#Wave from #Google to #Apache ?

When Google ended its development of Wave as a product, they promised to fulfil their promise and make Wave open source. As Wave is very much thinking outside the box of dated technology, it is encouraging that Apache is considering to adopt Wave as an Apache incubator project.

With Wave as a truly open source project, new  opportunities appear. There are developers who just come along and start contributing to the code and with Wave as an Apache project it benefits from an organisational support that is credible.

With Wave open source, there is one other aspect that is vital for it to become a success; internationalisation and localisation. Google told us that they were ready to provide localisation support for the core product. Now that it will run at Apache, it becomes possible to internationalise and localise robots as well.

We live in interesting times and with Wave becoming "Wave in a box" the promise of a new paradigm is not lost.
Thanks,
     GerardM

Wave goodbye

Sheer brilliance was not enough, it is curtains for Wave. Bits and bobs are likely to appear in Google products but the whole notion of Wave as the next generation, game changing product is not going to be realised.

For us Wave proved itself quickly; it was easy to produce a WYSWYG interface for MediaWiki. This generated a lot of interest in many places, it had us generate a lot of air miles and we had something to show and tell.

For us there were a few issues that were not resolved to our satisfaction. Our aim was to provide a WYSWYG interface for MediaWiki and this meant that our complete solution had to be open source. This took just too long, there were understandable reasons but it killed interest in the Wikimedia Foundation. As the Wave interface was to be used for Wikipedia, it was just not acceptable that there was no way to internationalise and localise Wave and its extensions.

I am sad that it is over, here is finally a video with Erik Schmidt talking about the demise of Wave..The sound quality is poor..



Thanks,
      GerardM

Can we use Wave to edit MediaWiki on a mobile ?

I spend quite a lot of time helping the Mobile Wikipedia become more prominent. I learned a lot from doing this so I consider it time well spend. The number of languages with sufficient localisation has gone up from 20 to 52 or 34 depending on how you count. We created some concept mobile main pages and we requested the implementation of two main pages for two Wikipedias.

The software used is build in Ruby on Rails and it is developed separate from MediaWiki. It is currently useful to read Wikipedia articles, you cannot edit and you can not sign on or set personal preferences.

The MediaWikiWave project proved the concept that it is possible to create a WYSIWYG interface for MediaWiki. We have a functional editor for MediaWiki, the question is will it also work on a mobile phone, the question is will it also work with other languages and scripts.

I expect that for Wave to succeed, it will support both mobile phones and other languages and scripts. We have been told that internationalisation is part of the core MediaWiki functionality, and as I argued earlier, internationalisation and localisation need proper support for bots and gadgets as well. The one thing I am not sure about is mobile telephone support. What I do expect is, if not great then rapidly improving, support in Chrome and on Android and Chrome OS devices.
Thanks,
       GerardM

Internationalisation is an architecture

The #wave internationalisation and localisation is said to be planned for the future. I believe that this will be true for the core product. However, this does not give me the confidence I need for the robots and gadgets that are build by all the people outside Google.

When you look at the Etherpad software, you will find that it has not been internationalised and consequently it is estimated to be some 3 to 6 weeks of work to introduce internationalisation to the code. I expect that a similar situation exists for the robots and gadgets but the problem is more complicated because of the many developers involved.

Internationalisation is an architecture and consequently it should be part of the design not only for the core code but also for everything else. A good example of how this should be done can be found at translatewiki.net where software like MediaWiki and StatusNet are localised. Both these applications have extensions and for MediaWiki almost all extensions are localised as a matter of cause. The first extensions for StatusNet are appearing at translatewiki.net and, it will prove a lot of work to get them internationalised and ready for localisation.

It would be great if a road plan for the total internationalisation for both Wave and its gadgets and robots would be published.. It may be even an idea to consider translatewiki.net, it boasts a community that aims to support over 250 languages...
Thanks,
     GerardM

Wave and education

We met at the first class restaurant at the Amsterdam central station and we discussed the potential of Wave in an educational setting. As you can imagine, many issues with Wave were discussed but the question was: "Is Wave ready for an experimental course where educators try to find out if Wave is a tool that makes sense in education".

When Wave is to be used in education, Wave itself will not be the subject and in this experiment it will be. The audience if the experiment will be educators who are interested to learn if the new paradigm that Wave presents is this leap forward. Such an experiment does not necessarily require everything that is needed for students: internationalisation and localisation can be left for later, it will be easy to find the necessary Wave invites. Functionality that makes sense in an educational setting like new content that is triggered either by the teacher of by conditions can be left for later as well.

We need to learn if Wave adds value. When it does and, we believe it will, the other open issues will need to be addressed as well. First we have to learn if Wave can enthuse educators.
Thanks,
      GerardM

Google Amsterdam

When Tom learned that Douwe Osinga was in the Netherlands, it was a great opportunity to seek a meeting and learn what the time line is for Wave.

If one thing is clear, it is that by the end of September 100.000 people will gain access to the Wave environment. Beyond that a lot of hard work is still to be done to make Wave ready. For us in the MediaWiki Wave project, it is clear that we will not wait for the APIs that will be ready in "two weeks". What we can do is sanitise the existing code, and include new functionality like the syntax highlighter written by Kim. There are plenty of things we can add to our code, using MediaWiki authentication is one of them and we will.

When you meet people like Douwe, it is a great moment to ask and inform about the issues on our end as well. There are two key show stoppers that will prevent adoption of Wave in the Wikimedia Foundation they are:

• Wave must be published open source
• Wave must include internationalisation infrastructure
  

In the way Google is developing Wave, they want to provide a stable product that will provide people a stable basis for further development. Some of the software provides this basis and this allowed for our project while other parts are just not ready. This is a reasonable rationale but it is equaly understandable that the WMF will not adopt software that is not published open source.

Given that there are Wikipedias in over 250 languages, all software has to be internationalised. At this time, the core Wave functionality includes the message structures that provide the basic building blocks for internationalisation. It is not clear how these building blocks are to be used in our software. It is not yet clear how we will interface with the Wave data; in MediaWiki we distinguish between the language of the content and the language of the interface. Wave does allow for multiple languages in the content.

What will be interesting is how we will resolve the issues we have with projects that use incorrect language codes. This is an issue that the WMF should address anyway. The easiest option would be to support only those projects with advanced software that conform to the relevant standards.
Thanks,
GerardM