Synchronizing translations in a Wiki with TikiWiki CMS/Groupware

Marc Laporte, TikiWiki.org, Canada

27 November 2008
http://www.aslib.co.uk/conferences/programme.html

Should we setup a test wiki so attendees can experiment?

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1-TikiWiki CMS/Groupware
2-Synchronizing translations in a Wiki

1- A full-featured, open source, multilingual Web Content Management System

2- The challenges and a working solution, used by the Firefox support site

by Marc Laporte, at ASLIB 2008, London

• MarcLaporte.com
• Collaboration and Wikis
• Translating the Wiki Way
• Mozilla (Firefox) Support
• Staging and approval
• Free source software & business model
• TikiWiki CMS/Groupware

• Over a decade of Web experience
• Expert on wikis, collaboration and groupware
• Project administrator of TikiWiki CMS/Groupware
• Longstanding interest and involvement in multilingual wikis

What are the most important volunteer mass collaboration projects in the history of humankind?

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Where is the "field" going?

Did open source reduce the number of programmers?

Examples of mass collaboration, crowdsourcing in other fields (FOSS, Wikipedia, etc.)

Why engage new people in your projects?

If you do, 7 assumptions of traditional translation workflow, etc and what this means for wikis

examples of various level of openness vs control. Ex.:

SUMO example: not 100% open, but still permits participation

Tools should support that

• Master language
• Edit freeze
• Enforceable timely translation
• Controlled language pairs
• Strong coordination
• Trained translators
• Separation of Authoring and Translation

Often not applicable in a collaborative environment

• Wikipedia
• Documentation
• Collaboration -> flexible, simple freeform project management
• Corporate Intranet or extranet
• Great for unstructured content, can be structured with categories and tags
• Effective document workflow

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http://wikis-in-plain-english.notlong.com/

Give someone a fish and you feed them for a day.
Teach someone to fish and you feed them for a lifetime.

Add that knowledge to a wiki
And countless people will be able to learn on their own

And share their knowledge
And many will feed their families

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• Powerful revision control: Every single change is tracked. Who/what/when + ability to show the difference

Need some good screenshots

• Use a standard web-browser
• Shared, editable
• Wiki syntax for simple links and formatting
• Email notification of changes (opt-in)

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• What about when… ?
  • …minor changes are frequent?
  • …translation can’t be expected to be complete everywhere?
  • …there is no master language?
• How do you track and propagate changes across languages? (without pulling your hair out 😊

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http://clwe-demo.notlong.com

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• Louis-Philippe Huberdeau
  • École de technologie supérieure
• Alain Désilets
  • Conseil de recherches national du Canada
• Sébastien Paquet
  • Université du Québec à Montréal
• Nelson Ko
  • TikiWiki CMS/Groupware / Carleton Univ. / Citadel Rock
• Marc Laporte
  • TikiWiki CMS/Groupware / Avantech.net
• Xavier De Pedro
  • University of Barcelona
• You?

• Needs accurate & precise documentation for Firefox
• Contributed by volunteers
• Minimum of 8 languages
• For urgent translations changes, messages can be tagged accordingly
• Staging & approval feature
• Starting with Firefox 3, application documentation is online
• Mozilla is both a user and a contributor/participant/partner.

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http://marclaporte.com/staging_approval/staging_launch.htm

• Shared resource
• Collaborative development
  • Contributor
  • User
• Popular examples
  • Linux
  • Firefox
  • Open Office

Free software is software which can be used, copied, studied, modified and redistributed with little or no restriction.

• Free beer?
• Free speech?
• Free kitten?

• What is the business model?
• How are you protected against vendor lock-in?

• No license fee to use the software.
• You can choose to pay for services
  • Installation, support, training, custom development and hosting.
  • But not licenses.

http://info.tikiwiki.org/Consultants

• Tightly Integrated Knowledge Infrastructure
• Combination CMS + wiki + groupware
• Stable & established application
• Very active community
• Free source software (LGPL)
• Consultants if you need paid support
• Used on tens of thousands of sites
• 6 years, hundreds of people.
• A new code commit every two hours

• Translated into 30+ languages
• 960 pages of documentation
• Unlimited number of users
• Unlimited number of groups
• Users can be in any number of groups
• Runs on standard php/mysql making web hosting easy and inexpensive

• Hundreds of built-in features
• Wiki
• Blogs & articles
• File gallery
  • Check-in/out, categories, plugin to filter
• Trackers
  • Custom database, forms and reports
• Discussion forums
• Polls
• Etc.

• Online community / association / club / special interest group / NGO (A)
• Personal site / family site (A)
• Simple portal / news site (A)
• Advanced portal / news site (A)
• Corporate web site (A)
• Groupware Wiki / Corporate Wiki / Corporate Intranet / Team project (A)
• Public Wiki (A)
• Group knowledge base / Knowledge Management (KM) / institutional memory (A)
• Product or software documentation and support (A)
• Customer extranet (B)

Personal knowledge base / manage my life (B)
Wiki-based Project Management (PM) (B)
Glossary / Dictionary / Encyclopedia (B)
Writing a book (B)
Framework / Activity Workflow / Specialized web Application (B)
Document Workflow (B)
Bug or Issue tracker (B)
Collaborative research (B)
Voice-enabled wiki and mobile applications (B)
Geo CMS (B)
Blog (one author) (C)
Blog (several authors) (C)
Event Management, Conference Management & planning (C)

Calendar of events (C)
Document Management System (DMS) (C)
SourceForge/Gforge type site (C)
Translation Management System (TMS) (D)
Traditional Project Management (PM) with Gantt charts, etc (E)
E-learning / Learning Management System (LMS) / classroom / course management system (CMS) (D)
Customer/Contact/Constituent relationship management (CRM) (D)
Bibliography (D)
E-democracy (D)
Social networking / Job board / Dating site / hospitality exchange / Car Pooling (E)
E-commerce / Shopping cart (E)
Enterprise resource planning (ERP) / Accounting (E)

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• Multilingual form & report generator
• Screencast:
  • http://twbasics.keycontent.org/movies/trackers.htm

The TikiWiki community will be happy to work with any organization to help use:

• The same principles as Wikipedia
• The same technology as Firefox
• Free source software

• …I want you to remember about this talk in 6 months
  • There is a wiki-translation.com community
  • Wiki energy will affect many sectors, including the World of translation
  • Wiki & open source technology is available at a good Total cost of ownership (TCO)

Wiki-translation.com
TikiWiki.org
Support.mozilla.com
marclaporte.com
AvanTech.net

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http://classic.squiz.net/welcome/monkey_movie