Thanks for this great post, Rob. It would be cool to have an i18n coordinator, though then he might have to start writing recommendations for how to improve i18n, l10n, and translation across the projects...

SJ

On Mon, 2 Apr 2007, Rob Church wrote:

Hello, bon jour, guten tag, saluton, etc.

I can't greet everyone fairly, because I don't speak 200-odd languages.

Unfortunately, MediaWiki doesn't, either, and that's what this email's all about.

I'm well aware that foundation-l has had a recent, er, "heated discussion" about internationalising the software with respect to starting new wikis, and I'd rather not stir up a beehive with regards to that.

We've got some fantastic people working on the internationalisation front for MediaWiki; credit must go to Niklas Laxström for his patient, unending work in this field. I'd also like to mention Rotem Liss, who has been providing updates for the Hebrew language for a long period, now, as well as our volunteers giving us updates in German, Russian, Chinese and Japanese; a big, firm "thanks" is in order.

The problem is that we don't have all the bases covered; there are vast numbers of languages not being maintained, and that's a bit of a problem for a software product that's supporting an organisation with international goals in mind.

While individual communities can and do perform translations in their MediaWiki namespaces, reliance on this means that each new wiki we launch needs to perform this step, as opposed to having the interface available in their language, from the fore. I believe that not having software that speaks to you in your language is an immense barrier to contribution.

I'd therefore like to rally a call to arms; we need translators! Thanks to (again, what an i18n legend this dude is) Nikerabbit's work on Betawiki (http://nike.users.idler.fi/betawiki/) means we will (I hope) soon have a clean extension on the Wikimedia Incubator which will make this stuff easier; it's the same process as editing the MediaWiki namespace now, except what we get out of it allows us to tweak and bundle up the translations into the right form for MediaWiki to use.

Of course, if you're able to get to grips with our message file format and you can work a Subversion client, you are more than welcome to update the localisation for your language, or indeed, any other language you feel you can contribute to, and submit patches. If you submit on a consistent and regular basis, then commit access is also forthcoming - we're grateful for people who can speak languages we can't, who can help us out in a major area.

Contributions to MediaWiki internationalisation fall under the GNU GPL, which is for all intents and purposes, ideologically similar to the GNU FDL. If you are the maintainer of a language, you will be credited for it, and you *will* have our immense respect and gratitude, as well as that of all our users.

There's a guide to getting started with internationalisation at http://nike.users.idler.fi/betawiki/Translating:Intro, and anyone interested in helping out is strongly recommended to contact (look, shall we just make him the official i18n co-ordinator?) Nikerabbit; who can often be found on IRC (#mediawiki, irc.freenode.net).

Thank you for your attention, and I apologise for cross-posting,

Rob Church MediaWiki developer _______________________________________________ foundation-l mailing list foundation-l@lists.wikimedia.org http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l