Submissions/WikiBhasha: Our Experiences in Enabling Multilingual Wikipedia Content Creation

This is an open submission for Wikimania 2011.

Review no.

138

Title of the submission: WikiBhasha: Our Experiences in Enabling Multilingual Wikipedia Content Creation

Type of submission (workshop, tutorial, panel, presentation): Presentation

Author of the submission: A Kumaran

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

Country of origin: India

Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.): Microsoft Research India

Personal homepage or blog: http://research.microsoft.com/people/kumarana

Abstract (please use no less than 300 words to describe your proposal)

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 35 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 (People and Community/Knowledge and Collaboration/Infrastructure): Infrastructure

Will you attend Wikimania if your submission is not accepted?: Probably, Yes.

Slides or further information (optional): We will make a position paper and slides available soon.

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