Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the WikiBhasha beta?
- Who can use WikiBhasha beta?
- How does it work?
- What browsers and operating systems do you support?
- Why are you releasing it as a MediaWiki extension, a Wikipedia user script, and as a bookmarklet?
- What does “WikiBhasha” mean?
- Do I need a login to use WikiBhasha beta?
- Do I have to login to Wikipedia before using WikiBhasha beta?
- If I am logged in to Wikipedia, are details of my authentication captured by WikiBhasha beta?
- Does WikiBhasha capture any personally identifiable information?
- Can I work offline?
- Can I save what I’ve worked on and continue later?
- Can users add inappropriate material into the target Wikipedia article? Can they overwrite existing content?
- What content can be edited in Wikipedia through WikiBhasha?
- Can I edit articles in any languages?
- What languages are you supporting?
- Have you integrated translation services of other translation service providers?
- Does WikiBhasha beta work between any language pairs?
- Why is the quality of translation inconsistent?
- At times, I seem to get only the default machine translated text. Why is this?
- How do Wikipedia and the language communities benefit?
- Why have you released WikiBhasha as open source? Will you use the data collected to enhance/ build products?
- How do I report a bug or give feedback?
A. The WikiBhasha beta is a tool that helps a community of users in creating multilingual content on Wikipedia. It enables 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 either compose new articles or to enhance existing articles in multilingual Wikipedias. Content created by the contributors are submitted back to the appropriate Wikipedias.
The WikiBhasha beta stays on Wikipedia through the entire content creation process, integrating discovery, linguistic and collaborative features transparently, in an intuitive user interface (UI). Contributors have the flexibility on the quantum of content to work on, and on whether to work on existing content or new content.
A. WikiBhasha beta has been built for people interested in creating multilingual content for Wikipedias. This may include Wikipedians or any/all language enthusiasts.
A. The WikiBhasha beta is a browser based application that is invoked on Wikipedia articles. It features an intuitive and simple UI layer that stays on the target language Wikipedia for the entire content creation process. This UI layer integrates content discovery, linguistic and collaborative services, focusing the user primarily on content creation in the target Wikipedia. A simple 3-step process guides the user in the content discovery and sourcing from English Wikipedia articles, composing target language Wikipedia article and, finally, publication in target Wikipedia. While a typical session may be to enhance a target language Wikipedia article, new articles may also be created following similar process.
A. WikiBhasha currently works on Internet Explorer 7.0 & 8.0 on Windows XP, Windows Vista & Windows 7 and Firefox: 3.5 or above on Windows or Linux Fedora 11/12.
Q. Why are you releasing it as a MediaWiki extension, a Wikipedia user script, and as a bookmarklet?
A. The MediaWiki extension needs to be reviewed and approved by the community before it is available as an extension on Wikipedia. While this process is underway, the same functionality is available as a Wikipedia user script for users with Wikipedia login credentials. The bookmarklet can be used by everyone who wants to contribute to Wikipedia.
A. The name reflects the concept and spirit behind the tool. The name WikiBhasha derives from the well-known term “Wiki” denoting collaboration, and “Bhasha”, which means “language” in Hindi or Sanskrit.
A. No. WikiBhasha does not require users to login.
A. WikiBhasha beta manifests itself as a UI layer on the Wikipedia page that it was invoked on, and it does not require you to login to Wikipedia. However, if you want your contribution to Wikipedia recorded with your Wikipedia credentials, then please login to Wikipedia BEFORE invoking WikiBhasha. If you do not, any contribution made through a WikiBhasha session gets recorded in Wikipedia as an anonymous contribution.
A. WikiBhasha beta does not capture or use in anyway user credentials if the user is logged into Wikipedia.
A. No.
A. No. WikiBhasha beta does not support this. However, this may be a good feature to add in the future. The WikiBhasha source code is available here.
A. No. WikiBhasha beta does not support this, as we neither require login nor capture or use any personally identifiable information.
A. WikiBhasha is a tool that facilitates the creation of multilingual content in Wikipedias. While it is possible that users misuse the tool to create inappropriate content, this is no different than the ability to do so directly on Wikipedia editor, without the tool. Also, the Wikipedia community has the ability to roll back to previous versions of any page. Wikipedia is a community-built and maintained site, and we are confident that users will respect the principles of the community.
A. Only Wikipedia articles may be edited in the supported list of languages. No special pages may be edited with WikiBhasha. Not that there could be other restrictions imposed by respective Wikipedias such as locked pages.
A. No, only the articles in the languages supported by the Microsoft Translator can be edited with WikiBhasha beta.
A. We support all language pairs supported by Microsoft Translator, with English as the source language. 30+ languages are currently supported. Any new languages supported by the Microsoft Translator will also be supported by WikiBhasha. You can find a list of supported languages here.
A. No. Currently, only the translation services provided by the Microsoft Translator are integrated into WikiBhasha beta. We are open to engaging with different language communities to explore translation options.
A. No. This would be a very useful and valuable feature, and we may work with the community to add this feature in the future. Currently, WikiBhasha beta works with English as the source language and any of the other supported languages as target language.
A. Machine translation technology produces translations of varying quality in different languages. We hope that the quality of translations can be improved over time as we collect more data.
A. The Microsoft Collaborative Translation Framework (CTF) displays only the default machine translation and any user corrections made to it. You will be able to see user contributed translations once they are made.
A. Though Wikipedia today has more than 14 Million articles in more than 270 languages, the English Wikipedia is by far the most populated. Wikipedia lists 3.36+ million pages in English, while German comes in second with close to 1.1 million articles- a huge difference in numbers. A long tail of the bottom 200+ Wikipedias have about 2 Million articles, collectively. The WikiBhasha beta helps the process of enhancing non-English Wikipedia content, and provides an easy to use, intuitive interface to create local language content without the user ever having to leave the Wikipedia site. WikiBhasha is thus a great tool for users to rapidly and easily create content in non-English languages, thereby increasing the amount of knowledge in these languages. The data collected through the use of the WikiBhasha beta will be shared with the Wikimedia Foundation, which will decide how to use this data.
A. We see this as a way for MSR to work with the user community to build the available body of knowledge in non-English languages. The interface allows the user to create content in local languages right from the Wikipedia site, without ever leaving it, and the created content is published back to Wikipedia. Thus, all the users and readers of Wikipedia have access to the latest articles.
We plan to use the data for research and to enhance our machine translation services. We will also share this data with the Wikimedia Foundation, which will decide how to use this data.
A. There are two ways in which you can provide feedback: through the forums available in www.WikiBhasha.org, or through the Feedback button in the WikiBhasha UI. Note that your feedback goes as an email to the WikiBhasha team.