MozCamp Berlin 2011, part 2

Except the general topic of Loving the Web, there was another important topic present in almost every time slot of MozCamp Berlin 2011, a topic that interest me more than anything else in software: localization. I attended most of the localization talks and gave one myself.

MozCamp Berlin 2011 WorldReady

• Vito Smolej from Slovenia gave two important talks about Translation Memory, especially in OmegaT. Translation Memory is barely used in Mozilla localization projects, even though it could make things much more efficient and Vito showed some ways in which it could be employed.
• Jean-Bernard Marcon from France talked about the state of the BabelZilla site, which is used to translate Mozilla add-ons. Gladly, i didn’t have to tell him that despite the impressive amount of localizations that are done at that site, it is very problematic because of numerous technical issues – he said himself that he’s well aware of them and is going to replace the software completely Real Soon Now. I found it a little strange, however, that Jean-Bernard is happy about using the site for translating only Mozilla add-ons and doesn’t want to extend it to any other projects – say, Firefox itself. Oh well, as long as he maintains the add-ons site well, i’m happy.
• Chris Hofmann and Jeff Beatty gave a great presentation about the present and the future of organizing localization groups and communicating about it. Frankly, it’s not all that i hoped to hear, but i’m really happy just to know that Mozilla, like Wikimedia, now has a guy whose job is to communicate about localization.

And i gave a talk that compares the localization of Mozilla and MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia. The slides are here. Many people who attended it said that it was bold of me to say these rather negative things about Mozilla. It is somewhat true – it is quite bold of me to use the first major Mozilla event i attend as a bully pulpit to promote my other project, but the talk was generally well-received. I believe that i succeeded at making my point: Both Mozilla and MediaWiki are leaders in the world of massively localized Free Software and both projects have things to learn from each other – Mozilla can simplify its translation workflow and consider converging its currently sprawling tools and procedures, as it is in MediaWiki, and MediaWiki can learn a lot from Mozilla about building the localization teams as communities of people and about quality control.

Finally, i was very glad to meet Dwayne Bailey and Alexandru Szasz – developers of Pootle and Narro, two localization tools used in the Mozilla world. Talking to them was very interesting and inspiring – they both understand well the importance of localization and the shortcomings of the current tools, including the ones that they are developing, and they are keen on fixing them. As a result of this excellent meeting i completed the translation of Pootle itself into Hebrew. And there is more to come.

MozCamp Berlin 2011, part 1

On November 12–13 i participated in MozCamp Berlin. (I’m writing this late-ish, because a day after that i went to India to participate in a Wikimedia conference and not one, but two hackathons. That was a crazy month.)

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In the past i participated in small events of the Israeli Mozilla community, but this was my first major Mozilla-centric event.

MozCamp Berlin 2011 group photo. Notice the fox on the left and yours truly on the right.

The biggest thing that i take from this event is the understanding that i belong to this community of people who love the web. I never properly realized it earlier; i somehow thought that loving the web is a given. It is not.

Johnathan Nightingale, director of Firefox Engineering repeated the phrase “we <3 the web” several times in his keynote speech. And this is the thing that makes the Mozilla community special.

Firefox is not the only good web browser. Opera and Google Chrome are reasonably good, too. Frankly, they are even better than Firefox in some features, though i find them less essential.

Firefox is not the only web browser that strives to implement web standards. Opera, Google Chrome and even recent versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer try to do that, too.

Firefox is not even the only web browser that is Free Software. So is Chromium.

But Firefox and the Mozilla community around it love the web. I don’t really have a solid way to explain it – it’s mostly a feeling. And with other browsers i just don’t have it. They help people surf the web, but they aren’t in the business of loving it.

And this is important, because the Internet is not just a piece of technical infrastructure that helps people communicate, do business and find information and entertainment. The Internet is a culture in itself – worthy of appreciation in itself and worthy of love in itself – and the Mozilla community is there to make it happen.

Some people would understand from this that Firefox is for the nerds who care about the technology more than they care about going out every once in a while. It isn’t. It’s not, in fact, just about a browser. It’s about the web – more and more Mozilla is not just developing a great browser, but also technologies and trends that affect all users of all browsers, rather than target markets. By using Firefox you get as close as you can to the cutting edge, not just of cool new features, but of openness and equality. Some people may find this ideology boring and pointless; i find it important, because without it the Internet would not be where it is today. Imagine an Internet in which the main sites you visit every day are not Facebook, Wikipedia, Google and your favorite blogs, but msn.com… and nothing but msn.com. Without Mozilla that’s how the Internet would probably look today. Without Mozilla something like this may well happen in the future.

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Thanks a lot to William Quiviger, Pierros Papadeas, Greg Jost and all the other hard-working people who produced this great event.

More about it in the next couple of posts very soon.

The Software Localization Paradox

Wikimania in Haifa was great. Plenty of people wrote blog posts about it; the world doesn’t need a yet another post about how great it was.

What the world does need is more blog posts about the great ideas that grew in the little hallway conversations there. One of the things that i discussed with many people at Wikimania is what i call The Software Localization Paradox. That’s an idea that has been bothering me for about a year. I tried to look for other people who wrote about it online and couldn’t find anything.

Like any other translation, software localization is best done by people who know well both the original language in which the software interface was written – usually English, and the target language. People who don’t know English strongly prefer to use software in a language they know. If the software is not available in their language, they will either not use it at all or will have to memorize lots of otherwise meaningless English strings and locations of buttons. People who do know English often prefer to use software in English even if it is available in their native language. The two most frequent explanations for that is that the translation is bad and that people who want to use computers should learn English anyway. The problem is that for various reasons lots of people will never learn English even if it would be mandatory in schools and useful for business. They will have to suffer the bad translations and will have no way to fix it.

I’ve been talking to people at Wikimania about this, especially people from India. (I also spoke to people from Thailand, Russia, Greece and other countries, but Indians were the biggest group.) All of them knew English and at least one language of India. The larger group of Indian Wikipedians to whom i spoke preferred English for most communication, especially online, even if they had computers and mobile phones that supported Indian languages; some of them even preferred to speak English at home with their families. They also preferred reading and writing articles in the English Wikipedia. The second, smaller, group preferred the local language. Most of these people also happened to be working on localizing software, such as MediaWiki and Firefox.

So this is the paradox – to fix localization bugs, someone must notice them, and to notice them, more people who know English must use localized software, but people who know English rarely use localized software. That’s why lately i’ve been evangelizing about it. Even people who know English well should use software in their language – not to boost their national pride, but to help the people who speak that language and don’t know English. They should use the software especially if it’s translated badly, because they are the only ones who can report bugs in the translation or fix the bugs themselves.

(A side note: Needless to say, Free Software is much more convenient for localization, because proprietary software companies are usually too hard to even approach about this matter; they only pay translators if they have a reason to believe that it will increase sales. This is another often overlooked advantage of Free Software.)

I am glad to say that i convinced most people to whom i spoke about it at Wikimania to at least try to use Firefox in their native language and taught them where to report bugs about it. I also challenged them to write at least one article in the Wikipedia in their own language, such as Hindi, Telugu or Kannada – as useful as the English Wikipedia is to the world, Telugu Wikipedia is much more useful for people who speak Telugu, but no English. I already saw some results.

I am now looking for ideas and verifiable data to develop this concept further. What are the best strategies to convince people that they should use localized software? For example: How economically viable is software localization? What is cheaper for an education department of a country – to translate software for schools or to teach all the students English? Or: How does the absence of localized software affect different geographical areas in Africa, India, the Middle East?

Any ideas about this are very welcome.

Type O Negative, part 2

Since my previous and very negative post about Google+ i played with it a little more. Apparently, a lot of my misunderstanding was related to actual bugs in its interface – for example, people that i’m not supposed to follow appear in my stream. I guess that it’s understandable, given that the service is so young.

I do have something very nice to say about it – it has an excellent interface for reporting bugs. You simply click the problematic area on the screen, write a description and submit the report. It is very buggy on Firefox, but i can understand that, too, hoping that they will fix it. It does work well in Google Chrome, but i can’t really use it, because Chrome’s right-to-left editing support is very bad. The sad thing is that after the report is submitted i don’t have a way to know what happens to it. Public bug tracking is one of the most common, most appealing, and most overlooked features of Free Software. However, reporting bugs in Free Software projects is a relatively hard process – the interface of bug tracking software such as Bugzilla is intimidating and lots of people don’t even know that they can use it.

I hope that Free Software web frameworks such as MediaWiki (Wikipedia’s engine), WordPress and Drupal, will adopt a similar model for reporting bugs and combine it with the already excellent concept of public bug tracking. If that would be Google+’s contribution to the web, it would be enough to say that it doesn’t suck.

Palestinian geeks and RTL bugs

In the last few months i opened a bunch of MediaWiki bugs related to writing from right-to-left. If you click on the non-stricken-out numbers there, you’ll see my name at a few pages. Unfortunately i’m not yet much of a MediaWiki developer, but i’m quietly learning it at home.

This flood of right-to-left bugs was noticed. Mark Hershberger, Wikimedia’s bugmeister, wrote a blog post inviting developers who know RTL languages to fix the bugs. In the recent MediaWiki Hackathon 2011 in Berlin, which i attended as a member of the MediaWiki Language committee, i had the pleasure to meet Mark and many other MediaWiki developers in person – they taught me MediaWiki hacking tricks and i taught them the basics of RTL language handling in computers.

MediaWiki Hackathon 2011 participants, Berlin. Photo: Tobias Schumann, CC-BY-SA-3.0-DE. Click to enlarge.

After the hackathon Mark’s blog post was made available for translation in translatewiki.net, the software localization hub for MediaWiki, Wikipedia-related projects and other Free Software. It makes sense to translate it, especially to RTL languages. I translated it to Hebrew. It was also translated to Macedonian and Bulgarian; to Bosnian and two types of Serbian; to French, Danish and German; to Latin, Albanian, Dutch, Chinese and Japanese.

Do you notice any right-to-left languages except Hebrew here? No, me neither. After i poked a few people, parts of it were translated to Persian, Urdu and Khowar, a language of Pakistan. And not a single line of it was translated into Arabic yet.

And i just don’t get it. It is a fact that there are Arab Free Software hackers on both sides of Jordan, as well as in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Syria and other countries. Judging by the tweets with the #palgeeks hashtag in Twitter, there are more startups in Ramallah than in Herzliya. There are Arab Wikipedia editors in Israel and the West Bank, not to mention the rest of the Arab world. There are a lot of translations of software messages into Arabic in the same website, translatewiki.net. But not of this blog post, which could bring more fixes to RTL bugs, which would in turn benefit all the people writing and reading in the Arabic alphabet – that’s hundreds of millions of people.

You could say: Why bother translating it from English into Arabic? After all, someone who has the skill to fix bugs in PHP code, probably knows English. But the fact is that translating it into Hebrew was worth the few minutes i put into it, because it caused the Israeli MediaWiki developer Rotem Liss to fix one RTL bug. (Thank you, Rotem.) Just think what it may do if it is translated to Arabic, which is spoken by many, many more people.

So, dear #palgeeks and Arabic-speaking geeks in other countries! If any of you are reading this, please invest a few minutes to do the following:

1. Go to translatewiki.net.
2. If you don’t have an account: Create one by clicking “ادخل / أنشئ حسابا” or “Log in / create account” at the top. Then follow the instructions on the screen to request Translator permission.
3. Go to Mark Hershberger’s post translation page.
4. Start translating into Arabic.
5. Copy the result to your own blog, publish it on Twitter, invite other Arab hackers to fix RTL bugs in MediaWiki.

Oh, and you are also cordially invited to Wikimania in Haifa and to the Hackathon that will take place for two days before it, starting on the 2nd of August. It’s not about politics; it’s about improving Wikipedia’s support for your language. And you’ll also get to meet Wikipedians from all around the world, which is even more fun in real life than it sounds. Really. (If you need assistance with getting into Israel, please contact me privately.)

Firefox and its memory problem

A Slashdot story says: “If you’re like a lot of Firefox 4 users out there, you’ve probably noticed that Firefox has a serious memory problem — it uses more than it really should.”

No, i didn’t. I am what people would call a “power user” of web browsers, and i didn’t notice any memory problems in Firefox. At least not any memory problems that caused any other problems that i would notice. I have no reason to measure the memory usage of an application if it doesn’t have any other problems. Let it use whatever it wants as long as it functions properly otherwise.

And, thank God, there are a lot of Firefox users who are much less advanced than i am, and they certainly don’t give a damn about memory usage.

So no, this claim about “a lot of Firefox users” noticing serious memory problems is just plain wrong.

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(Ahem, yes, i still read Slashdot.)

Metabolism

I decided to use a little less non-Free software and uninstalled Adobe Flash. It’s needed only for videos i don’t have to watch and for ads that i don’t want to watch. This made browsing faster and more enjoyable. One day HTML5 animations will take over and become as annoying as Flash is today; until then my web browsing will be more fun.

I often criticize Apple, but i praise their firm anti-Flash stance.

Do you edit Wikipedia? Thank the person who welcomed you

The Board of the Wikimedia Foundation published a Resolution on Openness. In short, quantitative studies show that new editors are joining Wikipedia and related projects slower than they used to, and the Board decided that this is the most important challenge that the Foundation must deal with in the near future.

One of the things that the Foundation is doing is to appeal to the community and ask to be more open towards new editors. I agree with this and pass this message on: Please, if you are one of the veteran editors of Wikipedia, remind yourself every once in a while not to bite the newcomers. Don’t just coldly tell them that they’re wrong, delete their contribution or block them. Maybe their contribution should be deleted, because it’s really bad, but please bother to explain it to them and don’t just send them a template message. Read chapter 31 of “Catch-22″ to get an idea on the damage that template messages do. Bite a newcomer and he will never come back. This newcomer may be an elementary school kid who has nothing better to do than adding bad jokes to Wikipedia, but it may also be a university professor who has knowledge about topics that nobody else knows. If you scare off that professor, he won’t come back and Wikipedia will not have any information about these topics for a long time, and possibly forever.

Just remember that the Wikimedia community is supposed to be easy to penetrate, not hard. Some other communities are even harder to penetrate, but it’s their loss. That’s one thing we don’t want to be. That’s the meaning of wiki.

And another thing. Remember that “welcome” message you received after you made your first edit in Wikipedia? Send a thank-you note to the user who sent it to you. Even if you already thanked that user in the past and even if that user retired from Wikipedia. Even if instead of a welcome message that user sent you a copyright violation notice – that happened to me and i am nevertheless thankful to that user, simply because he was polite about it. Send that user a thank-you note, now. Tell him about your achievements since then; tell him what was good about that welcome message; if he retired since then, tell him that you hope that he will come back. It will mean a lot to that user and it will mean a lot to you – it will remind you that that welcome message was more than just a template. It was the thing that made you part of the biggest community of people in history – the Wikimedia family.

Mobile Phones Suck

All mobile phones suck.

Mobile phones that need non-standard chargers suck.

Mobile phones with boot-up time of more than 10 seconds suck.

Mobile phones with touch screens that use the numeric keypad to enter text suck.

Mobile phones with touch screens in which it is hard in any way to use the numeric keypad for interactive voice response suck.

Mobile phones in which it is hard to change the volume of the speaker or of the ringer suck.

Mobile phones in which it is impossible to copy and paste text from anywhere to anywhere suck.

Mobile phones the software of which cannot be updated suck.

Mobile phones on which i cannot install my own fonts suck.

Mobile phones that need special software to be installed on a computer in order to get the ability to copy files to and from them suck.

Mobile phones that can be synchronized only with particular contact management software suck.

Mobile phones that don’t completely support reading and writing in any language in which it is possible to write in a modern GNU/Linux desktop computer suck.

Mobile phones that claim to be able to browse the Internet, but can’t be used to view a Wikipedia page without complaining about full memory suck.

Mobile phones that claim to be able to browse the Internet, but can’t be used to edit a Wikipedia page suck.

Mobile phones that claim to be able to play music, but cannot sort numbered album tracks suck.

Mobile phones that claim to be able to play music, but cannot play OGG or FLAC files suck.

Mobile phones that claim to be able to play music, but cannot display track names in any language suck.

Mobile phones that are hard to switch to vibration mode suck.

Finally, mobile phones that have any non-free software on them suck.

Translating Wikipedia Interface Into Amharic

There is a Wikipedia in the Amharic language, but it is developing slowly. One of the reasons for this is that the interface of MediaWiki, the software that is running the Wikipedia website, is translated into Amharic only partially, so people who don’t know Amharic can hardly use the website. Completing the translation of the interface will make the Amharic Wikipedia much more accessible to people who don’t know English. This is relevant not only to people who read and write Wikipedia online, but also to those who don’t have Internet access, because the Wikimedia Foundation and other organizations distribute offline copies of Wikipedia on CD-ROMs, printed books and other media.

Translation of Wikipedia’s interface is done by volunteers at the website translatewiki.net. I know this website well and i am willing to invest my time and teach any Amharic speaker who can translate software messages from English or from Hebrew. Practically no experience is needed – anyone who can use a web browser, can do this, too, and i shall provide all the needed support, anywhere in Israel. Do you know anyone who would be able to do this? This can be a great chance to improve one’s skills in computer use, in Amharic and in English and to help millions of Amharic speakers get access to one of the most important educational websites on the web.

If you know anyone who can help with it, please let me know.