[Mediawiki-i18n] outreach and why what can be achieved

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
At the moment we are reaching out to all the language communities that have
a Wikipedia. For some languages we have had reasons to reach out earlier;
they are the language communites of Indian languages and the language
communities where we identified issues with our MediaWiki plural
definitions.

As a result of the outreach about plural support, we are now looking into
the plural rules for Scots Gaelic. As you can read in the translatewiki
thread, these rules are used in several applications and it is beneficial
when the applicable standard has correct information about this so that it
is easy to implement. It is really heartening to learn that bugs have been
posted at the CLDR to include this language.

http://translatewiki.net/wiki/Thread:Support/New_plural_rules_for_Scots_Gaelic_(gd)
As support for things like plural are often implemented when a large body
of code has already been written, it follows that the existing code needs
to be refactored to include support for plural, grammar, gender in
messages. In many threads in Support at translatewiki.net, you will find
people indicating single messages. These are often readily picked up by the
staff at translatewiki.net. However, there are big projects that linger on
to mind comes logging. The log files are often about people, they do have a
gender and consequently many of the messages need change and support
gender. The good news is that Niklas build the framework that allows for
gender support in log messages. The bad news is that it is a big job that
needs doing for many logs.

If you are interested in working on the MediaWiki code and improve its
language support, we are quite happy to point you to what needs doing and
we do lend a hand when need be.
Thanks,
      Gerard
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