. I suppose I never swam as fast to reach the beach like yesterday.

What was a bit particular was that I did not know you could have allergic reactions, but being allergic to all sorts of plants I have always some emergency stuff at home and I needed it. So you can get anything from breathing difficulties to fever - uhmmm ... the night was ... particular as well. Now the leg is not as red anymore as it was yesterday, there are just these stripes, but I am not going to swim for some days until the jelly fish moved away. Normally they don't stay too long here and I am really not keen on having more trouble, in particular because this was only a "slight touch" I got, so no tentacles attached ... what would have happened if I got more of that stuff into my bloodstream?

One of those things ...

2008-06-15T18:58:00.002+02:00

Gerard is coming to Naples ... and I was sure he would arrive on Monday, don't ask me why, but for me the 15th was Monday. Now I received an e-mail at 16:30 approx that he was taking the bus since he had arrived at the airport ... uhmmmmmmmmm ... where was my brain? Then I looked at our conversation and he actually said cu today at 14:00 and for some reason I did not realize that today. Now he's coming with the bus - but which way ... so I don't know if leaving the house and go to the city centre or remain here. But one thing will remain in history: the "Gerard effect". When my kids heard that he already arrived and not tomorrow they immediately started to clean and put away all their stuff ... and I in the meanwhile decided that it made sense to get most of the housework done so that I will have more time ... now ... well what to do ... probably I will wait some more time until the next bus stops here on the street and then I will go to the centre of Maiori ... probably it is the wisest thing to do. Well I am really sorry that things went this way ... now the only thing is make the best out of it.

Open Nursery - Slideshows to learn languages

2008-04-17T08:38:00.001+02:00

How to get languages to kids (and not only).

Well when my kids were approx. 3 years old I wanted them to be exposed to a certain kind of terminology in German, because many of the "kid's words" were not part of our daily language. They are twins and therefore of course prefer to play one with the other and mom was was called when it was about eating, drinking, going to the bathroom etc. Then I created slideshows with all kinds of words that were interesting to them and I noted that this worked really well. The photos I then used cannot easily be published in a slide show (because of the licenses that others used – GFDL is not suited at all for photos) and therefore I now just took what my two produce(d) at school.

I created a slide show where the intro still needs to change, but I already wanted to show you an example and ask you to help with the translation and the recording of the words. It is really not much: just 10 objects, some colours and 10 short sentences. They can be recorded in "one rush" using audacity (I can cut them) and you need to use OpenOffice.org since I use a presentation I then transfer into single jpg files from where I create the slide shows.

The contents are available under cc-by-sa which means that also your translations will be under that license.

I already talked with SJ from the OLPC project and yes: the videos will be available for OLPC.

You can have a look at the sample slideshow here:

http://www.youtube.com/iiterinternational

I did not upload the file to be translated since I would like to avoid that maybe two of you do the same language (so I will send it to you by e-mail). Btw.: it would be nice to get the recording of the English terms from a native speaker – I did it myself in that trial part. Over time I would like to see American, European, Australian etc. English, because indeed there is a difference.

For now, since this video is part of the Open Nursery project which will be introduced during our conference about less resourced languages in Cherasco, Piedmont, Italy, I am concentrating on less resourced languages, but: all languages are welcome. I will just create the ones that belong to the less resourced languages first.

During the next days I will create a second slide show which shall include the numbers from 1 to 10 in combination with the words I used for the first slide show.

Like I already said: the introduction will be different, I just added it so that one sees that there will be an introduction.

As for the programme of our conferece, you can find it here:
http://gopiedmont.i-iter.org/contn%C3%B9/programme-international-day-31st-may-english-language

Some notes on the Open Nursery project can be found here:
http://eng.i-iter.org/content/open-nursery

Anybody is welcome to join us. Besides that the event will be also available via web-tv.

Well, so now I hope you will help to translate these videos. They will be made available in various places – so if you wish to host them as well: that would be really great.

This is being posted in various groups and sent through various mailing lists, so sorry if you get it more than once.

Thank you for your attention and I hope to read you soon!

Cheers, Sabine
*****
Sabine Cretella
CCO – Vox Humanitatis
s.cretella [at] voxhumanitatis.org
skype: sabinecretella

Anaprhaseus version 1.16

2008-04-09T15:25:00.002+02:00

I just noted that Anaphraseus 1.16 is out and downloaded it.

These are the news:

2008-04-06 17:25 [1.16b] ole_yansen

* Unicode UTF16 support for TM files

* Fixed "Segment are not opened in end of document" bug

And I am now going to test it whith a short Sicilian-Neapolitan translation :-)

Agricantus ...

2008-03-23T21:58:00.000+01:00

I almost forgot about them ...

The Logos Conjugator

2008-03-23T18:54:00.001+01:00

From now on you can also download the Logos conjugator which is available in various languages. For further info please refer to the Logos website.

Anaphraseus - the manual

2008-03-20T15:47:00.002+01:00

Well, we had a look on where would be the best place to publish the manual. One of the possibilities was Floss Manuals. So I had a talk with Adam Hyde and he created the section for the manual for us. This means that during the next days you will find what is already present from that manual there.

Anaphraseus a CAT-Tool supporting ISO 639-3

2008-03-19T23:12:00.004+01:00

I got my first Easter Egg from a colleague and I would like to say to Urs Wolffers: thank you Urs, you made my day :-)

Why? Well he asked if I knew something about a CAT-Tool which did not work well with him and I did not know about it. So I had a look and downloaded Anaphraseus and tried it out. I had some minor problems, because having a new tool and trying to do immediately "all you need" is not really the best way to start off with.

I am really happy that I found that tool because it solves at least two really relevant issues I had with OmegaT and one of these issues is only covered by Anaphraseus as much as I know.

ISO 639-3 support: yes, Anaphraseus supports ISO 639-3 language tags for its translation memories and that is really something special. Ahhh ... you are a programmer and say that it is quite easy to implement, well: maybe it is easy, but it is probably not interesting enough since I have been asking for it being implemented for approximately one and half a year. Now I have it and I don't need to fake to translate to whatever language anymore, but I can insert for example "EN" for the source language and "NAP" for the target language. THAT IS INDEED SOMETHING!

The second issue I always had was proofreading. I am working with a person who knows Neapolitan well for proof reading, but he is NOT a translator and therefore does not know CAT-Tools. I tried to give him the OmegaT TMX files for proofreading, but for some reason his Operating System mixed up the codes and I got a corrupted TM back. We could not figure out why this happened. So another time I copied and pasted the whole of the TMX file into a .doc document, but even that was somewhat troublesome. The solution in the end was to export the translation and send him the source and target files and then, when they came back, I had to copy and paste the changed sentences back into my project to have the translation memory with the changes. I believe you can imagine that this was quite time consuming.

Now with Anaprhaseus I have a Trados-like or Wordfast-like segmentation and even if it is not the nicest layout (a bilingual table would be the best one, but one cannot have all :-) it will save me loads of time and therefore I will be able to create more contents in Neapolitan. I mean considering how many people do actually write in Neapolitan this makes a really huge difference.

Here is an example of how such a segmented text looks like (this one is without proof reading – I just did some sentences to show you how it looks like):

{0>Questo libro è dedicato a mia figlia Luna che ama tanto i cavalli.<}4{>Chesto libbro è dedecato 'a figlia mia Luna ca ama tanto 'e cavalle.<0}>Visto che non esistono storie di cavalli multilingue sono passata a scriverle io.<}9{>Mo sto scrivenno io cheste storie pecché nun ce stanno 'e storie 'e cavalle in cchiù lengue.<0}

The glossary function is like with OmegaT: you have to work on it manually, so anyway there is no difference for me.

I did a complete translation of the first chapter of a book for my daughter from German to Italian (which I sent this evening to a colleague for proof reading) and I did it all with Anaprhaseus. Everything worked fine. The few issues which I had were solved quite fast and the reason for them was mainly me not knowing what to do and Ubuntu behaving a bit different then expected. But now: everything works fine from the very beginning to the clean-up at the end. There is already a short manual by Dmitri Gabinski, but it is for now not available online. I will let you know as soon as it is.

Thanks to Oleg Tsygany for the work already done and to Oleg and Dimitri for the time they took to answer all my questions.

A quote ... but really funny

2008-03-19T21:13:00.002+01:00

"Ein Zahnrad è quella cosa che fa funzionare i clock." - origin: my daughter Luna ... mixing three languages in one sentence ... :-D

Ladin Wikipedia on the incubator

2008-03-16T18:26:00.004+01:00

A week ago I received the following post (in German):

Hallo Sabine,

da Du Dich ja mit "less resourced languages" befasst, wollte ich fragen,
ob Du vielleicht ein paar Leute aus Südtirol, dem Trentino, der Provinz
Belluno oder sonstwoher kennst, die gerne Artikel auf ladinisch
Schreiben würden. Die Wikipedia liegt schon seit einiger Zeit im
Inkubator, aber keiner will dieses Ei ausbrüten.

Da die Ladiner in vielen Vereinen organisiert sind, habe ich mir
überlegt, in nächster Zeit eine davon Anzuschreiben, so z. B. die
ladinischen Feuerwehren und die Grupa per la defendura di uciei
(Vogelschutzbund). Falls Du auch ein bisschen Werbung machen kannst,
währe ich Dir dankbar :)

Liebe Grüße
Andi

Actually Andi asks me if I can help with recruiting people who help with the Ladin Wikipedia which is still on the incubator. Well, I am on one hand part of the LangCom and I am not sure if I should do this ... but on the other hand I am the CCO of Vox Humanitatis which actively promotes less resourced languages and the related projects. Well, Wikipedias in these languages are projects to be promoted and helped. Therefore I would like to ask anyone who is reading this to help to connect me/us to people speaking/writing Ladin so that I can connect them with the right people from my side. I am also going to write a number of associations that maybe can help. (E-Mail: s.cretella [at] voxhumanitatis.org).

Please note that we will actively support your help requests, but please consider that we only have a certain amount of time, so whatever needs to be done is going to be done even often it will take some days until we actually can move. Our to-do list is quite long :-)

Thanks for helping to spread the word!

Technorati tags: Wikipedia, Vox Humanitatis, Ladin

Blogger's code of conduct

2008-03-16T17:46:00.003+01:00

Actually I wanted to write this blog some 10 days ago, but like so often things just get crazy around you and time just gets too short ... but maybe it is good that there is some time in between, just to make people aware of it again.

Approx. two weeks ago there were some people who IMHO did not behave correctly. I mean: by blogging and by being connected to various organizations we also have a certain responsibility. What we need to be aware of is that often a simple statement, sometimes maybe joking around with friends, can be misunderstood and lead to really ... ehm ... not so nice results.

On Wikia the Blogger's Code of Conduct was published (as much as I understood it came about thanks to the co-operation of Jimmy Wales and Tim O'Reilly). I would like to ask you all, of the various foundations, associations and of course also all individuals who read this, to have a closer look and to adopt the Blogger's Code of Conduct when writing your blogs.

Thank you!

Cooking and languages???

2008-03-06T21:04:00.004+01:00

There is one strange thing that lately happens to me and I am wondering why that is. Up to some time ago I mainly cooked Neapolitan style, that is the way I learnt to cook when I came to the Amalfi Coast. Then you simply could not find many ingredients, but anyway: I had never learnt to cook how my mom and my grandma did. The strange thing is that it is some time now that I am considering my original language, the one spoken in Rodach, that is Mainfränkisch (well, a dialect of it). And its some weeks now that I am changing way to cook ... without even knowing what I do, I mean it is automatic. And the taste, well my family confirms this, is exactly the same the things my mom and my grandma cooked. Well yes, I saw my grandma hundreds of times doing things and in the past I already did some stuff I learnt from her like marmelades, peas in glasses (don't really know how you call this in English - well: vegetables that are treated to be there in winter when you don't have other stuff).

Now I am wondering why I am changing my way of doing things. Yes, I am changing myself, that's true as well, but: is it the dealing with that language that brings things back? Or could the reason be another one: it's almost two years now that I saw my mom for the last time - well this Saturday it is two years now. Now: there's nobody around anymore who can cook that stuff in my family. Do I automatically do it? Or maybe is it a combination of both, my mom not being here anymore and the language?

Ravello ... concerts ... once upon a time ...

2008-03-01T23:05:00.004+01:00

it was really difficult to get a ticket for one of the concerts in Ravello ... today it seems as if they were an everyday mass product: 84 concerts in one season starting on 1st of March ... don't know when they will stop, but let's say the end of October. This means 8 month, that is approx. 240 days ... this means approx. each third day a concert ... uhmmmmmm .... and they had difficulties to get the message out last year (at least as much as I understood).

Now when it comes to tourism marketing in that town they work with elite guests. But 84 concerts is not "elite production" but "mass production". This simply doesn't match. You can have the best artists for the whole of the year, but this concept simply cannot work with high level customers. They want the extraordinary, they want stuff nobody can easily have. That's why they are the elite. They can afford to pay high prices and they don't care about paying as long as they get premium service. Premium services are rare and not mass products. I mean 84 concerts like these in a city like Las Vegas (yes, I know what I talk about, I was there even if only for two days and over 25 years ago) can work, but not in such a small tourism centre on the Amalfi Coast in Italy .... I am really wondering how this season will work out for them ... in the end: or they will have to change their program for the future or they will need to change their tourism ... and in the worst case: they will loose both and that would be really sad.

Uhmmmm .....

Ketten ...

2008-02-24T22:43:00.004+01:00

Ich habe heute einer Freundin auf eine Mail geantwortet ... bei Ihr sieht's im Moment nicht so toll aus ... vor kurzer Zeit habe ich über ähnliches mit demjenigen gesprochen, der mir am nächsten steht. Ich möchte beiden dieses Gedicht widmen – ihr, weil ich hoffe, dass das Gesagte hift, ihm, weil es ihn gibt.

Es ist seltsam: auch hier muss ich jede Zeile mit dem "Gegenstand" beginnen – es geht nicht anders ...

Ketten

Ketten ... wir alle haben sie
Ketten ... sie binden und doch lassen sie frei
Ketten ... machmal werden sie schwer
Ketten ... und dann sind sie wieder ganz leicht
Ketten ... können die Seele zerstören
Ketten ... können sie retten
Ketten ... sind nichts anders als Bänder
Ketten ... sind Beziehungen
Ketten ... sind Leidenschaft
Ketten ... bedeuten Vertauen
Ketten ... bedeuten sich aufgeben
Ketten ... bedeuten sich festzulegen
Ketten ... versperren uns manchmal die Sicht
Ketten ... kann man sprengen
Ketten ... sind Geborgenheit
Ketten ... haben Schlösser

Ketten ... an dem Tag, an dem wir sie als Last empfinden, sie uns weh tun, dann sollten wir daran denken, dass wir selbst sie sprengen können

Ketten ... solange sie Geborgenheit und Sicherheit geben, dürfen sie auch verlangen, oft mehr als sie zugeben vermögen

Ketten ... sind Teil unseres Lebens, wir müssen nur lernen, richtig mit ihnen umzugehen

Ketten ... wir sollten den Schlüssel zum Schloss unserer Ketten, nur denjenigen geben, die sorgsam damit umzugehen wissen, denn sie sind es, die Einfluss auf unser Leben selbst haben

Ketten ... ich habe meine kennengelrnt – und Du, kennst Du Deine?

African Music

2008-02-22T15:15:00.002+01:00

Well, for now I call it African Music ... it is just: we don't know enough about this huge continent here in Europe and I suppose also in the rest of the world and so it is hard for us to feel the differences ... why don't they tell us more about the rest of the world???

It's been some weeks now that I met Outi who is Finnish and married with Ismaila Sané who is from Senegal. What I still find so strange is that I chose some people to contact by chance and ... well ... she's another one wanting to change the world :-)

We believe in local languages, in local culture and that they need to be maintained. We want our kids to learn the languages of the various families, simply because it is the only way to really connect them with their original cultures and give them their very own identity.

How many of us are out there? I mean: are you, who are reading another one like us? If so: just join us :-)

For now I would like to have you listen to the song Outi sent me today - I like it.

Wasser ...

2008-02-18T23:05:00.003+01:00

Ich schreibe eigentlich nie Gedichte ... nur irgendwo muss ich es doch von meiner Großmutter geerbt haben, denn manchmal muss ich einfach schreiben.

Dieses hier habe ich vor ca. 10 Tagen geschrieben - ob es gut zum Veröffentlichen ist, weiss ich nicht ... aber es ist für jemand ganz besonderes ...

Wasser

So wie Wasser sein

Die Räume ausfüllen, die man ausfüllen kann, die sich öffnen

So wie Wasser sein

Die Räume verlassen, wenn sie sich mit anderem füllen

So wie Wasser sein

Wasser ... Unendlichkeit ...

Wasser ... kann Felsen sprengen
Wasser ... kann Flächen glätten
Wasser ... kann einen tragen
Wasser ... spendet Leben
Wasser ... kann es nehmen
Wasser ... ist der Ursprung allen Lebens
Wasser ... umgibt uns
Wasser ... ist in uns
Wasser ... ist wie ein Spiegel
Wasser ... und doch sieht man hindurch

Wasser ... kann einen untergehen lassen
wenn man nicht gelernt hat, damit umzugehen

Wasser ... sich treiben zu lassen
Wasser ... darin schwimmen lernen
Wasser ... Deine Wellen ...
Wasser ... Du streichelst mich

So wie Wasser sein

Die Räume ausfüllen, die man ausfüllen kann, die sich öffnen

So wie Wasser sein

Die Räume verlassen, wenn sie sich mit anderem füllen

Doch ist es nicht so, dass wir nicht mehr sind, wenn das Wasser, die Essenz des Lebens nicht mehr da ist?

Apertium ... three lines to localize ...

2008-02-12T21:19:00.000+01:00

Hi Apertium is a MT (machine translation) tool which is particularly strong in translating similar languages. It is also used for pre-translation of Wikipedia articles for certain language pairs (Spanish-Catalan, Spanish-Occitan etc.) and shall be included in the Ubuntu distribution. Therefore it would be nice to have the three needed sentences localized in as many languages as possible.

To see which languages are actually there please have a look at

http://apertium.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/apertium/trunk/apertium-tolk/po/

From there you can create the .po file for your language. Once you translated the file please send it to: apertium-stuff@lists.sourceforge.net maybe sending also a copy to me s.cretella (at) voxhumanitatis.org (just to make sure the file goes through - you never know).

Of course, I understand if you don't know how to work with .po files.
In that case please indicate the language code (and language) you are translating in in the subject of your e-mail and send the lines below translated to the apertium-stuff list above and a copy to me. Please note that only the lines starting with msgstr need translation, the rest remains untouched.

If you work with particular languages that could create utf-8 coding problems in e-mails, pleas just copy and paste the text into a file and send us the file with the translated lines.

#: main_window.glade.h:2
msgid "Mark unknown words"
msgstr "Mark unknown words"

#: main_window.glade.h:3
msgid "This program is licensed under the GPL."
msgstr "This program is licensed under the GPL."

msgid "Translator"
msgstr "Translator"

An example of the screenshot can be seen here.

Thank you in advance for your help :-)

(Not even close to) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about ... Sicilian ... Neapolitan

2008-02-08T06:44:00.000+01:00

Thanks to Pat for having me sent the link - I am adding a first part and the link to the original article here, so that whoever reads this blog can find them.
*****
(Not even close to) Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about the Sicilian School, the ritmo cassinese, and the beginnings of vernacular literature in

Italy

, including Neapolitan.

Between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and about the year 1000, there existed in Europe a kind of “universal Catholic culture” (a phrase used by a number of sources); it was sustained by the official and scholarly use of Latin, even in the face of vernacular (meaning “of the people”) languages which were developing throughout the territories of the former Empire. These vernacular tongues would one day be known as Spanish, French, Portuguese, Italian, etc.—i.e., the large family of modern “Romance” languages. It is not surprising that residual Latin should have remained strongest in

Italy

, at the center of the empire, even as that empire disintegrated. Even the Lombards, the “barbarian” invaders who had invaded

Italy

many centuries earlier (569 b.c.) quickly absorbed both the religion (Christianity) and the language (Latin) of the territory they had subjugated. Thus, in Italy, the appearance of literature recognizable as early Italian comes about a century later than similar literature in early French or early Spanish (here, using for comparison the years 1150-1200, when both La Chanson de Roland for French and El Cantar de Mio Cid for Spanish appeared).

Read the complete article.

Copyright: Jeff Matthews

Afrophonewikis and localzations of Mediawiki

2008-02-03T00:38:00.000+01:00

I just learnt from the afrophonewikis list that three African languages finished the first localisation milestone, that is: Swahili, Sesotho sa Leboa and Amharic. That is really wonderful. Thanks Gerard for letting us know.

Well at this stage I also would like to thank those who actually did all the localization work and in particular Siebrand who is doing the organizational work, which is mainly done in the background and is key to whatever is done in terms of translation on Betawiki. Knowing how time consuming the organizational part is a special thanks to him.

Of course: whoever feels to be able to contribute, please do so and should you know people who could eventually help: tell them. The more the message gets out the better it is for all of your communities. Something that people often forget: the communities' work is their very own success - so please: write your very own success story by contributing to your community's projects.

OmegaWiki and licenses ... a thought

2008-02-01T10:01:00.000+01:00

There are many dictionaries around and there is no real central place for them because they are under different licenses and some are proprietary.

There is an approach to so called authoritative databases which get connected to OmegaWiki, but in some way that is problematic since you don't see the whole stuff "together" - you need to go from the community "place" to the other one and vice versa to see if there are contents.

Like always when I do things in the house I have ideas and often can see things like a picture in my mind.

Bèrto is changing the architecture of the Database and we will have a new version, that is OmegaWiki 2.0.

The database design I saw is really easy to understand and so it is also easy to "imagine" new stuff.

Now the data within the community database is licensed under CC-BY and GFDL license - Francis (Apertium) just told me in the chat that there is a really good Friulan dictionary under GPL license. So why not include this into OW? I already hear you know: but that is GPL and with that not compatible ....

Well if I look at an expression page right now we have the lemma + the definition and sometimes various different definitions that are defined meanings. IMHO it would make sense to be able to see the contents that refer to that very same lemma from other dictionaries. The only thing needed is "tagging the entries as being part of this or that license" and therefore they are shown under a different header. You would have some thing:

Contents available under CC-BY and GFDL double license
Contents available under GFDL license
Contents available under GPL license

As long as we don't allow for the export of mixed licensed lists I don't see a problem, because the contents show up one after the other, like book titles. I am wondering if this fits in the actual database without the need to have separate ones where you then need to connect to ...

It is just a thought not really thought out well ... but there is something in there
...

Facebook ...

2008-01-15T14:46:00.000+01:00

... sometimes there's really crazy stuff. Just going through all invites I have ... and sending out invites ... :-)

A quote I came accross by chance

2008-01-15T09:41:00.000+01:00

I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out. (Roy Croft)

Music ... never say never :-)

2008-01-11T21:35:00.000+01:00

Had you asked me some time ago, I would have said: no, I don't like that and I will never like it. But now, after some talk, listening and reading I am starting to appreciate music I would have never listened to before. Well: not anything really, because some songs are still too far away from what I really can listen to, but at this stage doors have been opened and sooner or later it could well be that I dig deeper into this. And what does this mean? Well: never say never ;-)

The song I was proposed to listen to today is the following one :-)

When Neapolitans become Indians and Pulcinella dances his raindance ...

2007-12-08T22:22:00.001+01:00

You are wondering about that title, right? So let me tell you the story. On our group for Neapolitan language we have people from many places in the world. Not all speak Italian, most speak English, many speak or learn Neapolitan ... what a mixture, right? Well ... discussions are always a bit particular since we have to use the language which most of us can understand and write - otherwise: would it make sense to discuss just in a handful of people? Uhmmm ... Wikipedians who are about NPOV will understand that the more people are involved the better it is for any kind of project and discussion.

There was this member of the group ... he complained about us writing in English, talks about the birth (?!?) of a new language called Naplish (never heard of this ... could be some Neapolitan indigenous dialect???) and says that there are only two natives in the group????? Moment ... but ... besides the two we all know who live in Naples also he lives there ... ehmmm ... I'd say they are at least three then, right? And the rest of the many of us who live in Neapolitan speaking regions??????????

Not enough ... first we are told that we should not write in English, but then who writes in English is actually the one complaining ... uhmmm ... does he eventually believe we don't understand him when he writes his very own version of Neapolitan??? Yes, he has a very own version that does not follow the actual grammar and spelling rules ... but: considering that we know how to talk ... well: we can understand what he writes when we apply Italian spelling rules to Neapolitan pronunciation (what a mess ... right? ... well, that's Neapolitan ...).

He talks about two mayor difficulties ... let me quote out of that mail:

"On one side the complexity of a language counting infinite variations on a
rather vast territory. Very often one may find deep lexical, phonetic and
syntactic discrepancies at very short distances.
On the other side our intellectuals and institutions live isolated in their
ivory towers, out of touch with the 'indians confined in their cultural reserve'where the language is still actively used."

Wow ... are there languages that are not complex? Without variations??? As much as I know only dead languages are without variations (but still complex) ... so what? Or am I completely ... ehmmm ... no ... ?!? I mean even if you take someone speaking Italian who lives in one region and then you take another one who lives in another region ... they both speak with variations, even grammatical variations ... even different words used to talk about the same thing, but all is considered to be Italian ... so why should this be different for Neapolitan which has much older roots and therefore more influences from outside?

"Our intellectuals" ... uhm ... who are these? I mean those few people who write Neapolitan to his opinion are intellectuals? And so I would be one of them? Gosh guys ... I'm an intellectual and I did not even know that ... that is hilarious ... And then: they live isolated in ivory towers? Wow... I'd like one ... that would eventually resolve our space problems ... and again: we then would be not in touch with the Indians (that is native Neapolitans) who live in cultural reserves (cities, small places etc.?) where the language is actively used?!?

Wow ... I am married to an Indian then ... and I live in the middle of a reserve ... hardly anybody here speaks Italian (well they know how to speak it, but not with people who live here - Italian is for strangers and even if I am German: I am not considered a stranger anymore ... they speak Neapolitan with me ...) or did I then become an Indian myself? (Indians, the real ones, please don't be upset about me using this - you have a great culture, please be proud of it and help to make your language and culture survive!)

Uhmmm and Pulcinella? Imagine him dancing a rain dance in his Neapolitan reserve ... well, hopefully rain will come and wash some negative thoughts away ... and Pulcinella will make people laugh like he has done for centuries ... have to write to a theatre company ... that's really something for them.

Quoting another piece:
"To aggravate the situation, these days you may find media and techniques which may tend to transform a language into an industrial product. The best
translation software will never be able to translate the nostalgic despair of
Santa Chiara or the magic wits of A rumba ré scugnizze."

First of all don't read the last sentence - there are 4 errors in 4 words ... if you want to know why, subscribe to the Napulitano newsgroup and read the explanations.

Then again: what I don't understand is that people seem to believe that Machine Translation is used and then the text is left as it is ... that would be plain stupid. Well, probably they don't do their homework about how professionals work and believe they are just better typers using babelfish ... Instead: machine translation it is a help in order to not having to type in all that stuff - and: machine translation is not suitable for any kind of text, certainly not poems and songs ... oh ... I forgot that our dear writer believes that Neapolitan is used only in literature and music ... but then again, when you go into the computershop here in the city and you ask for what you want using the proper word and pronunciation they often don't understand you: you need to know the Neapolitan one :-) (which very often is based on English writing with Neapolitan pronunciation ... a bit like anywhere).

Next quote:
"Considering this situation, we should publish easy, basic texts with the support of available technology, thus showing the fluency of an idiom still in use and evolution."

Wow ... he is a member of the group where I posted many bits and pieces from nap.wikipedia linking to it ... and I sent in all the short and easy written articles we published on Positanonews with "easy reading" links to OmegaWiki where people can find the word explained and translated into other languages ... or are my mails invisible???? (Please note that due to time problems the last article was not tagged that way.) Well over 4800 reads of one article show me that my mails seem to be somewhat visible ... or maybe there is some kind of magic wand for certain people that does not leave certain information through and filters it out??? Or is it Pulcinella doing one of his tricks ... see Pulicnella loves it when people struggle and fight (he is a bit naughty sometimes and helps things to go in a certain funny way ;-)

Next quote (with some omissis):
"As a little start, let me follow the example of ... (anonymizing dots), adapted to my native expression:"

And then The Devine Comedy by Dante (!!!!!!!) that is really one of the easiest texts of Italian (or better not really Italian) literature:

"Italian:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita. ....

Neapolitan:
Propie a mità ra vita mia
Ie me truvaie mmieze a na buscaglia scura,
roppe ch'eva perze a via maesta. ...."
(some attention to ortography is needed, sorry)

"English:
Half-way through my life
I found myself in a dark forest
after missing the right way. ....."

I mean calling a text by Dante (born in 1265, died in 1321) a simple text ... well ... I suppose Dante would be really upset ... I hope he will not come up during the dreams of somebody and tease and prick him ... that coud hurt ... well, he could use Pulcinella for that ... really ... and knowing how Pulcinella normally behaves :-D ...

Well let's say I prefer my Indians and Pulcinella dancing his raindance to using Dante to show simplicity of language ...

Translating Wikipedia articles (2)

2007-12-07T10:02:00.000+01:00

Like I already said yesterday, I would come back to this argument today.

Apertium is already used in some projects, one of which is the Occitan Wikipedia. For those who are not familiar with Wikis: there you have the possibility to compare the not proofread version with the proofread version and that is something you will see by clicking here.

What you see on the left hand side is the text as it was after the machine translation and on the right hand side the proofread version of the text. The changes are highlighted in green on the left and in blue on the right hand side. There are even some parts of the text that were not changed at all.

The work on the glossary and the grammar rules (well I am not using the specific terminology here to make things understandable for all) has been going on for approximately one year now.

At a certain stage the problems arise from vocabulary that is missing and not so much from the rules. Of course these translations will probably never be a 100% perfect, but the quality depends very much on us and our adding terminology and classifying it.

Comparing the above result to what you would see for Spanish-Catalan, well the last one having been under development for years is much better.

You can find further reading about co-operation between Wikipedia and Apertium on the Apertium Wiki.

Language pairs that are right now available are:

Spanish←→Catalan
Spanish←→Galician
Spanish←→Portuguese (pt and pt_BR)
Catalan←→English
Catalan←→French
Catalan←→Occitan (oc and oc@aran)
Romanian→Spanish

Many other language pairs are under development. Of course: you may start on any language combination that is comfortable for you. Please keep in mind: the more similar two languages are the easier it is to program the rules, the faster the translation engine will produce good translations.

If you want to start to work on wordlists, please write me at: s.cretella (at) voxhumanitatis.org and tell me which language pair you are interested in. You can also reach me by skype at: sabinecretella

I will upload a wordlist to google docs and give you access. Please let me know if you have difficulties to work online (that is if you work with a dial-in connection).

The Apertium Chat is on Freenode.

One more thing I just received criticism since machine translation would flatten the language: well any translated text, in particular when it comes to literature translations, is post edited by a second person. The translation is never published directly since during translation - and you can be the best translator of the world - there are always some bits and pieces that sound a little strange or that do not really transport the scene into the other culture. And please allow me to introduce the concept of cultural localization here that will be explained in one of the future posts here and that was coined by Dr. Martin Benjamin who is part of the advisory board of Vox Humanitatis. The concept of cultural localization became then immediately part of the scope of the association.

And since I am adding notes here: please remember that the Fundraiser of the Wikimedia Foundation is still running and that you can help by donating and telling others that the fundraiser is on. For more information and to donate please click here.

Translating Wikipedia articles ...

2007-12-06T19:27:00.000+01:00

... into less resourced languages. Well, time has come that we can start to think about how to go about a faster creation of contents for the many small Wikipedias. As you all know, often we have just a handful of people creating and translating and then adapting articles. Well ... combining various Open Source and Open Content projects we can now go a further step into the direction of fast contents creation, but that does not mean: stub upload. This is a completely different way of doing things.

Apertium is a machine translation tool that works really great with similar languages. Approx. a year ago I had a translation from Spanish to Catalan done by Apertium through the online interface (http://xixona.dlsi.ua.es/apertium/) and asked some people of the Catalan Wikipedia to have a look at it. They told me that of course it was not perfect, but that it would be easy to proofread it and much faster than actually translating it. In March I made a similar test during a masters for translation studies in Pisa. I asked one of the students who was bilingual Spanish and Catalan to have a look at the outcome of the machine translation of a general text. The grammar was almost perfect and and also the terminology. There were just 5 corrections in a bit more than half a page (A4).

Now what does this mean to us: if we have a bilingual wordlist for two similar languages under a free license, we can pass it on to the Apertium people. From there we are a step closer of getting machine translation for that specific language combinations on their way.

One note inbetween for the Apertium people who might read this: please don't mind me not using specific terminology to describe what needs to be done. It could become to techy.

So the next step is to identify what a term is and how it needs to be handled. That is for example a verb needs to be declared as such, then one needs to give it a tag that indicates which conjugation scheme needs to be applied. This needs doing for all word types, that is verbs, nouns, adjectives etc. After that grammar rules need to be considered. Step by step the correctness level will be improved and the time invested to complete wordlists which will be available as google doc spreadsheet and to add all the additional information will help to save a lot of time. That is: now it will take longer, once the engine "learnt" how to deal with the terminology and grammar for that specific language combination creating contents will become much faster. This will help the small projects in such a way that the few editors can concentrate on proof reading and adapting and will result in a faster contents growth that has quite high quality.

This project that is going to care about less resourced languages will be one of the first lead through Vox Humanitatis. Should you be interested in helping with the wordlists, please let us know which language combination you would like to work on (that is starting from English right now and step by step from others since most of the Terminology is there in English). We will get you the access to the online document. If you need to work offline, please let us know. You can contact me by e-mail: s.cretella (at) voxhumanitatis.org

I just received a list of the supported language combinations as well as an example for Catalan-Occitan and some notes on evaluation of machine translation co-operating with a Wikipedia community. This means I have quite some further stuff to tell you. I'll post that info tomorrow, otherwise this blog would become too long.

Please also note that the documents will be released under CC-BY license and therefore they can be integrated into any wiktionary.

Naples' airport ... a very particular publicity

2007-12-06T10:41:00.000+01:00

When on Sunday, 2nd November, I waited for the boarding to go to Barcelona, not having a book with me, I took some photos around and one is particular: the Italian mineral water producer Ferrarelle is creating publicity where each line of the publicity is written in a different language, in this case using "e 'o tiempo". It was the first time I saw Neapolitan taken to the level of all other European languages.

Thank you Ferrarelle!

(And yes, I don't mind giving a commercial company relevance if they do something like that).

Local languages applied - Catalan

2007-12-05T12:14:00.000+01:00

During the last three days I was in Barcelona at the European Forum on Science Journalism, but more about that during the following days. Now I want to talk about a language that has made its comeback into every day life and is doing really well.

I have been to Barcelona quite a long time ago, just for a transfer to change airplane and reach Malaga. Then I remember the signs at the ariport were in Spanish and English. Today when you come out of the airport you see them in Catalan, English, Spanish. Now you will say: but what's so special, right? Well, I already know that Catalan now is "official", but one thing is knowing it and a different one is experiencing it. Imagine the Naples airport with signs in Neapolitan, English and Italian or the Turin airport with Piedmontese, English and Italian ... it gives a very particular feeling to see that. In Catalonia people are very proud of their language and culture. When you talk to them they will tell you that it is relevant to use it for anything, at home and in business and of course at school or universities.

I was not sure about what to do: going by bus to the city centre or taking a taxi, but considering that probably Sunday around noon was the only moment when I could have a short walk in the centre I chose the bus. It turned out to be the right decision ...

When I reached the centre I saw something that looked a bit like a market and of course: I had to go there and see what was on. It was an exhibition of goods with labels in Catalan and there was an information stand. So I looked a bit around to see what they had. I started to talk with some young people who could not really understand English and so they called a man who then spoke French. Well my French is far from being perfect, but we managed to talk and so I found out he was the husband of the president of ADEC (Associació en Defensa de l'Etiquetatge en Català) and that they are actively promoting Catalan and with that typical Catalan products.

They had publicity material and I took some of them with me. I also got the contact to the association itself - that is: I will need to write them, but I should do that in Catalan - so if there is someone out there who can help, it would be great.

Besides all the other particular things and also similarities I found between the Amalfi Coast's traditions and typical things in Barcelona, I immediately had one thing come in mind: if this is Catalonia and it is so distinct in how things go and are done, in architecture etc. how might other regions of Spain be? I mean: I had that feeling of wanting to know more.

Now what does that tell us: I was looking at Barcelona with the eyes of a tourist and seeing all these particularities with all these particular names brought me to the conclusion that besides Catalonia there are many other regions of Spain to be explored. This was local languages applied - unification using diversification. Underlining the differences Catalonia helps the other regions in Spain to become more relevant as well. Tourists will come back over and over again, because they will feel the need that there is really a lot to discover.

Now imagine how that would be when a tourist comes to Italy. Having different languages which distinguish the local products from the national onew will help them discovering Italy - if you have the same name written on a product you need to read further to understand where things are from and the local product, the particularities loose much of their marketing force. Instead of just buying a bottle of wine when they go back home that is from Italy they will buy various bottles of wine: from Sicily, Tuscany, Campania, Puglia, Veneto, Piedmont (just to name some). That is: it would increase the demand and therefore economy would have better prospectives.

In Catalonia they went so far to have Catalan also in Universities, used for research, in schools. Kids grow up with Catalan and Spanish on one level and immediately also start with English. This means these kids will be used to think in various ways and will be able to easily connect to other cultures. They will be better communicators. And this will lead again to economical advantages for the region.

Of course we cannot apply everything at once, but step by step reconsidering what local culture really is about, we can follow this really great example Catalonia is giving us.

The same is valid for the whole world - for all regions, all people, any culture.

And yes: sooner or later I'll be back in Barcelona and discover it more deeply. During the next days I'll (time permitting) tell you more about the Museum, the conference, people I met ...

Neapolitan reaches 1000 entries on OmegaWiki

2007-11-26T22:32:00.000+01:00

This is a very short post - just to tell you that now there are more than 1000 words in Neapolitan language on OmegaWiki (and no, I did not add number 1000 since I am still hurrying after hundreds of things to do). Thanks to all who contributed to make the dictionary grow :-)

Ubuntu and D-Link 504T

2007-11-23T08:35:00.000+01:00

I already had difficulties last time to have my internet connection work properly with ubuntu, so I expected the same this time, but: the connection this time was there when I used the command line, but did not work when I wanted to start firefox. Well this meant a firmware update of the modem. So I downloaded the new version and there was another file that I downloaded "by chance" - a how to to reset the ADSL-Modem ... well it was one of those feelings: yes, I definitely needed it. I did the whole reset routine so many times and ... well I went to bed frustrated. This morning I tried first with my old windows computer to access the modem, no way - so the last chance was to use ubuntu ... and now: I have a working Internet connection with this ubuntu computer, but no internet connection with my windows computer - for whatever reason :-( I hope that at least by this evening I will have everything more or less running on this computer and then I will care about the other one ... or in the meantime, shutting windows down and reloading it for some strange reason it will work again.

Choosing what to do first or ...

2007-11-22T15:06:00.000+01:00

... just having to react???

These days are particular, busy, I should do hundreds of things contemporarily since for one month I did not do really much.

In addition to the ordinary work also wordsandmore.org seems to get more attention. The strange thing is that this happened because spammers had taken over the website during the period I was away and people got aware of it. It is great that they now started to check the website and hopefully will also start to contribute. Since these neat, mainly Chinese, spammers (yes that's ironical) used accounts to create their spam we now closed the wiki almost completely and people who want to co-operate need to ask for an account. Well, it is not difficult to create it and it seems they don't mind sending an e-mail to become members.

Still some spam accounts have not been blocked, since we are doing this step by step when we see that the accounts are used.

I hope this is a step in the right direction and the w&m website starts to create its communities.

Besides that I received the logo for vox humanitatis and had to set it up, otherwise the others could not have gone ahead with inviting people to join us.

The Wikimedia fundraiser is on and there's not much for me to do there - what I am actually doing is inserting a footer in each e-mail that tells people about it. So if you who read would like to donate, you can do this on the fundraising website.

Destinazione Italia - Gerard will get crazy with me these days. I start to see which files are ready and I am interrupted or by skype or by phone or by one of all these other neat things to do ... this needs doing ...

I received the confirmation for the conference in Barcelona - that is 3 and 4 of December - I'd say it is a good moment to talk about quality and Wikipedia and hopefully be able to make people aware of the fundraiser as well.

Christmas: only during the last days I noted that 24th of December is a Monday - that means that we can go to Germany for Christmas ... and I am happy about that since leaving my stepfather there alone ... no, I would not like that. It's the second Cristmas without my mom ... so the organisation will be mainly up to me :-)

My laptop is getting worse and worse here ... so I am waiting for the new one that was already sent from Germany. My first completely Windows free laptop. I'll use Ubuntu - my reseller already installed it :-) Well, Vista is not an option it would hinder me for quite some work I do, quite some software I need would not work and also most of my hardware would not be accepted. An Acer Extensa - first I wanted a Dell, but in Italy they only sell Windows on Dell computers and Dell Germany does not ship to Italy ...

Already time to prepare and get the kids from school - I should also have a look around the cribs and we were invited by a group called 'E Scugnizzi - so next week on Monday or Wednesday evening we will take our tour - first looking at the cribs that are steadily growing and then the music.

And then there is the article to be posted on Positanonews ... it is alread here, but I don't have time to tag it for easy reading ... probably this time I will just publish it since time is not enough to do everything.

Well ... time to go and get the earthquakes ... and when I come back I hopefully can get some mails and files ready.

When things don't go as expected ...

2007-11-07T23:18:00.000+01:00

Well, many of you know that I was supposed to deal with the Fundraiser 2007 and then at some stage, in October, I disappeared ... many probably asked themselves what happened and did not find an answer (I just sent a note to a very small group of people about what was on): well my husband was in hospital and came out again some days ago. In the meanwhile my kids were ill and had to take antibiotics and as last member of the family I had the same cold like they had and just finished to take my medicine. Again I was called from the school that Marco was not well and that I should take him home ... I went there and took him home – well: he is not really ill, just some coughing ... but enough to create some trouble at school.

I already tried to get back on my track ... like so often, things simply don't want to go like I want them to go and therefore I am not sure how much I will really be able to contribute during the next weeks.

Thanks to all those who supported me during this period, thanks to all who are actively helping the fundraiser.

Probably I will be able to do only very limited things, but I can see that things are going ahead and that is the most relevant thing.

Again: thanks to all who helped and are helping. I hope things will be back to normal, soon.

Wikimania 2008 ... where is it going to be?

2007-09-30T11:05:00.000+02:00

Well, these days many of us talk privately about it ... no, I am not going to tell you what others say, I am going to tell you where I would "feel" it right.

Alexandria

A place where cultures and people meet, it is somewhat a central point when it comes to connecting the modern with the ancient world. It holds the biggest library of the ancient world, a place where wisdom is collected ... wisdom that now reaches up to our days.

Isn't this a perfect merge? The antique world of knowledge combined with free knowledge for all?

The antique centre of wisdom meets the centre of wisdom of the present and future ... I find it unique. And besides many other facts that also are advantageous for Alexandria, this is my main point ... it can and probably will take us to the next level.

No well, one other thing is probably really relevant, besides the "feeling": Wikimania 2008 in Alexandria can attract people from the Middle Orient and can also contribute to peace when people start to co-operate on projects about knowledge. The wiki world is a very particuar one and I believe that many of you will agree when I say: it can change a live and how people think since we all feel or felt it ourselves.

I personally favour Alexandria for Wikimania 2008.

Wikimedian of the hour ....

2007-09-23T10:12:00.000+02:00

Well, it is not about being the best, the biggest, the whatever ... it is about contributing actively to the fundraiser ... a test-feature that shows a photo of the Wikimedian of the hour is running on two wikipedias for now - the Piemontese and Neapolitan Wikipedias. Besides that we decided that it made sense to have the donation page in our languages as well. Piemontese is already there ... Neapolitan still needs translation and then proof reading.

Now let's come to the point: the sense of this exercise is to get more people look at the donation page during the fundraiser period. We all know that a picture or graphic attracts our eyes more than just a written line. The Wikimedia Foundation will need more and more funds since it is continuously growing exponentially. This means we need and want to reach user groups that before were not reached and there are plenty of them. Of course we cannot do everything "right now" since the time left to the next fundraiser is short, but at least we should start to do something. Showing pictures of the community creates a different feeling of "being part of real people". It welcomes people in a different way.

These "Wkimedian of the hour" pictures can be used anywhere - also in the village pumps for example. Well, I would like to see you ... yes, you who are reading ... among us as well. You are a Wikimedian, so you should be there. Of course, those who want to remain anonymous can send me their picture and I will simply upload it without information about who it is. Pictures I receive by e-mail for publication on commons and flickr are released under cc-by-sa 3.0 and GFDL license.

If you don't know how to get that picture of yourself, well you can do a collage or just a screenshot like the one included in this blog.

The picture cycle gets updated regularly substituting the actual pictures with a bot, that is when some new pictures are added.

If you are on one of the projects that would already like to have the Wikimedian of the hour online, please let me know. I can pass you the file for the upload or eventually upload it with my bot.

I believe that for small projects (not only Wikipedia, but also Wiktionaries, Wikisource etc.) it will not only have fundraising effect, but will eventually also attract more people looking and hopefully contributing to these projects.

You can reach me by e-mail at scretella (at) wikimedia (dot) org

So I hope to see your picture online soon or have it in my mailbox. :-)

Two who love wikimedia projects ....

2007-09-21T15:48:00.001+02:00

... and regularly contribute were on holiday on the Amalfi Coast in Maiori ... it was great to meet them after such a long time knowing each other from various projects. It was funny to listen to French and understand it and to answer in German or just talk German :-). This is also the way on how my twins got their "Zuckertüte". I suppose they had fun here on the coast and they visited a place where I never have been: the top of mount Vesuvius ...
When we went to Positano to have a look at the shops, the particular way the houses are built and where I, this time, had the chance to meet a well known artist from the Amalfi Coast (who after the fundraiser will get its article on nap.wikipedia) we met with Michele Cinque in a bar and so I took the chance to take some pictures ... of course also for our WikiLove campaign.

What? You don't know what that is? Well we are trying to get pictures of many people who love our projects to be used for driving more attention to the upcoming fundraiser. There is a flickr group and a category on Commons. Well, yes ... it still needs to grow and I wanted to take my photo today, but again my husband is not here to take it ... and really one in pyjama when I wake up when he comes home after work would not give the best impression ;-)
And what about you??? Is your picture already there? No? .... So what about adding it on Commons or flickr? So many will be able to see you during the fundraiser period ...

Have fun!!!

Wikimedia Foundation and China ... Beijing and Fundraiser ...

2007-09-20T13:41:00.000+02:00

Really this is something I was already playing with for some days now and now it happened that Karl Siu added me as a friend on Facebook and so I saw his question: "Should XXIX Olympic Games in Beijing be boycottet?" ... My first answer is no - by boycotting them you don't reach anything, just some more problems are created. Instead of boycotting we should support them.

And what does this have to do with the Wikimedia Foundation and the Fundraiser? At a first glance nothing ... at a second: it can make a huge difference, depending on how we bring the message over and how our community would like to adopt such a message.

What do journalists very likely anywhere in the world use to find background information on the news? Wikipedia, right? Which kind of information will reporters from anywhere in the world need? Well: all that is in some way connected to the Olympic games ....

Now what would happen, if we start a project now, making it public to the press, that is about creating background information on the Beijing Olympic Games? That is making Wikipedia the most relevant information resource for background information for that event? What if we actively ask journalists to tell us which kind of information they would like to see and that the improvement on the articles and new articles are based on these questions?

What if these articles then are translated (or written) in as many languages as possible?

I believe that we have enough people who can help with such a giant project ... I believe that we have such a great community that has enough of that knowledge or is able to research the needed bits and pieces ... and that will save journalists loads of time, right?

Now ... do you believe that journalists who are going to save quite some time would also help us in some way? I would say: the likelyhood is very high. So what could they do for us? Well: help us to talk to people ... that's their job ... they can help us in different ways by telling the world that such a project is starting (now?) ...

1) they can and will attract readers and writers
2) they can talk about the fundraiser and ask people to remember that (donations) - don't forget: these people know how to get messages over ... so they could do it ... right?
3) the newspapers could grant some space to get our message in
4) people who read Wikipedia and follow the project that should then be very active during the fundraiser eventually (and hopefully) will see that the fundraiser is on and they donate ...

So: it is, in the end, all connected.

Maybe this is the way to involve a huge part of our community indirectly in the fundraiser?

And: it could also be a good opportunity to open a formal contact with the Chinese Olympic Committee ...

Btw. the press agency for Bejing will also follow the Earthrace - an event that wants to make biodiesel more attractive by tempting the world record of the world circumnavigation. There are some youtube videos around ... I also saw a presentation video a good week ago ... don't find the link right now - just search for Earthrace on youtube and you will find it ... it's quite interesting.

Fundraiser 2007 - Responsiveness of Community

2007-09-16T15:26:00.000+02:00

Many of you eventually know that I am dealing with the Fundraiser 2007 of the Wikimedia Foundation ... well ... there is one thing I feel a bit strange about: it seems as if general messages in village pumps and mailing lists where we ask for help simply don't go through ... or people simply don't read ... now there is a last attempt to be made and this is contact people one by one ... that is going through the projects and ask active people for help. In some way it makes me feel like spamming around and I don't feel actually comfortable with that, but on the other hand it seems to be the only chance we have ... uhmmm ... will go and do that now ... don't know if this translation of a saying is correct in English: when the prophet does not come to the mountain, take the mountain to the prophet ... have a great Sunday!

p.s. and yes, I already added a fundraiser button to my blog ;-)

Sardininan - Sassarese languages or language and dialect?

2007-09-11T08:53:00.000+02:00

Well, there is a nice website that can help us with that question ... and that is from the institution that cares about this officially - the Region of Sardinia.

When it comes to the Limba Sarda Comuna used on the actual Sardinian wikipedia there is no doubt that the language exists, but we must appreciate that it is an artificial language that was created out of the living languages of Sardinia. The website of the Region of Sardinia states:

Limba sarda comuna: una lingua realmente esistente: Sa Limba sarda comuna è naturale per il 92,8 per cento, è in posizione mediana rispetto a tutti i dialetti del sardo e può ancora essere migliorata per farla diventare la lingua ufficiale dei sardi.

Limba sarda comuna: a language that in fact exists: Sa Limba sarda comuna is natural be 92,8 per cent, it is in an intermediate position compared to all Sardinian dialects and can still be improved to have it become the official language of the Sardinian people

So they still want to improve the language ... nice ... 92,8 per cent of it is natural that means 7,2 percent is not natural. If I consider these percentages to what translators work with every day, that is the "matches" we get in our CAT tools, then 92,8 percent is a low percentage of being "natural". It seems to be high, but in fact it is not ...

Let's say I translate any kind of text (a sentence for example) and my analysis software tells me that the text is up to 93% percent equal to another sentence I translated before, this means that I cannot leave the sentence as is, because I will need to change at least one word in the sentence to make it a proper translation of what is there.

Just to give you an example:
The house on the hill is green - that is what was translated before. Now I get such a 92,8 per cent match with a sentence like: the tree on the hill is green. If I left it as is: it would state something completely different.

You can also look at it like this:
The house on the hill is nice and green. - that is 100% English
The house on the hill is nice and vert. - that is approx. 89 % English + 11% French
(it is just a matter of playing with the amount of words to get the 92,8%)

So what these 92,8% tell us: even if a huge part of it is considered to be built out of the "natural language part" it is still an artificial language.

But what is a language and what is a dialect? Well: that very much depends from which POV you look at things. But ISO determined some rules to understand what a language is and what not. That is, before you can get an ISO 639 code for a language you need to prove that this languabe complies to the standard. Of course there are living languages that don't have an ISO code, because up to now nobody cared for them - I am just thinking about Griko Salentino, a language spoken and written in Italy - but if people care about that language, they will ask for it.

What is a dialect ...

a) a language without an army
b) a way of expressing orally that developed out of a language and that has some differences , for example in pronunciation, some expressions etc, even having the same basics when it comes to grammar (just to mention one example)

So could

Campidanese (ISO 639-3: sro)

Gallurese (ISO 639-3: sdn)

Logudorese (ISO 639-3: src)

Sassarese (ISO 639-3: sdc)

be dialects of the Common Sardinian Language? Well ... only from a logical POV this is not possible, because they were there long before the Common Sardinian Language was created ...

By having their ISO 639 code, when they requested that code, they complied to the requests of the International Standardisation Organisation and therefore, on an international level they are considered to be languages even with an ISO code.

Please let me repeat: there are languages that don't have one, but these can request a code ...

When it comes to the language committee we had to draw a line somewhere and this line should not come from us, that is: it is NOT up to the members of the language committee to decide what a language is or not. We needed some kind of standard to apply and the clearest one was and still is the ISO standard. So if somebody wants to complain and say that the four languages above are in fact dialects of Sardinian and not languages, we should kindly invite them to create their papers and contact ISO directly to have the ISO 639-3 language code taken away ... it is NOT up to the language committee to take such decisions.

Another thing people should then also consider to do: also UNESCO states that these four languages are languages and they are in the red book of endangered languages - so if whoever states that they are not languages and he/she is so sure about it: they should also contact UNESCO. It is NOT up to the language committee to take such decisions as to delete four languages out of the endangered languages list ...

Sorry for me being so ironical, but: when such discussions about what is and what is not a language come up ... well: before you come to us, please go to the INTERNATIONAL bodies that deal with the question.

We are only normal people that base their decisions on standards and can tell people where to go to request their code, but we can nor create that code, nor influence what is recognised on an international level. (Nor do we want to do that).

Now to the question of sc.wikipedia ... I remember that, at the beginning, sc.wikipedia tried to host all of the Sardinian languages, then someone came up and decided to make sc.wikipedia a Limba Sarda Comune wikipedia only. Well: the Limba Sarda Comune is being used by Sardinian Authorities to facilitate their work.

In any case the code "sc" stands for the macro language Sardinian and not for the Limba Sarda Comune, so there is no reason why it should have the right to claim that code for the language. That is the Limba Sarda Comune, like any other language in the world that wants recognition by ISO must request an own ISO 639 code. It is not an option to simply say: now let's take that one since it is there ... well the one that is there stands for something else.

The question of the actual sc.wikipedia came up because of people telling us that Sassarese is not a language, but a dialect of Sardinian and that the Limba Sarda Comune (Common Sardinian Language) is the only "right language" of Sardinia.

Well again: it is not us who is going to decide on Sassarese and the other three being or not being a language - we rely on ISO 639-3 codes since we had to draw a line and avoid to simply assert things. It is not us who is going to decide if the Limba Sarda Comune is going to get an ISO 639 code. If you, who read this, are interested in this matter, it is up to you to get things on their way.

See: the decision to base whatever we do on ISO 639-3 was one of the wisest decisions ever taken within the language committee ... imagine which fights (almost all political based) we would have if we did not do this.

Just to make things clear - I repeat it again:

a) we do NOT decide if something is a language or not
b) we base our decisions on ISO 639-3
c) we actually need a solution for various scripts used for one language
d) we would love to see Multilingual Mediawiki there since it could be used to create easily sustainable communities
e) we are not going to go ahead on discussing if Sassarese is a language or not (it has a code)
f) we will need to find a solution for Limba Sarda Comune which does NOT have an ISO 639 code and is using the sc code in an improper way.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Fundraiser 2007 - communication with projects

2007-09-08T14:35:00.000+02:00

Well, dealing with the Fundraiser 2007 I am trying to involve the whole of the communities. But that seems easier that it really is ... one thinks: oh well, there are the village pumps and you just go around them ... or you go through the mailing lists (but not all projects have one) ... or in the worst case you use the various chat rooms ... well no, it does not really work ... a really well structured communication in this specific moment is not possible - and in some way we should think about a solution.

Village pumps:

I am getting step by step to them - there is no all comprehensive page - but even if there was there is one huge problem: they are structured very different from one project to the other. Often I posted "somewhere" without even understanding if it was the right place ... some have extra pages for messages written in a different language from theirs (but then again: there you don't reach a maximum number of people who maybe would help). Some have different sectors for different themes ... but again: there you don't reach all potential people, just the part of them that goes to the "general" village pump page. Uhmmmmmm ...... not sure how to sort this out ... and no: I would be agains a page for special "foundation information" since again it would be read by only a part of the users/editors and these would probably be more or less the same ones who read foundation list ....

Now I asked for a bot that can help us to add new sections to specific pages within the pywikipediabot framework - this would at least make one part of it easier, not having to go around all projects, but still the "how to communicate effectively" problem remains ....

For now, until we maybe get a better solution, I would like to ask people from the various projects to check the page where I list the village pumps and change the links I have there to the page where they want to have the messages added - for all projects please - this will help all of us to live an easier wiki-life. During the next days I will then make another round around the various Village Pumps asking people to correct the link on the page above if necessary.

I am sorry, but for now I don't see a different way to get this on the way.

And please: all links to all projects are needed - also the smallest ones ... they all have the same relevance.

Thanks!!!

Buttons and Banners for Wikimedia Fundraiser 2007

2007-09-06T13:04:00.000+02:00

Yes, I am going to tell you also here :-)

We are organising the fundraiser 2007 and we will need quite a bunch of help to get things on their way. So one of the first things we are doing is to care about buttons and banners that we can then add to our blogs, websites, user profiles wherever so that people anywhere in the world see it and can help.

So if you like creating buttons and banners and wish to help with the translations of the buttons and banners, have a look at meta:

Description:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2007/Buttons_and_banners_to_be_translated

First examples and translations:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fundraising_2007/web_buttons

Thanks and have a great day!

2000 reads ... crazy ... but they are definitely there ...

2007-08-27T10:05:00.000+02:00

The article about Freecol reached 2000 reads today. It has been published on 14 th of July and is still getting approximately 50 reads a day. Looking at the statistics and Google analytics most of these reads are unique reads - this means almost 2000 people looked at it. Mainly in Italy and the United States, but also in Germany and other parts of the world.

I noted that also the newer articles, like the one about the photo contest and the one about I Musicastoria are getting quite many reads.

What does this mean? I mean I can understand the photo contest, because it is about the Amalfi Coast and I can understand the amount with I Musicastoria which is a group that has really great music and is quite known around here ... but why the game? Probably these amounts of reads that are really high compared to those of articles in Italian, tell us two things.

Besides the fact that officially people still consider their native language, in this case Neapolitan, as a second class language, there is a high interest in it and probably people love to read and use their language ... eventually something is changing and they start to see it as relevant again ... it seems as if the desperately search for contents ... and what does this mean for our small Wikipedias? Probably there are many many readers that wait for us to write ... often these Wikipedias are the only projects that provide contents in less ressourced languages and therefore their role is quite different from what Wikipedia actually should be.

The other notion is that if so many people look at a computer game they eventually want one in their language ... this was the reason for us to go ahead and localize another game that is for now available for computers and will be available for mobile phones soon. If you want to play a game in Neapolitan or Piedmontese language, just have a look at Sudoku Mania and should you want to contribute with your localization: please contact me at s.cretella (at) wordsandmore (dot) org. I would really like to help you with the localization which is easiest done using OmegaT, since it already has a filter for java .bundle and html files.

.po files and OmegaT ... (Abiword)

2007-08-24T16:58:00.000+02:00

Well, like so often things happen when you don't expect them to happen. We have almost 40°C here and I suppose that on the balcony it is well over that temperature ... no way of really being able to work ... that will need to be done during the night when the temperature is lower ...

So I thought, well, let me see how much it would be to localize that game into Neapolitan ... then I started like so often to talk to Gerard and we were talking also about the localization of software into Neapolitan ... being just that handful of people OpenOffice is not possible, and for some strange reason Abiword came up and so I had a look at it. I saw the explanation of how to create a "clean" .po file ... stuff that was somewhat too complicated for me to deal with (or better: I did not feel like trying) and so I thought: wouldn't there maybe be an easier way in order to avoid doing the same over and over again ...??? Well, I saw there were already localized .po files online and one of them the en_GB.po and that was the moment when I saw that maybe the way we were now dealing with .po files, trying to create a filter or whatever for files where the segment with the translation is empty is the wrong way to go ... .po files have a regular structure. Seeing that English to English file with both filled segments it became clear that it should not be too difficult to build a filter - but: not being an OmegaT programmer really I am not able to do that, so how to use the present filters? ... Well, first I tried with XML, but that one did not work and then with html ... and that one works ...

How did I create a file with translateable html contents? Well: search and replace ... that's all ... it could be done with a simple macro or a short script in whatever language that can process the .po files provided that both segments in .po contain text.

Now that is now my modified .po file looks like now ...

at the beginning there is the usual html declaration and the html tag

then a translation unit looks like this:

#. DLG_Para_LabelAt
#: po/tmp/ap_String_Id.h.h:97
msgid "&At:"
msgstr ">&At:< div "

and of course the closing html tag at the end (sorry I cannot put this in here since blogger gets a hickup. Also the space in front of "div" must be taken out (blogger-hickup also here).

this means I just created a "div" tag around the text that may not be touched ... and the strangest thing is: it really works ...

So this is a pseudo filter for .po files and now I will be able to localize the software creating a translation memory and then, for future updates work will be much less. Of course, who is interested in getting that .html file that can easily (with search/subsitute) be re-converted to normal .po can contact me, but please give me some time to answer ... it is really one of these periods of the year.

Less resourced languages meet ... getting some projects on the way

2007-08-24T13:19:00.000+02:00

Berto from the Piedmontese Wikipedia, who also has i-iter.org that deals with less resourced languages stayed here in Maiori for some days and so we had plenty of time to talk and consider many strategies on how to protect less resourced languages and the very specific culture of the various regions in the world. Well there is still much to be worked out, but one thing became clear: we are going to work much closer together than before and we will find a structure on how to make the most out of the efforts of so many people who care about the same goals.

So yes, the first Piedmontese-Neapolitan meet-up made some first results.

This is just a note to let you know: something is going on ... so stay tuned for more news :-)

A game in Piemontese with an article in Neapolitan

2007-08-18T19:07:00.000+02:00

Approximately a month ago I wrote an article about the game Berto localized into Piemontese, Freecol and something incredible is happening ... I mean why should people who speak and read Neapolitan find an article about a game in Piemontese sooooo interesting? Well it is .... the article up to date has over 1550 reads (you can see that below the article) and gets further approx. 50 reads a day.

We don't have a clue on how often our small Wikipedias are read, but considering these figures: there are many readers for our languages, even if for now not writers.

What it also tells me: indeed time is due to go over to software localization for our languages ... in particular games, browsers, stuff you use often ... I am wondering how a handful of Wikipedia editors that we are will be able to deal with that ... we desperately need more people writing ... it doesn't too much matter that everything is written correctly, it is just relevant that people start.

Berto: tanks for that huge amount of work you did. It enters an incredible market nièche that is unfortunately always underestimated.

People find their languages fun - and they do want to read about such stuff - and thanks to a game two cultures meet ... exchange ... will co-operate ... that is something that I find incredibly exciting.

nap.wikipedia: a first so-called stable version article

2007-08-16T13:35:00.000+02:00

... it is not perfect in terms of wikification, the photos still were not uploaded to commons and some other things that need to be done, but it is a proofread article that was created initially for Positanonews, but then we decided to put only two paragraphs of it on the newspaper website (one of which is not on Wikipedia) and add the whole of the information on the Neapolitan Wikipedia. In this way I have a double use and double effect: people reading the article in the newspaper will reach the Neapolitan Wikipedia :-) and eventually there are some new ones that could become contributors.

Musicastoria, the band, is known in Austria and Germany where they already gave concerts and also in Yemen, well of course they are not known as much as here in Campania, but like so often: it is a matter of connections.

They are relevant to Neapolitan, its culture and its language since they go into the small villages and ask old people to sing their old songs, tell their old stories ... all in local language. There are not many of such groups around and I hope I will be able to involve them with some free projects.

Who knows if we will also get our first double licensed GFDL and CC-BY-SA 2.5 Neapolitan song from them ... it would be simply great :-) ... well, I will try to get it ;-)

The article on nap.wikipedia will need some time to become more complete ... but once it is: I want to translate it into English (many Italian Americans are from this region and they will love to know about them) and German. If you wish to help out with other languages, of course you are welcome :-)

Even a stub saying that

Musicastoria is a band from Vietri sul Mare, Italy playing ethnical music of the region of Campania and Southern Italy in general by collecting material through testimonials by old people.

in any language would be great.

If you want to listen to them, you can do this here (no complete songs, but 1 minute parts of some of them):

Pictures on nap.wikipedia

2007-08-14T10:10:00.000+02:00

As I already said in the nap.wikipedia beer parlour and on the discussion list: I will now start to delete images without license information. I waited for quite some time before starting because I know they were copied from other wikimedia projects, but this does not help ... we need or license information on it or they need to be deleted. There are too many of them to inform the people who uploaded them about each single picture.

I would also propose to only use Commons. So if you have opinions on this: let me know here, on nap.wikipedia or in the discussiongroup napulitano@yahoogroups.org.

This is just to integrate what was already said since it could be some read the blog but are not really active on nap.wikipedia - so: they can contact me and remedy the situation for the pictures they uploaded.

Thanks, Sabine

Length of articles in small Wikipedias

2007-08-13T13:04:00.000+02:00

Again I had a discussion about how big a Wikipedia article in small Wikipedias needs to be ... well thanks to Magnus Manske on the wiki-de mailing list I found a link that lead me to a Brockhaus version of 1911 (thanks for sending that one in just today). These kinds of encyclopaedias are still produced and for many they are enough (or even more than enough). So the length of an entry can be really short. Just look at the Examples.

What does this mean for us: well such short articles are very much wanted on our small Wikipedias and again I repeat: nobody can say that one or the other Wikipedia is good or bad only because they don't have long articles ... we could and should decide that in projects in less ressourced languages where you only have a handful of writers the "one line article" maybe including also a picture is enough to be called an article and not a stub. Why that? Well: 5 to 10 active people will never be able to create a project with all long articles, but they are well able to create over time an encyclopaedia like the one referred to above.

Time ago I stopped to add one sentence articles to the nap.wikipedia ... I suppose it is time to go ahead adding them - and: not adding the stub template, since we cannot and do not want to be compared with the big ones (that are compared to 50 and more volume paper encyclopaedias).

Said that ... as soon as time allows I'll go ahead to prepare the lists I have here.

Spelling etc. on nap.wikipedia

2007-08-12T13:09:00.000+02:00

Now we have that bunch of editors, but we don't have "fixed rules" on how to write things. This needs discussion, but not only among Wikipedians who write, but among all these people that are interested in the Neapolitan Wikipedia and connected projects. This means we are going to discuss this in the mailing list for the Neapolitan language and I herewith invite all interested people to join us there. You can also send an e-mail to napulitano-subscribe@yahoogroups.com

We must make a point, otherwise we really get into trouble - and we must start to use something like "stable versions in terms of ortography and grammar". I also have the corrected templates here and I hopefully will make it today to create them as well as the first "stable article".

Neapolitan is a particular language, since there is no law that rules how it needs to be written, but there are grammar rules and dictionaries and more than 500 years of literature. Of course some terms will need adaptation to today's language - and I want a wider public to be involved in this, not only the very small active community, but also very much the passive one: that is our readers - and many of them are in the discussion group mentioned above.

I was already thinking about creating a spell checker for firefox and OpenOffice.org, but my problem is: the day only has 24 hours ... I ask Carmine to proof read whenever he has time, the handful of editors is doing its best and I write some short news articles where I can connect directly to OmegaWiki and add terminology there that can then be used for the spell checker.

At this stage I am searching for someone who would like to start to create one with the very few words that are there. I really can't cope with it myself and people I know are not able to do it. So if there is somebody who would like to help us on that bit: the whole Neapolitan community would be really grateful. Having also a small file in place will lead to more data coming in step by step, since people will use the spell checker and give us their added wordlists. These of course then need to be checked and integrated, but it would at least start ... if we wait until whatever software has the functionality to do it we will need ages to go ahead. And we will need to repeat the same corrections over and over again - that simply does not make sense to me.

This spell checker should be under a CC-BY license so that we can use the list for integration in OmegaWiki and re-use the same work in various ways.

We already talked about course material etc. as well ... yes, indeed, it is time to create it ... I would like to see first of all written exercises that stimulate proper spelling and sentence building. But well ... it will take time ... we are only that very small group of people working on it.

Thanks to all who continuously help on nap.wikipedia with interwiki links, creating basic articles, taking out errors here and there and most of all: thanks to all who regularly dedicate their time to the Wikipedia.

I am now going to post exactly this text to the beer parlour on nap.wikipedia and send it to the discussion list.

Seagulls ....

2007-07-30T14:37:00.000+02:00

Well, due to a lack of time, or better time for doing things alone without needig to take the kids with me, I started to go to te beach around six o'clock in the morning ... it's just great: hardly anybody around, just some pigeons and seagulls (btw. the linked picture is just any seagull ... didn't find the kind we have here on the coast), a fisher boat here or there ... but: nobody swimming ... you don't have to care about your direction and you just can go ahead ... and ahead ... and ahead ... well, some here in town probably think I am crazy, because even if we are in the middle of the summer and the water is really nicely warm, when you get out there is still the wind coming from the mountains and that is quite fresh ... that is people here would say: be aware, you get a cold ... well up to now I did not and I will not :-)

But to the seagulls ... this morning I had a real funny situation ... I was in the water swimming and a seagull came flying over the water, just above me, looking down at me ... uhm I thought ... well, it went away in a wide circle, but a second one came along and did the same ... it looked down from the sky to what I was doing there ... then the first one came back - the same again ... it went ahead like this for some minutes ... the way they looked at me made me very much remember my parrot, when he looked at something all too interesting, eventually food ... so did these two consider me to be seagull food ;-) well ... looking at myself I'd say: uhmmm ... the'd need some grappa afterwards :-P

Let's see if they will be there tomorrow morning ...

Citazione ...

2007-07-21T15:01:00.000+02:00

La vera amicizia è una pianta che cresce lentamente e deve passare attraverso i traumi delle avversità perché la si possa chiamare tale. (George Washington)

Articles with stable version for nap.wikipedia

2007-07-20T13:27:00.000+02:00

Well, again this theme is on my mind ... stable versions ... on the Neapolitan wikipedia we have a very particular situation: only very few people are really able to write well and the others write "as they speak" often adopting the spelling of the Italian writing rules to Neapolitan or if they are Neapolitans who grew up in the states and are eventually of second or third generation you could even find some very particular words coined in the States (and well yes, that is still Neapolitan, just a different dialect of it), which of course does not work well. Even being many of them native speakers we have problems when it comes to written versions. Yes, there are rules, but Neapolitan is not taught at school nor you can easily find courses around where you can learn the language. Also when I write I always have to ask for proof reading by Carmine, well for me it is not even my mothertongue ... some people are frightened to write since they know they are not able to write correctly, but eventually they would write and start to contribute if they knew that the issue of having spelling errors in the end is not soooo big - this is something that can be sorted out.

What would be really helpful is a "stable version" function so that people can find proofread examples where they can rely on. This will help them to contribute on nap.wikipedia. For us it is not so much about having long pages with loads of contents - for us it is still on "getting people to write" in their native language.

Templates, the problem with the double quote and all that is too wiki specific is still too much for many ... I am also considering in not adding templates for cities etc. for the moment (for new pages) - it is confusing to people. I note that more and more when I talk with people who could become valid authors on nap.wikipedia. Most of those who write Neapolitan properly are of my generation or older and there are only few of them who really can dig into wiki syntax etc.

This means: we have to give them a really low entry level ... and we have to assure people who edit: there is a stable version where you cannot do any harm to, you can write, even if not 100% correct ... and you can then learn from the stable versions and the corrections made in your writings.

It is indeed a long process to get through all these problems ... and for now I don't see an end to it.

Just some interesting links

2007-07-10T15:00:00.000+02:00

* A life in the day: Florence Devouard

* What women talk about

It is too darn hot

2007-06-26T21:41:00.000+02:00

Italy is hot, too darn hot. It is too hot to move.. It is too hot to cook. You drink four five liters and .. you just sweat. When you go to the beach at 08:30 it is already too hot. So you swim, you get out, and again, it is too darn hot.

Even the computer agrees, it is too darn hot. Skype only works for a few minutes, then it overheats, it is too darn hot. So I put my brush under the computer there is now more room the heat can get out.. It is too darn hot.. To keep Skype going I have to wave air to cool the darn thing.. it is too darn hot..

It is to hot to do anything.. so I am happy that somone wrote this for me.. it is too darn hot

Love and sunshine from the Amalfi coast :-)

Elections and endorsements

2007-06-24T12:06:00.000+02:00

Now that the endorsement period is over I can write this ...

Well three board members are going to be elected ... than you have the possibility to endorse the three you would like to see and you go through the various presentations. I found some very young people who have really great ideas and in some way they would deserve their place as well... but then you have to make a choice ... that is you need to look at people, what they are able to do, how much background information they have and how much they deal with issues that are relevant to you.

Well what is relevant to me is the support of the lesser resourced languages ... the understanding that sometimes just talk is not enough (still thinking about the double quote issue with nap.wikipedia). The fact that they can behave in such a way that they can get results. And one very important thing to me is that they are honest to themselves and do state privately the same they state publicly (and there is no difference to whether I have the same opinion or not - it is just about stating what you really believe).

So in the end my endorsements went to Erik (Eloquence), Kim and Yann. I believe all three of them are well able to deal with the "big issues" that are relevant for the huge majority and at the same time they take the time to look at our very "small issues" compared to the others, but that are considered to be really huge mountains to our small communities.

I also understand that by offering their time to the board they will not have much free time left ... so thank you for considering to donate so much of your time to the community.

OmegaWiki a translation dictionary? By all means: no

2007-06-16T22:29:00.000+02:00

Out of a bar entry on it.wiktionary, yes I was pointed to the bar on it.wikt, I understand that most people see OmegaWiki just as a translation dictionary. But: if you feel like that, then you did not look properly at it.

At this stage entries are not really complete, but they already have a huge part of the complete functionality that is to come. This means we have:

- lemma
- definition (lemma + definition together form a Defined Meaning)

In the annotations you find all additional info like

String properties:
- example sentence
- hyphenation

Text properties:
well: this needs still some work

URL properties:
also here: still some work needed ... this is to link to other projects

Option properties:
- part of speech
- verb
- noun
- adverb
- describing word
- contraction
- article
- pronoun
- preposition
- conjunction
- interjection

Then there are
- Relations – this means to which other words the actual one is related
- Incoming relations – this is which other words relate to the actual one
- Class membership – for now with only "lexical item" in there
- Collection membership – for example: we have, just to name some, the General Multilingual Environmental Thesaurus, Destinazione Italia, OLPC Children's Dictionary, ISO 639-3 languages as collections. A list of present collections and their completion status can be found here.

Under Relations you will find the typical "narrower and wider terms" like you find them in a thesaurus for example.

What is still missing is Etymology – that one is planned, but not there right now – you will find it within the annotations.

So this is the basics of what we have now – and yes, many entries just have lemma + definition + translations, but that depends on the fact that for now we don't have all too many fans who care about the annotations :-)

But OmegaWiki is not only that ... it is already being used to create study material for students and to provide easy to read news articles for many. What does this mean, well the easiest thing is to have a look at two examples:
- http://www.positanonews.it/menu/default.asp?id=6090 for an example in Italan
- http://www.positanonews.it/menu/default.asp?id=6167 for an example in Neapolitan

You will find additional info on this theme and why we work with Positanonews in a former blog of mine: Combining projects just for fun ... and unexpected results. And a list of articles that will grow by one a week is maintained on OmegaWiki.

During the Holland Open Gerard showed the articles to some people and also other universities started about tagging their materials in such a way for their respective students.

This is just one of the many additional uses of the OmegaWiki data – maybe we will explain about the others in a separate post. It would be somewhat an overkill to put all in one article.

There is also another part of the post in the bar on it.wikt that needs an answer ... well people assumed that even if I work mainly on OmegaWiki I don't care about Wiktionary anymore ... that is more a kind of a personal question and not a factual one – so it will be answered separately.

Resignation as Bureaucrat and Admin from it.wiktionary ...

2007-06-16T22:07:00.000+02:00

... or: when things get crazy and you have to draw a line

I still remember my first steps on it.wiktionary ... 16th of June 2004, yes, exactly three years ago – the first term I edited was lunedì (Monday). The almost only user that was seen online in these days was Paulo. He wanted to pull up the project, but shortly after he saw that I took things seriously he went away.

On 30th August 2004 the idea of an universal Wiktionary was born – thanks to Gerard Meijssen who then created articles of languages with loads of templates in there – well... the whole story would be too much now, but thanks to some misunderstandings and a following very long skype conversation today we have OmegaWiki.

The Italian wiktionary was always subject to loads of spam. So at a certain stage, I don't remember exactly when, I became adminship ... well the only one then working there was me, so I was the only one who could have done some clean-up.

Well the spam load got more and more and it became almost impossible for me to do good work there ... so I started to ask for help ... some registered, became admins, went away. Again I went ahead alone. If it was not for the pywikipediabot I would not have been able to add so many entries to it.wikipedia since always the main work on it was to keep it clean from spam.

Last year then I became Bureaucrat ... well I was not really present anymore, but I cared about a very particular user group that before that started to edit it.wiktionary – most of them teens, great and wonderful young people dedicating their free time to free projects. I am not naming them one by one here, because I could forget someone and I don't want to do this.

Now many of you will ask themselves why I did not immediately leave Wiktionary when I was working on OmegaWiki (time ago called Ultimate Wiktionary and then WiktionaryZ). Well ... it is a bit like with a baby ... you feed it, see it grow and then it goes, but in some way there is still part of your life connected to it.

But back to our very particular user group: they are most of all teens, partly very young, but dedicated ... and they did good. Of course not always, but it's a wiki, right? So you do what you can when you can. I admire them – they did great work. They gave part of their live to the project. A good group of them became admins – they came while others who today claim to be the only ones to be able to give rules to the project then were present, but did not care at all when I said: hey guys, I can't deal with all that anymore, I need help. No, I will never again allow people to say that the youth of this country is no good – they are great! You just need to trust them to do good and they will do it. They put their heart in it.

Now today I was called through my discussion pag e on OmegaWiki since someone asked for the desysop of one of the admins. He was accused of being not active, not cleaning up spam and copyviolations ... ok, so I went to the chat (yes, I have the log, but anyway it is not relevant for me anymore ... so: it doesn't make a difference to publish it). So I asked for several things, most of them not really so tragic, but a desysop to one of the most valuable people at the time he joined ... well, that was something to really talk about.

Now what I learnt is that some wikipedians (well, yes, the one asking for desysop is quite new to wiktionary) assume that when you become and admin you assume the responsibility to regularly clean up the wiki ... well I would say: this is perceived completely wrong. If the admins were paid and had to sign a contract, well then this is a different thing, but they are not – they DONATE their free time. Ok, then I got the following as the reason for "desysop": ... ma di aver lasciato wikizionario senza policy, senza controllo copyviol, senza importare decine di lemmi da altri progetti... (but to have left Wiktionary without policy, without checking copyviol, whtout importing tens of lemmas from other projects) .... UHMMMMMM ....

Is there a contract where it is written down that who is elected Admin (well, ok, Sysop) or Bureaucrat has to do this and otherwise he gets desysoped? That is plain stupid – against any sense of collaborative projects, against any sense of humanity. Another nice sentence I got in these answers was (fairly at the beginning): " invasa di bambini che giocavano, può bastare come spiegazione?" (invaded by kids who were playing, isn't this enough of an explanation?)

I can't believe it ... well maybe these teens were not perfect, but they did their best, nobody is perfect. I would very much like to remind some poeople of what the Wikimedia Foundation aims to do: provide free knowledge to all people in the world in their language.

Now does this stop with the contents or are we here as well to transmit what Free Content, Free Software, Wikis and Collaborative Projects are to people, young and old, who are new to it. Also this is a kind of education, of giving knowledge – this is social knowledge. Well it seems that some do not like to invest in their future ... because instead of starting a desysop procedure this person could have talked to them, explaining them and if the explanation would have been logic enough they probably would have agreed and co-operated. But now? How can people feel good to work in such an environment? Does this really reflect the community spirit? I would clearly say: no.

I am not willing to co-operate in future on it.wiktionary since obviously under these circumstances I cannot be of any help. Therefore I resign from my being Bureaucrat and Sysop on the Italian Wiktionary. It is sad and part of my life is in that project ... I don't want to see it die ... it would be too much. So: I am not going to go back there ... well with two exeptions, one of which is: just my user page will contain a link to this article and to the place where people can find me if they want to talk to me – that's all.

One word to the new Amdins and Bureaucrats: according to what I learnt from the chat today it seems you signed for some kind of a contract by being elected Admin or Bureaucrat. I will have a look in one years time and hopefully you will all be there happily doing what you are expected to do ... well: it is a responsibility you took according to your new policies ... so the project is waiting for you – people are expecting you to do your job now.

There would be so much more to say .... please, if you work on other projects: don't follow this example – it destroys the community. We need to build community, bring over the spirit of free projects, of all free projects. The teens of today will be among the best editors of tomorrow. Never consider a kid, even a 5 year old, to be too young to do something – they are all well able, if they have an interest and they want to do. Trust them to do good. They need it – they are our very own future.

And to the editors who worked on it.wiktionary during my short period ... well during the last three years: thank you so much for your efforts and help – and a very special thanks to our young ones – I find it really special that you dedicate your free time to free projects ... like I already said: you are our future and the day will come, if it is not already here, that we will learn from you.

Thanks for your attention. And yes, of course: you will always find me on the Neapolitan Wikipedia but mainly working on the connection of various free projects in order to maximise results with the donations in time people give us. Yes, we must value each minute highly.

Thank you!!!

Combining projects just for fun ... and unexpected results

2007-06-07T12:40:00.000+02:00

The story ;-)

Well time ago, when we started to work on the Destinazione Italia project with OmegaWiki I understood that professors at the University of Bamberg need free news, but they need it tagged in such a way that the studends can easily look up words with definitions and translations.

Then some weeks ... well a couple of months ago ... I wrote my first article about the tuna cages that are planned in Cetara, near Maiori, on the Italian Wikinews which lead to a contact with Maria Rosaria Sannino from eCostiera since she received the article through google alert.

Well yes, we then made an appointment at the Bar Pineta with some other people from Agorà and Positanonews. That is where I met the director of Positanonews and understood that he is a very likeminded person, thinking very open and Open Content without really referring to it. So a natural Open Source person here on the coast ... that is indeed rare.

I started to take the headlines of Positanonews for the Costiera Amalfitana Wikia and I was offered to simply use the contents I prefer ... well, no, I don't do that, I prefer to link to it and not double contents ... well yes, during the next days I will need to work on the Wikia ... I did not have much time these days and still don't have much ...

Comunication with Michele Cinque and his team developed really well and we reached two very particular results with this - on one hand a news section in Neapolitan language and on the other facilitated reading articles (the list is maintained on OmegaWiki ... another one will be added by today).

The facilitated reading articles resulted from two things:

the need to link Neapolitan words to a dictionary in order to help people to understand the words and
the need of the University of Bamberg, that is news with links to the terminology so that students can read them more easily and have this terminology in such a fashion that it can be easily exported from a database

Most of you know me quite well ... sometimes I just do things to show what is possible and then all sorts of not calculated, that is unexpected results derive from what I do.

So I created my first "Easy to read" article to show it to Martin ... now he really likes the idea and we are going ahead to do this adding one article a week. This means three very different groups of people are now connected to produce open contents for the community (in alphabetical order):

OmegaWiki
Positanonews
University of Bamberg

Yesterday I took a first article from the Italian Wikinews (if you are from Wikinews, please have a look if attribution is ok in this way) which still needs to be taggen, to have some free content on national and international news in Italian with a free license, since of course Positanonews is centered mainly on regional news and all that comes from outside cannot be released under a free license unless the author does not agree to it. So we can add also Wikinews to the list above and we really have a good mix of projects from various sectors that all have the same spirit. Do as much work in the Open Source world as possible and give access to information and education to people.

Now you are eventually asking yourself why I chose this combination: well it was not chosen, it happened, just because people are open minded, have the spirit to pay it forward and do not only think about their own needs and wishes.

So thanks to all contributors from (in alphabetical order):

There will be other unexpected results ... they are already on their way ... and when time is due I will tell you about it.

Localisation PhD Scholarship at the University of Limerick

2007-05-29T13:57:00.001+02:00

Streamlining Quality Assurance in Digital Content Localisation

Symantec Ireland and the Localisation Research Centre (LRC) at the Department of Computer Science and Information Systems (CSIS), University of Limerick, have agreed to offer a 3-year funded position for a suitable candidate to work on a collaborative research project with Symantec and the LRC, leading to a PhD degree.

Candidates should forward their application (cover letter, CV) to the LRC, CSIS, University of Limerick, Limerick, Ireland. Note that the closing date for the receipt of applications has been extended to 22 June 2007.

More details on http://www.localisation.ie/resources/Research/symantecphd.htm

just copying and pasting .....

News ... in Neapolitan language ... no, not a wiki this time

2007-05-28T21:24:00.000+02:00

It is just about two weeks ago or so that a friend from the United States called me. His family is from Campania and therefore he is very much interested in the Neapolitan language. That is: for him Neapolitan is the true mother tongue. We already have a Wikipedia in Neapolitan as well as some few websites. With OmegaWiki we will now be able to build dictionaries in various language combinations and spellcheckers and some other nice surprises :-)

So talking with him that idea of making news available in Neapolitan became stronger - we already had thought about it before, but there was that final step that was missing. Said and done: we talked with Michele Cinque and Antonio D'Urso from positanonews about it - and they found it a great idea. One prerequisite of mine was: we or need somebody who really writes well or we need help to proofread my writings and/or translations. And yes: Carmine Colacino again is helping out here - thank you! This means: my texts are going to be proofread by him :-)

So that is how it came to be that now we have a news section in Neapolitan language on positanonews, the first registered online newspaper in Campania. Besides it being the first news section in an online newspaper I also thought that it would make sense to have texts for facilitated reading for all those who would like to look up a word. The technique is the same I use here on the blog: with a snap.com account so that you can have a preview of the page where the link leads to. Well: some more will be inserted over time and I will center on more difficult words then, because probably the normal ones are quite easily understood.

To give some more "food" to readers I will try to link to relevant wikipedia articles whenever these are present.

Of course, like always there will be critics :-) and yes I very much like criticism as long as it is constructive and people try to help to improve things. We very much encourage others to write there as well. It may be anything related from a familie's history, background information, actual news to the presentation of cultural events and music.

This is definitely a way to give space to all to write about life, news, culture and of course also encyclopaedic articles on Wikipedia. If you feel like writing: please just do. We know that it is not easy to write in Neapolitan but it is also true that if you don't try, you will not learn how to do it.

Thank you for your time and we hope to see you soon on the newssection for Neapolitan news on positanonews.it as well as on the Neapolitan wikipedia.

A big thank you to the director of positanonews Michele Cinque for giving us these unique possibility and to Antonio D'Urso for making it possible from the technical side. Again: thanks to Carmine Colacino for taking the time to copy edit my texts and translations.

An Encyclopaedia and Neapolitan music

2007-05-27T17:45:00.000+02:00

Yesterday evening I was at the hotel Domina Royal in Positano for the presentation of an Encyclopaedia. Well it was an exceptional evening, not only because of the contents of the programme.

The "Nuova Enciclopedia Illustrata della Musica Napoletana" (New Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Neapolitan Music) by Pietro Gargano. It will be great to have definitely something to verify the contents about songs we have on the Neapolitan Wikipedia and to add reference to these unique works that are not finished for now. But only having a look at the first volume, of which of course I simply had to get one :-) we will be able to check a lot of data we already have and it will help to make at least some of the data available in Neapolitan.

Such a huge corpus of text would be difficult to translate manually - it would take really loads of time and it would maybe be too expensive for quite a limited market. My thoughts here go very much in the direction of Apertium and the creation of a dictionary that allows for machine translation from Italian to Neapolitan and maybe also to English. This would help here since the terminology used is quite restricted and the whole of the corpus is work of one and the same author. So it would be easier to get high quality results and then just proofread the text. Going that way such particular works can be made available quite easily in other languages and can be offered through print on demand services.

Well: it is for now a dream ... that hopefully one day can become true.

I am still thinking on how some of the songs were presented ... it would be great to show you the whole presentation online. Who knows if the one person who recorded it with the videocamera will help to do this.

And yes, I met some very interesting people - and I had a really great evening. I would like to thank Michele Cinque from Positanonews (news in Italian and English) who invited me to this presentation.

How to create a spellchecker ... that is the problem.

2007-05-26T00:34:00.000+02:00

Considering that I need to write more and more often in Neapolitan, having a spell checker would be nice, but .... oh yes, that is a really big but ...

So you search for OpenOffice.org + spell checking in Google ... you reach a nice project page that leads you to Hunspell. Than you are there, you can download a bunch of files (that don't say anything about how to create such a dictionary) and you think ... well, let me look at Mozilla. So you go there: and you are redirected to OOo ... one project sends you to the other :-(

That is: you get into a nice cycle. No way to find out how a wordlist for such a spellchecker should look like or better be created. Maybe it should be obvious to the whole world on how to do that ... well it is not to me ... grrrrrrrrrr ...

eu-grant brings down fees to €1,600 for postgraduate Global computing and localisation programmes

2007-05-25T13:45:00.000+02:00

Just pasting this from a press-release I received - interesting for Translators.

Limerick, Ireland, 25 May 2007: The University of Limerick has just announced that the Irish Higher Education Authority (HEA) is making significant funding available to its recently launched new postgraduate programmes in Global Computing and Localisation. These grants will benefit students from all EU countries who will realize savings of approximately €3,650 against the standard fees.
The US$9 billion localisation industry has an increased demand for professional localisers with a solid technical and business oriented background. In close cooperation with industrial and academic experts, the University of Limerick who was the first to offer dedicated postgraduate localisation programmes in 1997 is now responding to this demand by offering two new postgraduate programmes in localisation, starting in September 2007.
The Graduate Diploma in Localisation Technology and the Master of Science in Global Computing and Localisation will be offered on a full-time and part-time (one-day-a-week) basis.
Reinhard Schäler, Director of the Localisation Research Centre (LRC) at the University and Course Coordinator for these programmes, said “We are extremely pleased to see that the Irish Higher Education Authority sees localisation as a strategic postgraduate skill and has decided to support it so generously. These grants will make a significant difference to students wishing to pursue our programmes.”
Ireland has been a world centre of localisation since the mid 1980s, with companies such as Microsoft, Oracle, Symantec and Google locating their European Headquarters here. International academic and business leaders have described the University of Limerick as “the Mecca of Localisation”, “teaching the best minds in the internationalisation and localisation business”. UL has been offering postgraduate courses in localisation for the past decade, is the home of the EU-funded Localisation Tools Laboratory and Showcase (LOTS) and is the publisher of the peer-reviewed and indexed Localisation Focus – The International Journal of Localisation. More information on these programmes is available on www.localisation.ie/education.

Real-time translation ... her name is Eleda or Iansa

2007-05-16T14:51:00.000+02:00

Hi, if you go into certain IRC channels these days you will find two new users: eleda and iansa ... well these are two really nice ladies (or better one that uses two different names) that, depending on the languages they know best or just a bit do a real nice real-time translation job in the chat.

Language combinations she knows best are Spanish-Catalan-Spanish and Spanish-Portuguese-Spanish. Her English-German-English .... well she needs still to learn a lot of grammar and vocabulary and the same for English-Dutch-English. There are also other language combinations, but sorry, I cannot list them all. Fact is: she can do already quite a nice job and will become better and better over time.

Now you are wondering who these nice lady is, right? Well eleda can be found in the apertium IRC if she is offline, just ask spectei where she's gone ... he will probaly know it. But who is she? Well she's the first translation bot for IRC that uses Apertium at its backend. It was programmed by Francis Tyers - thank you Francis, a first step into a direction that in future hopefully will help us a lot :-)

This means the better the Apertium terminology is the better the bot will do its work. We will have the possibility to add Apertium XML lines to OmegaWiki - as for now this is unfortunately still not possible.

Anyway: imagine that bot getting better and better ... and imagine having it at disposal during chat, e-mail (in Tunderbird for example) and ready in the background for websites (in Firefox for example).

Ah yes, there is that website translation tool aroud that produces all sorts of strange translations, well: when it comes to Eleda or better Apertium: we can change that. It is up to us to contribute with translations and grammar rules :-) so, if you want it: you just can do ...

Commands:
@help shows you the options
@follow + nick follows the person writing and shows you the translation in a private chat window
@unfollow + nick stops eleda from translating what that specific person writes

Of course: typing must be correct ;-)

Big ... bigger ... the biggest ... encyclopaedic articles ...

2007-05-03T22:06:00.000+02:00

I already wrote about this some time ago ... it is the never ending struggle and fight between two worlds:

- any length is fine, also just one sentence because this sentence gives basic information
- only long articles are good

Uhmmm ... well: I would like to invite you to come into a book store ... wow ... more than 29000 entries there. You find anything there ... general encyclopaedias in just one volume and many of the entries have a lengths of just one sentence (like: Maiori is a city in the South of Italy, on the Amalfi Coast, in the province of Salerno, region Campania). There are specialised encyclopaedias with very specific articles let's take an example, maybe about biology. There are the really big ones like the Britannica. Now each of them has a certain kind of target audience.

What is Wikipedia's audience? The general reader that could be happy enough with knowing that Maiori is a town in Italy, the highly specialised one that want to know all about a specific animal we maybe don't all know or those who want to read those huge articles? Who is our audience? All of them or just the "elite" of encyclopaedia readers that would say that one sentence about a town somewhere in the world is not enough? Uhmmm ... but what is Wikipedia's basic scope: "Provision of information in the field of general encyclopedic knowledge via the Internet." (I am quoting from the article about Wikipedia on the English wikipedia).

Reading that and considering what a wiki is: all discussions about what is better, best, worse, worst etc. don't need to be discussed. If we are NPOV all of these versions are equally valualbe and Wikipedia having its unique goal and being a wiki can combine all three of them in one. Isn't that incredible? So why limit what can be added? Even a small sentence can be of value ... and even a town or place that seems to be irrelevant to one can be relevant to somebody else. Who are we to say (just as an example): this city or river may not go into wikipedia as a stub since it is not relevant enough ... who tells us what is relevant or not? Wouldn't it be against the NPOV policy?

Oh yes, now I hear some shouting: but there are then 5000 articles about cities that are just stubs and the wikipedia seems to be bigger as it is ... well: go to the library, take one of those general encyclopaedias and look into it ... remember: for a kid one sentence telling where a city is often is enough - if there is more: even better, but that sentence can be a huge help when they study.

Imagine one thing, at the moment I am writing I don't have a clue on how many articles there are on nap.wikipedia ... I never really cared about numbers ... you don't believe it? Ask people who know me ... I simply don't look at that stuff. I contribute to wikis because I like to do it - it is irrellevant where and what and when. It is irrelevant how many edits I do ... I don't know how many there are around of mine. What counts is that we do what we do because we love to do it.

I repeat: each article, even of only one sentence can be of high value for somebody searching for information ... don't exclude the small ones, please and stop counting numbers ... it will help you a lot. We are not in competition - we are co-operating projects, that's all there is to it.

Apertium and OmegaWiki

2007-05-03T13:41:00.000+02:00

Apertium is a machine translation tool. OmegaWiki is a dictionary ... both can have advantages from each other. For now people who work on Apertium dictionaries don't work on OmegaWiki ... well in future this could change and people who work on OmegaWiki could become Apertium contributors :-)

How? Well this morning the lead of Apertium, Mikel Forcada, confirmed that it is fine for them to add a field to OmegaWiki that can contain data structured in Apertium format. Of course: we will need to follow their paradigms when we create that short structural piece, but that should not be all too difficult. There is aimaz, a contributor to Apertium, he is considering a "Paradigm Cruncing Program" - this evening I will try to understand more about it and how it possibly could connect to all the other things we have in mind.

Anyway: the connection between OmegaWiki and Apertium will make a difference for many less ressourced languages. I am just considering languages like Piemontese and Neapolitan and of course also Bavarian and others around the world: we will be able to translate texts automatically - Wikipedia is particularly well suited since these are texts without "feelings" that need to be transmitted. So that the few people who can really write in these languages can concentrate on proof reading.

Eventually you now wonder how good such a machine translation is: well that very much depends on the amount of data available for the specific language combination. When it comes to Catalan-Spanish I saw extraordinarily good results.

Machine translation will never really substitute translators, but it will be a big help for certain kinds of texts and for certain languages in particular.

Understanding the OmegaWiki MySQL database

2007-05-01T08:03:00.000+02:00

Well, I am not all through it, but I am finding what I need bit by bit. What I am wondering is: why is there no documentation, why I had to download the whole bunch to see what is where and find it out myself - that takes time and the way the database is gets people who would like to take a look and eventually contribute with queries probably quite annoyed ...

So let's see how I, a person that is a translator and not a programmer nor knows too much abut MySQL, found out where to look.

First step: I downloaded the MySQL database from the page on OmegaWiki. Then I needed a software to be able to open it. Zdenek from dict.info told me that XAMPP would be good for this and so I downloaded the portable version. I chose the Windows installer that guided me through the options. I activated Install Apache as service and Install MySQL as service.

Once it is installed you launch it. Then you open your browser and insert http://localhost and you get a starting page. Then I launched phpmyadmin (on the lefthand side) and created a database called OW.

The MySQL database I downloaded, that is the one with the OmegaWiki data was extacted and then copied into xampp/mysql/bin folder. Then you need to launch the window to execute dos commands in Windows (don't know how it is called in English). From there you go into the directory where the OmegaWiki data is and launche the command mysql -u root -p -f ow this copies the OmegaWiki database in your local OW database.

Then within phpmyadmin I choose the OW database and from there a series of trials started to find out what is where.

... to be finished ... as soon as there is some time ...

Talking Neapolitan with someone who is not Neapolitan

2007-04-16T10:27:00.000+02:00

The other day I had my first conversation after one and half a year working with Bèrto ëd Sèra who you might know from the Piedmontese Wikipedia - among others he also spoke Neapolitan with me and: he can do this really well having his accent and so one understands that it is a learnt language for him and not the mothertongue. Strange enough I had a problem myself. I speak Neapolitan most of the time with my husband, neighbours, people here in the city and it is normal for me to simply do so. The strange thing is: hearing him talking with that accent I had the same reaction people had at the beginning when I came here when talking with me. I had like a mental block - even if I wanted: no word in Neapolitan would come out of my mouth. I had to speak either Italian or English. I believe that is what many people here have as a reaction ... only when you are considered to be part of the place where you live they talk "their language" with you.

This also shows me another thing: our less resourced linguistic entities need help - a lot of help - they need to become languages like all others that people learn and where people (me included) will not have that mental block that does not allow you to speak that language ...

A Wikipedia that definitely needs help +++

2007-04-05T11:50:00.000+02:00

In these days some (very few really) people are arguing against the policies of the Language Committee that created some policies for the creation of new Wikipedias.

There is one Wikipedia that really needs help and in some way I don't like to take it as an example, but it shows so clearly why working first in the Incubator and on Betawiki makes so much sense.

I am talking about the Wikipedia in Tarantino dialect. Besides the fact that the language code used for the project cannot be correct from an ISO 639 point of view and therefore sooner or later should be considered by us as well. The Wikipedia was created at the end of Septermber 2006 and I was one of the first people signing up starting to create the Babel templates there. These templates are used to indicate if somebody knows a language and to which level (the level btw. is quite a subjective indication besides the mention native and professional - these two are the only objective ones).

Back to that Wikipedia. Since its creation, let's say we start to consider 1 October 2006 as starting point, the UI was only poorly localized. Partly it was localized from English to Italian and not to Tarantino. The quite a bunch of chances in that sense can be seen on 10 March 2007 - the following are just some of them:

# (diff) (hist) . . N MediaWiki:Mycontris‎; 14:15 . . (+17) . . Davide21 (Talk | contribs) (New page: I miei contributi)
# (diff) (hist) . . N MediaWiki:Cite article link‎; 14:14 . . (+16) . . Davide21 (Talk | contribs) (New page: Cita questa voce)
# (diff) (hist) . . N MediaWiki:Sitesupport‎; 14:12 . . (+9) . . Davide21 (Talk | contribs) (New page: Donazioni)
# (diff) (hist) . . N MediaWiki:Whatlinkshere‎; 14:12 . . (+11) . . Davide21 (Talk | contribs) (New page: Puntano qui)
# (diff) (hist) . . N MediaWiki:Upload‎; 14:11 . . (+14) . . Davide21 (Talk | contribs) (New page: Carica un file)

In any case I would like to thank Davide21 who is doing work on the roa-tara wikipedia, because be translating into Italian at least he makes sure more people can understand it in Italy. But in any case it does not help the Tarantino dialect - it is counterproductive since it seems as if it was Italian in that way.

The Wikipedia today has 40 articles, three admins and one bureaucrat. Some of these admins were elected during the last days. From the beginning not even 1000 edits were made and most of them were not to create contents. The stub template is at least in Tarantino. You are wondering why I can say that? Well: I can read it - besides some specific words for that region it is enough to know Neapolitan and Italian to understand what is written there. Many words correspond to Neapolitan written with Italian coding.

On the page about the admin elections it is mentioned that User:Beren85 is the only person really knowing Tarantino. That is problematic, since he cannot do everything on his own. The others already help to clean spam (and small wikipedias get loads of it ...) and that is relevant.

Now I had a look at the 40 pages and that is what came out of it:

Most pages do not have contents.

Pages with contents in Tarantino:

http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pozna%C5%84
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toru%C5%84
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/P%C3%A0ggina_Principale
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%80v%C3%AB_Marije
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kur%C3%B3w
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C5%81%C3%B3d%C5%BA

Most of the pages in Tarantino dialect, except the main page, have just one sentence and that one is amost the same anywhere:

Kurów éte 'na cettà pulacche.

Substitute the city name with another one and you get the contents of the other pages.

The longest bit of text is on the Ave Maria page, that is the prayer itself.

Pages with contents in Italian:

http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aiuto:Canale_IRC
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pagine_delle_prove/sandbox
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultime_modifiche

Pages with contents in English:

http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anemone
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_erectus_lantianensis
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_neanderthalensis
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuphar
http://roa-tara.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portale:Ch%C3%ACmeche (really half English, half Spanish titles)

The rest of the 40 contents pages have just a picture with the scientific Latin name under it.

This really means: they need help. Now considering the new policies this wikipedia would still be on the incubator and probably it would be the best place for it since even one person can work there step by step and has the time to attract other community members who can help him.

What I am wondering about is: where have al the Tarantino speaking people gone that supported the project? See: this would have been noted on Incubator - now the wikipedia is left on its own and they have to hassle with all sorts of problems.

Now to you who you are against the new policies: this wikipedia was created according to old ways of doing it - you support old ways ... so what I expect from you now is that you help this project - don't tell me: we are just volunteers: you volunteer in criticising the way of doing things, so you also need to stay to your word and show us that your way of doing things works better then ours. Also we, the language committee are all volunteers in several projects and also we have a private life, a family and work to do.

We know that working in the Language Committee, caring about language codes (co-operating with ISO-639-6 in another project), considering how to make sure a project can have success etc. will get us loads of critics - and we know we are only at the beginning.

Once we got the Wikipedia creation stuff right (and that took hours and days of work) we will need to care about the other projects like Wiktionary, Wikibooks, Wikisourc etc. and we will need loads of input from them - this means: we need to understand where the problems are and then try to find ways to avoid them.

Thanks for taking the time to read all this.

Localising Mediawiki Software

2007-04-05T11:11:00.000+02:00

Now this is an answer to a question that came up on the Mediawiki i18n list - how to localize Mediawiki. The best way to do it is to do it in one place. For now there is Betawiki that helps, one day we will hopefully have that feature integrated in Incubator. Nevertheless it takes quite a lot of time when you need to translate the messages one by one: open a page, write some word, save.

This needed time shortens a lot when you work with the help of a CAT-Tool like OmegaT.

For now working with OmegaT is possible, but it needs again Nikerabbits help to do so - he needs to extract the messages and then only one person can work on it at a time and then these messages can be uploaded again with the help of Nikerabbit. It is not the right way at this time, since he already has to deal with many things on Betawiki, so no, I don't want him to work more than necessary.

There is a feature on the way called WikiRead-WikiWrite (for OmegaT) - this feature should have been already there but due to health problems of the programmer it was not. Now we asked another programmer if he has time to do it, since otherwise we would loose funding and also the tool. It is a situation we would never have wanted to happen, but that's life - there is always that unpredictable part in it.

WikiRead-WikiWrite for OmegaT is supposed to enable the CAT-Tool to access a wiki page and get it into OmegaT so by translating you create a translation memory. This translation memory is relevant for translating similar texts and terminology research. We need consistency of terminology within Mediawiki at some stage - so: yes, it makes sense to use it.

Once we have the possibility OmegaT can read all the to be translated pages at once, one translates offline and stores to target. Translating offline without the need to have to open one by one the pages and then store them one by one requires only a third of the actual time needed if you do it online. Mind me: if you need to translate only one or two messages it makes sense to do it directly on Betawiki, if you have to deal with a whole series of messages then OmegaT will help to do a better job.

In a second stage we do imagine a wikidata application where the translation memories are stored. It is not so different from what we have now on OmegaWiki. What must be different is:

no limitation in lenghts of the entry on syntrans level
the definition field becomes a notes field and may be empty
license information must be properly stored according to the collection
possibility to store and retrieve translation memories

This means that any open source software can have its repository there and it also means that many strings you find in multiple open source applications can be re-used quite easily requiring less work in localization.

Of course having OmegaT with the direct connection to download the translation memory from there would be even better - but that needs additional programming from withing OmegaT - I don't have a clue on how much work this is ... well who knows how to code will be able to tell us I suppose.

I know we are quite a step away from that scenario even if WikiRead-WikiWrite hopefully will be there soon ...

Well if you want to make me a special birthday present and a huge improvement in localization efforts: consider to work on that bit.

Probably I will need to re-edit this post since I am not sure if I really considered everything (I suppose not ... its a period that often requires me to interrupt what I am doing).

The language (prevention) committee???

2007-03-27T23:12:00.000+02:00

I haven't been here for some days and had to follow up quite a bunch of e-mails and what do I find? People complain about the requirement to have a localized UI for a new language project, mainly talking about Wikipedia in a new language. We are also accused to use the policy request for our own neat reasons ... uhm ... which own neat reasons should we have if not making sure a new Wikipedia can have an easy life???.

Today most new wikipedias are really small projects with a quite restricted number of potential editors.

Now let us go back to the day the Neapolitan Wikipedia was requested ... I already had thought about a Wikipedia in Neapolitan, but had planned it for autumn 2006 to start, but everything went different: in Summer 2005 people in the discussion group napulitano@yahoogroups.com started to say things like "it would be great to have a Neapolitan wikipedia" and at a certain stage I simply decided to open the new language request and see if there was enough support for it. Within just very few days we reached the amount of votes needed and the Wikipedia was created fairly fast. The new project was there with a Neapolitan UI and me as temporary admin. From the 10 native speakers that supported the new project not all got active. In the end we were three stable editors.

Soon we found out that the Mediawiki software did not like a particularity of Neapolitan. In Neapolitan you have words that require a double quote, like d''o and the double quote from the Mediawiki software is understood like "write in italics". So we asked to solve this issue, but up to date we still have to use a workaround inserting # & 3 9 ; # & 3 9 ; (writing with spaces to make sure the blog does not convert to html). New users are sometimes driven away. The hurdle to be able to contribute on nap.wikipedia is high: people speak Neapolitan every day, but they never wrote it in their life. And when they then timidly start to contribute writing of course with errors since the only spelling they know is Italian and so they use Italian rules on Neapolitan pronunciation to write it down they find out that there are even issues in writing simple double quotes. Then again: some super Neapolitans who seem to know everything come to a collaborative project and complain about mistakes ... well whenever they are asked to contribute with their knowledge and to share it to make sure written Neapolitan has a chance to survive they vanish in the dark ... so what? Well, probably their Neapolitan is then not good enough and they are worrying about ... what??? ... and they probably feel big since they wrote an anonymous note ... well: probably you understand what I think about people who are not man/woman enough to say who they are and do facts instead of only complaining.

So: one request the language committee has is the creation of a certain amount of contents by a certain number of people in order to make sure issues related to languages can be dealt with before they arise on the new wikipedia. When they arise before the creation of the new wikipedia people will know how to ask and how to deal with things easier since they are on Incubator where they find a cross community and where there are plenty of people who can help and address them to the right contacts. Besides that: this requirements also helps to make sure that people really want to work on their language and it is not just a wish of that moment and that after two weeks they stop.

Another request is the localization of the User Interface. Well the User Interface of a Wikipedia can be edited only by an admin. The funny situation I had on the Neapolitan Wikipedia at the beginning was that I was the only temporary admin. A person with quite a lot of technical wiki skills, but lacking in Neapolitan language not being it my mother tongue. So the first bit of the localization was done like this:

* I translated a sentence
* sent the link to the Neapolitan discussion group
* got the corrections back via e-mail
* re-edited the sentence
* sent the link again to the discussion group for proof reading
* eventually had to edit again etc.

Now that was very time consuming and so only a small part was done since as soon as people became aware of nap.wikipedia they also started to vandalize the project ... well only the admin can delete spam, only the admin can do certain stuff. So everything slowed down on the localization end quite a bit.

Then other two admins and a bit later another one was elected and I got bureaucratship so I could nominate them admins. But still we are only four people who can deal with the UI localization - one of us only comes along when we call him - he really has not a minute of time and it is always difficult to get hold of him, a second one did not stay well and even now cannot edit every day. The only one being able to do a bit more is Eric and I would like to tell him: thank you, you are great!!!

Even if other people would like to help with the localization: they cannot help ... they would have to become an admin first.

On Betawiki the story is different: anybody gets edit rights for the various UI languages - thank you Nikerabbit for all the programming work you do - and there was one very special person who cared about the community around betawiki: Gangleri ... who knows where he is - we cannot reach him. Please, should you read this post: all of us would very much like to know that you are fine. Gangleri did such a great work ... well: Mediawiki should thank him ... he really worked all day for weeks or better months. Now Betawiki could be implemented on Incubator and people would have less problems with the localization, but it does not have priority. So for now we kindly ask people to do that job on Betawiki.

By working on Betawiki they do not only help their own Wikipedia, but also all Wikis that are potentially created in that language. That means: they do much more for their languauge than just doing it on the wikipedia bit by bit.

What I would like to say with this: please do understand that behind each request we made in the new language creation policy there are hours of work and considerations, many discussions on why a request makes sense and another one did not make sense (and therefore is not included n the policy).

We are here to help wikipedias to survive, to be able to build a reasonable and sustainable community around it, to encounter less problems possible when they have to live on their own. Many people underestimate the work it takes to build up a new wikipedia. Most new projects are less sourced language entities with not too many potential contributors. If we want to help them we need to consider our own experiences and we need to make sure they will not encounter the same problems that we had.

Wikipedias in less sourced languages with only a small number of potential editors: we want you among us and we want you to succeed and become brilliant projects.

There would be so much more to say ... but I hope that you, who are reading this, understand what we are about and will help us in our job.

Thank you!

Pisa ... again, but different this time

2007-03-26T08:58:00.000+02:00

Being on the way back home on the motorway I decided to get finally used to my PDA and start to write my blog. Up to date I always was in Pisa for conferences or meetings, but not this time. Yesterday meant "back into the class room" and teach to me, at the SSML. It was a strange feeling having the register with the names of the students in hand and having to check who was present and who not. It was the first time after 12 years and I noted that I missed that for quite some time. Showing students new things, explaining etc., yes it is definitely fun. Of course it was quite different to years ago, I did not give German language lessons, but explained how to use OmegaT, how to use Wikipedia and its sister projects to search for terminology. We looked at OmegaWiki and how to add a definition or translation. We also took the time to talk about things like networking on portals like LinkedIn. Last but not least we also had a look at IRC as a communication means sice in future chat will be more and more used by translators. In the end I asked, like I always do, what I could do better. It seems all were happy with what they learnt new. Resuming I would say : it was a great experience for all of us.

Banche ... ma sono fuori? (Monte Paschi di Siena)

2007-03-23T11:22:00.000+01:00

Allora: qualche tempo fa faccio un bonifico per inviare del denaro ad un c/c italiano. Ho tutti i dati e mio marito va in banca per eseguirlo. Quando torna vedo le spese per un bonifico: EUR 5,50 ... conoscevo questo importo per bonifci all'estero e quindi ho pensato che si sono sbagliati ... chiamo: e la risposta era: no, è l'importo da pagare per bonifici eseguiti in filiale per i c/c in Italia. Già allora ho scritto un'e-mail con lamentele al servizio dei clienti alla centrale della MPS. Ma che ... non si sentono mica di dover rispondere ... comunque: chiedere quel importo secondo me è frode e la Commissioner Neelie Smit-Kores presso la Commissione Europea come anche le varie associazioni per la difesa dei consumatori dovrebbero essere molto interessati (riceveranno la copia della e-mail spedita alla banca + qualche nota aggiuntiva). Non ho avuto il tempo per farlo in questo periodo ... giuro che lo farò. E: mi chiedo se i clienti della MPS in Italia semplicemente accettano questo prezzo perché non lo sanno diversamente o che davvero nessuno ci fa caso. E che ne è dei vari esercizi che hanno i loro c/c lì e che hanno più che un solo bonifico da fare? Il sistema online della MPS non lo ritengo sicuro in quanto è protetto da solo due password - esistono banche che hanno un livello di sicurezza superiore. (Password + TAN che cambia per ogni singola operazione eseguita).

Ma torniamo ai servizi. Nel 2004 non sapendo alcune cose ho pagato delle tasse in ritardo (eh vabbo' le cose in Italia sono diverse che in Germania) e quindi sapevo che doveva venire una richiesta di pagamento da parte delle Agenzie delle Entrate e quello puntualmente è arrivato quando neanche ero qui a Maiori. Allora: ho compilato il foglio e mio marito è andato in banca per pagare - gli viene detto che il modulo che abbiamo ricevuto dall'Agenzia delle entrate non era valido e che doveva compilare il modulo - quel prestampato celeste - manualmente. Ok, l'abbiamo fatto immediatamente e per assicurarci che il modulo inviato da parte dell'Agenzie delle Entrate sia davvero non valido abbiamo chiesto alla banca di attestarlo per iscritto, visto che se non ho quello sono logicamente io la responsabile per l'eventuale pagamento in modo errato: l'impiegato si è rifiutato e naturalmente anche il direttore ... ed è meglio che non mi dilungo sui modi ...

Conclusione: è ora di cambiare banca - appena il tempo me lo permette.

Una nota alla Monte dei Paschi di Siena: ma credete davvero che con quel tipo di servizio riuscirete a sproavvivere a lungo? E che ne fate dei soldi di tutti quei bonifici eseguiti che vi fanno entrare 5.50 EUR alla volta? Cioè se guardo il servizio: certamente non servono per migliorarlo - e allora che ne fate con i nostri soldi? Ricordatevi: siamo clienti e non siamo noi a dover essere grati che voi siete così gentili a prenderci il nostro denaro per "servizi".

Su livello europeo avete ancora tanto da imparare ... e com'era quella pubblicità tempo fa: "... perché non siete solo un numero ..." o qualcosa del genere ...

Esistono banche dove il c/c, i bonifici e altri servizi non costano nulla ... e non dico qui che pretendo di pagare nulla, ma il giusto per il giusto servizio - comparato con quello che fate voi mi chiedo: siete in grado di amministrare denaro o avete dei buchi neri, come nello spazio, che ingoiano tutto?????

Ritenete questo post come "gentile" - non ho espresso i miei veri sentimenti qui ...

Amalfi Coast - finding the treasure

2007-03-19T14:58:00.000+01:00

I hardly ever post personal notes here, well today I will. This is in answer to an article I read on Positanonews in English: City Slickers and Country Cousins.

What is it that makes people fall in love with this very particular part of the world? Well ... I still remember the day I first came here in the Summer of 1986. We arrived in the afternoon after a long trip first in train to Naples and then from there by car. The first glance at the coast leaving the motor way in Vietri sul Mare was simply incredible ... the sun reflected like many shimmering stars on the sea. The blue of that sea and the green of the mountains ... an incredible feeling came up ... from one second to the other, not having even seen more than that one glance, I was sure that this was the place to live, the place to stay until the end of days. This was the moment when I felt like coming finally home after an endless trip from wherever in the world. Still today, whenever I have to leave this unique place to live, even if it is only for some short days, I feel as if a part of me is ripped away and remains here. And when I come back home and I see that first glance (yes, I always prefer to drive some more kms and enter the coast in Vietri) what was ripped off when I left comes back and that very particular feeling is renewed. Mind me: for some strange reason I never took a photo of that view.

I suppose it happens with most people just that way: it is not something particular that makes us love this very unique part of the world - it is that one thousandth of a second that changes everything. Afterwards we say that we like it here because of this and that, but the moment we decide to stay is the very first one. Some people who come here on holiday probably have a similar experience, but less strong and less convincing - and yes, I am happy about that, there would not be enough space on the coast to have all who see the Devine Coast live here - of course: we hope all of them to come back and to take a part of the coast back home in their heart.

Of course there are also people who don't feel all this and just see the coast like a nice place to pass a holiday - well: these are the ones who are not made for it - they will find their place somewhere else and I very much hope for them that when they find it they decide to really take the step ... it is worth each second.

Back to the article on Positanonews: well yes ... many of these people might feel similar things I felt and still feel each time I see the sea, the sun on the water, the mountains.

Now you who read this are curious? Well: one day, if you decide to come here you will see ... and then, please let us know your thoughts about this very particular place.

When Open Source, Machine Translation and Computer Assisted Translation meet

2007-03-12T11:15:00.000+01:00

Nice title, right? Well what scenario is possible there? Where are the potentials? What are the problems?

Ok, so let's start: actually there is more translation need in Open Source and Open Content than what can be handled by humans right now. All we need is probably already available and just needs some adjustment and additional feature.

Imagine a software like Mozilla Firefox that needs UI translation and manual translation. Well: the UI should be done by using a CAT, but considering some basic facts like: translators are not programmers, each language is very different - this must be considered somewhere - and yes, I know they are working on it. Then take the manual and the help files: the need translation and over time updates. A workflow I could imagine is:

1) Machine translation of the manual/help files using Apertium
2) Alignment of source and target text and load it in OmegaT for proof reading and translation of the parts that are completely "out of order".
3) Creation of the final documents + feedback to Apertium

A second time the translation process starts it would then go like this:
1) Pretranslation of the manual/help files using OmegaT (sentences that remain the same receive 100% matches).
2) Machine translation of the new parts using Apertium
3) Proof reading within OmegaT
4) Creation of final documents + feedback to Apertium

To do that Apertium needs to be programmed for the language pairs needed - the approach of Apertium is to create a one language to the other machine translation. Therefore, like you can see when you try out the Spanish-Catalan version, which is already very mature, you will get factual translation where only a 4-5% needs some manual changes.

I showed this also to a translator who deals professionally with these languages and one wikipedian (time ago). Both of them confirmed that the factual translation is correct. So it is suited for manuals and encyclopaedic entries. Of course, if you put an article done with machine translation online, you need to mark it as such until it is proof-read.

Of course it could be that some specific terminology for software is now missing in its engine ... well that needs to be added. For now Apertium has own dictionaries that care about this, but we would very much like to see the contents creation within OmegaWiki - the reason is simple: on one hand people who need Apertium function better and better will create their dictionaries there and on the other hand the work they do can be also used for other scopes, such as spell checkers, offline bilingual dictionaries, the dictionaries for the OLPC laptop, other software localization projects etc. So: the work is done only once and then re-used. If we get various projects to work together all of them will have better results by having less work to do. This means their time is used more effektively and they can do more good in the same time.

When it comes to OmegaWiki there is one feature that we are still missing, but that is already planned: inflections. These inflections are needed for Apertium, they are needed for spellcheckers and for various other applications. So again: co-operation among various projects becomes a means to make sure they will go ahead and survive in future.

One last note: please don't consider only our everyday languages where in some way you normally find people to co-operate with (and where we really also should try to consider their time investment with the value it actually has and where exactly this consideration and respect often is missing) - consider all those rare, less sourced, non governmental languages or better language entities (just to introduce this term) that will be helped a lot by such ways of working.

Monopolising the CAT-Market

2007-01-29T16:55:00.000+01:00

When I read such stuff I understand that we do the OmegaT marketing the wrong way: http://www.econtentmag.com/Articles/ArticleReader.aspx?ArticleID=19044

We must go out to companies and explain them about translations, how to do them, what a CAT-Tool is and why it does not make sense to be dependent on a "closed technology".

Latin is dying out

2007-01-29T15:47:00.001+01:00

And another interesting link to read about Latin dying out ... if I only had time ;-) : http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/6308281.stm

PDF becomes a new ISO standard

2007-01-29T14:37:00.000+01:00

Well, just to let you know about this . .. don't really have time to write. If you are interested in PDF just click here and read more.

Erin McKean about Dictionaries

2007-01-28T18:58:00.000+01:00

Well ... I now understand a bit more about the New Oxford American Dictionary ... and if you are interested in Dictionaries you should have a look at the presentation by Erin McKean. Have fun :-)

Contents creation for wikipedias

2007-01-21T23:53:00.000+01:00

The following text was originally created for an e-mail to the afrowikinews group. I believe it is interesting to more people so I post it also here.

*****

Well if contents creation for Wikipedias is a theme: let's take up that
theme considering how it could be done.

Of course it depends very much about which wikipedia we are talking and
if we are talking about "how to build a wikipedia" only with the help of
the community or about "how to use funding". Or maybe a combined way.

Now let's talk about the case in which funding is available.

When it comes to funding, in a first place you have to consider if the
sponsor would like to see certain information there - that could be
anything: from descriptions of cities and mountains to biology to
whatever. The most requested pages are normally background information
to the news - this means: people search for articles that are related to
the news they read about in the newspaper, learn about in the news etc.

The best way would be: have people edit in the relative language. Often
you don't find enough people who are able to edit so one part of the
money should then be used to teach people how to create contents. This
will take some preparation time and eventually a workshop needs to be
created. Probably there people will need to move, so this must be done
well in advance to allow people for proper programming. Really this is
the ideal case.

When you don't get enough people who can edit the second choice is
translation. This means that in such a case co-operation is needed: you
find people, possibly professional translators or students in their last
year of translation studies (these could even use the project as a stage
and this implies that you have enough connections to relevant
universities - well: we are already building on these various networks)
and you have them translate chosen texts. Also here the ideal would be:
teach these translators some basics first - this is difficult to achieve
with professionals, but quite easy to achieve with students in their
last year - you can try to get the whole course involved by simply
agreeing to a "wikipedia translation workshop" within their study
programme.

Why translators and students will do a good job: they use their
translations as reference - remember: they are GFDL - this means when
they apply for a job they can give the link to their translations - this
will help them with their start up and assure that they are going to do
the best possible for the project.

How to choose who does what - that is valid for writing and translation
- and also here you have several possibilities depending on the project
and the wikipedia.

1) People can choose what to edit on based on a criteria they get - that
is you trust them to do good.
2) People are assigned to specific themes and articles.
3) You choose the articles to be translated and assign them.
4) The articles are choosen by the organisation that is providing the
funding
5) A mixture of these ways.

The first case is the most open one that has the highest risk potential,
but that can also get you the best results.
As for the case when you decide who does what, if possible, it makes
sense to talk to the various people so that you get a feeling for them -
this helps to choose the right people for the right themes.

One thing that is being done with Cherokee is machine translation and
for some wikipedias even that could make sense in order to have material
to work on. There are other examples where machine translation works
very well and people can concentrate on improving the 5% error quote.
Apertium is a software that deals with one language to one language
translation among similar languages - I did once a trial text about a
city and had it translated from Spanish to Catalan - the people who had
a look at that translation said that it was fairly good and that
correcting it was much faster than having to translate from scratch. So
also that could be an option. Of course there are proprietary software
solutions that do things really very good, but that are for now not
easily accessible.

But this last option is really only to be considered when there are not
enough mothertongue speakers available to reach a tipping point where
also other people start to contribute. Normally it is preferrable to
work with people who sooner or later will always go back to their work
to see what happened with it ... and see: even if a translator does not
know how to edit a wiki ... once he sees his/her articles there and
finds an error, a strange sentence, a typo or whatever: they will
correct it ... the reason is simple: they have a relation with this
text, they feel it theirs.

As you can see: there are many possibilities and there are even more -
it is impossible to describe them all - how a project in the end will
work out and is done always depends from a number of circumstances.

When it comes to Neapolitan: we would be happy if we could get the
funding to create the bilingual wordlist needed for Apertium so that the
handful of us who can edit articles could concentrate only on that bit.
Building the list bit by bit simply takes a lot of time and it would be
very important that one person could concentrate for some time to do
only this. Well, maybe one day  :-) 

While I was writing this e-mail a mail by Delirium reached the
foundation list where he states the following:

-----
....omissis ....

This is also a problem for sources, because on some topics, even
very important ones, there is often only information available in one
language---for example many China-related topics have information only
available in Chinese.  On en: this is not so much of a problem, because
we have many Chinese-speaking editors.  But el: has few to no
Chinese-speaking editors, so cannot use such sources, except indirectly
by translating the en: article.

Of course one does the best with what one has, so the smaller Wikipedias
simply need more people to begin with, and then will probably have to
rely more heavily on translating articles from the larger Wikipedias.
-----

And really: the only thing I can do at this stage is thank Delirium - he
could not have expressed the problems of some wikipedias better.

Thanks for taking the time - your ideas and thoughts are like always
welcome and will help to improve our work for sure.

Open Content :-)

2006-11-23T20:40:00.000+01:00

Well, some days ago Gerard told me that somebody on IRC said to him that WiktionaryZ, since it is not a Wikimedia Foundation project, is not Open Content ... well that is completely wrong.

Fact is that we would like very much to see WiktionaryZ in the Wikimedia foundation. Fact is that we were told by the foundation that they do not have the technical means to fulfill the requirements for Wiktionaryz (among others 24*7 uptime and adeguate backup procedures). Hosting WiktionaryZ will cost quite a lot in terms of financing ... well: therefore we need partners. But we do not only have financial partners - we also have many partners thanks to their contributions in terms of contents.

Our license is the same as the one the Wikimedia Foundation uses: GFDL and in addition, to allow for easier sharing of data in the form of dumps - may they be bilingual dictionaries or multilingual dictionaries of specific themes or the whole contents - the CC-BY license.

So: there are two very clear points - or better three. Yes, we would like to be within the Wikimedia foundation if that was technically possible. Unfortunately there is the lack of the technical possibilities to be hosted on the Wikimedia Foundation's servers and therefore: yes, we want to co-operate closely. We are indeed Open Content since we use adeguate licensing. Whoever says the contrary simply is wrong.

Thank you!