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