History: WS08Paper:Context and Background

Source of version: 8 (current)

The work described in this paper is part of an Open Source project called the Cross Lingual Wiki Engine (CLWE) project, which was started in the Fall of 2007: http://www.wiki-translation.com/tiki-index.php?page=Cross+Lingual+Wiki+Engine+Project&bl=y This project aims at designing, developing and testing lightweight wiki tools that can be used to translate content in the new frontier of massively collaborative environments. Our aim is to develop and evaluate processes and tools that can be used with any wiki engine. However, as a first step, we elected to use TikiWiki as our initial development platform. The hope is that 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. The choice of TikiWiki CMS/Groupware as our platform for this reference implementation was justified by the openness of this community towards multilingual support, and the fact that it had already a strong core of developers who were interested in making a CLWE happen. Moreover, around the same period of time, the Support Mozilla community (SUMO) selected it among many other content management system to run the new support site for the Firefox browser. The knowledge base contained in the support site had to be available in multiple languages to reach a user base as large as possible. The SUMO group's ambition is to initially support 8 languages for the most important pages of the knowledge base. Without specific tools to help this task, it would be nearly impossible to ensure content quality. In the context of the Cross Lingual Wiki Engine Project, the SUMO knowledge base appeared to be an excellent primary test case. Because of the great number of languages to be supported and the large amount of potential content and translation contributors, the knowledge base is a perfect scenario to test our tools and study the collaborative translation behavior. To the Mozilla foundation, widespread adoption of Firefox is a critical business objective. Without quality documentation available to a large public, those objectives are impossible to reach.