[Wikipedia-l] How does the localisation of MediaWiki work (using Beta-wiki)

Sun Jul 9 17:20:31 UTC 2006

Hoi,
Because of some misunderstanding let me try to explain how the latest 
method of localisation works.

History:
There used to be a situation that the localisation was done using a PHP 
message file. This file needed to be updated when new messages came 
about or when existing messages were changed. This happened because of 
work done on the MediaWiki software. In practice this worked not that 
well and there was also a need to have some messages changed to reflect 
a policy or whatever that was specific to a project. Because of this the 
messages exist. You can change and localise the messages in a project.

The challenge:
The bigger projects with the exception of the en.wikipedia have a lot of 
messages adapted for its language. For people for whom the project 
language is a foreign language, the PHP messages are used because it is 
all the information that is available to help. When a new project 
starts, it does not benefit from the localisation work done elsewhere. 
When a message is changed, it needs to be fixed for that language in ALL 
projects.

The work being done:
Nikerabbit and Gangleri have done absolutely great work by setting up a 
wiki that is there to manage the localisation of MediaWiki. The result 
of this project is that for many languages a proper localisation exists. 
In the process of getting as far as we are, many issues with right to 
left languages have been fixed both in the messages and in the core of 
the MediaWiki software.. Many messages now make use of the Plural 
construct; this allows for the correct phrasing of singular of plural 
forms of text in the messages. The messages are platform agnostic; they 
will however indicate the correct name of the project.

The current issue:
In order to make use of the standardised messages, it is important to 
use the standard messages and not have project specific messages that 
say the same thing. Deleting /these /messages ensure that when a message 
is changed, it will be part of the next update of the software. For the 
project specific messages, it is important that someone who maintains 
these messages is subscribed to the mediawiki-i18n at mail.wikimedia.org 
mailing list. This list is used to inform about the messages/issues that 
are of interest with respect to internationalisation. Wikimedia uses the 
MediaWiki messages in all its projects and in all the languages the 
message Outside the WMF there are many, many more wikis that will 
benefit from us doing a better job localising the software.

The challenge:
I have set myself the challenge to find more people to help with the 
localisation for more languages. MediaWiki is great software is excels 
because it has already been localised in so many languages. For those 
languages where it did not yet happen, we find that the projects are not 
doing that great. By finding interested people and organisations 
MediaWiki will become more usable. It will become not only more usable 
because it will become easier to start a project in languages like Akan 
or Xhosa it will also become more easy to read projects like the 
en.wikipedia as the user interface will no longer be a distraction.

The question:
What if any are the practical issues with this strategy. From my 
perspective there are only winners. * Project specific messages are 
unaffected * All other messages benefit from an effort designed to 
provide a timely and improved service.

Thanks,
     GerardM