Translatewiki.net is a core part of the MediaWiki ecosystem. While not a Wikimedia Foundation project, it’s used by hundreds of volunteers to improve the localization of MediaWiki and its extensions, alongside other open source projects, which has led to MediaWiki being one of the most internationalized software packages available.

We’re very pleased to be able to recognize the incredible volunteer efforts behind translatewiki.net at least in a small way. Starting tomorrow, Siebrand Mazeland will be able to devote one day a week to the support of the project on a contract with the Wikimedia Foundation. We’ve identified core priorities for the next year as an increase in the number of volunteer developers supporting the translatewiki.net infrastructure, and the number of volunteer translators working on localization for the most widely spoken languages.

Welcome, Siebrand, and a big thank you to the entire translatewiki.net community for their work. :-)

Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation

Ok, we still need to complete automation of update runs for LocalisationUpdate, but it seems to be working!

It’s not the most glamorous of extensions, but you can see here an updated message (“Den här sidan” where the current deployed message file says “Denna sidan har”)!

– brion

Problem #1 — causes huge increase in CPU load on web servers

Problem #2 — completely kills THE ENTIRE SITE when you DISABLE it because serialized LUDependency objects in the message cache can’t be reinstantiated.

Sigh… Why can’t life be easy :)

Update 2009-09-23 16:30: Roan is starting work on replacing the database storage layer with a flat-file which should be more efficient for our use case.

Brion Vibber, Lead Software Architect

An international team of volunteers has translated the MediaWiki software used by Wikipedia into more than 100 languages. This is a critical precondition to enable participation in Wikimedia projects from all parts of the world. Today, the work of translating the wiki software is done through a wiki: BetaWiki , which is not operated by the Wikimedia Foundation.

Free Culture Spotlight, a new blog feature that will focus on free culture and open source efforts external to the Wikimedia projects, takes a look at this extraordinary effort and the people behind it.

Wikipedias exist in more than 250 languages. From the very early beginnings of Wikipedia, the project was conceived to be multilingual. In March 2001, Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales announced the first non-English Wikipedias. In his announcement, Jimmy wrote:

One problem is going to be technical support of these languages, since if there
are “fancy letter” problems, I will not know much how to deal with them. Japanese
is pretty much all “fancy letters”, but I assume that Linux/Apache/Perl will just
magically support it? Or will they be forced to use non-fancy ASCII urls?

Indeed, supporting content in other languages well is a very hard problem. Fortunately, increased standardization and awareness of internationalization problems has made it a little easier to at least deliver content to the end user. Try loading the Hebrew, Russian, Japanese or Hindi Wikipedia: On most modern systems, you should see the correct character sets. Note that it’s not just the content of the encyclopedia that is in a different language: The entire user interface is localized, and in right-to-left languages like Hebrew, even the navigation is optimized.
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