Hi All,
As some of you already know, *Usability Teamhttp://usability.wikimedia.org * is driving the task of updating the default skin of all WikiMedia Foundation wikis to a skin called *Vector*http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Vector. English Wikipedia and some other big wikis have already moved to *Vector skin* some time back. Apart from the UI, the logo of Wikipedia is also updated http://blog.wikimedia.org/2010/wikipedia-in-3d/.
Yesterday (2010 June 30) at 10:30 PM IST, some other wikis (that have carried out the formalities required for the UI change) are also moved to the new UI. Among this, 3 Indian Language Wikipedias are also there. Following are those Indian Language wikipedias:
- Malayalam - http://ml.wikipedia.org - Bengali - http://bn.wikipedia.org - Telugu - http://te.wikipedia.org
Please note the new default skin and the new logo that are appearing on these wikis. (You may need to clear the cache to see the changes. )
Now to move your language wiki to Vector, you have to perform the following two major operations:
1. Update the logo of your wiki 2. Localize the Vector skin system messages
Logo update
For some languages, logo is already updated. See the list here: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia/2.0
If your wiki's logo is missing from this list, then you need to create the new logo based on the instructions listed on this page. http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikimedia_official_marks/About_the_offic...
Localizing the Vector skin System messages
For the current update, you need to localize the Vector skin system messages. To localize the system messages, use Translate wiki - http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Main_Page
The current Localization statistics of Vector skin system messages is available here. http://translatewiki.net/wiki/User:GerardM/usability-stats
You can see that many Indian languages (for example, Tamil) are missing from this list. The reason is, none of the Vector skin system messages are localized for those languages. Even for the big Languages like Hindi and Marathi the percentage of localized messages is very low.
So I request the respective Indian Language Wikipedia communities to take required initiative to switch over to the new Skin. Usability team is planning for next set of switch over by the end of July. So you have almost one month to finish these tasks.
Once you finish the above tasks you need to:
- Let the community know about this upcoming update (Use the village pump, Site Notice, Mailing list, and so on) - Appoint some volunteers to answer the questions related to this - Appoint an ambassador to collect the feedback/issues/bugs and report it to the Usability Team.
Please let me know in case you require any support regarding this.
Regards Shiju Alex