History: CLWE Google Summer of Code Proposal

Source of version: 1

The Cross Lingual Wiki Engine (CLWE) project aims at developing and evaluating lightweight processes and tools to support the collaborative creation and maintenance of wiki content. Such tools are necessary for com

Although the project is based on the TikiWiki platform, our aim is to come up with a blue print and reference implementation that can be replicated by other wiki engines. All code produced in the course of this project will be distributed as Open Source software.

The project will take an agile, incremental and user-centered approach to developing the tools. We will start by implementing the "Simplest Thing That Could Possibly Work", and quickly deploy it for use on our own site (www.wiki-translation.com), and possibly other more corporate sites (ex: ILOG, the Mozilla support site). We will then enter a longer phase where we will iteratively refine and expand these minimal features based on user feedback. 

Our aim is to develop and evaluate processes and tools that can be used with any wiki engine. However, we will use TikiWiki as our initial development platform. Once we have figured out how to enable translation the wiki-way inside of TikiWiki, other wiki engines will be able to follow suit by emulating what we have done.

In order to facilitate this type of emulation, the project team will strive to continuously document their own experience on a lessons learned page:

* ((Lessons Learned from the Cross Lingual Wiki Engine Project))

as well as developer blogs and project discussion forums.

The running code for the cross-lingual version of TikiWiki, and the list of lessons learned, will be the two main outputs of the project.

Below is an approximate timeline with milestones. Note that those are just indicative of what we are aiming for. Given the highly distributed, mostly volunteer nature of this project, we have no way of guaranteeing that specific outputs will be produced by specific dates.


||__Time__|__Activities__|__Deliverables__
__Nov-Dec 2007__| Requirements Gathering, User-Centered Design.|User Personaes, Usage scenario, Prioritized list of features
__Jan-Feb 2008__|Initial development|First release of running software, First set of lessons learned.
__Feb 2008__|Testing and validation of first prototype|Re-prioritized list of features
__March-Nov 2008__|Incremental expansion and refinement|Increasingly powerful versions of TikiWiki translation features, increasingly detailed list of lessons learned||