Consolidation was the name of the game for the past sprint for Wikimedia’s Localization team. A bug triage, testing, documentation and bug fixes were the activities designed to make our software more stable and more usable. When you read the bug triage report it becomes clear how much the devil is in the details; real native language expertise is needed to understand and assess the issues  we aim to solve. Read the report and you will see how much we rely on our community, on people like Srikanth and Nemo_bis.

Now that we are writing documentation in a central place, like here on the language statistics of the Translate extension, we are now able to provide you with a help text that is specific to the context. For the language statistics it is a help text about “statistics and reporting“. This functionality is ready but will become available in the deployment of January 30. You can help us and yourself by reading and understanding the text. Ask when you have questions and you can translate the text and make the text that much more your own.

Narayam is another extension that has been improved with user documentation. This documentation is completely new and it can effectively replace existing documentation. The existing documentation has the benefit of being written in the local language and we expect that what is written will be similar to the Narayam documentation. The language communities can then decide if they want to point to the local documentation. Like all our software, the Narayam documentation will be available for translation. Having the translation ready may be one of the considerations.

A lot of work is going into the description of the many input methods like the Inscipt layout for Assamese. These descriptions are “must have” help information when you do not know a particular keyboard layout by heart. They also provide a wonderful opportunity to verify if our implementation for a particular keyboard method is correct. This is yet another instance where native speakers can help us a lot.

Testing and coming to grips with the different tools was a major goal for this sprint. PHPunit and Qunit is what is used to test PHP and JavaScript and the tests developed are used in an environment called TestSwarm and Jenkins (respectively for PHP and JavaScript). As our team is so much into language support, we are learning what the limits are for testing for different languages and scripts.

All in all there may have been a slush and we have done a lot of code review, but we also managed to make sure that our functionality has gained stability for this and future releases. Additionally, work was done on grammar support for JavaScript, but the patch for that was stuffed in a bug report because of the slush, as the story was moved to the next sprint. Grammar support is what fills the gap in localization support between JavaScript and PHP and makes it available to any and all other developers.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

When there is a code freeze or a slush, the potential for what is to be delivered is curtailed. It is official; you will not deliver new code, you will work towards consolidation of the new MediaWiki release.

One of the objectives for this and the next release is that the time between releases will decrease. Even though the Localization team works in two week sprints, it can help with getting the release out of the door. The first thing to do is help even more with code review, the other thing is make sure that its code will be optimised for easy coding, testing and use.

When you check out mingle, (user guest, password guest), you will find that the developers of our team are learning about the various testing tools. They are even updating the developer documentation to make it easier to understand how to set up new automated tests.

When you are testing, it is necessary that code provides information about its execution. This realization means that the code needs to be refactored in order to allow for testing. Documentation is another part of the puzzle that helps stabilise code; you will find a prodigious amount of documentation that is scheduled for this sprint.

All this translates in quite a minimal deployment for the first week. Its highlights are:

Translate:

• Better error checking and handling in Special:Translate
• Translatable page id prefix changed from page| to page-
• Don’t reuse messages from core

WebFonts:

• Fixed download of Vemana Telugu font
• Added font for Ahirani (ahr)

Narayam: Some fixes to Assamese transliteration rules

Core: the cropping of text in level 1 headers is fixed for Indic languages

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

WebFonts is the first extension that gets user documentation served from MediaWiki.org. At the time of writing, the documentation has been written, it does serve people with help text about WebFonts and it is ready for translation. People looking for help will be served help in the language of their user interface if there is a translation.

In a way it seems like a minor thing but consider;

• MediaWiki can serve help texts for its functionality
• this help text may differ based on the language of the user
• the help text can be translated
• a new community for MediaWiki help text translation is needed
• functionality like Narayam will surely get its user documentation in the near future

It will be a challenge to other developers and developer teams to adopt and refine the way assistance to our users is provided. We learned at translatewiki.net that documentation did improve the quality of the localisations. We hope that user documentation will reduce confusion and makes for happy editors and readers.

The WebFonts user documentation was deployed last Tuesday. This and some other changes can be found in the deploy list. As the holiday season is in full swing, sprint 6 has started; it will run into the new year.

In this sprint stories will be developed that will make “Translation review” feature complete. When this is implemented, it will help translators and localisers review each others work and assign a status to their work for further considerations. As you can imagine, the different statuses themselves will become available for translation; card 326 defines this and will make this possible. This is just one of many stories that make up this feature.

For the localisers of the MediaWiki software a long held ambition will be realised; card 206 will see “plural” support implemented for JavaScript. When this functionality is deployed, it will result in a long list of future changes that will see changes to the actual messages.

The new year will bring us many new challenges and opportunities to the many many language communities. The Wikimedia Localisation team will work hard to provide you with the tools to be efficient in any language to get our message out and provide information in any language. For some of us the new year starts at a different moment so it will be very much business as usual; we welcome you to have a look at our sprint backlog (user:guest password: guest) and bug us in bugzilla with whatever needs fixing.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant