Language team celebrates 10 years of MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle - Wikitech-l

8 Feb 2023

Slightly over ten years ago the Language team released the first MediaWiki
Language Extension Bundle, or MLEB for short. To date, we have made 64
releases supporting MediaWiki versions from 1.19 to 1.40alpha, and PHP
versions from 5.2 to 8.

Some things are still the same:
* MediaWiki version compatibility policy
* tarball releases
* the goal of providing top notch language support in a convenient package

Some things have changed:
* we went from monthly releases to quarterly releases
* LocalizationUpdate is no longer included in the bundle because it was
made obsolete by automatic translation backports

We don't know much about the users of the MLEB, but according to our
statistics, each tarball release is downloaded on average approximately 300
times. Some people use MLEB releases via git.

As the initiator of MLEB, I am happy to see how far we have come. Thanks
belong to Abijeet Patro and Kartik Mistry who together have done the actual
work to make the releases in the past years.

Fun fact: the tool used to make MLEB releases is called melange. I don't
remember for sure, but I think the name was chosen because it's short for
"MEdiawiki LANGuagE'' and it had a quite appropriate meaning: "A mixture
of
different things; a disordered mixture" (English Wiktionary).

The first release announcement is quoted below.

  -Niklas

ke 28. marrask. 2012 klo 12.17 Niklas Laxström (niklas.laxstrom(a)gmail.com)
kirjoitti:

...
  The Wikimedia Language Engineering team is pleased to
announce the
 first release of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle. The bundle
 is a collection of selected MediaWiki extensions needed by any wiki
 which desires to be multilingual.

 This first bundle release (2012.11) is compatible with MediaWiki 1.19,
 1.20 and 1.21alpha.
 Get it from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MLEB

 The Universal Language Selector is a must have, because it provides an
 essential functionality for any user regardless on the number of
 languages he/she speaks: language selection, font support for
 displaying scripts badly supported by operating systems and input
 methods for typing languages that don't use Latin (a-z) alphabet.

 Maintaining multilingual content in a wiki is a mess without the
 Translate extension, which is used by Wikimedia, KDE and
 translatewiki.net, where hundreds of pieces of documentation and
 interface translations are updated every day; with Localisation Update
 your users will always have the latest translations freshly out of the
 oven. The Clean Changes extension keeps your recent changes page
 uncluttered from translation activity and other distractions.

 Don't miss the chance to practice your rusty language skills and use
 the Babel extension to mark the languages you speak and to find other
 speakers of the same language in your wiki. And finally the cldr
 extension is a database of language and country translations.

 We are aiming to make new releases every month, so that you can easily
 stay on the cutting edge with the constantly improving language
 support. The bundle comes with clear installation and upgrade
 installations. The bundle is tested against MediaWiki release
 versions, so you can avoid most of the temporary breaks that would
 happen if you were using the latest development versions instead.

 Because this is our first release, there can be some rough edges.
 Please provide us a lot of feedback so that we can improve for the
 next release.

   -Niklas

 --
 Niklas Laxström