[Foundation-l] Localisation of MediaWiki

Thu Jan 17 12:39:32 UTC 2008

Hoi,
The bounty program that I announced the other day is designed to help us
improve the localisation for many languages dramatically. We hope and expect
that many languages will be helped to the level that allows only for
occasional maintenance. What we can do is help languages become adequately
localised. It is for the combined communities for a language to ensure that
MediaWiki remains properly localised.

These communities can be from many places. I talked with the good people of
Wikihow yesterday, they have a project in Urdu, and they are interested in
helping us out with the Urdu localisation. There are many other
organisations that have worked on localisation. When they incorporate their
work in BetaWiki, it becomes part of MediaWiki and consequently more people
are served with the work done when it becomes part of a new release. With
more people finding their way to BetaWiki it will be less stressful to
maintain a MediaWiki installation for languages other then English.

Thanks,
     GerardM

On Jan 17, 2008 1:25 PM, Cormac Lawler <cormaggio at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Jan 16, 2008 9:25 PM, Jesse Martin (Pathoschild) <pathoschild at gmail.com
> >
> wrote:
>
> > Hello,
> >
> > GerardM and I had a long phone conference about localization
> > requirements, and we've reached a consensus.
> >
> > Cormac raises a valid concern about the difficulty of localization
> > alongside all the other tasks of opening a new wiki, but the new
> > requirements actually mean less work is needed for the first project.
> > The previous requirements called for the translation of around 1400
> > messages for the first wiki, and around 200 messages for the second
> > wiki. The new requirements only call for the translation of 500
> > messages for the first wiki, and 1700 before the second wiki is
> > approved (by which time many messages have usually been translated
> > over time by the first wiki's community).
> >
> > Even though the new requirements include all extension used by
> > Wikimedia wikis, this is redistributed so that the difficulty of
> > opening the first wiki is reduced, and localization can be done slowly
> > over time until the second project instead of in a huge one-time
> > batch.
>
>
>
> Thanks for this, Jesse. I hadn't understood (and I take it from your mail)
> that there is a 'staggered' process for localisation - that new projects
> are
> to be asked to translate a set number of messages, and subsequent ones the
> rest (that haven't already been done by the first). On the language here,
> perhaps my delineation of "first" and "subsequent" projects up till now
> ("first" being projects that have begun before this policy changing, and
> "subsequent" being new projects) was causing confusion - or perhaps I'm
> still confused. :-) Anyway, I think a staggered process is better than a
> huge one-time batch - but it still seems like an awful lot of work (on top
> of other pressures), and I am just wondering how best to distribute the
> work...
>
> Cormac
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