Extension:WikiBhasha

What is WikiBhasha?
WikiBhasha (Beta) is a browser-based application that helps a community of users to create multilingual content in their [non-English] Wikipedias, leveraging the large English Wikipedia content. This application manifests as a simple and intuitive user interface layer that stays on the target language Wikipedia article that is created or enhanced through this application, during the user-session. At the end of the session, all content created or modified are submitted to the target language Wikipedia.

WikiBhasha Workflow
The UI layer implements a simple 3-step process helping the user in gathering content from source language Wikipedia, composing the target language Wikipedia article, and finally, submitting new content to the target Wikipedia. The UI layer integrates content discovery, linguistic and collaborative services, transparently.

The WikiBhasha (Beta) workflow for contribution to a Wikipedia is in three Steps – Collect, Compose & Submit.

Collect Step
The Collect step is meant for identifying appropriate content from English Wikipedia (say, from the Tiger article) for enhancing the target language Wikipedia article (say, its inter-wiki-linked Panthera Tigris article in Spanish Wikipedia). For example, the English Wikipedia article may contain sections (say, Conservation Efforts) that that may be missing in the Spanish article. Once such content is identified, you may correct the default translations (in target language) to make the content ready for enhancing the target article. You may use the search mechanism to identify more source content from multiple articles.

Compose Step
In the Compose step, you focus on composing a new target language article or enhance an existing article (say, Panthera Tigris in Spanish Wikipedia), with the content sourced in the collect step. An editable pane is provided, with which you can create the new article, or enhance the existing one, by moving the [translated and corrected] content into pane). In addition to moving the sourced content, you may rearrange, modify or rewrite the moved content, or add new material, to get your contribution to the target language article right.

Submit Step
The Submit step puts you in the edit page of the target language Wikipedia article you were working on. The edit box would contain the material you worked on in the compose step. You may use the Wikipedia edit page for any final edits, preview or submission to target language Wikipedia.

Search
Use the Search tool to explore source or target language Wikipedias for other articles from which you identify/source content to enhance target Wikipedia article. The search tool displays relevant articles from both the source and target language Wikipedias, as returned by the default Wikipedia search mechanism.

All the previously visited topics in the user session are avialable for the sssion. Select any topic from the Visited Topics list to switch to that topic. If you select a topic in the source language, the topic will be opened in the Collect step. If you select a topic in the target language, the topic will be opened in the Compose step.

Collaborative Translation Framework
In both the Collect and the Compose steps, a collaborative mechanism – Collaborative Translation Framework (CTF) – is available. CTF is a collaborative cloud service provided by Microsoft Translator, which makes available alternative translations (provided by other users) for the highlighted sentence.

WikiBhasha: Avialability
Currently WikiBhasha (Beta) is available as a MediaWiki Extension, under Apache 2 License and partly under GPL v2.

It is available as a user-script (from Wikipedia user, WikiBhasha.MSR).

It is also available as an installable bookmarklet (and a Grease Monkey Script for Firefox users) from the WikiBhasha site.

Supported Platforms
WikiBhasha (Beta) currently supports all translation pairs in Bing Translator, in which either the source language is English.

WikiBhasha (Beta) currently tested on Internet Explorer (7 or above) on Windows XP, Windows Vista & Windows 7 and on Firefox (3.5 or above) on Windows and Linux (Fedora 11 or above).

User Guide
The WikiBhasha beta user guide is available here. Instrucxtions for installation and use of WikiBhasha are provided in the User Guide.