[Mediawiki-l] Announcement: New mailing list for internationalisation

[Rob Church]

I'd like to announce the creation of a new mailing list dedicated to
centralising discussion regarding MediaWiki internationalisation.
Details can be found at
http://mail.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/mediawiki-i18n.

MediaWiki's support for multiple languages, and the provided
translations, is dependent upon volunteers to maintain the language
files the software uses, and it's fair statement to point out that a
lot of these are out of date or missing entries.

When a developer adds a new feature which requires an interface
message, it's added to the English-language localisation files, and
sometimes the files corresponding to another language, if spoken, e.g.
I might add a new feature and provide English and French messages.
This doesn't help other languages, such as German or Russian.
Likewise, removals or renaming of messages don't propagate to other
languages (although I intend to write a couple of quick scripts to
help make this convenient), leaving obsolete messages behind.

What would be awesome is if each language had a maintainer who was
active in helping to keep their specific language up to date. Some
languages do seem to have de facto maintainers; Rotem Liss, for
example, has adopted Hebrew, and we receive frequent patches from him
in response to updates we make.

I'd therefore like to take this opportunity to extend a welcome to
anyone interested in helping to clean up their spoken language's
translations to join the list and see what it's all about and what
needs doing. I am, of course, happy to answer questions prospective
maintainers have, and Niklas Laxström is another figure you might want
to contact.


Rob Church