Concurrent with the WikiConference India a hackathon has been organised. At the Mumbai hackathon many Wikimedia developers are present but there are many, many more Indian developers. The one thing that is quite funny is that when you ask them “what language do you speak”, they say that it is English. Only when you ask “do you speak any other languages?” you learn “eh, Hindi, Marathi, Tamil..”

Obviously a hackathon is not only for language support, far from it, but there will be a lot of development on the things that tie in with the functionality developed by the Localisation team for MediaWiki like input methods, web fonts and maybe even transliterations between the scripts used by languages like Konkani or Panjabi.

Hackathons are powerful; they help raise awareness that there is not only an “edit button” but that you can also work on the code and help determine what MediaWiki and consequently Wikipedia may be.

Thanks,

Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant