Atul Vinayak
Wikipedia is awesome. One if the greatest things we have ever done as a civilization. If you know what you want, there's a good chance you can find it on wikipedia. But what if you don't know what you want? What if you just want to explore and discover new things? Wikipedia has Special:Random...
aharoni
It sometimes happens in people’s lives that someone tells them something that sounds true and obvious at the time. It turns out that it actually is objectively true, and it is also obvious, or at least sensible, to the person who hears it, but it’s not obvious to other people. But it was obvious...
aharoni
I was wondering: In which languages, user interface translations tend to be longer, and in which ones they are shorter? The intuitive answers to these questions are that Chinese and Japanese are very short, English tends to be shorter than the average, Hebrew is shorter than English, and the...
colin_morris
I’ve spent a lot of time editing Wikipedia. I do it for many reasons, but one of the sillier ones floating around the margins of my consciousness is that I like to think that, by expanding Wikipedia, I am in some small way helping the advance of AI and speeding along the arrival of the...
colin_morris
Wikipedia sure is popular. The most popular articles in a given week routinely get millions of views. But with 6 million plus articles, Wikipedia has plenty of room for articles about topics which are profoundly obscure, even downright boring. I should know, I’ve written dozens of them! Some of...
aharoni
This is a new version of a post that was originally published in 2015. Much of it is the same, but there are several updates that justified publishing a new version. Introduction As you probably already know, Wikipedia is a website. A website has two components: the content and the user...
aharoni
Happy Africa Day! To celebrate this, I am happy to make a little announcement: It is now possible to write in all the Wikipedias of all the languages of Africa, with all the special letters that are difficult to find on common keyboards. You can do it on any computer, without buying any new...
aharoni
Originally written as an answer to the question What are some major flaws in Wikipedia? on Quora. Republished here with some changes. Wikipedia has a whole lot of flaws, and its basic meta-flaw is the disease of familiarity. It does not mean what you think it means. The disease of...
aharoni
The Wikimedia Foundation is leading a process to write a strategy for the Wikimedia movement. This process takes over a year. A few months ago, the conclusion of Phase 1 of this process was published: The strategic direction. Some central concepts in this document are “knowledge as a service” and...
aharoni
Twitter sometimes offers machine translation for tweets that are not written in the language that I chose in my preferences. Usually I have Hebrew chosen, but for writing this post I temporarily switched to English. Here’s an example where it works pretty well. I see a tweet written in French, and...
aharoni
This post is outdated. For a newer version see Amir Aharoni’s Quasi-Pro Tips for Translating the Software That Powers Wikipedia, 2020 Edition Español: Iniciando la Traducción y la Localización de la Interfaz de WikipediaFrançais: Débuter dans la traduction et la localisation de l’interface...
aharoni
In November I gave a talk about how we do localization in Wikimedia at a localization meetup in Tel-Aviv, kindly organized by Eyal Mrejen from Wix. I presented translatewiki.net and UniversalLanguageSelector. I quickly and quite casually said that when you submit a translation at translatewiki,...