Technical Evolution of Wikipedia - Teknika Evoluo de Vikipedio
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0:04 - 0:09Technical evolution of Wikipedia by Brion Vibber - Former CTO of Wikipedia
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0:09 - 0:12Good evening, everyone.
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0:12 - 0:15It's my pleasure to present to you, Brion Vibber.
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0:15 - 0:23For years, he's worked at the Wikimedia Foundation as their chief technical officer.
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0:23 - 0:31and I'm very happy, that Lu [the German translator] could come. He runs Esperantoland.org.
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0:31 - 0:35I'll give the floor to Brion.
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0:35 - 0:52Wikipedia: is there anyone who doesn't know about Wikipedia?
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0:52 - 0:57So, a bit of Wikipedia history
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0:57 - 1:05and mostly about the technical aspect of multilingual support.
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1:05 - 1:14Originally when the Wikipedia was founded, it was only in English.
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1:14 - 1:22Now something which is nice and easy about English is that it doesn't have any accented characters.
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1:22 - 1:30But of course, an important problem with that is that the American programmers, like myself,
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1:30 - 1:38don't know much about problems concerning letters and writing systems in other languages,
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1:38 - 1:48and because of that, a lot of software and websites don't handle languages well,
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1:48 - 1:54except those from Western Europe.
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1:54 - 1:59Many are interested in supporting other languages,
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1:59 - 2:08so we can take all human knowledge to everyone on earth.
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2:08 - 2:16So, it would be good to support other languages, but that didn't work well at first.
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2:16 - 2:22I set up many websites for Wikipedia in many languages,
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2:22 - 2:25several dozen languages, in fact.
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2:25 - 2:33But many of them were totally messed up, for example the Japanese Wikipedia.
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2:33 - 2:41Now, it can be written well. It has many characters.
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2:41 - 2:47It looks good and one can read and write. Everything works well now.
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2:47 - 2:52But originally, it looked very similar to that.
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2:52 - 3:02It remained an important problem for many languages: Japanese, Chinese, Russian, Hebrew, etc.
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3:02 - 3:06Many of them didn't work at all.
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3:06 - 3:20At one time, Polish even set up its own website for its wiki,
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3:20 - 3:28which supported Eastern European letters well, but still not Japanese nor Russian, etc.
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3:28 - 3:36At that time, I started to get to know Wikipedia through Esperanto.
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3:36 - 3:45I was a university student and I learned French at a normal course.
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3:45 - 3:55But I became interested in other languages, and I taught myself Esperanto online and through books, etc.
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3:55 - 4:00On my computer and online, it was very interesting,
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4:00 - 4:08and the Esperanto Wikipedia was founded by our dear Chuck.
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4:08 - 4:21At that time, we still had a messed up character set, well for Esperanto, which has accented characters.
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4:24 - 4:31That way it has an accent on the letters.
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4:31 - 4:40But, for it to be written on the webpage, you had to write using the "x system".
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4:40 - 4:50So, "cx" changes to "ĉ", etc. It looks really ugly.
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4:50 - 5:07To make it more beautiful and show it the way it should be, I added Unicode support.
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5:07 - 5:19Unicode is a system to encode characters for every language in the world:
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5:19 - 5:28from Egyptian hieroglyphics to modern Japanese and Korean as well as many symbols
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5:28 - 5:35in one system, which can include all of them.
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5:35 - 5:45So that, we don't need a separate Polish system for Eastern Europe,
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5:45 - 5:49and French for Western Europe, etc.
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5:49 - 5:58We can have just one system, one program, one website for every language.
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5:58 - 6:13With that worldwide system, it was started in computers already 20 years ago,
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6:13 - 6:23but in 2001 or 2002, when we founded Wikipedia, Unicode was still "new" online,
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6:23 - 6:30so it was difficult to use it in "American" programs.
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6:30 - 6:42You had to kind of study how UTF8 works to put Unicode in a web page.
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6:42 - 6:53But, I was able to study it a bit, and I added support to Wikipedia's original software.
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6:53 - 7:04I gave it a converter from the "sx" to the correct "ŝ", etc.
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7:04 - 7:10But I found that it's not just for Esperanto.
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7:10 - 7:14It can work for other languages as well.
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7:14 - 7:22For example Russian, Japanese and Polish can work with Unicode.
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7:22 - 7:28Unfortunately, it was a bit more complicated,
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7:28 - 7:41because at that time we also upgraded to new Wikipedia software, which was completely different from the original.
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7:41 - 7:48It was better, but it still didn't support Unicode.
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7:48 - 7:57Of course, it was created by Western Europeans and Americans,
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7:57 - 8:05and it didn't know there were other languages other than in Western Europe and North America
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8:05 - 8:08which have other letters.
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8:08 - 8:17So, that's why it was necessary to add Unicode support three times.
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8:17 - 8:21Originally for the Esperanto Wikipedia.
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8:21 - 8:34The second time for the new system, which was originally created for the English Wikipedia and didn't need Unicode.
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8:34 - 8:44And again when we completely changed the software to speed it up,
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8:44 - 8:49but then it was completed the third time.
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8:49 - 8:59In 2002 and 2003, we tried to start new Wikipedias in many languages.
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8:59 - 9:13We reacquired Polish and were able to better unite it with the other languages.
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9:13 - 9:22For example, one language can link to a page about the same thing in another language.
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9:22 - 9:29Now with the same system for everything, one can do that.
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9:29 - 9:39It's better to combine the groups in their own language.
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9:39 - 9:46Similarly, there were other problems for the languages in the program online.
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9:46 - 9:54It was somewhat problematic, that the traditional American programmers
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9:54 - 10:06and often even the Western Europeans created their own programs only in English.
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10:06 - 10:16It was a problem when someone didn't know English or didn't know it well
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10:16 - 10:21or just wanted to use a system in their own language.
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10:21 - 10:32Because of that, we also had to add a system to translate messages from the websites,
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10:32 - 10:38so everyone can understand it in their own language.
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10:38 - 10:52For example, we can see ... Article, Discussion, History, Delete
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10:52 - 10:57"Article", "Talk", "Edit", "History", only in English.
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10:57 - 11:01It's not very good, though generally one understands English.
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11:01 - 11:23So, we created a map between the messages and a short description about every message.
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11:23 - 11:41When we have something larger, long messages, and there are sentences and paragraphs, etc.
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11:41 - 11:46It's a bit more complicated than simple words.
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11:46 - 11:54That's why we give a name for every message.
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11:54 - 12:10In the program, it doesn't have an English sentence, it just has a name which is "login-message" or the like.
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12:10 - 12:22In a file with the map for each individual language, is the name and the message.
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12:22 - 12:26The message can be translated into every language.
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12:26 - 12:36Similar systems are used in many programs of various kinds,
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12:36 - 12:50but what is most different about the Wikipedia system, is that one can also change that message.
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12:50 - 13:14If I want to change that sentence a bit, so that my Wikipedia can have a standard or rule
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13:14 - 13:24how one writes an article or choose administrators, etc.
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13:24 - 13:31It can be different in the Wikipedia system.
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13:31 - 13:36One can ... I'm not logged in, so I can't ...
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13:36 - 13:49but the website administrators can use the wiki to change their own messages.
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13:49 - 13:54[Unfortunately then, my camera stopped working.]
- Title:
- Technical Evolution of Wikipedia - Teknika Evoluo de Vikipedio
- Description:
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Brion Vibber, previous CTO of Wikimedia, speaks of the early history of Wikipedia and Esperanto's influence on the multilingualism of the project. English subtitles coming soon. This video is under the Creative Commons BY-NC-SA license.
Brion Vibber, eks-teknikestro de Vikimedio, parolas pri la frua historio de Vikipedio kaj la influo de Esperanto pri la multlingveco de la projekto. Ĉi tiu filmeto estas sub la permesilo de Krea Komunaĵo BY-NC-SA.
- Video Language:
- Esperanto
- Duration:
- 13:55
brion.vibber edited English subtitles for Technical Evolution of Wikipedia - Teknika Evoluo de Vikipedio | ||
brion.vibber edited English subtitles for Technical Evolution of Wikipedia - Teknika Evoluo de Vikipedio | ||
Chuck Smith edited English subtitles for Technical Evolution of Wikipedia - Teknika Evoluo de Vikipedio | ||
Chuck Smith edited English subtitles for Technical Evolution of Wikipedia - Teknika Evoluo de Vikipedio | ||
Chuck Smith edited English subtitles for Technical Evolution of Wikipedia - Teknika Evoluo de Vikipedio |