Internet resources: Microsoft and Wikipedia team up to release joint software

On October 18 2010 Microsoft Research announced the launch of the beta version of WikiBhasha, a multilingual content creation tool for Wikipedia.

The WikiBhasha beta is available as an open source MediaWiki extension (under the Apache License 2.0), and as a separate program on Wikipedia website. The tool is also available as an installable bookmarklet at http://www.wikibhasha.org .

The WikiBhasha beta is a browser-based tool that works on Wikipedia sites. It features an intuitive and simple user interface that stays on the target-language Wikipedia for the entire content creation process. WikiBhasha integrates content discovery with linguistic and collaborative services, focusing the user primarily on content creation in the target Wikipedia.

A three-step process guides the user in the content discovery and sourcing from English Wikipedia articles, composing Wikipedia article in the necessary language and publishing it in the target Wikipedia. Although a typical session may be to enhance a target-language Wikipedia article, new articles may also be created following a similar process.