WikiConference India 2011/Submissions/WikiBhasha: Our Experiences with Multilingual Content Creation Tool for Wikipedia

Timestamp
15:19, 30 August 2011 (UTC)
Title of the submission

WikiBhasha: Our Experiences with Multilingual Content Creation Tool for Wikipedia

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, or presentation)

Presentation

Author of the submission

A Kumaran, Naren Datha, Ashwani Sharma and Vikram Dendi

E-mail address or username (if username, please confirm email address in Special:Preferences)

a.kumaran@microsoft.com

State of your origin (Country, if you are not based in India)

Karnataka

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.)

Microsoft Research India & Wikimedia India Chapter

Personal homepage or blog

http://research.microsoft.com/people/kumarana/

Abstract (maximum 500 words)

WikiBhasha is a framework to enable easy creation of multilingual content in any wiki site, leveraging content from another language. WikiBhasha is designed as a modular and extensible framework, integrated with a variety of linguistic, collaborative and workflow components, to make the manifested application and the user interface native to any given end user scenario.

We customized this framework for Wikipedia, as WikiBhasha Beta, for creating content in non-English Wikipedias, leveraging the large and trusted English Wikipedia content. In essence, it manifests as an edit layer that may be invoked on any Wikipedia article in one of the supported languages, enabling a contributor to Wikipedia to search/source content from other Wikipedia articles, translate/correct the sourced content, and organize the sourced content and new information to enhance the multilingual Wikipedias. The content contributors could either compose new articles or to enhance existing articles in target Wikipedias, and have the flexibility on the quantum of content to work on. WikiBhasha stays on Wikipedia for the entire duration of the user-session, and any/all changes made by the user are posted into Wikipedia. Finally, collaborative tools to sharing the translation knowledge with the community, and leverage the existing knowledge are integrated.

WikiBhasha is released as an open-source MediaWiki extension, partly under Apache 2 and partly under GPL 2 licenses. The user and developer documentations are available as a part of the extension release. WikiBhasha is also available as a bookmarklet in the WikiBhasha release site, along with the user guide and a tutorial. WikiBhasha currently supports about 40 languages.

After the public release of WikiBhasha in October 2010, over last few months, we have been conducting usability experiments with content creators focusing on its usability, and liaising with different Wikipedia communities around the world, focusing on its adoption as a content creation mechanism for multilingual Wikipedias. In this presentation, we will discuss our experiences working with various communities during the beta program, in terms of responses in individual workshops, data created, feedback received and development activities undertaken.

We would also be very interested in having an open dialog with different Wikipedia communities, to explore (i) usability and suitability of WikiBhasha for content creation for specific Wikipedias, (ii) specific tools and resources that need to be devised and integrated for individual communities, and (iii) research collaborations with specific groups and communities in exploring content creation in Multilingual Wikipedias. We are planning to release all data collected through WikiBhasha as a public research resource.

Track (Community/Knowledge/Outreach/Technology)

Technology

Will you attend Wikiconference if your submission is not accepted?

Yes

Slides or further information (optional)

We will make a position paper available soon.