Creating multilingual content on Wikipedia using WikiBhasha beta from Microsoft Research

What is the WikiBhasha beta?

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.

WikiBhasha beta is a powerful multilingual content creator. It has an easy to use, intuitive user interface, and enables easy and quick translation of articles from English to more than 30 other languages that are supported by Microsoft’s Machine Translation system and Microsoft’s Collaborative Translation Framework.

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.

 

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.

Check the video for a quick introduction to WikiBhasha beta -

WikiBhasha Beta from Microsoft Research

 

Installing WikiBhasha beta as a Bookmarklet -

You can install WikiBhasha beta as a bookmarklet in your browser by following the instructions below:
(By adding WikiBhasha as a bookmarklet, you irrevocably agree to the "Privacy Statement" and "Terms of Use” whereby some startup code goes into the bookmarklet of your browser and Microsoft takes no responsibility for malicious behavior.)

In Internet Explorer
Make sure the Favorites Bar is visible in Internet Explorer. If it is not visible, on the View menu, point to Toolbars and then click Favorites Bar.
1. Right-click WikiBhasha (Beta) link* and click Add to Favorites. (* Please check http://www.wikibhasha.org/wikibhasha/install.htm  for the link)
2. On the Add to Favorites window, in the Create in list, select Favorites Bar.
3. Click Add. The Internet Explorer Favorites Bar now has a new WikiBhasha beta bookmarklet.

WikiBhasha beta bookmark as seen in Internet Explorer

In Firefox
Make sure the Bookmarks Toolbar is visible in Firefox. If it is not visible, on the View menu, point to Toolbars and then click Bookmarks Toolbar.
1. Right-click on WikiBhasha (Beta) link* and click Bookmark This Link. (* Please check http://www.wikibhasha.org/wikibhasha/install.htm  for the link)
2. On the New Bookmark window, in the Folder list, select Bookmarks Toolbar.
3. Click Save. The Firefox Bookmarks toolbar now has a new WikiBhasha beta bookmark.

Installing WikiBhasha beta as a Wikipedia Gadget -

WikiBhasha beta is available as a user script if you already have Wikipedia login credentials. However, note that you need to install the user-gadget in each of the language Wikipedia’s that you may be interested in.

1. Log in to Wikipedia. (You need to create an account on Wikipedia if you do not already have one.)
2. In every language Wikipedia that you are interested in:

• Visit my preferences, and click on the Appearance tab.
• Edit your default skin file (such as, “Monobook.js” or “Vector.js” file) to add the following:

importScriptURI('http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:WikiBhasha.MSR/WikiBhasha.js&action=raw&ctype=text/js');

3. Please save your changes and reload your page to see the script added to your profile. You should see WikiBhasha in the left side as a menu item, and on Edit page as a button (as below):

 

Download the WikiBhasha beta User Guide from here.

Take WikiBhasha beta for a test drive by clicking on the install link below.

Install - Click here to install WikiBhasha beta

For FAQs, installation instruction details, user guide, discussion, feedback, suggestions etc please check -

http://www.wikibhasha.org/index.htm

(H/T to Hardik )

EDIT: Also check Enhancing Multilingual Content in Wikipedia

“Wikipedia has become one of the world’s largest and perhaps most powerful information repositories. But it is heavily English-centric.

Making Wikipedia more multilingual inspired a Microsoft Research India team to develop a tool called WikiBhasha, which was launched Oct. 18. WikiBhasha—“Wiki,” signifying its community-oriented approach; “Bhasha,” a Sanskrit word meaning “language”—features a content-creation platform that combines linguistic services, such as machine translation, with a Wikipedia-friendly content editor. Everyday users in countries around the world, as well as language enthusiasts, can use WikiBhasha to adapt English-language Wikipedia articles for local languages. Along the way, they can create new local content to expand the article they have translated.

WikiBhasha users also can create new articles from scratch. And in time, the tool could help convert articles in languages other than English into local languages.”