Det vatten du hämtar ur bäcken lär dig känna källan – a Swedish Proverb.

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team participated in GNUnify 2013 held in Pune, India on February 15–17. The team presented their work, conducted a translation sprint, organized workshops and also participated in discussions with local Wikipedians about using MediaWiki and Wikimedia projects in their languages.

Presentations by the team

Runa Bhattacharjee presented about the changing dynamics in the adoption of localized content and the need for developing tools that facilitate new demands. She introduced the projects that the Language Engineering team is working on. Siebrand Mazeland and Niklas Laxström gave a walkthrough of the MediaWiki Translate extension and the translatewiki.net platform, and showcased the new design and features of the updated translation editor.

Santhosh Thottingal presented how the jQuery libraries of Project Milkshake can be used to prepare multilingual web applications for internationalization; he also presented a tutorial on their use. Amir Aharoni demonstrated the easy use of the input methods provided by the jQuery.IME library and how to contribute using phonetic keymaps. He encouraged use in web applications of the currently more than 140 input methods of the library. Yuvaraj Pandian demonstrated how he ported jQuery.IME for use in Android devices.

Alolita Sharma spoke about technologies and tools that help contributing to Wikipedia in various languages. She highlighted the need for features and tools to support non-English Wikipedias and the solutions that the Language Engineering team is developing that would help eliminate fundamental hindrances that contributors face while trying to create content for Indian languages. She also spoke about the other Wikimedia projects that are open for participation.

Workshops

Amir Aharoni conducted a workshop on the jQuery.IME library, in which he demonstrated the procedure to add a new input method and submit it for inclusion on GitHub. A two-hour translation sprint was conducted in which almost 40 participants translated various projects hosted on translatewiki.net. At the end of the session, more than 1000 completed translations were logged and prizes were distributed for the most significant contributions. Yuvaraj Pandian, Sucheta Ghoshal and Harsh Kothari conducted a workshop on building MediaWiki gadgets. Participants were introduced to the process of creating gadgets using JavaScript and CSS, and making them available for other users.

Language Engineering BOF session

The Language Engineering team also organized a session to discuss technical issues related to Wikimedia projects in Indian languages, which was attended by local Wikipedians. Issues related to following up on internationalization and localization bugs and building local technical user groups were discussed.

To conclude, participation in open source conferences such as GNUnify helps get more open source developers as well as language Wikipedians aware of the latest tools that the Language Engineering team is developing which they can use as well as receive direct feedback from the global communities the team serves.

More information can be found in the detailed report.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Fortuna i forti aiuta, e i timidi rifiuta — an Italian proverb

The Wikimedia Foundation and Red Hat jointly organized the Second Open Source Language Summit on February 12th and 13th, 2013. The summit was held at the Red Hat engineering center in Pune, India. Similar to the previous summit, this face-to-face work session was focused on internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) features, font support, input method tools, language search, i18n testing methods and standards. The sessions were work sprints, each with special focus on a key area. Participants included core contributors from the Wikimedia Foundation, Red Hat (including Fedora SIG members), KDE, FUEL, Google and C-DAC. Below is a summary of what was accomplished during these two days.

Input Methods

Parag Nemade and Santhosh Thottingal worked on making additional input methods available for the jQuery.IME library. 60 input methods, covering languages like Assamese, Esperanto, Russian, Greek, Hebrew were added bringing the total to 144. Also IMEs from the m17n library missing from the jQuery.IME library were identified.

Translation tools, translatewiki.net & FUEL Sprint

Siebrand Mazeland and Niklas Laxström, together with Ankit Patel, Rajesh Ranjan and Red Hat language maintainers, worked to identify more tools that could be used as Translation aids in a translation system. The FUEL project aims to standardize translations for frequently used terms, translation style and assessment methodology. Until now it has focused mostly on languages of India. The FUEL project can now be translated in translatewiki.net. Pau Giner demonstrated new designs for the translation editor and terminology usage, remotely from Spain.

Language Coverage Matrix

To better evaluate the needs for enabling support for languages, a matrix detailing the requirements and availability of basic and extended features is being drawn up. With 285 languages currently supported in Wikimedia and more than 100 in Fedora, this document will be instrumental in bridging the gaps and porting features across projects and platforms. Key areas of evaluation include input methods, fonts, translation aids like glossaries and spell-checkers, testing and validation methods, etc. A preliminary draft was created during the summit by Alolita Sharma, Runa Bhattacharjee and Amir E. Aharoni.

Fonts, WebFonts

An initiative to document the technical aspects of fonts for scripts for languages spoken in India started during the language summit. For each of the scripts, a reference font will be chosen and each font will be explained in detail to intersect with the Open Type font specification as a standard. It will aim to act as a reference document for any typographer working on Indian language fonts. Initial draft and outline of this document was prepared during the second day of the language summit, mainly by Santhosh Thottingal and Pravin Satpute.

Testing Internationalization Tools

Finding suitable methods for testing internationalized components and contents was the major focus of this sprint, with the Fedora Localization Testing Group (FLTG) and Wikimedia’s Language Engineering team sharing details of their testing methods. The FLTG conducts Test Days prior to Fedora beta releases with a test matrix targeted at specific core components, and Wikimedia uses unit tests for frequent testing of their development features. The FLTG showed its plans to integrate the screenshot comparison method for testing localized interfaces. This method will be useful for Wikimedia too. Extending the method for web-based applications and Wikimedia’s language requirements (e.g. right-to-left) were identified as areas for collaboration.

More news from the Language Summit can be found in the tweets, the session notes and the full report.

Runa Bhattacharjee, Outreach and QA coordinator, Language Engineering

Edit-a-thons are a well-established way to teach new people how to edit Wikipedia or encourage existing contributors to collaborate around a given topic. But organizing a formal edit-a-thon can take some time and energy, especially with larger events like the San Francisco WikiWomen’s edit-a-thons I helped organize in 2012. These events are a lot of fun, and we accomplish plenty of good editing that makes them worth the effort, but I often walk away from them feeling like I just ran a marathon. Maia Weinstock called the planning process for her Ada Lovelace edit-a-thon at Harvard “a whirlwind effort”, and WikiWoman Sarah Stierch and I have agreed that we probably don’t have the energy to organize them more than a few times a year. That’s unfortunate, because we’ve noticed that many women who start contributing at these events enjoy the social nature of editing together in a group and are more likely to make their next edit at another event than at home alone.

What if we started having smaller editing parties, on a more regular basis?

Inspired by Piper Klemm’s account of a WikiWomen editing party she hosted with a couple of friends at her house in 2011, I recently invited two of my close friends to learn to edit Wikipedia. My friends are smart, professional women who have a lot of information in their heads and at their fingertips, but somehow they’ve never gotten around to making that first edit on their own. My friend Tracie offered up her living room and wifi, I brought some tasty things to eat and a bottle of champagne to help us toast the new year, and the three of us sat down for a couple of hours to talk, snack, and contribute to Wikipedia. I loved that it took literally 15 minutes of planning: a couple of emails to set the date and time, and a quick stop at the grocery store. We had a lot of fun, and yes, we edited an encyclopedia.

My friends created their accounts, and then we looked around for something interesting to work on. Tracie is a nurse, so I pointed her to WikiProject Medicine’s list of popular pages to find something in need of improvement. She jumped into copyediting the Heart rate article. Liza is a water resources engineer who has been eyeing errors in the 100-year flood article for months, so she dove in there. I’ve been working on bits and pieces for articles related to modern Afghan art and politics lately, and after giving them a few pointers on wiki-markup and edit summaries, I turned to catch-up on my own backlog.

It didn’t take long before we were too absorbed in our screens to talk much. Liza described editing like being in “a wormhole.” In about 10 minutes, my friends went from not being sure how to get started to having a backlog of articles they want to fix. “Everything I go to now, I feel the need to edit,” said Liza.

We didn’t try to complete entire articles, and we probably only added or improved a few sentences each that night. But Wikipedia is made of many edits and every contribution counts. I left satisfied that we have two more WikiWomen involved, since making that first edit is sometimes the biggest barrier to becoming a Wikipedian. Since that evening, they’ve both been watching their articles for changes and Tracie has made a few more edits in recent days. If they aren’t yet addicted to editing on their own, that’s ok. It was so easy to pull this together that I think we can pick a night to make an editing party happen every month. Seriously, all you need are a couple of friends, some refreshments and internet access, and off you go.

Experienced Wikipedians, I’m sure you have that one person who knows everything but still hasn’t tried their hand at editing. And if you’re new to Wikipedia and don’t know any experienced editors yet, that’s ok too, you can still get a few friends together to do this. Wikipedia has introductory help pages, a help desk, and the friendly folks at the Teahouse will be happy to quickly answer questions from new editors in their Q&A forum.

I’m attending my next editing party later this week, and plan to host another one for WikiWomen’s History Month in March. You should too, and tell us how it went in the comments. Having someone there to celebrate when you see your first edit live on the page really is a whole lot of fun, I promise.

Siko Bouterse, Head of Individual Engagement Grants and volunteer WikiWoman

“What’s it like to be a Wikipedian?”

“How did you get started editing?”

“How do you make an account on Wikipedia?”

“How do you upload a photo on Commons?”

…those are just some of the many questions that people often ask those of us who edit Wikipedia and contribute to its sister projects. Do you have questions similar to these that you’ve always wanted to ask a Wikipedian?

Well now your chance. WikiWoman Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz will be answering your questions by participating in the first Ask a WikiWoman online event.

On Thursday, January 17, the WikiWomen’s Collaborative will host Ask a WikiWoman via their Twitter! Participants from around the world will have a chance to ask Adrianne, a Wikipedian since 2004, anything about Wikipedia. The event will take place from 10 AM PST (18:00) until 5:00 PM PST (01:00) via the @WikiWomen Twitter.

How do I ask a question?

To participate, you have to have a Twitter account. Twitter is free to join if you aren’t a member yet. After logging in to your Twitter account, ask your question and include hashtag #askawikiwoman in your question. Adrianne will then answer your question!

Who is Adrianne Wadewitz?

Dr. Adrianne Wadewitz, aka User:Wadewitz, has been a Wikipedian since 2004. She’s a “feminist, scholar, educator, and digital humanist,” and has a deep passion for empowering women to contribute to Wikipedia and for helping to provide women around the world with access to free knowledge. As an educator, she has participated in the Wikipedia Education Program, where she has used Wikipedia in the class room as a learning tool since 2011. With a PhD in English Literature from Indiana University, Adrianne has channeled her passion for literature into her Wikipedia contributions. She was a leading force in bringing articles about Mary Wollstonecraft and the life of Jane Austen to Featured Article status, making them some of the finest articles on English Wikipedia.

“I’m thrilled to be part of the first “Ask a WikiWoman” event,” she said. “Nothing quite demystifies Wikipedia and encourages people to participate as a real person who can answer questions about this strange and wonderful website. I’m a Wikipedian. Ask me anything.”

And we hope you will do just that – ask a WikiWoman anything. We’ll see you on Twitter on Thursday, January 17!

Sarah Stierch, Wikimedia Community Fellow

Español

El mes pasado, Argentina se sumó a la fiebre de editatones en América Latina, eventos también realizados en Chile y México.

El 8 de diciembre, una veintena de voluntarios de Wikipedia asistieron a la primera “editatón” realizada en Buenos Aires. El evento fue organizado por Wikimedia Argentina, en conjunto con el Museo del Bicentenario, en cuyas dependencias se realizó la actividad.

Tras un recorrido por el museo, los voluntarios mejoraron diversos artículos de Wikipedia relativos a la historia de la Argentina y a los artículos de la colección del mismo museo. Para ello, fue fundamental la cesión de imágenes en alta calidad realizada por el Museo del Bicentenario de algunos objetos actualmente en exposición, obras de arte de la colección y tomas del museo. Estas 86 imágenes, publicadas bajo licencias libres, permiten que puedan ser usadas en Wikipedia y por cualquier persona mientras cite al autor de la obra y mantenga la licencia original.

Dentro de las imágenes publicadas se encuentran el retrato oficial de Juan Domingo Perón y su esposa Eva realizado por Numa Ayrinhac, la banda presidencial y el bastón de mando de Raúl Alfonsín y el primer sillón presidencial usado por Santiago Derqui, entre otros.

En un par de semanas, 40 imágenes ya están en uso en más de 16 idiomas (desde el español al aragonés, el árabe y el ucraniano). Se estima que más de 2 millones de personas al mes verán las imágenes del Museo y que están actualmente incluidas en Wikipedia, pero puede ser mucho más a futuro a medida que los voluntarios incluyan estas obras en diversos artículos de Wikipedia para ilustrarlos.

La iniciativa fue aplaudida por Juan José Ganduglia, Director del Museo del Bicenentario, quien participó activamente en la Editatón apoyando a los asistentes proporcionándoles información respecto al Museo y la historia detrás de los objetos exhibidos. El éxito de esta primera Editatón abre las puertas para un nuevo evento durante 2013 en el Museo y en otras instituciones similares dentro de la Argentina.

Osmar Valdebenito, Director Ejecutivo, Wikimédia Argentina

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On November 9-11, the Wikimedia Foundation held a developer meetup in Bangalore, India. The gathering provided an opportunity for India-based developers to work with the Foundation’s engineering teams on several projects, such as JavaScript-based language engineering tools, and mobile applications with PhoneGap and LAMP technologies.

The DevCamp focused on Language Engineering, Mobile development and User interaction and experience design (UI/UX). It was attended by more than 85 developers, UX/UI designers, Wikimedians and translators. The work sessions focused on developing various Wikimedia mobile apps as well as language tools. The first day of the DevCamp kicked off on Friday with tutorials on Developing mobile applications with PhoneGap by Brion Vibber and How to internationalize your code by myself. Interactive Q&A after the sessions concluded the day with a lot of challenging and interesting questions after both tutorials.

The second day started off with Santhosh Thottingal introducing Project Milkshake (the team’s JavaScript-based internationalization libraries) and the Universal Language Selector currently under development. The mobile team introduced various mobile projects like native mobile apps, mobile front-end, and VUMI-based feature phone apps that powers Wikipedia Zero. Interaction designer Pau Giner introduced design projects and guided new contributors. People started selecting projects they were interested in and teamed up with Wikimedia engineers. It was exciting to see some contributors make their first-ever open-source commits during the DevCamp. People continued to hack throughout the two days.

The final day of the DevCamp started with stand-up updates from all participants, and ended with demos and presentations of 18 projects by 25 presenters. One of the most lovely updates was presented by Lakshmi, who learned to type in her language, Malayalam, using the typing tools that Wikimedia engineers have developed.

Accomplishments at the DevCamp include contributions to language engineering projects, where contributors added unit tests to jquery.ime (the input method library for multiple language scripts), submitted bug fixes, tested and actively reported bugs on jquery.ime and the Universal Language Selector. Another highlight was Brion Vibber’s integration of Universal Language Selector, WebFonts and support for language variants to the Wikipedia mobile app. One of the contributors, Ershad, built a Google Chrome extension based on the input method jquery.ime and won a Wikimedia shoulder bag for it. Other highlights include patches submitted to MathJax (a library used to render mathematical equations on HTML pages) by Aditya Ravi Shankar and myself to add internationalization support.

On the mobile platform, Swayam made enhancements to the Translate proofreading mobile app. Other mobile apps developed at the DevCamp include a Commons uploader and an app to track recent changes. Patches were also submitted to MobileFrontend, an iOS client library, and a first working version of the Wikipedia FirefoxOS app.

On the UI/UX design projects, participants worked on ideas for redesigning the translatewiki.net home page, the Mobile Universal language selector, Commons discovery and triaging apps. Here’s a complete list of demonstrations that were made at the Bangalore DevCamp; you are welcome to join the coding fun!

All in all the DevCamp maintained a high energy level throughout the three days, as well as produced a lot of new code, bug fixes, input keymaps, unit tests, mobile apps, translation UI and mobile designs, and positive collaboration across the board.

Amir E. Aharoni, Software Engineer (Internationalization)

(This guest post by Aditi Vashisht and Netha Hussain is part of the series on the WikiWomen’s Collaborative)

On Sunday, 4 November 2012, Wikimedians from Mumbai, India, conducted a Wikipedia workshop for women at Vidyalankar Institute of Technology,Wadala. The event was aimed at introducing women who are not yet editing Wikipedia to the website and teaching them how to edit.

“Lots of women are interested in editing Wikipedia, but sometimes they need to be specially invited to join in,” said Bishakha Datta, one of the primary organizers of the workshop. ”Doing this workshop was a chance to strategically get women to participate by creating an event meant for them, where they could freely ask questions, including basic ones, without feeling silly or stupid.”

Wikipedia editors Krutikaa Jawanjal and Pradeep Mohandas, who facilitated the event, were motivated to conduct a women’s workshop for bridging the gender gap that exists in Wikipedia. A lot of preparations were done ahead of time. Vidyalankar Institute of Technology was found to be the best place to conduct the workshop among all venues investigated by the team of organizers. The volunteers got together to discuss the agenda and the schedule of the event and planned their respective sessions.

Over one hundred participants signed up for to attend on the workshop’s Wikipedia page. A Facebook page was created for the event, where approximately 50 participants registered. Interested participants also emailed Wikipedia’s volunteer customer service group, OTRS. The enthusiasm was so high among the participants that registration had to be closed down a couple of days before the workshop. Some of the interested attendees had experimented with editing Wikipedia, and they had started asking questions to the organizers even before the event was launched! All participants who created an account were sent welcome messages by the organizers.

“The pre-meetup preparations involved more than 50 days of work. Two meetups were conducted for planning the workshop. The whole process involved a lot of hard work, yet it was fun,” said Karthik Nadar, the Secretary of Wikimedia India Chapter.

The workshop was a full day event with a lot of fun activities. More than 70 participants attended. After an introduction by the organizers, the participants were divided into groups and one facilitator was allotted to each group. The facilitator helped their group to create and expand a Wikipedia article by themselves. During the lunch break, the participants were served pav bhaji, an Indian delicacy. The participants moved around and made friends with each other and the organizers during the lunch break.

During the afternoon session, the participants asked to clarify their doubts about editing. Organizers gave a brief introduction about the Wikimedia India Chapter, and they conducted sessions sessions on How to add references to a Wikipedia article and How to upload pictures to Commons. The much awaited results of Wiki Loves Monuments India were declared after the sessions. Organizers also conducted a Wiki-Quiz and the winners were given t-shirts and other Wikimedia goodies!

Conducting the workshop was a memorable experience to the team of organizers. Krutikaa said her best memories included the ones where she had to resolve doubts and answer questions about editing Wikipedia. Wikimedian Rohini Lakshane said that it was thrilling to see the joy on the faces of the participants when their edits went live. She said she is planning to organize more workshops in the future because she thinks that workshops of this kind can make the community grow. For Karthik, the workshop was not about the number of participants, but about the number of people who are excited to edit Wikipedia.

The event was covered by various newspapers and websites. Videos on various aspects of Wikipedia were created during and after the event by a team of journalists. Techgross, an online daily for news-related to technology, reported: “Here is wishing that many more such workshops are held across India, Techgoss is sure there are many takers.”

(The Mumbai community is planning to conduct similar events in various parts of the city in the coming months and we’ll provide further updates soon.)

– Aditi Vashisht and Netha Hussain

Lakshmi Valsalakumari is an IT professional who wants to expand her horizons. She attended the recent Wikimedia Developers Camp in Bangalore and had this story to tell:

I have been an Information Technology professional working with well-known software organizations over the last 15 years. While IT has been keeping me busy, productive and happy, I have also all along harbored an interest in history and the humanities. I have recently decided to pursue these interests full-time, joining a research program at the Centre of Exact Humanities, International Institute of Information Technology, Hyderabad, India.

With my recent shift into academics and research, I have been referencing Wikipedia quite a bit in the last two to three months, and I have been amazed at the sheer magnitude of information found on it. While I have been reading the Wikipedia pages extensively, I had never yet considered editing it, not even in English, the language I reference Wikipedia most in, and the one I use most on computers.

Editing and contributing content in Malayalam, my mother tongue, had not really occurred to me either—Malayalam being a language I hardly used on my computers—until I attended the Bangalore Wikimedia Dev Camp.

I have tried typing Malayalam using my regular browser, but I have not been very happy with the effect. This was not the way I liked to see Malayalam written and rendered, so I had not made any further efforts to write Malayalam online. At the camp, I met Santhosh and Manoj—avid Malayalam Wikipedia contributors—and they persuaded me to give it another shot.

The first step was to download the Meera Unicode font for Malayalam, then to change my default browser to one of those that can render Meera well (I tried out Google Chrome; Firefox was even better, I was told), and then to try out typing Malayalam using the regular English keyboard.

I liked what I saw. When I typed the suggested key combinations, even complicated Malayalam letter combinations were being rendered the way I would have written them using pen and paper. I tried more and more combinations—ta, tha, tta, Ta, tma, thra, tya, zha—and was pleased with the effect. This was fun!

Soon, I was creating my first article. I noticed that on the main Wikipedia page, an article on Barcelona mentioned Catalonia as a red link, meaning that no further information was available in the Malayalam Wikipedia on it, whereas there was plenty of information on the same subject in the English Wikipedia. Manoj guided me through the steps as I created my first page in the Malayalam Wikipedia, copied the template information over from the English article and saved the heading, trying to get it right in Malayalam. I viewed my saved efforts, and with a sense of achievement, I went to grab a coffee.

Back online with my coffee, I was surprised to find a message on the article Talk page—someone had already posted a comment on the page I had just saved, chiding me for the lack of content and references. “This will drive away people from Wikipedia,” the post read. “Please ensure I get enough content on the page!”

Man, that was fast! I had no idea people were watching and following Wikipedia edits this closely. Manoj encouraged me to type more, so I returned to my effort. While I was getting comfortable with the typing, I was still grappling for suitable words in Malayalam for the content I was reading in English. Manoj suggested Olam, an online dictionary, and sure enough, I was able to find several of the Malayalam equivalents I was searching for.

And so, I typed on. Again, to my surprise, I found people editing the content and giving helpful suggestions even as I was still typing—one person told me to leave native names as such and not translate those, and another formatted some of the changes. By the end of the day, I had posted a decent amount of info, although there remained much more to be added.

I was happy with my day’s work. I had never imagined that using Malayalam on my computer and editing the Malyalam Wikipedia content would be such a pleasant and enjoyable experience, one that I was actually looking forward to!

Another point I must mention here is the sheer volume of Malayalam content that I have started seeing online, on Wikipedia pages and elsewhere. This must be due to the attention paid to this field of languages, literature and culture online by movements like Wikimedia. In 2005, I remember searching online for a well-known Malayalam lullaby Omanathingalkkidavo by Irayimman Thampi, but could not find anything. I had then resorted to the memories of my immediate relatives to try and pen the forgotten lyrics. Now, when I search for the same, the amount of material that comes up on that lullaby is amazing!

My heart-felt appreciation to Wikipedia and all its online community members who have made all of this possible. I hope to be part of this movement myself and do my bit toward furthering easy availability of multi-lingual content online

Lakshmi Valsalakumari

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The Wikimedia Language Engineering team is developing technologies that make it possible to speakers of all languages to contribute to Wikipedia in their language as easily and naturally as possible. Lakshmi’s story is an example of how these technologies enable people to develop reference and educational content that makes Wikipedia useful to people in the whole world. These technologies are deployed in Wikipedias in most languages of India, and more languages and projects are being added all the time.

Amir E. Aharoni, Software Engineer (Internationalization)

The Wikimedia Foundation and Red Hat co-organized an Open Source Language Summit in Pune, India on November 6-7, 2012. The summit focused on language tools and technology development to support languages on Wikipedia, the Web, Linux and other Open Source platforms.

In total, 45 core language technology developers, open source contributors, typographers and technology evangelists from the Wikimedia Language Engineering and Mobile teams, Red Hat, Mozilla Foundation, KDE, GNOME, translatewiki.net and other open source projects participated in sessions and work sprints on internationalization and localization features supporting various open source projects on the web and Linux. After brief introductory talks, we focused our work on font support, input method tools, language search, and web and localisation standards.

Highlights: 

The event had short talks on the following topics:

The following people won prizes for their code contributions during the event:

• Anish Patil ported Universal Language Selector’s cross-language search algorithm to gnome language search
• Aravinda VK wrote a set of font-forge python wrappers to make changes to fonts programmatically. Aravinda fixed a few bugs in Kannada Gubbi font for Harfbuzz rendering engine and also wrote Kannada KGP keymap for jquery.ime
• G Karunakar added Hindi inscript keyboard layout to Firefox OS GAIA

Other accomplishments included:

• Kushal Das added patches to deploy Universal Language Selector on http://www.mozilla.org and also a patch for a bug on Mozilla localization platform.
• Alolita, Sankarshan, Runa, Satish worked on discussing APIs for various translation workflows and putting together an initial specification.
• Rajeesh Nambiar, Hussain KH, Ani Peter, Praveen A and Pravin Satpute fixed and filed upstream bugs for Malayalam, Kannada, Gujarati and Punjabi fonts with Harfbuzz.
• Parag Nemade added InScript2 keyboards for Sanskrit, Nepali, Marathi and Konkani to jquery.ime.
• Ankit Gadgil wrote over 200 unit tests for Marathi and Hindi input methods in jquery.ime.
• Yuvaraj Pandian, Pau Giner, Arun Ganesh and Siebrand Mazeland developed an initial version of an Android-native app for Translatewiki.net for translation reviews.
• Pau Giner conducted user testing with new translation prototypes with translators. Arun Ganesh created an icon for gnome-transliteration.

You can browse through tweets and more notes from the event. Happy reading!

Srikanth Lakshmanan
Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer

Happy Ada Lovelace Day!

Ada Lovelace Day celebrates the legacy and life of Ada Lovelace (10 December 1815 – 27 November 1852), who is considered to be the first computer programmer in the world. This day also celebrates women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics fields (STEM).

Amazing events and activities are happening around the world, including among Wikipedia contributors. Today two editing events took place that aimed to increase content about women in science on Wikipedia, one at Solidaritetshuset in Stockholm, Sweden, and another at Harvard University. Tonight, in San Francisco, we’ll celebrate with a party hosted by the Wikimedia Foundation, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Ada Initiative, a non-profit named after the Countless of Lovelace that supports women in open technology and cultural fields

Friday, there are two more important international events. Wikimedia UK is coordinating an edit-a-thon focused on women in science, which will be hosted at The Royal Society of London. In India, Wikipedia editors are organizing an online event where participants will focus their editing on Indian women scientists. We’ll be sure to share successes and stories from these events in the upcoming weeks.

Is there a woman in the tech world that you find inspiring? How are you celebrating the legacy of Ada Lovelace this week? Let us know in the comments.

Sarah Stierch, Community Fellow