[HOT] Board Meeting Minutes March

Tue Mar 13 14:59:26 UTC 2018

Some other languages I have added supports also include Amharic, all
languages officially recognized by states or territories in India, all(?)
official/national languages shared by several countries.
For each country there's now a "place" page with relevant links. I have
also included their own category, and a few common subcategories: Users,
Places, Tagging guidelines, Events (note that the new "Disasters" category
is also part of Events). The "Disasters" category will interest HOT.

The main category for HOT is also a bit more organized. I added today a
subcategory for "guides" (not just OSM tagging, but guidelines for various
topics, including designs, methodology...)
HOT is fully organized by year (this helps focusing current activities and
what is going on.

Generally I do very little editing in pages I collect and organize (most
often the categories at bottom, basic HTML corrections for correct
rendering, the languages bar at top for pages that have translations).
These tasks are highly incremental and repetitive, this could be boring to
do for many, but I'm patient and progress by small successive steps. I do
my best to never break any existing link, and solve all double redirects
left: linking articles together is probably easier to do now from any
language (there's some utility templates for that such as {{{LL|article
name in English}} or {{LLC|Category name}} used in category pages (notably
for {{see also|...}}).

The hard work being done, there's less things to do to translate things. I
document as much as possible the templates used, and also organize the
templates with their topic of interest. I've tuned many templates so they
work with different writing directions, and many templates are now
autotranslated. I have also documented all the language fallbacks used for
missing translations (I derived rules from those used in Wikimedia Commons).

I have also regularized all language codes used, to be fully BCP47
conforming (this allows external search engines to find relevant topics and
propose more accurate automatic translations if needed, and infer various
things from our own organized terminology, enhanced also by the links to
Wikipedia or Wikidata which provide additional semantics.

In some cases, I need to rename pages to avoid ambiguities (place names
have lots of homonyms): this is not always very simple to adapt. I may have
forgotten some cases, and in that case, sorry for the disturbance, there's
always a way to fix that clenly and centralize the maintenance as much as
possible to avoid most duplicate works and finally reduce the long term
maintenance as the content of the wiki is constantly growing.

2018-03-13 15:38 GMT+01:00 Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr>:

> I'me sometimes criticized for this huge work, many don't realize the work
> I4ve done and jusst see that the wiki is now becoming accessible to them
> and just start using it.
> I receive very few "thank you". But my goal is always to improve the
> cooperation between people around the world, and let them know what's
> happening in their areas or topics of interest, and then build and organize
> the translations they need or want locally, and document local things they
> do in OSM and let others working elsewhere becoming aware of what's
> happening and which new ideas would be useful to develop elsewhre
> (including in well developed countries).
> I've not done much work in HOT meetings since the start of the year,
> because I was very busy at organizing the international contents and solve
> various problems that were pending since long on the wiki.
>
> The wiki is still the main place where people go to find something. I
> think that since I started this huge task, many people have profited of the
> improved navigation and searchability, and new local projects are now
> starting more easily with more people involved worldwide. They can now find
> a lot of things, find new interests, develop better solutions, better
> organize their events, work with better cooperation, and more generally
> this helps improving the overall quality of map data and increase its usage
> worldwide. OSM has now a strong international presence, it is linked with
> lot of opensource/open data projects. Commercial companies start using it,
> and even governments and companies are better incited to open their data:
> the world is realizing that an open map is a real chance of development and
> offers significant economies of scales, and everyone does not need to
> contract and pay Google to use a map on their projects. The number of
> topics covered in OSM is now very large and it offers many new
> opportunities.
>
> Sharing geographic knowledge is better than trying to sell it with
> proprietary restrictions.
>
>
>
>
> 2018-03-13 15:19 GMT+01:00 Blake Girardot <bgirardot at gmail.com>:
>
>> Hi Philippe,
>>
>> Thank you very much for all your work on the OSM wiki.
>>
>> For those that might not know, Philippe is very dedicated to improving
>> the OSM wiki as a whole to support translations and
>> internationalization much more effectively (in addition to better
>> organization). If you have ever had questions about how you can help
>> translate any OSM wiki page, Philippe is great person to ask.
>>
>> Thank you again for all your hard work for OSM and HOT Philippe!
>>
>> Respectfully,
>> blake
>>
>> On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 2:58 PM, Philippe Verdy <verdy_p at wanadoo.fr>
>> wrote:
>> > Note: I'm recreating a categorization of HOT meetings minutes/logs, by
>> > working troup or by year, they are now being collected on hte wiki in
>> >
>> > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Humanitarian_
>> OSM_Team_Training
>> > (replace Training by the Working group name)
>> >
>> > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Humanitarian_
>> OSM_Team_meetings
>> > (ordered by date)
>> >   https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Humanitarian_
>> OSM_Team_2017
>> > (ordered by date, includes also activation pages in that year, replace
>> 2017
>> > for each year)
>> >
>> > I've already collected the minutes for two working groups: Training, and
>> > Activation, the others are being sorted.
>> >
>> > This can help have a log of HOT activities and keep track of past
>> > experiences to help building and organizing new activities and
>> activations.
>> >
>> > Most of these pages were not categorized, and in fact hard to find. Next
>> > step will probably be to unify the naming scheme, but for now pages are
>> not
>> > renamed.
>> >
>> > Once I have filled the categories for each working group, I may look at
>> most
>> > populated categories to see if we need subcategories (there will
>> probably be
>> > subcategories by year in
>> > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Humanitarian_
>> OSM_Team_meetings
>> > (ordered by date)
>> > In which case we would have
>> >
>> > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Humanitarian_
>> OSM_Team_2017_meetings
>> > (ordered by date)
>> > (also added as a subcategory for
>> > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Category:Humanitarian_OSM_Team_2017
>> )
>> > and then there would be only two parent categories instead of 3 for each
>> > meeting.
>> >
>> > I've also organized the new "Category:Disasters" with some disaster
>> types.
>> > Project pages for specific disasters by country/region and dates are
>> also
>> > categorized in their respective categories for the coutry/region and in
>> the
>> > Disaster type category (which have also some relevant subcategories for
>> > tagging or other OSM projects, not just HOT), in order to improve the
>> > cooperation between local teams and other thematic OSM groups or local
>> > contributors.
>> > For some countries/regions I created a "place" page with geolocation,
>> > wikipedia/wikidata, users/contacts, local meetings, and local projects.
>> >
>> > The purpose is to integrate all the efforts that share common needs or
>> > resources (even after the HOT event tracking) to improve the maps and
>> have
>> > all projects followed by larger sets of contributors and make them
>> aware of
>> > ongoing or pending actions, or know that there has been some HOT action
>> in
>> > their area. It can be used as well to study how we all perform
>> together, or
>> > to detect duplicate non-coordinated efforts. This can be used also by
>> HOT to
>> > limit their field of action, or better evaluate what is needed and find
>> > local contacts more easily. It can be used to make statistic analysis,
>> > quality auditing, and so on: the wiki has lots of information which is
>> not
>> > linked to relevant topics.
>> >
>> > Note: I include the possibility of coordinating languages (this is a
>> long
>> > project started since months which also helps developping local
>> communities
>> > in their language). I have improved also the number of languages
>> supported
>> > in the wiki (not everything needs translation, but translation of
>> specific
>> > pages is possible at any time and should be linked to other languages
>> for
>> > all contents still not translated). So I have added recently support for
>> > South Asian languages, improved the categorization and linking in India
>> > (soon I'll structure the Bangladesh area). I've made major improvements
>> for
>> > navigating the Caribbeans, Brasil and Mexico. I integrated the recent
>> events
>> > in Oceania and Indonesia. Africa needs more work (but the problem is to
>> find
>> > translators in African languages outside the 3 major languages: French,
>> > English, Arabic, possibly also Portuguese). Some core training pages are
>> > needed for non-Latin written scripts (notably Amharic), but also for
>> > Latin-written languages (Wolof and Lingala for example). Support for
>> South
>> > African languages was also added (but not actual translations: I made
>> the
>> > complex part so that translators and contributors don't have to start
>> > immediately to do the huge work needed to build the structure and align
>> it
>> > to the rest).
>> >
>> > I did not forget Europe however (and not just the European Union). In
>> > general I make the structures on the wiki more regularized to help find
>> > relevant topics more immediately. I also resolve various linking
>> problems
>> > people experiment when they try to organize their country/regions
>> (Russia
>> > for example has some basic structure, which is still not uniform, but
>> would
>> > require significant improvement: many "red links" everywhere). But I've
>> made
>> > minimal changes to Russia because there are active contributors on the
>> wiki
>> > that are slowly making this structuration.
>> >
>> > And more generalyl I fix various problems reported by Mediawiki itself
>> or by
>> > helper templates that I have solidified. Now the wiki is very solid in
>> > English, French, German and Japanese, it starts being better organized
>> for
>> > Italian, Dutch and Portuguese. Lots of efforts are needed for Russian
>> and
>> > Chinese, but even more for Arabic, Hindi, Urdu, Bengali, Thai, and
>> > Indonesian (Vietnamese is better advanced) to have a good worldwide
>> coverage
>> > with minimum efforts and more accessiblity to OSM projects by people
>> > worldwide. English should not be the single language for everything
>> > (including in India or Southern African countries).
>> >
>> > _______________________________________________
>> > HOT mailing list
>> > HOT at openstreetmap.org
>> > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/hot
>> >
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> ----------------------------------------------------
>> Blake Girardot
>> OSM Wiki - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Bgirardot
>> HOTOSM Member - https://hotosm.org/users/blake_girardot
>> skype: jblakegirardot
>>
>
>
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