[Mediawiki-i18n] Announcements from Wikimedia Language team

Niklas Laxström niklas.laxstrom at gmail.com
Fri Jun 17 09:18:09 UTC 2016


The Wikimedia Language team has been assembling monthly reports about
language support activities for one year. You can read the latest
report at:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering/Reports/2016-May

Highlights for May include: Special:Translate got an edit summary
field and modernization of web font formats: woff2 is in, eot is out.

Due to the nature of our work, the Language team [1] (Amir, Kartik,
Pau, Runa, Santhosh, and myself) alone cannot adequately support all
the languages of the Wikimedia movement. That is why the report
includes work by volunteers. We have bolded the names who we believe
are contributing as volunteers.

This report focuses on technical activities. You wont find future
plans or high level roadmap items on it. There is currently a major
omission: the i18n work of MediaWiki core itself. That is lacking
because it is more difficult to filter those activities and also
because we have not had much time for MediaWiki core i18n work.

To acknowledge the work of volunteers and to support them better, the
Language team released a statement of intent for code review [2] about
six months ago. To summarize: we attempt to review patches not by us
within a week, and patches stalled due to no updates after review for
three months will be abandoned -- unless we feel they are worth fixing
ourselves.

When we released the statement, we also agreed to reduce the existing
backlog of open patches. The results so far are positive, even though
it is easy to find examples where we have not been able to follow our
intent. Translate extension had 35 open patches when we started in
February -- at end of May it had only 12 open patches [3]. Universal
Language Selector had gone from 10 to 6, and fewer of them unreviewed.
Content Translation had gone from 15 to zero. Our jquery repositories
in GitHub have not fared as well, but we hope to achieve similar
results there in the future.

We excluded many repositories from the statement of intent in the fear
that we would add too much of a burden to ourselves. To our delight,
except MediaWiki core i18n, all those repositories have had swift
reviews and I count only two open patches in them.

  - Niklas (on behalf of the Language team)

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering
[2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Language_engineering/Code_review_statement_of_intent
[3] The numbers change constantly. As of 2016-06-17 Translate has 23
open patches, but only 10 of them not from our team. Universal
Language Selector has 13 patches, 5 of them not from our team. Content
Translation currently has 6, one of them not from our team.



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