The Language Engineering team at the Wikimedia Foundation works on a set of tasks every two weeks. This post is about the team’s accomplishment over the past two weeks. You can also check the slides of our demonstration.

jQuery.ime: Wikimedia wikis use Extension:Narayam to support input of non-Latin text. As part of Project Milkshake, jQuery.ime is a generic input method tool ported from Narayam, which can be used even outside the Wikimedia universe. We have completed the development of jQuery.ime and this example demonstrates the plugin in action. It supports over 60 input methods across 32 languages. There is detailed technical specification and we welcome you to try out and contribute to the project by creating new input methods or reporting bugs. The next phase will be to integrate jQuery.ime with Universal Language Selector.

Internationalization requirements for VisualEditor: The VisualEditor will change the Mediawiki editing interface in a major way, making it much more user friendly. The Language Engineering team has a keen interest in making sure the VisualEditor supports all languages. We have written detailed Internationationalization and Bidirectional text requirements for the Visual Editor to support all languages, including right to left languages. Other available documents are a general test document, right to left test and Indic tests for testing input method compatibility with VisualEditor. Do perform these tests for your language and report bugs if you find them.

India Events: The Language Engineering team will be in India in early November participating in the OpenSource Language Summit in Pune and the Wikimedia DevCamp in Bangalore. If you are a developer interested in working on language related tools or Wikimedia Mobile, please sign up for the DevCamp. We will also meet up with community and talk about Language Engineering tools at the Language Engineering meetups in Pune and Bangalore. If you’re near, please sign up and we’ll see you there!

In brief:

• Universal Language Selector got some bug fixes, including scrolling, choosing fonts, and it is now fully internationalized.
• As mentioned in the previous blogpost, We have completed integrating Extension:Translate with CentralNotice. Some patch sets are awaiting code review. Unfortunately this feature might be missing in this year’s fundraising translations, due to other fundraising priorities.
• We held IRC office hours (log) on October 17th. The next session is on November 21st.

Srikanth Lakshmanan

Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer

The Internationalisation/Localisation (i18n/l10n) team at the Wikimedia Foundation works on a set of tasks every two weeks. This post is about the team’s accomplishment over the past two weeks.

The Universal Language Selector(ULS) is designed to not only change the user interface language, but also to help the user set other language settings. ULS will contain input method and font settings along with it. The current version of ULS includes full integration with WebFonts and is now set up for testing at http://translatewiki.net. Let us know about bugs you find by reporting at Bugzilla. ULS now uses the Project Milkshake component jquery.webfonts. This means that when ULS is deployed, the WebFonts extension will be deprecated.

Language Settings in the ULS

Display settings dialog with option to choose font and to change the user interface language.

Other accomplishments

• Published a detailed plan for collecting metrics and impact measurement criteria for our work. Please provide us feedback after reviewing these criteria.
• Conducted a translation rally at translatewiki.net. According to preliminary results 180 translators contributed to 65,000+ translations on different Wikimedia related projects in 115 languages. 54 users will share the bounty sponsored by Wikimedia Nederlands, the Dutch Wikimedia chapter.
• Improved prototypes for Translate workflow user experience and completed user tests. You can check out test results. If you are a translator and wish to help us test the prototypes, please sign up.
• Met with the Wikimedia Deutschland Wikidata team about moving ahead with ULS for Wikidata language selection.
• The Georgian alphabet is now supported in Extension:Narayam.
• All Marathi wiki projects now have input method to Narayam deployed.
• Tim Starling wrote a php parser for the CLDR plural rule definitions. Some time back we had written a JavaScript parser for this. Soon the plural support in MediaWiki localisation messages will be based on CLDR plural definitions.

Please remember to join in at our sprint demo every 2 weeks to keep up with our latest work. The demos are every other Tuesday at 15:00 UTC. For those who could not attend, you can watch the latest demo  as well as all our old demonstrations are now available  in commons.

Srikanth Lakshmanan, Internationalisation/Localisation Outreach / QA Engineer

The average age of the MediaWiki developers is quite young. They often started contributing to the MediaWiki code while still in school or university. When their contributions show promise, they are sometimes asked to contribute to particular projects. This has resulted in the hiring of students and they continue to do professionally what they at first did as a hobby.

While the Wikimedia Foundation is happy with the talent it gains in this way, it feels strongly that finishing formal education is very important. Some students only work for the WMF in their holidays while others manage regular contributions in their free time as well. Such relations are often strengthened through programs like the Google Summer of Code or through summer internships.

Niklas Laxström recently finished University and this happy occasion is reason enough to interview him. As you may know, he works for the WMF Localisation Team and his claim to fame is that he started what became translatewiki.net. Niklas has been instrumental in much of the internationalisation and localisation development for the MediaWiki software.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Congratulations, master Niklas. You finished university !! What did you study and what is your exact title (in Finnish)
I studied language technology with minors in Finnish language, Computer Science, East-Asian studies and collection of Russian language courses. I’m now Master of Arts, filosofian maisteri.

You started with what became translatewiki.net before you started university. How did your study influence the development of translatewiki.net
Before university I had a hobby project for inflecting Finnish nouns. It wasn’t successful nor had it a good design, but it started series of events, which caused me to start studying language technology.

My studies were pretty heavily biased in hard language processing: for instance syntactic parsers, finite state technologies and morphologies.  however, the open source language technologies are not yet in a level where that kind of processing can just be plugged into any software.

Learning about variation in languages has been very useful to me. It helps avoiding solutions that only work for limited number of similar languages. I learned most of that in linguistics courses but also by studing several dissimilar languages. l also liked the isolated courses about copyright, terminologies and string processing, which turned out to be useful in different situations.

On the other hand, working with MediaWiki and translatewiki.net has given me enormous amounts of practical experience all over computer
engineering, which helped me to perform better in engineering related courses.

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after the slush, the flush

When new code does not find its way into production for quite some time, it tends to pile up. It is like with snow and when the time comes when it starts to thaw, it starts with a trickle, the trickles become a stream and all the streams rush down the mountain.

For the WMF Localisation team we worked on our documentation, our help system and our tests. We went to conferences in Belgium and India. And we worked on many small iterative improvements. We rolled out webfonts to more wikis. Input methods were improved and deployed as per requests. We have had our translation memory working on translatewiki.net for ages and now it is configured for use on the WMF wikis who use the Translate extension. Actually, we did experiment first with a new algorithm and we did configure one of the labs systems as a host for the memory of all the fine work we did and do.

Over time a lot of work went into things like plural rules. As the number of languages increase and as we support not only PHP but now also JavaScript, we are optimising our code and we are checking it again. We frequently find that a re-factoring is in order. It makes the code more elegant and easier to maintain. With added documentation and tests we ensure that we know it will work well.

Another fine project waiting to get to the stage where it will flow into our codebase is an updated Easy Timeline. The functionality has always been broken when used in many of  the “other” languages, languages written in a different direction, a different script.  The updated Easy Timeline has been given a revamp; it uses SVG to create the image and you can test it at translatewiki sandbox. Amir welcomes bug reports and LOVES to hear your comments

As you know, we use mingle for our project management (user guest, password guest). In it we have stories that explain the functionality that we are going to develop. Story 532 is one such:

As a potential translator, I want to be able to tell translation administrators in a structured way that I am interested in translating to one or more languages and at the same time provide them with some data about me and preferences on how and how often I would like to be contacted, so that translation administrators can more effectively and efficiently target translators.

Together with the acceptance criteria a narrative like this enables the developer to develop and the finished product to be accepted by our product manager. A story comes with tasks and once you have read the stories and the tasks you have a clue of what goes into getting you new functionality.

The conferences were great, we learn a lot from meeting so many wonderful people. Many tests are deployed and they run regularly. The documentation, including user documentation is written and we love you to translate many of them in your language. We feel really pumped up to get cracking and provide you with more functionality in the next sprint.

Thanks,
Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Last week, our blog post about the readers study shared insights about how readers use search on Wikipedia, as well as new search functionalities that they are interested in. This week we share findings from our readers on more search improvements and other features that they would like to see on Wikipedia.

a. Improvements to finding information
b. Sharing, downloading and printing
c. Integration with social networking websites
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Search and Wikipedia

Search is central to the Wikipedia experience – both as a way of reaching the website as well as discovering content on Wikipedia.  Several questions on the Readers Survey 2011 were aimed at understanding the search experiences across nations, languages, and devices. Here are some of the key insights about search from the study:

Contents

• a. About half of our readers specifically look for Wikipedia in search engine results
• b. Search is the most desired improvement to Wikipedia
• c. Readers speaking Portuguese and Arabic are much more desiring of better search
• d. Search on mobile platforms does not perform as well as desktops

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Identifying language abilities has been real popular. The “Babel templates” are quite popular on the English Wikipedia and, many of the literally hundreds of templates have been copied to other wikis.

With a limited knowledge of a language, people can be really effective execute many tasks. It helps however when they are addressed in an understandable way.

At translatewiki.net we have been using the Babel extension for a long time; it does not use any templates and all the languages used in any of the WMF projects are supported. As it has been in use for so long, it became really rich in localisations.

Using the Babel extension is easy; my Babel user information for instance can be seen to the right and the syntax for this box can be seen below.

Sanskrit Wiktionary with the Chrome browser demonstrates issues for the Localisation team.

This #Wiktionary screen shot shows the first iteration of the language support that will be brought to MediaWiki by the Wikimedia Localisation team. It makes it possible for people with a standard US keyboard to emulate a keyboard appropriate for their language.

Narayam, the MediaWiki extension, was originally conceived by JunaidPV and has been further developed to provide keyboards for many more languages. Particularly the people who use the languages from India will benefit. Many different scripts are in use but many computers do not have an appropriate keyboard for the many different languages.

Now that Narayam is live on some wikis, we will gain the experience necessary before it will go live on other projects and for other languages. When it works well, external tools like the ones shown on the Sanskrit Wiktionary can be phased out as well.

At translatewiki.net you will find keyboard methods for many more languages. Please try them out and, when you cannot find a keyboard method for your language, you may discuss within your community if Narayam can be beneficial for your language.

Thanks,

Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Offline use of Wikimedia content is a strategic goal for the Wikimedia Foundation. Kiwix is an offline app that allows user to read content without an internet connection, and it can now be localized into many languages on translatewiki.net.

There are many instances where people do not have an Internet connection available, or where it is cheaper to work offline, notably in the “Global south”.

Data from Wikimedia projects can be exported to the openZIM format, and then read offline on Kiwix, the only openZIM client.

Several projects with local developers invested a considerable amount of time creating their own offline app for their language, their script or for special requirements like formatting for books.

With the localization of Kiwix on translatewiki.net, it is now much more of an option to work on such features in Kiwix. Customizations like including fonts with a package or having specific formatting for a book or a source remain possible.

We hope our community will help localize Kiwix in the 270+ languages we currently support with Wikimedia projects. Please start translating the interface and let us know how it goes.

Thanks,

Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

Wikimedia projects support over 270 languages. This amazing global reach is powered by volunteers who translate not only the contents but also text used in MediaWiki so that localized wikis can be easily navigated and operated by users in their local language. Translatewiki.net is the amazing translation engine which not only supports Wikimedia projects but other open source projects. Siebrand and Nike are leading this translation platforms.

The user experience programs at Wikimedia Foundation is also benefited from translatewiki.net and translation volunteers. The usability beta has been completely translated into thirteen languages and twelve languages are 99% complete. These stats can be found at the translation completion status page for the usability extension by courtesy of GeardM.

The usability beta is planned to be switched to be the default interface in April. Additional translation boost for languages which are not fully translated will improve the usability of the new interface greatly.
GerardM had a great example of the interface in Nepali, whose localization is not complete, in his blog.

Translation help for such as Indonesian, Greek, Thai, Arabic, Hebrew, Italian, Sinhala, Korean and much more, are greatly appreciated.