Kanishkas

සිංහල විකිපීඩියාවට සාදරයෙන් පිලිගනිමු ! Singhalawap 19:03, 7 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Felidae's Involvement in Sinhala Wikipedia

Hi All,

I am Kanishka and I am from Felidae. Because there is some misunderstanding and debate about Felidae’s involvement in Sinhala wikipedia, we thought it is important to clarify what we are doing.

I understand that Hasitha from Felidae has contacted many of you in this regard and is hoping to have a meeting with all of you. Without waiting for this meeting , I thought it is best to discuss a bit about this project with you.

Introduction to the Project

The Sinhala Wikipedia development project is a project initiated by the Information and Communication Technology Agency of Sri Lanka (ICTA) in partnership with Practical Action and Felidae. As you all know there is plenty of content regarding any subject in the English language on the internet, but there is very limited content available in Sinhala. For our people to use ICT effectively, specially people who are not comfortable with English such as people in rural disadvantaged communities, there needs to be sufficient content in Sinhala on the internet.

The ultimate content/knowledge destination on the web is the Wikipedia. Although people in urban areas will be able to benefit from the English Wikipedia with more than 2.5 million articles, people in rural communities find it difficult to benefit from this. Therefore, the ICT Agency has taken the initiative to develop the Sinhala Wikipedia and promote its use among communities.

When the project started, the Sinhala Wikipedia consisted of less than 300 articles. This was not enough for it to be a general resource for all purposes and for it to become popular among the larger community. The Wikipedia will grow into a useful and multi faceted resource only when there is a sufficiently large number of users who can contribute their wealth of knowledge to the Wikipedia.

Thus, to attract a larger community to the Wikipedia, it is necessary to increase the number of articles in it. It was therefore decided to translate 5,000 articles from the English Wikipedia to Sinhala. This was to be the “seeder” content which will attract more users to use the Sinhala Wikipedia regularly and make it grow in size and quality.

Since the target beneficiaries of the project are rural disadvantaged communities, we did a lot of research earlier on in this project to understand which areas of the vast knowledge available in the English Wikipedia will be useful to them. Focus group discussions were organized with representative sets of rural community members and we discussed which areas they have difficulty obtaining information for out of the areas of knowledge available in the English Wikipedia. This exercise was facilitated by Practical Action South Asia, an organization which is doing a lot of useful development work with rural communities.

In order to get the opinion of the general public in this regard, we also conducted an online survey publicized through e-mailers. Many interested users participated in this survey, and we used the survey feedback to aid our selection of articles as well.

Choice of articles and article length

We collected a lot of useful information from the exercises above, from which we compiled the set of articles to be translated from English to Sinhala. The set of articles chosen covers every area requested by rural community members and the general Sinhala online community.

Due to timeline and other limitations, we were at a dilemma to decide whether to develop a smaller number of full-length articles or a larger number of smaller articles covering more areas. Since the goal of the project is to increase the popularity and usefulness of the Sinhala Wikipedia it is important to have more articles across a diverse set of topics. Only then will the Wikipedia appeal to a larger community of users.

Therefore it was decided to go with a larger number of articles covering a diverse and useful set of topics. The number was set to 5000 articles. The expectation is for this seeder content to be useful to a larger community of users, and for that larger community to develop these 5000 article into the future 10,000 or 100,000 articles of the Sinhala Wikipedia. Only then will the Sinhala Wikipedia become the useful resource people use every day.

So in Wikipedia terminology, you may consider some of these 5000 articles to be Wikipedia stubs.

Brief Introduction to Felidae

Felidae is a company started by 3 undergraduates from the University of Moratuwa in 2005. We do work in several areas with respect to development, specially e-learning and software solutions.

We are a company working genuinely towards the development of our country. We take pride in working with leading institutions in the country as well as the larger community, giving meaning to our slogan “Together we can”. It is therefore our pleasure to be part of this Sinhala Wikipedia development project.

Process

Translating 5,000 articles across different areas in a world leading encyclopedia is no easy task! To meet this challenge we decided to follow the process below.

1) Undergraduates studying in different universities will be used to translate the articles. This ensures that people who know the respective subject areas will be doing the translations

2) The articles will then be typesetted by professional typesetters

3) The typesetted articles are then uploaded to the Sinhala Wikipedia, after which they are reviewed by experts in the respective fields (usually degree holders in the respective areas)

Problems Identified and Possible Solutions

We faced several problems when putting this novel process into action. Some of these problems have been raised by Sinhala Wikipedia community members as well.

The following are the problems that have been noticed.

1) Getting quality work out of some of the translators (mostly undergraduates) is difficult. Therefore some articles that have been submitted are very poor translations, and in the worst cases, word-to-word translations from English.

It must be noted that while some articles have these translation issues, most articles are very well done and are up to the expected level.

2) Some reviewers are slow to deliver reviews due to their busy schedule. This has resulted in us having to limit the amount of expert reviews, meaning that we will not be able to do a expert review of all articles. But we will be doing a layman review of all articles to minimize spelling and other basic mistakes as far as possible.

3) Due to some articles being a sub section of the English article, the title of some articles does not give a clear idea of what the article is about. We are currently working on providing meaningful titles to these articles.

Wikipedia community members have raised most of these concerns and have given us some very valuable feedback. We are currently considering how we can implement the feedback received from the community.

Notice at the bottom of articles

We have put in a notice under each article we have submitted to the Sinhala Wikipedia to say that the article was translated from the English Wikipedia under this project. Although some users have commented on this notice text, it is very important to keep it in so that we can identify which articles we have submitted and for future reference. Although this notice is not published with any commercial intention in mind, we do understand the concerns raised by some Wikipedia users regarding this. We will be discussing with other project partners as to what can be done in this regard.

The Way Forward

The noble wikipedia concept is made possible by great volunteers like you all. We all owe a lot to you for your commitment in developing and moderating the Sinhala Wikipedia and bringing it to the level it is today. We should have gotten in contact with you much earlier on in the project, but it was not clear how to make contact with you. However, I’m very glad that we have finally managed to get in touch and hear each others’ ideas and concerns.

So let’s work together,

Make Sinhala Wikipedia grow to 5000 useful articles,

Get more and more users to see the benefit of Sinhala Wikipedia,

And make Sinhala Wikipedia develop our wonderful motherland.

--Kanishkas 19:20, 7 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

දිග කථාවක්! මේ ලිපියට තරම් මහන්සි උනානම් අනික් ඒවටත් No problem.

OK I'm (+). Hope other genuine wikipedians are the same. (they will respond to you later I guess)

Hope this is not some thing like කථාව දෝලාවෙං - ගමන පයිං

Wish you all the best !! Singhalawap 19:35, 7 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

OK. we are still live on wiki. බිඟුවා 01:52, 8 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

වැඩේ හරියට කරනවනම්, කරන්නෙ කවුරුද, මුදල් ගෑවෙනවද කියන එක ගැටළුවක් නැහැ. කරුණාකර හැම ලිපියකම පහළින් එකතු කර ඇති This article has been translated by Felidae... කතන්දරේ අයින් කරන්න. අපි හැමදෙනාම පටන් ගත්තොත් ඒක කරන්න... This article has been translated by Shaakunthala., This article has been translated by බිඟුවා!, මෙහෙම තිබුණොත් කොහොම වේවිද? විකිපීඩියාව ඇඩ්පීඩියාව කියල රීනේම් කරන්නයි වෙන්නේ ඔහොම ගියොත්. පහත දැක්වෙන සබැඳි තුන ඔබේ අවධානයටයි. ඔබ ලා මූලික උපදෙස්වත් කියවා නැති බවකුයි 'ෆෙලිඩේ' ලිපි දුටු විට මට හැඟුණේ.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Your_first_article
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Citing_sources

ලිපි පරිවර්තනය කළේ කවුද කියල වාර්තා වීම ගැටළුවක් කර ගන්න එපා. හැම ලිපියකටම ඉතිහාස පිටුවක් තියෙනවා. ඒකත් මදි නම් ඔබේ ආයතනයෙ වෙබ් අඩවියෙ වෙනම වෙබ් පිටුවක ඒ ලිපි ලැයිස්තුගත කරන්න පුළුවන් (කිලෝබයිට් සීයක දෙසීයක HTML පිටුවක් සර්වර් එකට බර වැඩි වෙන්නෙ නැහැනේ... :P). ඒ නිසා ඔය unethical bottom tag එක ඕනෙ නැහැ.

--සමීර ශාකුන්තල | Sameera Shaakunthala 09:52, 11 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Reworked Articles from Felidae

Dear All,

We at Felidae have gone back to the drawing board with respect to our previous work on wikipedia articles. As there were problems in the articles we have uploaded earlier, we set up the articles on our own server and did all the revisions and rework there to improve our articles.

Now we have done the revisions in our articles. We have also provided good formatting, images and tables. We are now ready to upload a subset of these articles to the wiki and are considering how it should be done.

We have uploaded these articles at an earlier stage to the wikipedia. We would ideally like to replace our old articles with the improved new articles. However, some of you have made updates to these articles in order to make them better and these updates will be lost if we replace the older articles.

An alternative is for us to upload these improved articles alongside the articles we have uploaded earlier. In order to distinguish new articles, we can start their title with a star (e.g. "*bicycle" instead of "bicycle"). This way, the community can decide whether they are happy with the new articles and can delete the previous articles if so. If they have modified the previous articles, and if there is anything to be taken from the new improved article, they can make any additions to the older article and delete the new article.

Please let us know your ideas about this.

correcting articles by Feliday company (cut & pasted from Chathuni's talk page)

Before looking deep into felide articles & correct them I think we should look into gross errors.

ex-

• Gross title errors like මාස් සර්වේයර් '98 ක්‍රමලේඛය
• Merging fragment into 1 and deleting fragments
• Categorizing

Singhalawap 17:24, 10 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Dear චතුනි අලහප්පෙරුම

I understand and appreciate what you are doing. My point was not what you are doing is wrong, but to point out there are some major errors to correct, in there articles.

Plan you have suggested is great. But I worry about the effort to be spend on this. If the Felide company help us to do that we will be able to do it soon, if not we will be in trouble.

As I;m not that much interested on topics they have translated I may not be doing correcting those unless I see a gross defect on those. I'm interested on gathering local knowledge here in sinhala wiki rather than translating rarely needed alien topics.

Once again I appreciate the work you are doing. Singhalawap 19:31, 10 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Hi Chathuni and Sinhalawap,

Just want to say that Felidae is more than happy to give you guys a helping hand in order to correct/improve whatever you have suggested. We need to come up with a process both you and us can follow. I am new to wiki so I don't understand many things yet. But I saw Chathuni has said she is marking articles for deletion and we can improve them (i.e. they don't get deleted immediately).

We are looking into how this can be done, still no clear idea. If you can suggest something (i.e. what is the best way we can see the list of articles to be improved and how we can see what corrections/improvements are to be made) it will be a great help. --Kanishkas 02:02, 11 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Ah

Finally the Felide compnay has accepted that they don't know much about the wikipedia.

Dear Kanishka, it seems complex at 1st, but involve, be active & try to live in. Soon it will be something easy.

Even after yeas & much contribution there are lot to learn even for me.

Once you start showing your commitment & active participation, will teach you more. For today I suggest you to learn to see what going on by clicking ‍නව වෙනස්වීම් link @ left side border, so u can learn by observing what others do.

welcome to the World of wikipedia. Soon you will start loving wikipedia than money !

Singhalawap 17:50, 11 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Correcting Felidae articles

Thanks for your response. First things first you all involved with Felidae Company should understand, realize and accept that none of us have the OWNERSHIP of articles due to several reasons such as:

• according to wikipedian rules, any person can edit/change any article at any time
• in your case you are translating an article done in English Wikipedia due to effort by many editors and none of them have claimed the ownership to that article
• even if you do research and produce an article it can be edited and/or completely changed by any other at any time and hence claimimg ownership is of no value
• article space is there for the article and no other
• according to wikipedian rules, regulations, and norms no person or entity can claim ownership for an article
• WHEN YOU ARE IN ROME YOU SHOULD BEHAVE AS A ROMAN & when you contribute to Wikipedia, you are bound by its norms. You can not keep on discussing whether to accept those or try to compromise. They have been devised after much careful thought and deliberations.
  O.k, then about articles, we write articles with the prime intention of serving the community through dissemination of knowledge. No personal glory is involved even in minute quantities. For an article to be useful to a reader, it should be:
• free of grammar and syntactical errors
• should have correct data
• should be pleasant/attractive
• should be easily digestible
• should be comprehensive
• should allow gathering of more related information
  

Now, the articles contributed by Felidae company do have the following weaknesses:

• Bad sinhala words. Some wikipedians campaign that all your articles should be deleted not because of some hatred feeling. It is simply because your articles are full of Sinhala Word errors. Correcting them is an UP HILLTASK. Still WE WILL COLLECTIVELY TRY.
• Some translations are incorrect in your articles. They also need attention.
• Usage of Tables, Images, Templates make an article attractive. You have completely ignored them. Some Templates are altready translated to Sinhala and when we use them labels appear in Sinhala. We will have to use them more and more.
• Most of your articles are very short & give minimal benefit to users.
• Your articles do not link to other articles. If you observe the articles Tokyo and Dubai I helped, they now have links to other articles. Reader can click them and gather information if necessary. Some links appear in red meaning they are not written in Sinhala. So any one is inspired to write/translate them.
  

Now for the methodology:

• First you all agree to do away with the tag claiming the ownership. We will delete the tag in all your articles.
• I will help you by starting the correcting of Bad Sinhala words.
• In articles I have marked for speedy deletion (By administrator after careful consideration of views in the article talk page), I have indicated some of the bad words in their talk pages. You can correct them. In future I will provide a complete list.
• I will keep on marking your articles and provide a list of Bad words in the talk pages.
• We all will prepare a table of your articles with English article name and the status of correction in the Village Pump (කෝපි කඩේ). This will be a working doc and will be updated continually.
• After we finish enough corrections we will commence merger of small articles to make larger and hence useful ones.

In future:

• try to be mindful about good Sinhala
• translate total article. Build the structure of article with section names in Sinhala. First do the introduction. Then translate section by section.
• Use templates, images and Tables.

We will give you a helping hand.
I may have omitted some points. Please bear with me. Please comment. --චතුනි අලහප්පෙරුම 14:02, 11 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Dear Chathuni,

Thanks a lot for this very comprehensive response. I will go through this and get back to you in detail.

--Kanishkas 11:40, 13 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

The Tag - It's Gone!

Dear All,

It is my pleasure to inform you that we had a discussion with all project partners involved in this project and it was decided not to use the tag under articles in the future.

This is a great victory for the wikipedia community. All the concerns and ideas you have raised did not go to waste, and we are glad we could convince all project partners regarding this.

We thank the wikipedia community for pointing out the inappropriateness of this tag in the wikipedia context. All future articles uploaded by us will not have this tag

Regards, --Kanishkas 11:41, 13 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

That is Good. --බිඟුවා 11:52, 13 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

We will work together as indicated above. Mud had been slung on me. Yet I will honor my word. Thanks for brave decision about tag. About Sinhala & Complete Articles etc we will help you. --- චතුනි අලහප්පෙරුම 12:24, 13 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Lets do it

Please go to ෆෙලි‍‍‍ඩේ ලිපි විස්තර වගුව and do the necessary. I will fill the table as fast as I can. Other Wikipedian's may help us. The incorrect words and correct words are in the talk pages of indicated articles. For a beginning only කයිරෝ is analyzed. -- චතුනි අලහප්පෙරුම 14:41, 13 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

thanks chathuni. lets make this happen --Hasithad 17:12, 14 මැයි 2010 (යූටීසී)

Reworked Articles from Felidae

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there currently is a discussion at WP:AN regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. The discussion is about the topic Reworked Articles from Felidae.Thank you. --Lee (talk) 13:53, 22 මාර්තු 2011 (යූටීසී)

Reworked Articles from Felidae

Hello. This message is being sent to inform you that there currently is a discussion at Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard regarding an issue with which you may have been involved. Thank you. --Lee (talk) 16:56, 28 මාර්තු 2011 (යූටීසී)