On Saturday 28 January 2012 at 20:00 UTC there will be a workshop on Translation tools. It will take between 60 and 90 minutes and will consist of an introduction of use cases and features, as well as a Q&A. (local times)

The workshop will focus on the use cases covered by the Translate extension on Wikimedia Meta-Wiki for the following user roles:

• writers: those who write texts that need to be translated
• translation administrators: those who mark pages for translations and post-process translations when they have been made

Please put the following page on your watchlist and write your name down if you would like to attend. The workshop is held online using WebEx. I would advise you to log in 15 minutes in advance to ensure you have ample time to set up your computer if you have not used WebEx before. WebEx can be used in desktop environments on Linux, OSX and Windows.

If you would like to familiarise yourself with the technology before the workshop, please take a look at the elaborate documentation, which includes some tutorials. In the next two weeks, the already present documentation for translators will also be completed.

Credit goes to Pete Forsyth for proposing to have this workshop. Hope to see you online Saturday!

Siebrand Mazeland
Product Manager Localisation
Wikimedia Foundation

When you make use of any of the projects of the Wikimedia Foundation, you are expected to abide by its terms of use. These terms of use provide you with practical and legal terms of reference. The original version is in English but we do know that for many in our communities English is not a language that will convey any message.

For this reason the translation of the terms of use is essential. There is a recurring need for the translation of texts and this translation work is done by volunteers. This work is really important to get our message out, making it as easy and efficient as possible is one way of showing our appreciation for the work that these volunteers do.

Translation is made easy because the user interface will just work in the language set in the preferences.

Details like the languages that have a translation are all shown in the language set in the preferences.

Even with the best preparation, a text may change over time. As the text is broken into separate fragments that need translation, it is possible not only to indicate what needs to be revisited by a translator, it is also possible to indicate the changed text in pink in the readable text.

Volunteers are masters of their own time. They choose how much they want to do in one go. Making the translated text immediately available is one way in which we show appreciation for the work that is done and, at the same time it is an invitation to other volunteers to complete the work that still needs doing.

With all the Translate functionality in place, we expect that it is easier to translate, we hope that more people will be involved and that important texts like the “terms of use” will become available in as many languages as we can find translators for.

Gerard Meijssen
Internationalization / Localization outreach consultant

I’m happy to welcome two new members in the Wikimedia blogs family: the Community blog, and the Global blog.

As the Wikimedia Foundation grows, so does our need to communicate with the rest of the community. Our blogs are a major communication channel to share news and accomplishments of our staff and volunteers.

Each blog can be recognized by its header.

Recently, we’ve started to publish more often, to increase transparency, understanding and collaboration. These new dedicated blogs are a way for us to structure the conversation with our community, much like we did in the past with the Tech blog.

Rather than creating completely separate blogs, we’ve decided to build on the existing Wikimedia blog. For those familiar with WordPress, it means the community & global blogs are categories that we’re simply showing more prominently than regular categories. More details are available in the history of the Wikimedia Blog 2011 overhaul page on meta.

The new blogs also have shortcuts that you can bookmark: http://communityblog.wikimedia.org and http://globalblog.wikimedia.org.

The Techblog, which was living separately, is now fully integrated with the Wikimedia blog; from now on, our readers will be able to find all our news in one central place.

If you’re only interested in a specific topic, you can still subscribe to the dedicated RSS feed available at the top of each blog, or in your browser’s URL field. You can subscribe to the “Main blog/Highlights” section to be notified only of major news.

We’ve also taken this opportunity to upgrade the software and fix a few bugs in the theme.

We’ll continue to improve the blogs incrementally over the next few months. We already have a few ideas, but we’d love to hear your opinions in the comments below or on m:Talk:Wikimedia Blog/2011 overhaul.

–
Guillaume Paumier

In the Wikimedia Foundation, we’ve got two technical groups: the Operations/Development crew (the group you are used to hearing from on this blog) and ourselves in Office IT (OIT).  The OIT group is responsible for the Foundation’s internal computing needs.  This includes things like fixing the printers, getting new workstations online, as well as just making sure the internet stays up so the staff can keep working.  We’re just like any other in-company IT staff.

(more…)

I am sure that many folks noticed that on the morning of 2009-06-26, techblog.wikimedia.org and blog.wikimedia.org went down.  It turns out that some of the parts of our WordPress installations were compromised.  I do not want to get in to a direct show and tell of what they did, but hopefully we have hardened the installation to the point that it will not occur again.

This is why the blogs exist on their own server, so when things like this happen we can minimize the impact.  The blogs are both up and running now, along with the other services that were affected.  All but techblog was back online before Friday was over, techblog lagged behind until today.  (As techblog was the point of exploit, we got everything else back up first.)  Other affected services were the Open Conference Systems site for Wikimania 2009, as well as our survey software.  Both of those were back online ASAP after the incident and the rest followed after.

Of course, it was hard to get this information out to folks when the blogs were down!  It goes to show how easily using the blogs to get info out has been, since without it we had to scramble to get the information out of other channels.

Thanks to everyone who assisted in the restoration, and also thanks to everyone for their patience while the system was fixed.

Some readers of the blog who subscribe via RSS may not be seeing the latest posts on the Wikimedia Blog. We switched servers recently and it may have affected how the feeds reach your reader.

You can re-subscribe to RSS feeds with the links on the left-hand menu bar, or visit http://blog.wikimedia.org/feed/

Thanks – happy reading!

Jay Walsh, Communications

Last week the blog family of Wikimedia was expanded with the addition of the Wikimedia Technical Blog.  Fairly self-explanatory in its naming, the Technical blog will explore all matters software, hardware, and infrastructure relating to Wikimedia.  That includes the servers and capacity that deliver Wikipedia to hundreds of millions of users around the world every month, not to mention the open-source wiki platform MediaWiki.

Helming the blog will be our own tech team, headed by our CTO Brion Vibber, alongside the pool of volunteers who work on the code and keep our systems humming along.

The Technical Blog is also part of Planet Wikimedia, the RSS blog aggregator for all blogs Wikimedia related – a must-subscribe if wiki is your thing.

Happy blogging to the technical team!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Starting today the Wikimedia Technical Team now has a single, unified blog for updates.  This is a much more technical blog than the Wikimedia Blog (which covers Foundation issues and news).  Software updates, server changes, and other such issues will be covered here.

Public domain, from the USGS and NASA en:Landsat 7 program. Image shows San Francisco, California. Original found here courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The Wikimedia Foundation has a blog! This is the first of many posts and many years, so there’s no better time to talk about what this initiative is all about.

The staff of the Foundation have a lot to say to a lot of people. So who are you? We expect you are: active users and editors of the Wikimedia projects, including Wikipedia, curious members of the media, other bloggers, our moms (hey Mom!), our neighbors, and our friends. In short, a lot of people who understand and support our mission: free knowledge!

The blog is a chance for us to engage in a less formal discussion, and to bring up the sorts of topics that may not fit in a press release, or are too interesting or timely to wait to tell you in person. We get lots of great news from other friends in the free knowledge world, and we want to share their good news as well as ours.

We also want to use this as a space to ask questions of the Wikimedia community, that includes those of you who may just be readers of the projects and those who contribute or edit actively. Comments are enabled (we’re still working out the kinks) so expect your voice to be heard. We know you’ll be nice and treat others well :)

We will also bring in guest contributors, and share news and views from our board members and prominent members of the community. Hopefully you will get a chance to understand how things work inside our offices in San Francisco and among our little staff family planted on both sides of the planet

So sign up, leave a comment, subscribe to our feeds and keep checking in.

Thanks!

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications