[Foundation-l] LocalisationUpdate is live

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
It used to be that when you added to the localisations at translatewiki.net,
it could take months before these localisations became part of any of the
WMF projects. This is no longer the case. From now on, your localisations
will become available in a much more timely manner. Typically localisations
will become available within a day, the worst case scenario is that it will
take three days.

This has some major implications. It was found that people in languages
where the localisations of the software of the Usability Initiative did not
stick with the "beta test". This presented a problem; is this because of the
lack of localisation or is it because of cultural differences with regard to
usability. We can now ask people to help us iwith the localisation and learn
quickly where the problem is. We know that information for several scripts
is missing in the advanced toolbox. Telugu was added recently but Devangari,
Kanada, Tamil and Sinhala is still missing.

We can now really concentrate our standard localisation in one place. This
is very much wanted because it will improve our performance and it will
ensure better maintenance of our MediaWiki system messages.

It is for all these reasons that we ask you to got to translatewiki.net for
your localisations. It would be appreciated when all the messages are
compared with what has been done locally. When local messages are the same
as in translatewiki.net, they will eventually be removed by the Wikimedida
developers. When they are not the same, there will be local messages that
have missing parameters, these messages are best removed locally. Other
messages indicate things that are specific to a project these messages are
the ones that have to remain locally.

With the LocalisationUpdate being live on all our wikis, we hope and expect
that the quality of the localisations will improve. This will make it easier
for people to understand what is asked from them by our software and this
will grow our number of readers and editors. We need you to help us realise
our wish to bring information to everyone. Localisation is an important part
of making this possible.
Thanks,
      GerardM