Software:WikiBhasha

Short description: Multi-lingual content tool for Wikipedia

WikiBhasha

A sample instance of WikiBhasha.
Original author(s)	Microsoft Research
Developer(s)	Microsoft
Initial release	October 18, 2010 (2010-10-18)
Stable release	1.0.1 / October 25, 2010 (2010-10-25)
Repository	phabricator.wikimedia.org/diffusion/SVN/browse/trunk/extensions/WikiBhasha/
Written in	JavaScript, PHP
Operating system	Microsoft Windows, Linux
License	Apache License 2.0 and partly GPL v2
Website	www.wikibhasha.org

WikiBhasha is a multi-lingual content creation application for the online encyclopedia Wikipedia.

Overview

WikiBhasha enables contributors to Wikipedia to find content from Wikipedia articles, translate it into other languages, and then either compose new articles or enhance existing articles in the various language versions of Wikipedia. The tool acts as a simple and intuitive user interface layer that stays on the target language Wikipedia article that is being created or enhanced during the user-session. At the end of the session, all the additions or modifications of content are submitted to the target language Wikipedia in the updating process.

WikiBhasha supports content creation in more than 30 languages. It enables easy content creation in non-English Wikipedias by leveraging the large volume of English Wikipedia content as the source of information. Initially, the Wikimedia Foundation and Microsoft Research were working closely with the Wikipedia user communities focusing on content creation in Arabic, German, Hindi, Japanese, Portuguese and Spanish. The word Bhasha means language in many North Indian languages, and is related to the word Bahasa of Malaysia and Indonesia.

The software is similar to the Google Translator Toolkit used to translate Wikipedia articles since 2008. The key difference between the two is that WikiBhasha runs as an overlay within the Wikipedia interface, while the Google toolkit runs elsewhere and requires a Google account.

Availability

As of 2010, WikiBhasha (Beta) was available as:

• MediaWiki extension, under Apache License 2.0 and partly under GPL v2,
• Installable bookmarklet (and a Greasemonkey Script for Firefox users) from the WikiBhasha site.

User guide

The WikiBhasha beta user guide provides instructions for installation and use.

See also

• Machine translation
• Microsoft Translator
• Comparison of machine translation applications

Further reading

• A. Kumaran; K. Saravanan; Naren Datha; B. Ashok; Vikram Dendi (2009). "WikiBABEL: A Wiki-style Platform for Creation of Parallel Data". ACL 2009, Proceedings of the 47th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 4th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing of the AFNLP. doi:10.3115/1667872.1667880. 

External links

• Home of WikiBhasha and MediaWiki extension page
• Home of WikiBABEL Project site
• Microsoft Research announcement on the release of WikiBhasha
• Wikimedia Foundation announcement on WikiBhasha
• WikiBhasha: Enhancing Multilingual Content in Wikipedia - Microsoft Research