On Sat, Aug 11, 2012 at 9:33 PM, Amir E. Aharoni amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Hallo,
It's my first email on this list, so in case you don't know me: I am Amir, I'm from Israel, I'm a wikipedian since 2004, I write mostly in Hebrew and English, I care strongly about language issues in software in general and about right-to-left support in particular, and I work in the WMF's localization team.
Now, about the subject: you probably know that i18n is "internationalization" and "l10n" is "localization". "m17n" is a less common term, which means "multilingualization" - making software able to work in many languages at once. This email is about one of the easiest and the most important ways to make Wikidata support many languages on one page everywhere.
I've been testing the Wikidata demo for a few days now, with the aim of getting it deployed in the Hebrew Wikipedia very soon. The first thing that I noticed is that even though everybody understands that Wikidata is supposed to be massively multilingual, little or no use is made of the lang and dir attributes in the HTML that Wikidata generates. The most immediate example is http://wikidata-test-repo.wikimedia.de/wiki/Data:Q2?uselang=en
Thanks for the reminder, Amir. I'll bring it up.
Cheers Lydia