History: WS08Paper:TikiWiki and SUMO

Source of version: 2 (current)

!TODO: Maybe this is too much detail about SUMO. Maybe just summarize it in the Intro section? As a mean to reach a broader audience for its popular web browser Mozilla Firefox, the Support Mozilla (SUMO) group, part of the Mozilla Foundation, decided to change the way the project's documentation was maintained. In the past, the documentation was bundled with the application. However, the searchability of the documentation was questionable and the documentation could not be updated as easily. In order to provide better support to the Firefox users, the SUMO project decided to replace all previous components used to support the users with a single help desk. The new help desk contains a knowledge base containing articles and howtos, support forums and live chat. The knowledge base is based on a wiki to enable collaboration on a large scale and simplify the distribution of new content. The TikiWiki project was selected as the platform for the new support site because of its extensive feature set. Multilingual was one of the major challenges the SUMO project was facing. In the past, a master language paradigm could be used to handle the documentation source files. However, with the arrival of collaboration, maintaining multiple languages and ensuring the quality of their content became an issue. To reach a maximum amount of users, 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 serves of the primary test case. Because of the amount 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. However, the SUMO group has specific requirements that had to be met above the initial goals of content synchronization. The SUMO group requires very high quality content. For this reason, they use an approval workflow to make sure all content visible on the website is approved. Moreover, they needed a way to mark translations as potentially out of date to warn readers that significant changes were made on an other translation. To categorize the different pages in the knowledge base, extensive use of tags is being made. In order to improve the experience of the readers, these tags also need to support multilingual correctly. However this aspect will not be covered in the current paper. ! Links (need to be referenced properly before publication) * [http://wiki.mozilla.org/images/3/3e/SUMO-FOSDEM2000.pdf|David Tenser's slides at FOSDEM2008] * [http://blog.mozilla.com/sumo/2007/09/28/firefox-knowledge-base-alpha/|Knowledge base announcement] *[http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2007/08/04/mozilla-launches-official-firefox-support-site-alpha|Announcement comments]