Thursday, December 20, 2012

jQuery, MediaWiki 1.20, tabs and other news

About a year ago, Expression pages were modified to show only one language at a time. This was explained in this blog post. Some feedback I had was that the little arrow indicating a dropdown list (when hovering over it) was not obvious for new people. So I have changed the dropdown list to a tab system, that is visible without any hovering. This can be seen in http://www.omegawiki.org/Expression:India .

Apart from that, the "identical meaning" checkbox has been changed to "=" or "≈" that is selected with a combobox. The main advantage is to solve a bug that we had with the checkbox. Also, it is believed that "=/≈" is easier to understand.
Basically, the idea behind "identical meaning" is that when an exact translation ("=") for a concept does not exist in a given language, the contributors can suggest approximate translations ("≈") that are the closest to the concept in that language.

From the technical side,
OmegaWiki has just been updated to MediaWiki 1.20. Also, a month ago, several javascript functions of OmegaWiki were changed to use jQuery. We don't have enough programmers to implement many wonderful new features (any volunteer?) but at least we try to keep up-to-date with the latest versions of MediaWiki.

From the lexical side,
we now have about 46.000 concepts translated with 470.000 words in 419 languages.
The main language is still English with 48.000 words. I would be happy to reach the 50.000 milestone. We are constantly adding new words but at the same time, we delete "sum of parts" definitions like "ecosystem preservation" = "the preservation of ecosystem" (coming from the GEMET data), and other dummy entries about languages that were created during an other import of data.

Other languages above 10.000 words are Spanish (35610), French (29919), German (29872), Dutch(27402), Italian (17117), Portuguese (15163), Finnish (12694), Swedish (12439), Polish (11776) and Russian (10236).

We also have about 1800 images illustrating our 46.000 concepts, and more than 15.000 links to Wikipedia articles.


Thank you to all contributors.