Hi,

As a volunteer developer for MediaWiki, I have for quite some time been working on two related things: improving the usability of Wikimedia Incubator through an extension, and improving internationalization and language support in MediaWiki. My Google Summer of Code project was a continuation of these. A difficulty for me is that I usually code whatever comes up at a certain point, as opposed to having a detailed plan, so GSoC was in that regard different for me, plus looking at what I did so far generally, I think I have done greater things for MediaWiki (like improving RTL support) in the past than now during GSoC.

In MediaWiki core I wanted to include all ISO 639 language codes [1] and their names and I wanted to make a cache for the MediaWiki language names in general. This has been done, although the cache is implemented only for the list of ISO 639 languages. As for unplanned things, I continued working on the page content language, specifically converting DateFormatter, dates in sortable tables and default image alignment [2] to the page content language; I also did a few more things, e.g. added a Uzbek Latin-Cyrillic language converter[3].

In the WikimediaIncubator extension, I created a special page (Special:IncubatorFirstSteps[4]) that guides users through setting up an account and/or creating a test wiki. I improved the automatic info pages [5] which welcome users to a certain test wiki and I added a parser function which will eventually replace the current info page template. It should therefore be able to take parameters, and not all of them have been added yet but the general structure is ready. The database and logo code is rewritten, enabling localized logos on the info pages (not important, but nicer). Lastly, I wanted to add filtering and suggestions for language codes in inputboxes where they need to be entered, which I did in the preferences.

Now I will still work on the extension and I will likely be active on MediaWiki in general, but as I explained I do not really have a plan :) In core however, I think I would still like to add the feature to specify the page content language via the interface (into the database), currently it is only possible through an extension hook.

My mentor was Niklas, and as we are both more quiet persons we did not communicate as often as it probably should in GSoC; on the other hand I am familiar with MediaWiki so I did not have a lot of questions or problems. In any case I would like to really thank him for his time and all the code review he did for my code commits.

It was also very nice to have regular deployments to Wikimedia wikis, especially since Incubator is in phase 1, so it gets code updates quickly after the code is branched.

Lastly, I probably could have achieved more in the GSoC summer, but it is always surprising how fast the time can go even though you are a lot of your time at your computer.

Thank you, Robin Pepermans (SPQRobin)

[1] All languages: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/11829/ [2] Default image alignment: on translations in RTL languages, images are correctly aligned at the left instead of right, for example on https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Highlights,_May_2012/ar [3] Uzbek converter: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/15690/ [4] https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:IncubatorFirstSteps [5] Incubator info pages are in the format Wx/xyz, e.g. https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wn/bn All my recent commits: https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/q/owner:SPQRobin,n,z