Grants:PEG/Kruusamägi/Minority Translate, phase II

This Wikimedia Foundation grant has a fiscal sponsor. MTÜ Keeleleek administered the grant on behalf of Kruusamägi.

This grantee has requested a change to the project start or completion date submitted here, and this change has been approved by WMF and is now reflected on this submission page. Please see the discussion page for details, including reporting requirements that may have changed as a result of this change.

statusFunded

Project & Event Grants

Minority Translate

Developing a tool, that speeds up the article creation process in smaller Wikipedias and helps to provide a better coverage of various topics in bigger wikis.

targetall language versions

strategic priorityImproving Quality + Increasing Participation

start dateFebruary 1

start year2015

end date~~August 1~~ September 1

end year2015

budget (local currency)2850 €

budget (USD)3366

grant typeindividual

non-profit statusNo

creator• Kruusamägi

contact(s)• ivo.kruusamagi

gmail.com

give feedback

endorse

friendly space expectations

view all PEG requests

Goal

The current version of the tool can be seen here (wiki page for Minority Translate tool).

The first goal is to make the tool more powerful by expanding and improving on its feature set. The second goal is to expand the userbase of some smaller wikis, while promoting the tool.

Plan

Activities

The existing program already allows to speed up the article creation process and it has been used to start about 300 articles. The goal is to expand the program with new features that will significantly improve the efficiency of translating Wikipedia articles. Planned features are listed below. New versions are scheduled to be released once a month, starting in February. The complete set of features should be implemented by August 1, 2015.

To be done:

implement a new flexible engine with better feedback;
text memorization to give user the ability to save and conveniently recall or paste commonly used text;
powerful and flexible auto-complete functionality, which will greatly reduce time spent on mundane tasks such as writing wikitext syntax;
dynamic copy-paste, which will be able to carry over the source article wikitext with predefined changes, thus reducing the time on creating new similar articles;
dictionary support (both web-based and file-based);
spellchecker + data collection to improve spell-check functionality (small languages don't have very good spellers);
a wikilink checker that will eliminate the need to manually open and check linked wiki pages;
general MediaWiki support, such as wikis in the Wikimedia Incubator;
customizable special symbol table to allow quick addition of special symbols and characters such as symbols and smaller language specific characters that might be missing from the keyboard;
better statistics module;
more elaborate and comprehensive user manual;
prettier and more convenient UI design;
additional minor features, based on user feedback;

We will also look into building a mobile version and creating a wiki based translation recommendation list.

Some promotional activities are planned to get people to use the program. Main focus will be on speakers of Võro language. It is easier to collect user feedback due to the geographical proximity. Planned activities include promotion of the Võro Wikipedia and workshops to teach people how to use the tool and editing in general.

Currently we are discussing the possibility of cooperation with Obinitsa, the Finno-Ugric Capital of Culture in 2015. This also brings up the topic of Finno-Ugric languages. Many among those smaller languages are threatened and may not make it to the 22nd century. Wikipedia will be the sole encyclopedia for most of them. It is cruacial to provide all help possible to preserve them and we hope that Minority Translate will do just that. The Finno-Ugric wikipedians are the first big target group. We have already introduced this program to some of them and will use the upcoming Finno-Ugric wikiconference 2015 to promote the tool even more.

More active promotion of this tool is planned when most of the functions described above have been implemented and the program is out from the beta phase. We will also look for beta testers from different Wikipedia versions during the time of development.

Our main partner is NGO Keeleleek, which is a free software propagating unit in the Estonian language technology landscape. We'll also reach out to some other institutions with the hope of cooperation on the development of the program and collecting valuable source material for the development of language technology.

Current team compromises of 6 people and includes long-time wikipedians from Estonian and Võro Wikipedias, linguists and a programmer. Some other people have also helped us along the way (for instance with interface translation) and this will play even bigger role in the coming year. We'll also try to cooperate with some universities and language institutions in developing and promoting the program.

Impact

Target readership

This is a general purpose tool, that could be used by any wikipedian or nonwikipedian in any language. The program can be used to load and edit articles from any Wikipedia language and has built-in localisation support with a couple of initial interface languages.

The tool can help small wikis to rapidly increase their article count and bigger wikis can use it to improve their coverage of other language specific topics.

Fit with strategy

What crucial thing will the project try to change or benefit in the Wikimedia movement? Please select the Wikimedia strategic priority(ies) that your project most directly aims to impact and explain how your project fits. Most projects fit all strategic priorites. However, we would like project managers to focus their efforts on impacting 1–2 strategic priorities. Examples of strategic priorities can be found here.

Increasing quality and participation.

More articles could be created with lot lesser time + more even coverage can be achieved via working with larger sets of articles + possibilities for linguistic analyses should attract linguists and people speaking small languages.

This project should help to demonstrate the role of Wikimedia movement on saving the information behind disappearing and threatened cultures. When that information is lost, then it is lost. And we should not let that happen. We should help them to save their culture. To write it down, to record it and to share it.

Measures of success

Please provide a list of both quantitative and qualitative criteria that will be used to determine how successful the project is. You will need to report on the success of the project according to these measures after the project is completed. See the PEG program resources for suggested measures of success.

The project is deemed successful when the promised functionality is implemented.

Promotional part is done well, when by the end of August more than 100 users have tested the program (i.e. they have saved at least one article with the tool) with 10 or more languages and 50+ persons have kept on using the program (i.e. started 2 or more articles with it).

Note: In addition to your project-specific measures of success, you will also be asked to report on some global metrics at the end of your final report. Please keep this in mind as you plan, and we'll support you as you begin your project.

Resources and risks

Resources

Team members: Ivo, Andrjus, Sven-Erik, Peeter, Sulev and Kristian.
Evidence of past success in executing similar projects.

Risks

The main risk is that wikipedians would not start using this tool (i.e risk that translation tools will never be popular). It is also one of the reasons why this is not just meant for existing wikipedians but also for people with linguistic background (that is: if wikipedians will not use it, we'll try to "make" new wikipedians via outreach and cooperation). Not to mention that smaller wikis need to do some outreach anyway.

Budget

Please provide a detailed breakdown of project expenses according to the instructions here. See Budget Guidelines.

Grantees are subject to line-item scrutiny of expenses. Changes to the approved budget beyond 10% in any category must be approved in advance.

Project budget table

Program development	1500 €
Promotion costs	1000 €
Other (webserver, etc)	350 €

Total cost of project: 2850 €

Total amount requested from the Project and Event Grants program: 2850 €

Additional sources of revenue that may fund part of this project, and amounts funded: --

Non-financial requirements

See a description of non-financial assistance available. Please inform the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) of any requests for non-financial assistance now.

Requests for non-financial assistance, if any: Contact from someone from whom we might ask wiki-software related questions if something comes up.

Discussion

Community notification

You are responsible for notifying relevant communities of your proposal, so that they can help you! Depending on your project, notification may be most appropriate on a village pump, talkpage, mailing list. Please paste a link below to where the relevant communities have been notified of this proposal, and to any other relevant community discussions. Need notification tips?

The project has been propagated mostly outside Wikipedia (for instance in the first ever Fenno-Ugric cooperation seminar). This is because notification in wiki just doesn't work.

Our closest small Wikipedia version is Võro. Half out of its active editors are in our team.

Endorsements

Do you think this project should be selected for a Project and Event Grant? Please add your name and rationale for endorsing this project in the list below. Other feedback, questions or concerns from community members are also highly valued, but please post them on the talk page of this proposal.

I tested two versions of this tool and I can see that it will be a great addition. It will be like a Wikipedia CAT tool (CAT tool that is customized for Wikipedia). This will not only be helpful in creating articles, but it will also help growing contributors skills. For example, in Wikipedia Education Program in Egypt, we have many groups working on translating content from many languages into Arabic. If this tool is developed, students will not only benefit from practicing translation, they will also practice using CAT Tools which will definitely help them in their future careers as translators.--Reem Al-Kashif (talk) 15:06, 11 February 2015 (UTC)

This is a great tool for developing Wikipedia in lesser used languages, that means potentially hundreds of languages. I have used it on the Northern Sami Wikipedia and the Livonian Wikipedia Incubator and have found that it facilitates my work considerably. Using this tool to create and edit articles on vital encyclopedic content saves the user lots of human hours of work by automating the more tedious parts that are better left to machines. Thus it will help lots of lesser used language activists (like me) who are not proficient in writing and maintaining bots but have a working grasp of some language with very few speakers that need the urgent support of as many activists and technological gadgets as possible to ensure their transition into the digital sphere and further survival (having Wikipedia in the vernacular is a huge boost to the status of any lesser used language). I very much expect the planned features that would allow me to save even more time in developing the Livonian Wikipedia (hopefully it will get out of Incubator sometime). As far as I am aware, the tool is in active use in developing the Võro Wikipedia (fiu-vro.wikipedia.org) and has been used for Wikipedias in numerous other smaller Finno-Ugric languages. -- Ohpuu (talk) 03:24, 13 February 2015 (UTC)

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