Hoi,
For your information, a request has been made for the Maithili language.
Given that the language Maithili fulfills the requirements of the language
committee, it has the "eligible" status. This means that when the conditions
have been met, the Maithili request will be approved.
I have asked for Maithili to be enabled on BetaWik<http://translatewiki.net>i,
this means that everything is in place for this phase. I have asked for
English to be the fall back language as Hindi is currently not an option as
this language is not really supported in MediaWiki at this time (18.35% -
7.57% - 0.00%).
There has been a lot of activity at BetaWiki, when you look at the group
statistics <http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Group_statistics>, you
will find that a lot of progress has been made for the Indian languages.. I
do want to remind you that all the work done in BetaWiki will be available
in all the WMF projects (particularly Commons is of relevance here). The
localisations will also become available in the releases of the MediaWiki
software. There is a growing number of projects outside the WMF particularly
in languages other then English. With more websites using MediaWiki, it
becomes easier to find people who can contribute to our projects as well.
Thanks,
GerardM
Hoi,
In advance to a more general announcement, I am going to announce a new
project aimed to improve the localisation of MediaWiki. The details of this
project are published at
http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Translating:Language_project . We are happy
that Hivos allowed us to make this project a reality..
There is a limited amount of money available, and the money available is
biased towards making MediaWiki as usable as possible in languages where it
is not really usable at the moment. We have up to 200 EURO available
(including our payment costs) for the localisation of one language. We will
offer you the choice to pay the money directly to you or when you work as a
group (for instance the Wikimedia Chapter India) you can ask us to pay it in
one go to your organisation. As a last option we have a program whereby you
can donate your money to our program "Donations, putting your money where
your mouth is". This program will pay for things like localisations in other
languages, paying for programmers to finish code that is not production
ready yet, adding features to Open Source programs like OmegaT or OmegaWiki.
If you have other suggestions for this scheme you can ask us to consider
this
In a thread on the Wikimedia India list, there was talk about the need of
Java programs to be used in MediaWiki. Finding money for a developer to
assess if these programs are safe to run in MediaWiki is something that I
would consider for a project in the "Donations, ... " project.
NB the money is to make MediaWiki useful. MediaWiki is however continuously
developed and localisation for your language is constantly needed. The best
we can achieve with money is to get localisation done for now. As MediaWiki
is what makes your Wikipedia or other project possible we urge you to help
us maintain MediaWiki as the best Wiki engine available.
Thanks,
GerardM
Stichting Open Progress
http://betawiki.orghttp://www.hivos.nl/englishhttp://openprogress.orghttp://openprogress.org/Donations%2C_putting_your_money_where_your_mouth_is
Hoi,
I want to congratualte the people of the Bengali projects for being the
first language of the Indian subcontinent to have a 100% localisation for
the MediaWiki system messages. They are powering ahead with the messages for
the MediaWiki extensions. In this way MediaWiki is truly usable for anyone,
inside or outside the Wikimedia Foundation. In this way, it shows clearly
what Open Source is about; it is usable for everyone. :)
Thanks,
GerardM