Hi Everyone,

Please join me in welcoming Joel Sahleen as software engineer in the Language Engineering team.

Joel joins us from Adobe where he has been a globalization engineer for the past 5 years. He developed the internationalization and localization system for PHP components used in the Adobe Marketing Cloud. He also helped build a continuous integration system for localization that currently supports many different products, programming languages and file formats. Prior to becoming a techie and taking the job at Adobe, Joel did a long stint as a Teaching Fellow in the Departments of East Asian Languages and Literatures and Religious Studies at Stanford University. Joel taught courses on Early Chinese Language, Thought, History and Culture and developed course materials used for Advanced Classical Chinese. Joel is very interested in the development of collaborative, online, multilingual texts and is looking forward to advance platform support for languages, scripts, encodings and formats in the Wikimedia universe.

In Joel’s own words - “My main reason for wanting to join the WMF is that I believe in its mission. I believe providing access to knowledge is one of the best things you can do to help a person live up to his or her full potential, and as the world becomes more interconnected and interdependent, I believe it is essential that the pursuit of knowledge becomes more community-driven and accessible to everyone. Language engineering is key to making this collaborative effort possible and I am glad to be joining a team and an organization that is actively working to make the world a better place.” I couldn’t agree with him more.

Joel lives right outside Salt Lake City, Utah with his wife, two boys, nephew and two dogs. He enjoys traveling, writing, painting and most of all - learning new things.

He can be reached on email at jsahleen at wikimedia.org and on our irc channels including #mediawiki, #wikimedia-dev and #mediawiki-i18n. ​ He will also be at Wikimania so feel free to say hello!​

Joel - I am excited to have you on the language engineering team :-) Welcome!

​-​ Alolita

Alolita Sharma आलोलिता शर्मा Director of Engineering Internationalization & Localization Wikimedia Foundation