You start to write about your application –

OK, you will need a front page and a couple of sub-pages – that doesn’t sound so bad, does it?  Many people have done just this on UserBase.  Some write directly onto new pages, some are happier to draft their work first, so use sub-pages of their User-space pages, and that works fine.  With our without the help of the UserBase Admins, the content can then be pasted into the correct tree structure and the draft removed – and everyone’s happy.  But what if you want to write a whole manual?

As the Amarok team have discovered, it’s a whole new ball-game.  You start with a Contents page, listing all the pages you think you’ll need, and you start to build.  Before you finish I’ll guarantee that you’ve thought of something that would have been better on a page of its own.  As it happens, that’s not a big problem – you can edit the contents page and create a new page that way.  But wait – what seemed good organisation to start with is less convincing now, and maybe it would be better to move things around, re-organise a little.  Hmm – not so bad!  There’s a little icon for Move – ah yes, it moves the page to the structure you want and even leaves a re-direct behind, in case someone uses the old link.

Sounds pretty good, doesn’t it?  Unfortunately this is where it starts to come unstuck.  Once you’ve finished, the Translators move in – and where should their links point?  If they translate from the original they probably will use the original link, which is now a re-direct.  That’s not good.  We have to clean up re-directs, in that case, and that’s when we find that moved pages have been moved yet again, causing double-redirects – an even bigger job for cleaning up.  You see, we can’t just delete them – there could be a number of pages that link to the old page, so we have to track all links, and in the case of the double-redirect we have to do that for both levels of old pages.  It can be quite difficult to follow, but it’s a necessary part.  Happily we have almost finished the double-redirects – heaven preserve us from triple-redirects!

“So you said I could make it easy for myself?”

We think so.  It’s experimental, yes, but it should help anyone starting new documentation.  Most of what you see on UserBase is in the “Main” namespace, but today we have opened up a new namespace called “Draft”.  You can start your documentation there without worrying about the issues I’ve just talked about.  Move things around as much as you like – just remember that in the end any page links will need sorting!

The idea is that when the pages are ready we can simply move the whole structure into the Main namespace if any redirects have been dealt with, but if it has proved more complex and things have been moved around a lot we can use Copy/Paste to create the Main pages from the Draft ones, fixing links as we go and losing all the redirects on the way.

One last thing – you have to be the main writer for your documentation, and you are used to an entirely different kind of mark-up, finding that attempting Mediawiki mark-up gets you utterly confused.  We can handle that too – and again the Draft namespace is the best place to do it.  Put your plain text there.  Add any markup that will be obvious to us, for instance <bullets>,  and we will help you get it looking the way you want.

Using Draft  should remove a good deal of anxiety and hassle, but we need you to try it out.  Take a look at Draft and let us know what you need to make it even better for you to draft your documentaion.  See you there!

There is a strange sort of time-warp.  We can’t remember which day it is, yet the week is disappearing fast.  Most of the time I’ve been working with a group on UserBase issues.  Matthias (Pipesmoker) Meßmer has been on-call to fix many theming or display issues that we identified, while Niklas (Nikerabbit) Laxström, our wonderful Translate extension author, has added new features for our delight.

In the past, we used “Special:myLanguage” markup to help “other-language-speakers” to get the correct language page, but when you were working on a page, adding a link with that markup did not show the essential red-link that warns you that the page is not yet created.  Now it does show a red-link, which makes life so much easier for all contributors.

Another “big deal” for us was that there were times when it was decided that a page had been poorly named, or wrongly inserted into the page structure.  Because some of our translators are so diligent, we acquired translations of the page almost immediately, and before the problem was realised.   Once a page had translations added it was not possible to move it.  Now, thanks to yet another of Niklas’ efforts, a page together with all its translations can be moved to a new location.

You may remember that Claus Christensen is our Danish translator for UserBase.  He and I have worked mainly on improving accessibility.  Over the lifetime of UserBase we have added a great deal of help for users and contributors, yet people have found it difficult to find the exact function they needed.  We decided that extra sidebar links were necessary.  Again, Matthias and Niklas had to help the more arcane needs, but finding your way around should be very much easier.

Previously we have thought that it is not necessary to translate help pages, on the grounds that in order to translate you have to have a good grasp of English.  Recently, though, Zhao Han pointed out to me that for people who use other-script languages it can be helpful to see translations of help pages, so we worked on that too.

Lots of small changes have happened too, mostly the sort that you don’t notice when they are right, but you would have seen when they were not so good.

Finally, Hans (Mogger) Chen decided that UserBase needed its own strong logo.  He designed a possible logo, then took it to Eugene (it-s) Trounev, who assessed the practicalities and started on “the real design”.  So – watch out for that before the end of the week.

Oddly enough, even through all the long days of activity, we still have managed to have fun.  Eugene’s prowess in the kitchen is now known, and I’m sure he’ll be in much demand in the future too.  I’ve never tried handling food on a swinging barbecue before – and probably won’t again!  You need more hands than an octopus to hold everything steady.  We’ve had wonderful warm, sunny weather, so whenever the head needed clearing we’ve sat outside and discussed things, but we’ve been careful, because the first day some of us were sunburned before we realised what was happening.

I’m so impressed with the amount of work we’ve managed in the time, and will be pushing for a repeat sprint to bring the next set of improvements.

As many of you know, Translatewiki is a Mediawiki extension, used by UserBase.  Today’s newsletter announces its 6th birthday!

We are 6 years young!

Translatewiki.net was started as a small addition to a test wiki of NiklasLaxström. First the project became known as Betawiki until it matured andbecame translatewiki.net. We are grateful that our project is hosted forfree and given room to grow by netcup.de <http://netcup.de> . The platformnow supports localisation for 20 free and open source projects with almost1,000 message groups, has 2,500 translators in over 200 languages. Its usershave made over 3 million edits and contributed close to 2 milliontranslations for Free and Open Source Software products. According to thes23 statistics, translatewiki.net is one of the largest independentMediaWiki installations around.

Impressive indeed!  What’s more, ??Niklas Laxström gives freely of his help and advice.  Many of you will know him as Nikerabbit, on IRC, and others will remember Niklas and Siebrand Mazeland from Akademy 2010.

Congratulations to the Translatewiki team – keep up the good work 🙂   See you at the WebWorld sprint, Niklas.

I promised to nag you about UserBase, and here we are, already in April, and I haven’t said a word. Yet.

New content on UserBase is still slow to arrive, but we’ll talk about that another day. Today I’m looking at the position on translations.

If you haven’t looked lately, you will be surprised to hear that our landing page, Welcome_to_KDE_UserBase, is already translated into 30 languages. Sadly, I can’t say the same about any other page. Still, it’s not all gloom – there is some nice news too. Following the suggestion of a member of our localisation team, we have begun the creation of Translation Teams. This is in the very early stages, but the idea is that Team Leaders will keep an eye on any work done in their language, and provide any guidelines that are language-specific, so that a standard can be maintained. So far we have nine volunteers (some, army-style volunteered, I’ll admit 🙂 ) and although their teams are very small at the moment, we hope to make more people active in this field. 131 people have registered to do some translation, so there is plenty of room for growth in output.

We now have 392 pages within the translation system. Let’s see how some of the languages are faring. These statistics reflect the number of pages that are wholly or partly translated to the language.

Top of the league are Ukrainian and Danish, with all 392 pages translated. Yurchor and Claus_chr have been working hard for us since we first launched the system, and deserve a medal each. After that, there are:

Italian 297
Spanish 255
Chinese (China) 183
Taiwanese 155
German 144
French 117
Russian 108
Catalan 92
Brazilian Portuguese 86
Dutch 64
Romanian 59
Turkish 40
Japanese 32
Indonesian 31
Polish 28
Rusyn 21
Portuguese 20
Swedish 18
Galician 17
Czech 15
Finnish 14
Simplified Chinese 8
Korean 3
Bosnian 3
Esperanto 2
Hungarian 1
Slovak 1

Surprised at some of these numbers? I was.  Pleasingly, I’m seeing good growth in Italian, Spanish, Chinese and Taiwanese (one man doing both language variants) and Catalan, but some of the other languages are surprisingly slow.

As always, if you have questions about helping, join us on IRC, #kde-www, or simply leave a message for me on my UserBase Talk page.

If you speak Ukranian or Danish, excellently.  If you speak Chinese or Italian, quite a lot of pages.  Brazilian Portuguese, German and Spanish are beginning to make real progress.  If none of those are your language, there are very few pages translated.  To see how your language is faring, go to the Language Statistics page and enter your ISO_639-2 code

We now have 79 members registered to translate on UserBase, though only a fraction of that number is working regularly on translations.  For the top group, though, the figures are staggering.  In the last week for instance:

• Yurchor has touched 788 pages, making 1455 changes
• MarcusGama has touched 768 pages, with 1416 changes
• Claus_chr has touched 764 pages with 1454 pages!

Not everyone can manage so much time and speed, but that doesn’t stop some people.  These people have also been very active

• Qiii2006 made 402 changes
• Caig made 425
• Sordon made 123 and
• Nilli made 132.

while others have made fewer but equally valued contributions. This is the translation activity for the last 21 days:

Maybe you have an hour or two with nothing pressing to do?  You can easily get started.  There’s plenty of help available in our Tasks and Tools page.

By now we have completed the transfer of most existing translated pages to the new system, but there are a few glitches.  Where we don’t have a registered translator for a language, the only options are to lose the translation or to copy and paste it into the new sections.  For some languages that’s a feasible option – you only need to know enough to recognise whether a paragraph is matching the English one in content, but what if the language is a non-latin-character one?  I met one such this week.  One page has only a single translation in the old system, but that translation is Arabic.  I know by the structure that it matches most of what’s on the English page, but I’m sure that some bits are missing.  I really need help from someone who can sort that out for me.  It’s not a long page and I’d guess that someone with the right skills could do the whole thing in less than half an hour.

Other skills are needed too – php, css, database-query to name a few.  We have people with all these skills, but too small a team puts too much pressure on a few people.  What is really needed is a group for each task, maybe three or four, so that no-one is being pressured when he has other things to do.  If you can help, please come to Freenode’s #kde-www and talk to us.  You’ll get a warm welcome, I guarantee

You won’t be surprised to hear that at Akademy I spent a good deal of time talking to people about UserBase, how we can improve it, and how it can help with documentation problems.  Several exciting improvements are expected in the next few weeks, but I’m leaving that as a teaser for now.  First I want to talk about just one of the ideas that was floated, as we sat watching people stir the barbeque.

Just a reminder – if you are going to trans late in UserBase you need to

• request addition to the Translator group
• when you have confirmation, open the page Special:LanguageStats/your-country-code to see which pages need your attention
• Please don’t use the redlinks in the old language bar – those pages will be lost when migration is complete.
• Those in the Translation group should be able to see “Translate this Page” on any page that has been prepared.  That link takes you to the page where you choose your language.

After almost a year of planning we now have the TranslateWiki facility on UserBase!  What difference does that make?  A lot!  For a start, it means a completely new way of working, if you’ve been one of our faithful on-line translators.  It takes a little getting used to, but it has big advantages for the future, and will, in the long run, save you a lot of work.  To explain how, I need to tell you something about its capabilities first.

Producing a Manual

Off-Line Translations

How Does it Work?

Migration

Happy Christmas, everyone.  Time enough for work in a few days 🙂

Reading my newest Linux Format I was delighted to hear that there is a project in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, that uses donated/recycled computers.  I live in West Yorkshire, but in the south-west corner, so Sheffield is a mere 40 minutes drive away.  Naturally I followed this up – an opportunity too good to miss.  If you live in the mid- to north of England, take a look at http://www.access-space.org/?c=recycling

I was curious to know more about the activities of Access Space – and amazed and delighted at what I saw there.  The most surprising thing was http://www.open-source-embroidery.org.uk/ !  The Html Patchwork, no less.  Every cell of the patchwork represents the hexadecimal colours, and every contributor gets web space to tell about their work and activities.  The resulting patchwork was displayed in Sweden this summer, but if you live in or near San Francisco you can see it during October to next January, at the Museum of Craft and Folk Art.

Then there’s LOSS – The Linux Open Source Sound project.  Electronica is not my kind of music, but I did sample a few tracks – they appear to all be Creative Commons licensed.  For a smile you really should listen to the Jake Harries -Eh? track.  The CD was recorded in 2006, but I did notice that at least one upload was in 2009, so presumably the project is still active.

Part III – coming shortly – has news about developments related to UserBase in particular and our wikis in general.