Please join us for the following tech talk:
*Tech Talk**:* The MediaWiki Content Translation Extension
*Presenter:* Joel Sahleen, Software Engineer, Wikimedia Language Engineering
*Date:* November 3rd
*Time:* 1800 UTC
<http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?msg=Tech+Talk%3A+Design+Research+in+Product+Development&iso=20141022T19&p1=1440&ah=1>
Link to live YouTube stream <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x7f5Zfvit5E>
*IRC channel for questions/discussion:* #wikimedia-office
Google+ page
<https://plus.google.com/u/0/b/103470172168784626509/events/ckomd4k0uh1fbrafb15tjas343s>,
another
place for questions
*Talk description:*
Wikipedia is the largest online encyclopedia in the world. With more than
32 million articles in over 280 languages, Wikipedia's network of
language-specific MediaWiki sites has become an important global resource
for the preservation and distribution of knowledge. If you look at how
Wikipedia's content is distributed across these language-specific sites,
however, you find that much of it is only available in a few “major”
languages, with English having by far the most content. At the same time,
there is also content found only in smaller Wikipedia language editions
that really deserves a wider audience. In order for different language
communities to be able to share content with each other, we need to provide
their multilingual users with a quick and easy way to translate content
found in one Wikipedia language edition and then publish the result in
another Wikipedia language edition. This is where the MediaWiki Content
Translation extension comes in.
The MediaWiki Content Translation (CX) extension provides a community’s
multilingual users with an array of translation tools they can use to
bootstrap the creation of new articles in their target language from
existing articles in related source languages. These tools are powered by a
set of integrated translation services that are potentially adaptable to
other Wikimedia projects. The extension is currently being made available
as a beta feature for a limited set of test languages that includes
Spanish, Catalan and Portuguese. More languages are planned to be added in
the future based on community interest, impact and various technical
criteria.
This talk will give an overview of the MediaWiki Content Translation
extension’s key features and describe its general architecture. The focus
will be on identifying the problems Content Translation is meant to solve,
explaining how we have attempted to solve these problems and discussing the
value the extension can add to Wikipedia and other MediaWiki based projects.