The Wikimedia Language Engineering team is pleased to announce the
first release of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle. The bundle
is a collection of selected MediaWiki extensions needed by any wiki
which desires to be multilingual.
This first bundle release (2012.11) is compatible with MediaWiki 1.19,
1.20 and 1.21alpha.
Get it from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MLEB
The Universal Language Selector is a must have, because it provides an
essential functionality for any user regardless on the number of
languages he/she speaks: language selection, font support for
displaying scripts badly supported by operating systems and input
methods for typing languages that don't use Latin (a-z) alphabet.
Maintaining multilingual content in a wiki is a mess without the
Translate extension, which is used by Wikimedia, KDE and
translatewiki.net, where hundreds of pieces of documentation and
interface translations are updated every day; with Localisation Update
your users will always have the latest translations freshly out of the
oven. The Clean Changes extension keeps your recent changes page
uncluttered from translation activity and other distractions.
Don't miss the chance to practice your rusty language skills and use
the Babel extension to mark the languages you speak and to find other
speakers of the same language in your wiki. And finally the cldr
extension is a database of language and country translations.
We are aiming to make new releases every month, so that you can easily
stay on the cutting edge with the constantly improving language
support. The bundle comes with clear installation and upgrade
installations. The bundle is tested against MediaWiki release
versions, so you can avoid most of the temporary breaks that would
happen if you were using the latest development versions instead.
Because this is our first release, there can be some rough edges.
Please provide us a lot of feedback so that we can improve for the
next release.
-Niklas
--
Niklas Laxström
<tl;dr>: Read https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Mentors and
add your name to the mentors table and start tagging #GCI-2018 tasks.
We'll need MANY mentors and MANY tasks, otherwise we cannot make it.
Google Code-in is an annual contest for 13-17 year old students. It
will take place from Oct23 to Dec13. It's not only about coding:
we also need tasks about design, docs, outreach/research, QA.
Last year, 300 students worked on 760 tasks supported by 51 mentors.
For some achievements from last round, see
https://blog.wikimedia.org/2018/03/20/wikimedia-google-code-in-2017/
While we wait whether Wikimedia will get accepted:
* You have small, self-contained bugs you'd like to see fixed?
* Your documentation needs specific improvements?
* Your user interface has some smaller design issues?
* Your Outreachy/Summer of Code project welcomes small tweaks?
* You'd enjoy helping someone port your template to Lua?
* Your gadget code uses some deprecated API calls?
* You have tasks in mind that welcome some research?
Note that "beginner tasks" (e.g. "Set up Vagrant") and generic
tasks are very welcome (like "Choose and fix 2 PHP7 issues from
the list in https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T120336" style).
We also have more than 400 unassigned open #easy tasks listed:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/HCyOonSbFn.z/#R
Can you mentor some of those tasks in your area?
Please take a moment to find / update [Phabricator etc.] tasks in your
project(s) which would take an experienced contributor 2-3 hours. Read
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Mentors
, ask if you have any questions, and add your name to
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/2018#List_of_Wikimedia_mentors
(If you have mentored before and have a good overview of our
infrastructure: We also need more organization admins! See
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Google_Code-in/Admins )
Thanks (as we cannot run this without your help),
andre
--
Andre Klapper | ak-47(a)gmx.net
https://blogs.gnome.org/aklapper/
Due to a regression, for a few months now Wikimedia Foundation has
stopped updating translations on its wikis every day.
Now that the harmful consequences have become clear, I've asked that we
returned to our normally scheduled localisation updates as for the
previous decade or so:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T203737
Non-Wikimedia wikis can still receive the best quality of service by
running the localisation update every day, thanks to translatewiki.net
translators and staff.
Federico